2 . A butterfly’s wings can have many jobs besides keeping the insect high up in the air. They may be used to attract mates, or to warm potential attackers to stay away. All of these roles, though, depend on their unchanging colouration. This plays into the idea that butterfly wings are dead tissue, like a bird’s feathers. In fact, that’s not true. For example, in some species males’ wings have special cells releasing some chemicals which attract females.
Nanfang Yu, a physicist at Columbia University, in New York, has been looking into the matter. Together with Naomi Pierce, a butterfly specialist at Harvard University, he has now shown, in a paper published in Nature Communications in February, 2020, that butterfly wings are, indeed, very much alive.
In their experiments, the two researchers used a laser to heat up spots on the wings of dozens of butterfly species. When the temperature of the area under the laser reached 40℃ or so, the insects responded within seconds by doing things that stopped their wings heating up further. These actions included a butterfly turning around to minimize its profile to the laser, moving its wings up and down or simply walking away.
Butterflies engaged in all of these heat-minimizing activities even when the researchers blindfolded them. That suggested the relevant sensors were on the wings themselves. Dr. Yu and Dr. Pierce therefore searched those wings for likely looking sensory cells. They found some, in the form of neurons (神经元) that were similar to heat detectors known from other insects. They also uncovered disc-shaped cells that appeared to be similar to pressure-sensitive neurons. They guess that these are there to detect deformation of the wing—information an insect could use to control its flight pattern.
The third discovery they made to contradict the “dead wing” idea was that some butterfly wings have a heartbeat. A butterfly’s wings have veins (静脉). These carry a bloodlike liquid which, researchers have now found in males, shows a pulse of several dozen beats per minute. The source of this pulse appears to be the scent pad, a dark spot on the wings that produces the female-attracting chemicals. Apparently, this “wing heart” acts as a pump that helps bloodlike liquid through the scent pad.
In all their experiments simulating different environmental conditions, Dr. Yu and Dr. Pierce consistently found that, different parts of the wing are covered by different sorts of scales (鳞屑). In particular, tubes pass through scales over the scent pads. This improves their ability to spread heat away and helps keep the living parts of a butterfly’s wing alive.
1. A bird’s feathers are mentioned in Paragraph 1 to ________.| A．introduce the latest research findings on a bird |
| B．highlight the special feature of a bird’s feathers |
| C．show common knowledge about butterfly wings |
| D．stress the difference between a butterfly and a bird |
| A．Butterfly wings are complicated living organs. |
| B．Butterfly wings have little reaction to external heat. |
| C．The scent pads on some male butterfly wings are their hearts. |
| D．Heat-minimizing activities help detect deformation of the wings. |
| A．Seeing Is Believing | B．More Than Meets The Eye |
| C．Nothing Seek, Nothing Find | D．Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds |
Researchers are studying the unconscious reactions that happen when we make eye contact. They have found that making eye contact makes us less aware of
There is one road that spans thousands of years. Along it are the echoes of camel belts,
5 . Casting blame is natural: it is tempting to fault someone else for a mistake rather than taking responsibility yourself. But blame is also harmful. It makes it less likely that people will own up to mistakes, and thus less likely that organizations can learn from them. Research published in 2015 suggests that firms whose managers pointed to external factors to explain their failings underperformed companies that blamed themselves.
Blame culture can spread like a virus. Just as children fear mom and dad’s punishment if they admit to wrongdoing, in a blaming environment, employees are afraid of criticism and punishment if they acknowledge making a mistake at work. Blame culture asks, “who dropped the ball?” instead of “where did our systems and processes fail?” The focus is on the individuals, not the processes. It’s much easier to point fingers at a person or department instead of doing the harder, but the more beneficial, exercise of fixing the root cause, in which case the problem does not happen again.
The No Blame Culture was introduced to make sure errors and deficiencies (缺陷) were highlighted by employees as early as possible. It originated in organizations where tiny errors can have catastrophic (灾难性的) consequences. These are known as high reliability organizations (HROs) and include hospitals, submarines and airlines. Because errors can be so disastrous in these organizations, it’s dangerous to operate in an environment where employees don’t feel able to report errors that have been made or raise concerns about that deficiencies may turn into future errors. The No Blame Culture maximizes accountability because all contributions to the event occurring are identified and reviewed for possible change and improvement.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which supervises air traffic across the United States, makes it clear that its role is not to assign blame or liability but to find out what went wrong and to issue recommendations to avoid a repeat. The proud record of the airline industry in reducing accidents partly reflects no-blame processes for investigating crashes and close calls. The motive to learn from errors also exist when the risks are lower. That is why software engineers and developers routinely investigate what went wrong if a website crashes or a server goes down.
There is an obvious worry about embracing blamelessness. What if the website keeps crashing and the same person is at fault? Sometimes, after all, blame is deserved. The idea of the “just culture”, a framework developed in the 1990s by James Reason, a psychologist, addresses the concern that the incompetent and the malevolent (恶意的) will be let off the hook. The line that Britain’s aviation regulator draws between honest errors and the other sort is a good starting-point. It promises a culture in which people “are not punished for actions or decisions taken by them that match with their experience and training”. That narrows room for blame but does not remove it entirely.
