1 . How Did You Get Five Fingers?
Your arms and toes began as tiny buds that sprouted from your sides when you were just a four-week-old embryo (胚胎). By six weeks, these limb buds had grown longer and five rods of cartilage 软骨) had appeared in their flattened tips. By week seven, the cells between the rods had died away, forming five small fingers or toes from once-solid masses of flesh.
Now, a team of scientists led by James Sharpe from the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona has discovered that these events are carefully orchestrated by three molecules. They mark out zones in the embryonic hand where fingers will grow, and the spaces in between that are destined to die. Without such molecules, pianos and keyboards wouldn’t exist, and jazz hands would be jazz palms.
These three molecules work in a way first envisioned by Alan Turing, a legendary English mathematician and code-breaker. Back in 1952, Turing proposed a simple mathematical model in which two molecules could create patterns by spreading through tissues and interacting with each other. For example, the first molecule might activate the second, while the second blocks the first. Neither receives any guidance about where to go; through their dance, they spontaneously organize themselves into spots or stripes.
Since then, many scientists have found that these Turing mechanisms exist. They’re responsible for a cheetah’s spots and a zebrafish’s stripes. For 30 years, people have also suggested that they could sculpt our hands and feet, but no one had found the exact molecules involved.
Sharpe knew that these molecules would need to show a striped pattern. Sox9 seemed like the most promising candidate. It is activated in a striped pattern from a very early stage of development. By comparing cells where Sox9 is active or inactive, Jelena Raspopovic and Luciano Marcon found two other groups of genes—Bmp and Wnt—also formed striped patterns. Bmp rises and falls in step with Sox9 and both are active in the digits. Wnt is out of phase; it’s active in the gaps. The three molecules also affect each other: Bmp activates Sox9 while Wnt blocks it; and Sox9 blocks both of its partners. It looked like these were the molecules the team was searching for not a pair, as Turing suggested, but a trinity. To confirm this, they created a simulation of a growing limb bud and showed that Sox9, Bmp and Wnt could organize themselves into a pattern of five stripes, by activating and blocking each other.
There’s still a lot to discover, though. For example, I’ve used Bmp and Wnt as shorthands here—in reality, each represents a class of several molecules, and the team still needs to work out which specific member is part of the Turing’s proposal.
1. The underlined sentence in the second paragraph means that ________.| A．some certain molecules are necessary for the growth of human fingers |
| B．the development of embryos is dependent on some certain molecules |
| C．without some certain molecules, music won’t exist in this world |
| D．the molecules work in a way that Alan Turing once offered |
| A．Molecules interact by following a strict mathematical model. |
| B．Molecules have a strong will to form patterns in nature. |
| C．The formation of patterns in nature may be dominated by molecules. |
| D．Alan Turing was able to track down the movement of molecules. |
| A．A protein that determines humans’ development in childhood. |
| B．A gene especially important for the development of our limbs. |
| C．A striped pattern that always interacts with Bmp and Wnt. |
| D．A simulation of growing limbs that activate and block each other. |
| A．How human limbs are developed may well be similar to how animal spots are shaped. |
| B．The way Sox9 interacts with Bmp and Wnt is still a mystery that needs further studying. |
| C．Sox9 can activate both Bmp and Wnt to form our limbs, according to scientific research. |
| D．Sox9, Bmp and Wnt are three specific molecules that determine the growth of fingers. |
2 . On March 7, 1907, the English statistician Francis Galton published a paper which illustrated what has come to be known as the “wisdom of crowds” effect. The experiment of estimation he conducted showed that in some cases, the average of a large number of independent estimates could be quite accurate.
This effect capitalizes on the fact that when people make errors, those errors aren’t always the same. Some people will tend to overestimate, and some to underestimate. When enough of these errors are averaged together, they cancel each other out, resulting in a more accurate estimate. If people are similar and tend to make the same errors, then their errors won’t cancel each other out. In more technical terms, the wisdom of crowds requires that people’s estimates be independent. If for whatever reasons, people’s errors become correlated or dependent, the accuracy of the estimate will go down.
