1 . Maps, number lines, shapes, artwork and other materials tend to cover elementary classroom walls. However, too much of a good thing may end up
Psychology researchers Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin and Howard Seltman of Carnegie Mellon University looked at whether classroom displays affected children’s ability to maintain
“Young children spend a lot of time — usually the whole day — in the same classroom, and we have shown that a classroom’s
Should teachers
“We do not suggest by any means that this is the answer to all
For the study, 24 kindergarten students were placed in
“We were also interested in finding out if the visual displays were removed, whether the children’s attention would
However, when the researchers totaled all of the time children spent off-task in both types of classrooms, the rate of off-task
The researchers hope these findings will lead to further studies into developing guidelines to help teachers design classrooms
A.attracting | B.distracting | C.holding | D.paying |
A.confidence | B.relationship | C.consistency | D.focus |
A.gains | B.opportunities | C.needs | D.disabilities |
A.social | B.natural | C.physical | D.visual |
A.turn over | B.take down | C.try out | D.look into |
A.athletic | B.environmental | C.educational | D.communicative |
A.additional | B.prior | C.national | D.independent |
A.However | B.Besides | C.Therefore | D.Meanwhile |
A.stretch | B.adapt | C.concentrate | D.explore |
A.decorated | B.empty | C.transitional | D.laboratory |
A.teaching | B.classroom | C.school | D.personality |
A.accuracy | B.emphasis | C.impact | D.perspective |
A.refer | B.listen | C.respond | D.shift |
A.questions | B.behaviors | C.incidents | D.tasks |
A.originally | B.innovatively | C.appropriately | D.exclusively |
A. techniques B. negative C. factual D. slip E. identify F. conscious G. stick H. distance I. analyzers J. approach K. deceptive |
The Language of Lying
“Sorry, my phone died.” “It’s nothing. I’m fine.” “I love you.”
We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day, and we spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect them, from medieval torture devices to polygraphs, blood-pressure and breathing monitors, voice-stress
Psychologically speaking, we lie partly to paint a better picture of ourselves, connecting our fantasies to the person we wish we were rather than the person we are. But while our brain is busy dreaming, it’s letting plenty of signals
A technology known as linguistic text analysis has helped to
First, liars mention themselves less when making
Second, liars tend to be more
Third, liars tend to use longer sentence structure, inserting irrelevant but
Talking With — Not Just to — Kids Powers How They Learn Language
Children from the poorer families begin life not only with material disadvantages but cognitive ones. Research for decades
But just the quantity of words a child hears is not the most significant influence on language acquisition. Growing evidence has led researchers
A paper
The researchers confirmed the classic 1995 finding that, overall, kids from wealthier families hear more words. And small
The researchers calculated that a child’s verbal ability score increased
The study is a “very, very important” addition to a growing body of work, says developmental psychologist Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University. “We have known for quite a while that conversational turns — or
4 . Precognitive dreams are dreams that seemingly predict the future which cannot be inferred from actually available information. Former US President Abraham Lincoln once revealed the frightening dream to his law partner and friend Ward Hill Lamon, “…Then I heard people weep… ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ I demanded. ‘The President,’ ‘he was killed!’…” The killing did happen later.
Christopher French, Professor in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, stated the most likely explanation for such a phenomenon was coincidence (巧合). “In addition to pure coincidences we must also consider the unreliability of memory”, he added. Asked what criteria would have to be met for him to accept that precognitive dreams were a reality, he said, “The primary problem with tests of the claim is that the subjects are unable to tell when the event(s)they’ve dreamed about will happen.”
However, some claimed to make such tests practicable. Professor Caroline Watt at the University of Edinburgh, has conducted studies into precognitive dreaming. She stated that knowing future through dreams challenged the basic assumption of science — causality (relationship of cause and effect).
Dick Bierman, a retired physicist and psychologist, who has worked at the Universities of Amsterdam, Utrecht and Groningen, has put forward a theory that may explain precognitive dreams. It is based on the fact that when scientists use certain mathematical descriptions to talk about things like electromagnetism (电磁学), these descriptions favour the belief that time only moves in one direction. However, in practice the wave that is running backwards in time does exist. This concept is called the time symmetry, meaning that the laws of physics look the same when time runs forward or backward. But he believes that time symmetry breaks down due to external conditions. “The key of the theory is that it assumes that there is a special context that restores the broken time-symmetry, if the waves running backwards are ‘absorbed’ by a consistent multi-particle (多粒子) system. The brain under a dream state may be such a system where broken time-symmetry is partially restored. This is still not a full explanation for precognitive dreams but it shows where physics might be adjusted to accommodate the phenomenon,” he explains.