1. According to the research published in 2015, companies that ______ had better performance.| A．blamed external factors | B．admitted their mistakes |
| C．conducted investigations | D．punished the under performers |
| A．It encourages the early disclosure of errors. |
| B．It only exists in high reliability organizations. |
| C．It enables people to shift the blame onto others. |
| D．It prevents organizations from making any error. |
| A．Innocent people might take the blame by admitting their failure. |
| B．Being blamed for mistakes can destroy trust in employees. |
| C．The line between honest errors and the other sort is not clear. |
| D．People won’t learn their lessons if they aren’t blamed for failures. |
| A．Why We Fail to Learn from Our Own Mistakes |
| B．How to Avoid Disastrous Errors in Organizations |
| C．Why We Should Stop the Blame Game at Work |
| D．How to Deal with Workplace Blame Culture |
6 . Children often learn new languages more easily than adults do, but it’s unclear why. Some theorize that grasping a language requires absorbing subtle patterns unconsciously and that adults’superior conscious reasoning is to blame. New research suggests that, indeed, grown-ups might just be too smart for their own good.
For a recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, a group of Belgian adults at the same time read and heard strings of four made-up words(such as “kieng nief siet hiem”). Specific consonants (辅音) always appeared at the beginning or end of a word if the word contained a certain vowel (元音). Participants next read the sequences aloud quickly. Their ability to avoid mistakes doing so indicated how well they absorbed the consonant-vowel patterns.
But before exposure to the new words, the participants had carried out a separate test: pressing keys to react to letters and numbers. Some got a much faster, more mentally draining version of this test. Those who did the difficult version claimed greater mental exhaustion afterward—but performed better on the following language task. The researchers assume that tired learners used less conscious analysis on the word rules: they were free to learn like a child.
For a related paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, the research team had English-speaking adults listen to streams of syllables (音节) secretly grouped into three-syllable “words.” Later, they played pairs of three-syllable units; one word in the pair came from the stream, and one was a new combination. The participants guessed which word was familiar, then rated their confidence.
In one participant group, some had first done the original mentally draining test. In another, some had received magnetic pulses to interrupt activity in a brain area that previous research has linked to executive control. In both groups, these measures improved participants’ performance on the syllable task when they were unsure about their answers, indicating unconscious analysis of speech.
Neuroscientist Michael Ullman, who was not involved in either paper, likes that both the studies added to mental burden differently and measured different skills. That’s really good in science because you’ve got evidences pointing to the same direction,” he says, adding that he would like to see higher language skills such as grammar studied this way.
1. The reason why some Belgians were given a more difficult test before the language task was that __________.| A．they would have no time to prepare for the upcoming task. |
| B．they would be too tired mentally to consciously analyze the rules |
| C．they could have something to refer to in the following task |
| D．they might compare the difficulty level of the two tasks |
| A．The research result is not solid until grammar is included. |
| B．Subconscious mind remains to be explored in science. |
| C．The outcomes of the two researches back each other up |
| D．More evidence is needed to back the claim of the two papers. |
| A．Human brain processes languages in multiple ways. |
| B．Conscious analysis is the key to mastering a language. |
| C．Increasing mental health improves one’s language. |
| D．Reducing reasoning may help to learn a language. |
1.推荐一项运动并说明理由;
2.提示该项运动需做的准备。
注意：1.词数100词左右;
2.开头、结尾已给出，不计入总词数。
Dear Jim,
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yours,
Li Hua
8 . My morning routine varies little from day to day. I walk the dog, eat breakfast at the kitchen counter with Katie and Matt, and then settle in for a day at the computer. And because I work mostly from home, I have learned that little walks into the outside world are important for psychological well-being. So before I begin attempting to put sentences together, I walk over to a little coffee shop in my neighborhood, and chat with the folks behind the counter.
The coffee shop is on the other side of the historic Chesapeaker & Ohio Canal from my house. Whenever in season, tourists line up to take a slow boat, if not to India, at least into the 19th century.
One warm day last fall, I turned the corner to see one of the boatmen sitting alone on the boat, bathed in early-morning light. He was playing the violin. The scene stopped me in my tracks. What I witnessed could only be described as a perfect moment. Ten seconds at most. But months later I still remember just standıng there, watching, listening, and taking it all in.
We all have such moments put before us. Little surprises. Whether we’re wise enough to see them is another thing.
I thought of the violin man one Sunday afternoon while reading the biographies of those killed in the Columbia incident. The specialist Laurel Clark, talking from the shuttle a few days before it was to land, said it was blissful to see the simple unexpected wonders of space like a sunset. “There’s a flash; the whole payload bay turns this rosy pink,” she said. “It only lasts about 15 seconds, and then it’s gone.”
I once had a friend who had a strange habit that never stopped to amuse me, maybe because I never quite knew when she was going to spring it on me. It could come in the middle of a particularly lively dinner with old friends. Out of the blue, she’d say, “Stop! I want to remember this moment.” I realize now, after her death, what wise advice that is.
1. The author goes out for a walk every day in the morning mainly because __________.| A．she needs to walk the dog and enjoy the fresh air |
| B．she considers that it is good for her physical health |
| C．she hates to be left alone at home when others are out |
| D．she benefits psychologically from contacting the outside world |
| A．enjoyable | B．valuable |
| C．sensible | D．reasonable |
| A．develop a good habit |
| B．enjoy life to the fullest |
| C．catch the valuable moments in life |
| D．be willing to follow friends’ advice |
More than just
White Fang spent the first month of his life
