1 . Each week, the BBC Autos editors select their favourite transport-related news stories, features and videos from around the web. This week, we noticed a trend toward offering creative solutions to global transportation problems.
Carry on without your carry-on
In an effort to save money and increase customer spending, United Airlines will restrict some passengers’ access to overhead compartments. The Huffington Post reports that United will be the first US airline to limit “basic economy” flyers to a single free carry-on bag that can fit under a seat.
Grandad’s Coke pool rust-removal stunt goes wrong
Not only are fizzy drinks(起泡饮料) capable of rotting teeth, they can also remove rust(锈). One Latvian grandfather decided to put cola to the ultimate rust-removal test by submerging his car in a pool of Coca-Cola. In a video posted online, the unnamed daredevil grandad fills a lined pit with 6,000 two-litre bottles of Coke. He then settles into the driver’s seat and speeds into the hole, smashing the front of his red Audi. Whether or not the rust was removed is unknown, but the Daily Mail contends that “
A.Improvement in the amount of rust on the car was far less than the damage to the vehicle. |
B.The problems have stirred up heated discussion on the Internet. |
C.Some of the suggestions are innovative and intelligent, but others are likely to make travelers feel funny. |
D.Coca-Cola is already a food giant, which attracts children and adults alike around the world. |
E.In other words, starting next year, those who purchase the cheapest fares will not only be allowed one personal item that fits under the seat in front of them. |
F.United’s move to limit carry-on bags and charge more for flying perks (飞行特权) isn’t a new concept. |
2 . Pollution is a disaster for the soil. When chemicals go into the ground, they slowly reduce the fertility of the soil and make it unsuitable for farming. They may also change the structure of the soil , which gets more easily destroyed by water and air.
For ordinary consumers, the influence of soil pollution can be felt most strongly in the supermarket. Exposure( 暴 露 ) to soil pollution can pollute foods grown in the field, harming people’s health.
One example of this is the “ poisonous rice event” that surfaced in 2013. Some rice from Hunan province was found to contain higher levels of cadmium(镉), a kind of metal likely to cause cancer, because Hunan has some of the worst soil pollution in China, according to CBC News. All the samples collected from this area were heavily polluted by cadmium. Sometimes, the cadmium level is 20 times higher than the national standard.
According to scientists, high levels of cadmium have been linked to organ( 器官) failure,weakening of bones and cancer. “ Cadmium is likely to store up in the kidney and liver,” Chen Nengchang, a scholar at the Guangdong Institute of Eco-environment and Soil Sciences, told The New York Times. “ When the amount reaches a certain point, it will cause a serious health risk for the organs.”
Unfortunately, fixing the problem was not as simple as destroying a few piles of rice. Since the outer covering of rice are often used to feed farm animals, the meat we eat and the milk we drink may both be at risk.
Luckily both the government and Chinese consumers have becomes more and more aware of this kind of pollutions, and aim to fight the situation with combined effort. There are many things we, as individual, can do to help. Eating organic foods are one of them.
Organic food is not only better for our health but also for our environment, especially the soil. To grow organic food, farmers stop using all artificial chemicals------including fertilizers, and pesticides. This production method does not cause any risk of soil pollution, unlike traditional farming, which uses tons of artificial chemicals. By consuming organic foods, we support healthier soil.
1. Which of the following is NOT mentioned about the influence of soil pollution?A.The production of the crops will decrease greatly. |
B.The soil will be poor in quality and improper for farming. |
C.The foods grown in the polluted field harm people’s health. |
D.The soil will become more easily destroyed by water and air. |
A.It caused cancer or death. |
B.Some contained more vitamins. |
C.It was reported as an advertisement. |
D.Some had higher levels of cadmium. |
A.the polluted soil | B.the failing organ | C.the poisonous rice | D.the sick farm animals. |
A.The government has realized the importance of it. |
B.It is good for both our health and the environment. |
C.Its production method is easier than the traditional one. |
D.Farmers used fewer fertilizers and pesticides when growing it. |
3 . Growing up, I was always totally in love with fashion. I’m the type of girl who follows Fashion Weck trends and spends much money on clothes. And while I have dreamed about building a career in fashion, I’m well aware that it’s not easy to make a name for yourself in the field. Despite this, I decided against studying medicine to follow my dream and went to West Virginia University for Fashion Design.