Although Bierman’s explanation is still based on guesses and has not accepted by mainstream science, Watt does think it is worth considering. For now, believing that it’s possible to predict future with dreams remains an act of faith. Yet, it’s possible that one day we’ll wake up to a true understanding of this fascinating phenomenon.
1. According to French, what makes it difficult to test precognitive dreams?A.Unavailability of people’s dreams. |
B.That coincidences happen a lot in reality. |
C.That criteria for dream reliability are not trustworthy. |
D.People’s inability to tell when dreamt events will happen. |
A.the assumption of causality | B.the time symmetry |
C.memories of ordinary people | D.modern scientific tests |
A.Lincoln was warned of the killing by his friend |
B.Watt carried out several experiments on causality |
C.researches on electromagnetism are based on the time symmetry |
D.time’s moving in two directions may justify precognitive dreams |
A.Should Dreams Be Assessed? |
B.Can Dreams Predict the Future? |
C.How Can Physics Be Changed to Explain Dreams? |
D.Why Should Scientists Study Precognitive Dreams? |
5 . The emergence of black holes undoubtedly marks the beginning of a revolution. Black holes have many peculiar properties, such as the alteration of space and time, the radiation of gravitational waves and so on. Scientists are still trying to study the properties and evolution of black holes in order to better understand the origin and evolution of the universe.
Recently, a team of astronomers may have found a solo-wandering black hole using a strange trick of gravity called microlensing (微透镜效应), but the results still have to be confirmed.
Sometimes it’s tough being an astronomer. Nature likes to hide the most interesting things from easy observation. Take, for example, black holes. Except for the strange quantum (量子) phenomenon of Hawking radiation, black holes are completely black. They don’t emit a single bit of radiation – they only absorb, hence their name.
To date, the only way astronomers have been able to spot black holes is through their influence on their environments. For example, if an orbiting star gets a little too close, the black hole can absorb the gas from that star, causing it to heat up as it falls. We can watch as stars dance around the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Even the famed pictures of the black holes in the center of the Milky Way and the M87 galaxy(星系) aren’t photographs of the black holes themselves. Instead, they are radio images of everything around them.
But surely not all black holes have other light-emitting objects around them to help us find them. To find these wanderers, astronomers have tried their luck with microlensing. We know that heavy objects can bend the path of light around them. This is a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and the slight bending of starlight around our own sun was one of the first successful tests of the theory.
Microlensing is pretty much what the name suggests. When astronomers get extremely lucky, a wandering black hole and pass between us and a random distant star. The light from that star bends around the black hole because of its gravity, and from our point of view, the star will appear to temporarily flare in brightness.
And when I say “extremely lucky” I mean it. Despite trying this technique for over a decade, it is only now that astronomers have found a candidate black hole through microlensing. Two teams used the same data, a microlensing event recorded from both the OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) telescope in Chile and the MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) telescope in New Zealand. One team found that the mass was somewhere around seven times the mass of the sun – definitely black hole territory. But the other team estimated a much smaller mass, around 2-4 times the mass of the Sun. If the true mass of the object is at the lower end of that spectrum (光谱), then the wanderer is probably not a black hole.
1. Why does the author say it is hard to be an astronomer?A.Einstein’s theory is hard to understand. |
B.Many things in nature are not easy to observe. |
C.Understanding the evolution of the universe is not easy. |
D.Whether the black hole has been found remains to be seen. |
A.Stars’ wandering in black holes. |
B.Black holes’ absorbing the star’s gas. |
C.The relationship between stars’ heating and black holes. |
D.Finding black holes by observing environmental changes. |
A.People can often find black holes with glowing objects. |
B.Research groups can work together to find black holes. |
C.Glowing objects around black holes help us find them sometimes. |
D.Understanding the properties of black holes helps find them. |
A.To persevere in the end is to win. |
B.Facts speak louder than words. |
C.Failure is the mother of success. |
D.Things are not always what they seem. |
6 . Why Are You Still Coughing?
Have you caught a cold recently — but can’t get rid of the cough? You’re not alone. The symptom can stick around for weeks after our bodies have cleared a virus. Michael Shiloh, a physician specializing in infectious disease research at UT Southwestern Medical Center, says coughing patients often report that they were sick as many as eight weeks prior to seeing him. He says, “
The United States saw a sharp rise in cases of influenza in late 2023 that’s dragged on into 2024. And though positive tests for the illness have leveled off or decreased countrywide over the past weeks, the number of people seeking healthcare for respiratory (呼吸的) diseases is still elevated across much of the U.S.