But a new study led by Joaquin Navajas offered an interesting twist (转折) on this classic phenomenon. The key finding of the study was that when crowds were further divided into smaller groups that were allowed to have a discussion, the averages from these groups were more accurate than those from an equal number of independent individuals. For instance, the average obtained from the estimates of four discussion groups of five was significantly more accurate than the average obtained from 20 independent individuals.
In a follow-up study with 100 university students, the researchers tried to get a better sense of what the group members actually did in their discussion. Did they tend to go with those most confident about their estimates? Did they follow those least willing to change their minds? This happened some of the time, but it wasn’t the dominant response. Most frequently, the groups reported that they “shared arguments and reasoned together”. Somehow, these arguments and reasoning resulted in a global reduction in error. Although the studies led by Navajas have limitations and many questions remain, the potential implications for group discussion and decision-making are enormous.
1. What is paragraph 2 of the text mainly about?| A．The methods of estimation. | B．The underlying logic of the effect. |
| C．The causes of people’s errors. | D．The design of Galton’s experiment. |
| A．the crowds were relatively small | B．there were occasional underestimates |
| C．individuals did not communicate | D．estimates were not fully independent |
| A．The size of the groups. | B．The dominant members. |
| C．The discussion process. | D．The individual estimates. |
| A．Unclear. | B．Dismissive. | C．Doubtful. | D．Approving. |
3 . What is volunteer travel?
Volunteer travel involves taking a trip where all or part of the purpose of the trip is to participate in an arranged service opportunity helping others. Typically, the volunteer activity takes place in a foreign country, but some opportunities can involve national or regional projects.
Charitable interests often go far beyond national boundaries. People in developed countries become interested in the struggles of people in less developed countries.
| A．The primary purpose of the trip was very specific. |
| B．This type of travel has been an option for many years. |
| C．Educational institutions also made volunteer travel an option. |
| D．Sometimes, donating money is not enough to satisfy the need to help. |
| E．The Internet has helped make community service in general more popular. |
| F．These trips are usually arranged by church organizations, human interest groups or non-profits. |
| G．A new trend is that for-profit tour operators arrange group travel around volunteer opportunities. |
4 . In 1953, when visiting his daughter’s maths class, the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner found every pupil learning the same topic in the same way at the same speed. Later, he built his first “teaching machine”, which let children tackle questions at their own pace. Since then, education technology (edtech) has repeated the cycle of hype and flop (炒作和失败), even as computers have reshaped almost every other part of life.
Softwares to “personalize” learning can help hundreds of millions of children stuck in miserable classes—but only if edtech supporters can resist the temptation to revive harmful ideas about how children learn. Alternatives have so far failed to teach so many children as efficiently as the conventional model of schooling, where classrooms, hierarchical year-groups, standardized curriculums and fixed timetables are still the typical pattern for most of the world’s nearly 1.5 billion schoolchildren. Under this pattern, too many do not reach their potential. That condition remained almost unchanged over the past 15 years, though billions have been spent on IT in schools during that period.
What really matters then? The answer is how edtech is used. One way it can help is through tailor-made instruction. Reformers think edtech can put individual attention within reach of all pupils. The other way edtech can aid learning is by making schools more productive. In California schools, instead of textbooks, pupils have “playlists”, which they use to access online lessons and take tests. The software assesses children’s progress, lightening teachers’ marking load and allowing them to focus on other tasks. A study suggested that children in early adopters of this model score better in tests than their peers at other schools.
Such innovation is welcome. But making the best of edtech means getting several things right. First, “personalized learning” must follow the evidence on how children learn. It must not be an excuse to revive pseudoscientific ideas such as “learning styles”: the theory that each child has a particular way of taking in information. This theory gave rise to government-sponsored schemes like Brain Gym, which claimed that some pupils should stretch or bend while doing sums. A less consequential falsehood is that technology means children do not need to learn facts or learn from a teacher—instead they can just use Google. Some educationalists go further, arguing that facts get in the way of skills such as creativity. Actually, the opposite is true. According to studies, most effective ways of boosting learning nearly all relied on the craft of a teacher.