When I got a part-time job at Girl’s Lift last summer holiday. I was excited to be able to write articles for the website, sit in on editorial meetings and help pick the cover for the August/ September issue. But when GL editor-in-chief Karen asked if anyone wanted to help out in the fashion room for all the clothes, accessories, shoes and beauty products used for shoots(拍 摄). I jumped at the opportunity. After spending so much time with the clothes, I knew I just had to go on site for the shoot. My parents always told me to speak up when I want something, so I gathered up the courage to ask Karen if I could help out on the shoot. Not only did she say yes, but she told me that I could help out at another the following week.
The next day, when the photographer asked me to help him test the lightning for a few shoots, I was super excited. When one of the two models didn’t show up, I was asked to step in for her. Before I knew it, I was sitting in hair and makeup, being fitted for my clothes for the rest of my life. Never in a million years did I think I would be in a magazine. Let alone on four pages of a major fashion magazine. I am really grateful for this opportunity, but it would never have happened if I didn’t speak up and ask to be a part of it.
1. The writer’s dream is to ________.A.become a model for Fashion Week | B.take up a job in fashion |
C.study in West Virginal University | D.be an expert on medicine |
A.problem | B.subject | C.magazine | D.newspaper |
A.her parents | B.the models | C.the photographer | D.Karen |
A.It’s amazing to appear in a fashion magazine. |
B.It’s not easy to become famous in one’s career. |
C.Speak up for what you want and you will get it soon. |
D.Stick to your dream and try everything you can for it. |
4 . Most people think of zoos as safe places for animals, where struggles such as difficulty finding food and avoiding predators don’t exist. Without such problems, animals in zoos should live to a ripe old age.
But that may not be true for the largest land animals on Earth. Scientists have known that elephants in zoos often suffer from poor health. They develop diseases, joint problems and behavior changes. Sometimes, they even become unable to have babies.
To learn more about how captivity (监禁) affects elephants, a team of international scientists compared the life spans of female elephants born in zoos with female elephants living outdoors in their native lands. Zoos keep detailed records of all the animals in their care, documenting factors such as birth dates, illnesses, weight and death. These records made it possible for the researchers to analyze 40 years of data on 800 African and Asian elephants in zoos across Europe. The scientists compared the life spans of the zoo-born elephants with the life spans of thousands of female wild elephants in Africa and Asian elephants that work in logging camps (伐木场), over approximately the same time period.
The team found that female African elephants born in zoos lived an average of 16.9 years. Their wild counterparts who died of natural causes lived an average of 56 years — more than three times as long. Female Asian elephants followed a similar pattern. In zoos, they lived 18.9 years, while those in the logging camps lived 41.7 years.
Scientists don’t yet know why wild elephants seem to live so much better than their zoo-raised counterparts. Georgia Mason, a biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada who led the study, think stress and obesity (肥胖) may be to blame. Zoo elephants don’t get the same kind of exercise they would in the wild, and most are very fat. Elephant social lives are also much more different in zoos than in the wild, where they live in large herds and family groups.
Another finding from the study showed that Asian elephants born in zoos were more likely to die early than Asian elephants captured in the wild and brought to zoos. Mason suggests stress in the mothers in zoos might cause them to have babies that are less likely to survive.
The study raises some questions about acquiring more elephants to keep in zoos. While some threatened and endangered species living in zoos reproduce successfully and maintain healthy populations, that doesn’t appear to be the case with elephants.