Coughing is an important reaction that protects the airway from dangers like water or bits of mis-swallowed food, says doctor and researcher Lorcan McGarvey of Queen’s University Belfast.
While it may seem obvious that coughing is meant to clear our throats, it’s also possible that viruses cause the reaction to help themselves spread.
“We don’t know,” says electrophysiologist Thomas Taylor-Clark of the University of South Florida. “But what we can say is that we do know some things, one being that viruses cause infection.”
A.The reaction is caused by nerves that reach into the airway. |
B.Scientists know about many different stimuli that can cause cough. |
C.Many infections involve dry coughs that don’t produce phlegm (痰) at all. |
D.We can’t really detect virus any more in these individuals, and yet they’re still coughing. |
E.But at least temporarily, they can send us into coughing even when we’re no longer sick. |
F.Scientists still aren’t sure exactly why otherwise healthy people experience this kind of persistent cough. |
A. emerge B. absorbing C. subject D. defining E. movement F. originally G. course H. universally I. happens J. constant K. corresponds |
How Long Is a Second?
The length of a second depends on how you’re measuring it. There are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute — so surely a second is 1/86400, of a day, right? Well, it turns out that
“The second was
In the 16th century, people turned to technological solutions to this problem, and the first recognizable mechanical clocks began to
By around 1940, quartz crystal clocks (石英钟) had become the new gold standard. However, problems arose, and this was where atomic clocks came in. “Atoms exist only in particular energy states and can only change from one state to another by
In fact, scientists are discussing whether it’s time to redefine the second again. But while several important questions still need to be answered before this
8 . The development of bigger brains has long been considered a hallmark of our species’ increased intelligence and subsequent dominance on this planet. The last two million years of our evolution were marked by a nearly fourfold increase in brain volume.
But a growing body of evidence suggests our brains recently changed in an unexpected way: They declined in size sometime following the end of the last Ice Age.
“Most people think of brain evolution happening in this one-dimensional way. It grows, plateaus and stops,” said Jeremy DeSilva, a professor of paleoanthropology at Dartmouth College. “But we’ve lost brain tissue equal to the volume of a lime - it isn’t a tiny little sliver we’re talking about.”
The precise timing of that Post-Ice Age brain shrink has remained a mystery until now. A group of researchers led by DeSilva used a mixture of fossil and modern specimen data to pinpoint that this loss of gray matter happened between 3, 000 to 5, 000 years ago, according to research published in June in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
Many anthropologists had initially assumed that the changes coincided with the appearance of agricultural practices around 10, 000 years ago, and a global shift away from hunting and gathering.
The more-recent dates from DeSilva’s group point to booming eras for ancient civilizations in North Africa, the Middle East and South America -complex societies that they think may have played a role in the shrinkage.
They hypothesized that human societies got so cooperatively organized in the past 3, 000 years that we began relying on what researchers call collective intelligence.
“It is the idea that a group of people is smarter than the smartest person in the group,” said James Traniello, a biology professor at Boston University and one of DeSilva’s co-authors. “So basically, if you live in a group, you solve problems more rapidly, more efficiently and more accurately than what’s possible for any individual.”
Traniello said the inspiration for applying this idea to why human brains may have shrunk came from “ultrasocial” insects such as ants. Ants form highly cooperative societies in which division of labor has favored smaller-brained individuals due to an advanced level of social organization.
The researchers suggested that perhaps our need to maintain a large brain c to keep track of information about food, social relationships, predators and our environment—has also relaxed in the past few millennia because we could store information externally in other members of our social circles, towns and groups.
“We’re so social that we don’t have to know everything anymore,” DeSilva said. “And we collectively then operate as a pretty functional society.”
1. What did Jeremy DeSilva mean by saying “But we’ve lost brain tissue equal to the volume of a lime- it isn’t a tiny little sliver we’re talking about.”?A.The shrinking of human brain is significantly noticeable. |
B.The shrinking of human brain is a normal result of evolution. |
C.The shrinking of human brain is not as serious as we imagined. |
D.The shrinking of human brain is not a big deal. |
A.A species’ body size is not directly related to its brain size. |
B.Cooperative social organization is likely to cause brain shrinkage. |
C.The phenomenon of brain shrinkage is not limited to human beings. |
D.Human beings and ants are among the most cooperative species. |
A.The coming-into-being of agriculture. |
B.The booming civilization in the world. |
C.The advancement of social organization. |
D.The development of information technology. |
A.The reduction of brain size is likely to give rise to serious consequences. |
B.We humans are still the most intelligent and dominant species in the world. |
C.Collective intelligence most probably account for human’s smaller brains. |
D.Social specialization brings more good than harm to us human beings. |
9 . WHAT ARE RIP CURRENTS?