Second, edtech must narrow, rather than widen, inequalities in education. Here there are grounds for optimism. Some of the pioneering schools are private ones in Silicon Valley. But many more are run by charter-school groups teaching mostly poor pupils, where laggards (成绩落后者) make the most progress relative to their peers in normal classes. A similar pattern can be observed outside America.
Third, the potential for edtech will be realized only if teachers embrace it. They are right to ask for evidence that products work. But skepticism should not turn into irrational opposition. Given what edtech promises today, closed-mindedness has no place in the classroom.
1. According to the passage, education technology can ________.| A．decrease teachers’ working load |
| B．facilitate personalized learning |
| C．help standardize curriculums |
| D．be loved by schoolchildren |
| A．The students who are better at memorization tend to be less creative. |
| B．Schools with bans on phones have better results than high-tech ones. |
| C．Shakespeare was trained in grammar but he penned many great plays. |
| D．Lu Xun’s creativity was unlocked after he gave up studying medicine. |
| A．at the service of teaching |
| B．limited in use among pupils |
| C．aimed at narrowing the wealth gap |
| D．in line with students’ learning styles |
| A．To stress the importance of edtech. |
| B．To introduce the application of edtech. |
| C．To discuss how to get the best out of edtech. |
| D．To appeal for more open-mindedness to edtech. |
5 . We’ve all had the experience of wanting to get a project done but putting it off to a later date. So why do we delay things? Are we built to operate this way sometimes?
These questions are central to my research on goal pursuit (追求). It all starts with a simple choice between working now on a given project and doing anything else. The decision to work on something is driven by how much we value accomplishing the project in that moment — what psychologists call its subjective value. And delay, in psychological terms, is what happens when the value of doing something else outweighs the value of working now.
This way of thinking suggests a simple trick to defeat delay. For example, instead of cleaning my house, I might try to focus on why grading papers is personally important to me. It’s simple advice, but sticking to this strategy (策略) can be quite difficult.
People are not entirely wise in the way they value things. For example, a dollar bill is worth exactly the same today as it is a week from now, but its subjective value — roughly how good it would feel to own a dollar—depends on other factors besides its face value, such as when we receive it. The tendency for people to devalue money and other goods based on time is called delay discounting. For example, receiving $100 three months from now is worth the same to people as receiving $83 right now. People would rather lose $17 than wait a few months to get a larger reward.
Getting something done is a delayed reward, so its value in the present is reduced: the further away the deadline is, the less attractive it seems to work on the project right now. The tendency to delay things closely follows economic models of delay discounting. One way to manage it is to make the finish line seem closer. For example, vividly imagining a future reward reduces delay discounting.
1. Which of the following best explains “outweighs” in Paragraph 2?| A．Is equal to. | B．Is greater than. |
| C．Is involved in. | D．Is central to. |
| A．Avoid setting a deadline too strictly. |
| B．Consider doing nothing temporarily. |
| C．Increase the subjective value of working now. |
| D．Realize great fun of working immediately. |
| A．Time and tide wait for no man. |
| B．A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. |
| C．One of these days is none of these days. |
| D．Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched. |
| A．Asking for nothing in return. |
| B．Lowering our high expectations. |
| C．Searching for instant satisfaction. |
| D．Making future rewards more inviting. |
6 . Pollution
Pollution happens when the environment is dirtied, by waste, chemicals, and other harmful substances(物质).Pollution is a problem all over the world. But it is especially bad in large cities with a lot of industries and cars.
Wildfires, volcanoes, and industrial chemicals cause some air pollution. But most air pollution comes from burning fossil fuels (矿物燃料）These include coal, oil and natural gas. The burning of fossil fuels may release harmful gases. Air pollution may cause such diseases cancer and asthma. It also leads to polluted rain that can harm living things
Causes of water pollution are easy to see. People dump(倾倒) garbage and dirty water into river, lakes and oceans. Factories or cities sometimes release poisonous chemicals, and other wastes into water. These chemicals may make the groundwater unfit to drink.
Littering, or throwing garbage on the ground, is a form of land pollution. Litter can destroy the habitats of plants and animals. The buildup of dangerous chemicals in the ground is another form of land pollution. The chemicals may come from farms or factories.