1. According to the first two paragraphs unlike other zoo animals, zoo elephants ________.A.have difficulty eating food. | B.live to a ripe old age. |
C.are not afraid of predators. | D.develop health problems. |
A.They compared zoo elephants with wild elephants. |
B.Zoos kept detailed records of all the elephants in the wild. |
C.They analyzed the records of the elephants kept in zoos. |
D.The zoo-born elephants they studied are kept in European zoos. |
A.Female elephants live longer than male elephants. |
B.Female zoo elephants live longer than their wild counterparts. |
C.Female zoo elephants die much earlier than their wild counterparts. |
D.Elephants in zoos and those in the wild enjoy the same long life spans. |
A.It may not be a wise policy to keep elephants in the zoo. |
B.Elephants are no longer an endangered species. |
C.Zoo-born elephants should be looked after more carefully. |
D.Zoos should keep more animals except elephants. |
5 . Over this past year, lifestyle blogger Aileen Xu has kept a monthly gratitude list.
It wasn't a hard sell. “I think just over the last few years there's been more of a trend to focus on gratitude,” says psychologist Laurie Santos, who teaches a popular course on the science of happiness at Yale.
You can buy different kinds of gratitude journals, or download apps that remind you to take down your blessings. “Those types of products can remind us to take time to be grateful,” Santos says.
And noting your gratitude seems to pay off.
Making gratitude lists is just one way of enjoying those benefits. The best way of expressing gratitude may be different for each person. You could choose to keep your gratitude private or share it with others.
However, for all the research on the broad benefits of expressing gratitude, there's also evidence that it isn't for everyone. And it isn't a cure-all. It can't make injustice (不公平), loss or pain disappear.
A.What gratitude can do is to give us hope. |
B.There's a growing body of research on the benefits of gratitude. |
C.That's why gratitude features heavily in Santos' happiness class. |
D.Gratitude is a very rich emotion, but it's also a complicated one. |
E.Sometimes it was the big stuff(事情): “I'm grateful so many people care. ” |
F.Santos' students are asked to write a thank-you letter and then read it out loud to the recipient. |
6 . For the first time in its history, the International Olympic Committee has allowed a team of refugees to compete at the Games. All of the team’s members were forced to leave their home countries. Now they’ve come together to compete under the Olympic flag instead.
Making it to the Olympics is something eighteen-year-old swimmer Yusra has always dreamed of. But just last year, she was swimming for her life. She and her sister were forced to leave their home in Syria because of the war there. They were trying to get to Greece in a rubber dinghy (橡皮艇) with eighteen other refugees, when their boat broke down and began filling with water. Most of the people on board couldn’t swim, so she and her sister jumped in to help push it to shore.
Three hours later, they made it to safety, and eventually to Germany as refugees. Refugees are people who have left their home country because their lives are threatened by war, bad treatment or violence---often because of their race, gender or beliefs. Around the world, more than 60 million people are in this situation. And some of them, like Yusra, are elite athletes who have trained all their lives to compete at the highest level, only to have that chance taken away.
Now, a team of ten, including swimmers, runners, and judokas from Syria, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Congo have been given the chance to compete at the Games under the Olympic flag. They’ve also been given their own coaches, officials, uniforms and a chef, all paid for by the IOC. And in the past few months they’ve been training hard. The IOC says it wants the team to inspire and give hope to other refugees, and draw attention to the issues millions of other around the world are facing. And these guys say they are up to the task whether they win gold or not.
“These refugee athletes will show the world that despite the unimaginable tragedies that they have faced, anyone can contribute to society through their talent, skills and strength of the human spirit,” the statement continues.
1. What does the underlined sentence mean?A.She trained all her life. |
B.She swam for the glory of life. |
C.She swam to escape being drowned. |
D.She swam to escape from other refugees. |
A.Syria | B.Germany | C.Congo | D.Ethiopia |
A.Race | B.Violence | C.Religion | D.Nationality |
A.help the refugees to fulfill their dreams of winning the Olympic gold medal. |
B.offer the refugees a chance to earn bread by themselves. |
C.light a candle of hope for all the refugees in the world. |
D.curse the darkness of the society by forcing them to pay attention to the life of refugees. |
7 . Born in the 1950s, shopping malls were once the symbol of the U.S. consumer culture, but many are now dying out.