Rip currents are like the rivers of the sea, transporting water near the shore back out into the ocean depths. The presence of these currents can be hidden by the wild movements of the surrounding waves. This means that as well as carrying seaweed and pieces of materials quickly out to sea, they can rapidly sweep away even the strongest swimmers. Around 80 percent of all lifeguard rescues are caused by powerful rip currents pulling a swimmer into danger.
If you find yourself being pulled out to sea by an unsuspected rip current, you should remain calm, focus on staying afloat and, if you can, swim parallel to the shore. Your instincts might tell you to swim towards land, as this is where you’re aiming to get to, but the current will be too strong to swim against. Instead, aim to move across the current and into slower flowing water next to it. A rip current may only pull you just past the breaking waves, but in some cases they can take you hundreds of metres offshore. The strength of currents can be hard to predict, so it’s safest to stay on lifeguarded beaches and not to swim if you see any indication of a rip current.
1. Understanding rip currents can help ______.A.prevent you from swimming into danger | B.transport water out into the ocean depths |
C.clear away seaweed and pieces of materials | D.warn lifeguards against rescue in rip currents |
A.difference between various currents | B.two types of zones off shore |
C.an ideal route to surf in safety | D.how rip currents form |
A.1000 metres off the shore beyond “HEAD”. | B.The channel through the gap in a sandbar. |
C.The location where a red flag is erected. | D.Over the narrow stretch of a sandbar. |
10 . Business innovation is an organization’s process for introducing new ideas, workflows methodologies, services or products. Like IT innovation, which calls for using technology in new ways to create a more efficient and agile organization, business innovation should enable the achievement of goals across the entire organization, with sights set on accomplishing core business aims and initiatives. Innovation often begins with idea generation, wherein ideas are narrowed down during brainstorming sessions, after which leaders consider the business viability, feasibility and desirability of each idea. Business innovation should improve one existing products, services or processes; or it should solve a problem; or it should reach new customers. Recent examples of business innovation include the introduction of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, whose creator and namesake James Dyson declared in advertisements that he set out to build a better product by applying industrial cyclone technologies to the household appliance.
The purpose of the business innovation process is to create value for the organization. That value can come from creating new revenue opportunities or driving more revenue through existing channels; from creating efficiencies that save time, money or both; or from improvements to productivity or performance. In short, innovation should lead to higher profits. Additionally, the results of an organization’s innovation process should yield a competitive advantage; it should help the organization to grow and reach — or, better still, exceed — strategic objectives.
Innovation and invention are closely linked, but the two terms are not interchangeable. An invention is an entirely new creation. The process of business innovation can produce an invention, but the term is broader in scope and includes the application of an existing concept or practice in a new way, or applying new technology to an existing product or process to improve upon it. To better understand the difference, consider this: The telephone is an invention, but the smartphone is an innovation.
Business innovation can also be classified as either revolutionary or evolutionary. Revolutionary business innovation yields a drastic change in a product, service, process, etc., which often destroys or supplants an existing business model. This is also known as radical Evolutionary or incremental innovation involves smaller, more continuous innovation, improvements that, while important, are not drastic enough to shift a company or market into a new paradigm. Disruptive innovation is a category that emphasizes the destructive aspect of revolutionary innovation; this term applies to business innovation that leads to the creation of a new market that displaces an existing one or, similarly, a significant upheaval in a category of products or services.
Business innovation, like most business initiatives, has both benefits and risks. Organizations should recognize on the negative side that the business innovation process can be a costly undertaking that does not always produce a return on investment (ROI); that idea considered likely to succeed could still fail; and that stakeholders could fight the changes required to be successful. On the other hand, organizations need to weigh those risks against the benefits of business innovation.
1. What does the underlined word in the first paragraph mean?A.Persuasibility. | B.Scarcity. | C.Generality. | D.Practicability. |
A.Create value benefits for the enterprise. |
B.Reform the management structure of enterprises. |
C.Encourage staff to make more inventions. |
D.Upgrade the product performance. |
A.They are essentially the same concept. |
B.They can replace each other in the context. |
C.They can bring huge commercial benefits. |
D.They are closely related but have different conceptual scopes. |
A.The precautions for brainstorming meetings. |
B.The considerations for business innovation. |
C.The difference between innovation and invention. |
D.The revolutionary change in business innovation. |