Many governments, environmental groups, and ordinary people are working to control pollution. Governments have passed laws to keep people from releasing dangerous chemicals into the environment
| A．Farmers use chemical to help crops grow. |
| B．This type of pollution may be seen in big cities. |
| C．They also can harm fish and other forms of life. |
| D．These chemicals can spread to plants and animals. |
| E．In addition, air pollution may be a cause of global warming. |
| F．There are three main forms of pollution: air, water, and land. |
| G．Some companies and people are trying to use fewer fossil fuels. |
7 . Behind every great product is a great team. Teamwork in the workplace offers the staff the opportunity to become more familiar with each other and learn how to work together.
Efficiency (效率)
Work teams develop systems that allow them to complete tasks efficiently.
Support
Ideas
Teams in the workplace often met to discuss how to deal with company problems. When a team works well together, it allows staff members to feel more comfortable in offering suggestions. Team members become accustomed to processing brainstorming information.
| A．There are challenges each day in any workplace |
| B．When the team faces a particularly hard challenge |
| C．We all know teamwork helps companies earn more money |
| D．When a task is handed to a well-trained and efficient team |
| E．It is also the fuel that allows employees and companies to have success |
| F．The company surely benefits from various suggestions given by efficient teams |
| G．One of the main benefits of a strong team environment is to share ideas with each other |
8 . Last summer, two nineteenth-century cottages were rescued from remote farm fields in Montana, to be moved to an Art Deco building in San Francisco. The houses were made of wood. These cottages once housed early settlers as they worked the dry Montana soil; now they hold Twitter engineers.
The cottages could be an example of the industry’s unusual love for “low technology”, a concept associated with the natural world, and with old-school craftsmanship（手艺）that exists long before the Internet era. Low technology is not virtual (虚拟的) —so, to take advantage of it, Internet companies have had to get creative. The rescued wood cottages, fitted by band in the late eighteen-hundreds, are an obvious example. Other companies are using a broader interpretation（阐释）of low technology that focuses on nature.
Amazon is building three glass spheres filled with trees, so that employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.” At Google’s office, an entire is carpeted in glass. Facebook’s second Menlo Park campus will have a rooftop park with a walking path.
Olle Lundberg, the founder of Lundberg Design, has worked with many tech companies over the years. “Our tech engineers are the ones who feel impoverished, because they’re surrounded by the digital world,” he says. “We’ve found that introducing real crafts is one way to regain their individual identity.”
This craft-based theory is rooted in history. William Morris, the English artist and writer, turned back to pre-industrial arts in the eighteen-sixties, just after Industrial Revolution. The Arts and Crafts movement defined itself against machines. “Without creative human occupation, people became disconnected from life.” Morris said.
Research has shown that natural environments can restore our mental abilities. In Japan, patients are encouraged to “forest-bathe”, taking walks through woods to lower their blood pressure.
These health benefits apply to the workplace as well. Rachel Kaplvin, a professor of environmental psychology, has spent years researching the restorative effects of natural environment. Her research found that workers with access to nature at the office - even simple views of trees and flowers - felt their jobs were less stressful and more satisfying. If low-tech offices can potentially benefit the brains and improve the mental health of employees then, fine, bring on the cottages.
1. The writer mentions the two nineteenth-century cottages to show that _________| A．Twitter is having a hard time |
| B．Old cottages are in need of protection |
| C．Early settlers once suffered from a dry climate in Montana |
| D．Internet companies have rediscovered the benefits of low technology |
| A．is related to nature | B．is out of date today |
| C．cosumes too much energy | D．exists in the virtual world |
| A．Critical | B．positive |
| C．worried | D．doubtful |
| A．Past Glories, Future Dreams |
| B．The Virtual World, the Real Challenge |
| C．High-tech Companies, Low-tech Offices |
| D．The More Craftsmanship, the Less Creativity |
9 . Communication technologies are far from equal when it comes to conveying the truth. The first study to compare honesty across a range of communication media has found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails. The fact that emails are automatically recorded — and can come back to haunt (困扰) you — appears to be the key to the finding.
Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asked 80 students to keep a communication diary for a week. In it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and confessed to how many lies they told. Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each medium. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and an astonishing 37 per cent: of phone calls.
His results to be presented at the conference on human-computer interaction in Vienna, Austria, in April, have surprised psychologists. Some expected emailers to be the biggest liars, reasoning that because deception makes people uncomfortable, the detachment (非直接接触) of emailing would make it easier to lie. Others expected people to lie more in face-to-face exchanges because we are most practiced at that form of communication.
But Hancock says it is also crucial whether a conversation is being recorded and could be reread, and whether it occurs in real time. People appear to be afraid to lie when they know the communication could later be used to hold them to account, he says. This is why fewer lies appear in email than on the phone.
People are also more likely to lie in real time—in an instant message or phone call, say— than if they have time to think of a response, says Hancock. He found many lies are spontaneous (脱口而出的) responses to an unexpected demand, such as: “Do you like my dress?”
Hancock hopes his research will help companies work out the best ways for their employees to communicate. For instance, the phone might be the best medium for sales where employees are encouraged to stretch the truth. But, given his result, work assessment where honesty is a priority, might be best done using email.
1. What does the phrase “to stretch the truth” in the last paragraph mean?| A．to tell the truth | B．to understate something |
| C．to overestimate something | D．to deceive people |
| A．Because it takes more time to think than to speak. |
| B．Because lies in emails may do harm to their credit. |
| C．Because of the detachment of emailing. |
| D．Because they are practiced to be more honest in emailing. |
| A．Emails contain more lies than other communication media. |
| B．Face-to-face communication contains more lies. |
| C．Face-to-face communication contains more lies because it is not recorded. |
| D．Deception makes people uncomfortable, which reduces mistakes in phone calls. |
| A．Honesty is always the best policy. |
| B．Employees should choose suitable media for different communication purposes. |
| C．If honesty is important, employees should choose face-to-face talk. |
| D．Employees should be honest with their clients, their bosses and their rivals. |
10 . Making beers on the moon might seem like a pipe dream to many, but for a group of students from the University of California at San Diego, there is a chance to take their research beyond Earth’s surface.
The Lab2Moon competition, held by TeamIndus, is offering students the chance to secure a spot on the TeamIndus rocket this year.
Taking craft beer to the next level, the students want to test whether it’s possible for yeast(酵母) to work and create beer on the moon. However, they believe the experiment is not just a creative concept for astronauts, it’s also important for the development of drugs and yeast-containing food, like bread.
“The idea started out with a few laughs among a group of friends,” said Neeki Ashari, a fifth-year bioengineering students at UC San Diego. “We all appreciate the craft beer. When we heard that there was an opportunity to design an experiment that would go up on India’s moonlander, w e thought we could combine our hobby with the competition by focusing on the practicality of yeast in outer space.”
The preparation work for the beer — up to the stage of adding yeast — will all be done on Earth, and rather than separating the fermentation ( 发酵) and carbonation stage of making beer, the team plans to combine them.
This removes the need to release CO2 accumulated in the process, which may result in cleanliness and safety issues out in space.
If selected, Team Original Gravity will be the first to make beer in outer space, and the fermentation will take place in a container no bigger than a soda can.
All teams competing for the place will showcase their ideas in Bangalore, India, in March.
Sadly, you won’t be enjoying moon beer in your local craft beer bar anytime soon, as no samples will be brought back. However, this small experiment could provide important data on just how practical it is for us to make and create our own resources on other planets and moons by learning how consumables (消耗品) behave in different environments.
1. How did the students feel when they got the chance to design the experiment ?| A．Excited. | B．Nervous. |
| C．Confident. | D．Casual. |
| A．The mixing of two stages. | B．Adding yeast on Earth. |
| C．The preparation work on Earth. | D．Fermentation and carbonation. |
| A．It has been designed based on similar experiments. |
| B．It’s quite competitive compared with other designs. |
| C．It’s design has already been approved by TeamIndus. |
| D．Its process was adapted to make it safer and greener. |
| A．It seems like a pipe dream. | B．It’s extremely complicated. |
| C．It’s meaningful and hopeful. | D．It’s creative but impractical. |