Dying shopping malls can be found across the United States, often in middle-class suburbs. Economic decline in certain areas together with an upward trend towards online shopping and new forms of urban shopping centers have pushed the once seemingly unbeatable shopping malls into decline. It is estimated that 15 to 50 percent of shopping malls may close in the coming decades.
American shopping culture follows its housing culture. Numerous shopping malls were therefore born after the Second World War, as Americans with cars and fat wallets moved to the suburbs. U.S. shopping malls were built at a rapid pace as shoppers fled cities, peaking in the mid-1990s when they were being built at a rate of 140 a year. Thus, too many shopping malls are left though construction has gradually decreased since then.
Currently, there are around 1,500 shopping malls across the U.S. Most share a handful of similar feature. They usually contain two or three stories of stores separated by walkways. Food courts serve pizza and other fast food. Parking lots are big enough to easily misplace a car.
Shopping malls in Europe might contain grocery stores or childcare centers, while those in Japan are often built around mass transit (交通枢纽). But the suburban American shopping malls are hard to get to and mainly sell clothes and gifts.
As many shopping malls became redundant (过剩的), leaders in many U.S. towns who once fought for malls now struggle with how to transform them to new uses. Highland Mall in Texas is being transformed into a community college campus, and Lakeland Mall in Florida now houses a megachurch (大型教会). Others have been redeveloped to include housing, offices and even green space. However, it is hard to imagine every shopping mall meeting the demands for such transformations.
1. What is this passage mainly about?A.The introduction to American consumer culture. |
B.The changes in Americans' shopping habits. |
C.The growth of American shopping centers. |
D.The decline of American shopping malls. |
A.After the Second World War | B.In the mid-1990s. |
C.After mass transit appeared. | D.In the 2000s. |
A.They make them look different from each other. |
B.They make them more accessible to the public. |
C.They change them to serve other purposes. |
D.They move them to the urban areas. |
My wife and I recently welcomed a child into the world.His only interest right now is keeping us awake 24/7.But one day,he'll need to learn something about finance.When he does,here are some suggestions.
1. You might think you want an expensive car,a fancy watch,and a huge house.But you don't.
2. I hope you're poor at some point.Not struggling,and not unhappy,of course.But there's no way to learn the value of money without feeling the power of its scarcity.It teaches you the difference between necessary and desirable.
3. Don't stay in a job you hate because you made a career choice at 18.Almost no one knows what he or she wants to do at that age.Many people don't know what they want until they're twice that age.(These are the signs you're in the wrong career.)
4. The best thing money buys is to control over your time.
5. Your savings rate has a little to do with how much you earn and a lot to do with how much you spend.I know a dentist who lives paycheck to paycheck,always on the edge of ruin.I know another person who never earned more than 50,000and saved a fortune.The difference is entirely due to their spending.
6. Don't listen to me if you disagree with what I've written.The world you grow up in will have different values and opportunities than the one I did.More important,you'll learn best when you disagree with someone and then are forced to learn it yourself.(On the other hand,always listen to your mother.)
A.It’ll make you learn to enjoy what you have, fix what’s broken. and shop for a bargain. |
B.Spending more is likely to stimulate your motivation for more earning. |
C.It gives you options and frees you from relying on someone else’s priorities. |
D.Living with less is the most efficient way to control your financial future. |
E.Actually, your parents have already given you too much. |
F.What you want is respect and admiration from other people. |
9 . The largest genetic study of mosquitoes has found their ability to resist insecticides(杀虫剂) is evolving rapidly and spreading across Africa, putting millions of people at higher risk of contracting malaria(疟疾).
British scientists who led the work said mosquitoes’ growing resistance to control tools such as insecticide-treated bed nets and insecticide spraying, which have helped cut malaria cases since 2000, now threatens “to disturb malaria control” in Africa.
“Our study highlights the severe challenges facing public efforts to control mosquitoes and tomanage and limit insecticide resistance,” said Martin Donnelly of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, who worked on the study with a team from Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Latest World Health Organization (WHO) data show that 216 million people were infected last year with the malaria parasite(寄生虫), which is transmitted by blood-sucking Anopheles mosquitoes. The disease killed 445,000 people in 2016, and the majority of them were children in sub-Saharan Africa.
To understand how mosquitoes are evolving, the researchers sequenced the DNA of 765 wild Anopheles mosquitoes taken from 15 locations across eight African countries. Their work, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, created the largest data resource on natural genetic variation for any species of insect.
Analyzing the data, the scientists found that the Anopheles gamblae mosquitoes(冈比亚疟蚊)were extremely genetically diverse compared with most other animal species. This high genetic diversity enables rapid evolution, they said, and helps to explain how mosquitoes develop insecticide resistance so quickly.
The data also showed the rapid evolution of insecticide resistance appeared to be due to many previously unknown genetic variants(变体)within certain genes. The scientists said these genetic variants for insecticide resistance were not only emerging independently in different parts of Africa, but were also being spread across the continent by mosquito migration.
Michael Chew, an expert at Britain’s Wellcome Trust global health charity which helped fund the research, said the finds underlined the importance of pushing scientific research ahead to control malaria.
Global efforts to control malaria through effective vaccine, insecticides and the best drug combinations require urgent, united action by scientists, drug companies, governments and the WHO.
1. Which of the following is scientists’ headache?A.The number of mosquitoes in Africa is growing rapidly. |
B.Some genetic variants of mosquitoes are still unknown. |
C.The existing insecticides aren’t as effective as they used to be. |
D.Millions of African people have resistance to medicines for malaria. |
A.threatening drug companies | B.spraying insecticides |
C.limiting blood donation | D.transmitting data |
A.Children are more likely to be bit by mosquitoes. |
B.Many previously unknown variants are found in the study. |
C.The mosquito migration contributes to the spread of variants. |
D.Anopheles mosquitoes have great genetic diversity. |
A.It created the largest data on natural genetic variation for any insect species. |
B.It found the possible causes for the rapid evolution of insecticide resistance. |
C.It discovered where the genetic variants emerged and how they were spread. |
D.It highlighted the public efforts and appealed to limit the use of insecticides. |
10 . The American Craftsman style is a type of design. It was popular from 1900 to the 1930s. It changed the style of building in the United States.
The craftsman style originally began in Europe. The British Arts and Crafts style arose in the 1860s. The unique designs of this movement tried to offer dignity to the common person. Handmade items were preferred because they were thought better than items that were mass-produced. But this British style was still Victorian. It still only served the wealthiest clients.
In 1897 a group of Boston architects brought these handcrafted styles to American. They planned a show of craft objects, which turned out to be a huge success. Here they realized the potential and established the Society of Arts and Crafts on June 28, 1897. Its slogan was “to develop and encourage higher standards in the handicrafts.”
The American style began as the Victorian Era was ending. It emphasized handmade work. Originality and simplicity were highly valued. Local materials and the quality of the handicraft were very important. these traits were meant to dignify the modest homes of the middle class.
These simple designs used glass and wood that were produced locally. They were also very elegant. The metalwork was a reaction to Victorian Opulence. The increase of mass-produced housing items was rejected. The American Craftsman used clean lines. It also relied on sturdy structure. Natural materials were always used in these houses if possible.
This style introduced many changes to the average American home. New designs were made for families without servants. This was a trait of the new middle class. The kitchen went form being a hidden room to a prominent one. Another development was the breakfast nook. This new area provided the family with a place to gather at any time of day.
Also, inspirational to the Craftsman style were the Shaker and Mission designs. The American Craftsman style led to the Art Deco Movement of the 1930s.
1. According to the passage, the American Craftsman style is a type of ________.A.Shaker and Mission design |
B.house made for families with servants |
C.design which was popular from 1900 to the 1930s |
D.breakfast nook |
A.The breakfast nook provided the family with a place to gather. |
B.The kitchen became a more prominent room. |
C.This style did not make any changes to the middle-class American home. |
D.Houses were designed for a new middle class with no servants. |
A.richness | B.greed |
C.ugliness | D.distaste |