Text 1 Whatever else went wrong in the world this year, no one can complain about a shortage of celebrity breakups. From Jennifer Aniston's split with Brad Pitt in January to Jessica Simpson's divorce from Nick Lachey in December, 2005 was filled with ruined romance. But hold the tears—at least for the ex-wives. Bad marriages might have been making them sick. Researchers say that long-term anger and hostility between partners is much more dangerous for women than men and can impair our immune system and put us at risk for depression, high blood pressure and even heart disease. In a study published in the current issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser and her colleagues at Ohio State University recruited 42 healthy couples who had been married an average of 12 years to spend two 24-hour stretches in a hospital research unit. On the first visit, the couples were encouraged to be loving and supportive of each other. On the second visit, they talked about their areas of conflict. On each visit, a special vacuum tube created blister wounds on their arms that were monitored for healing. The most hostile couples took an average of a day longer to heal. "Hostile marital interactions really enhance production of stress hormones, especially for women," Kiecolt-Glaser says. "And immune change is greater for women than for men." What makes women so vulnerable to a husband's hostility? Kiecolt-Glaser, a professor of psychiatry and psychology, says women remember both positive and negative interactions more than men because they're generally more aware of the emotional content of a relationship. Women have larger and broader social networks than men, she says, and they're more sensitive to "adverse events" in their networks—a friend, a child, or a sister in trouble. That sensitivity is especially acute when it comes to their most intimate relationship, with their husband. A common laboratory strategy for studying marriage, Kiecolt-Glaser says, is to watch couples talk about a disagreement and then have each partner rate their own and their spouse's behavior. "Women's ratings of the behavior are much closer to the outside observer's codings of hostility than men's," she says. "Men simply don't see it." Long-term unhappy marriages have serious health consequences. In another study published earlier this year in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and San Diego State University looked at data from more than 400 healthy women who were followed for 13 years before and after menopause. They found that marital dissatisfaction tripled a woman's chances of having metabolic syndrome, a group of heart-risk factors. Only widows were more likely to have metabolic syndrome than the unhappy wives; even divorced and single women had better health-risk profiles. What should you take away from all this? Kiecolt-Glaser says couples should learn to keep hostility in check. "When relationships are stressed," she says, "you see a 'tit for tat' kind of behavior where things really escalate. The most important thing is to cut that off early."
1. The marital status of the celebrities is mentioned in the beginning to show ______
A.how popular divorce is among famous people
B.how hostility between partners might end up in divorce
C.that divorce has become less popular even among celebrities
D.that divorce may be a better option than bad marriages
Text 2 If I could guarantee one thing in life it would be change—the fact that it will happen even when we resist it. It is the constant motion in our lives and its power should not be taken lightly or underestimated. Change is personal, change is powerful. Think about the magnitude of the word when we talk about changing ourselves. Your desire to change may come from wanting to improve yourself in some way from the inside out. I am certainly glad when I hear this from people, because at our very core there is always work to be done. Maybe it's about healing ourselves from a broken heart or replenishing our soul when a painful situation has left us feeling mentally, physically or spiritually depleted. Maybe it's just that deep-down desire to be kinder to ourselves, for ourselves to treat ourselves better. Things that sound easy to change can actually be the hardest things we've ever done, and because of this it's important to internalize the changes we want to make by journaling and writing down our goals. We say we're going to be more in touch with family or be more positive, but how many times have these regular conversations remained just that conversations, insignificant words that could have been powerful if we had backed up our talk with a timeline for change? I'm talking about living a life where our words become the framework for positive actions—a life in which we stop wishing for a better job or more time with our children or better bodies, and instead think about what we must do to spur the change for ourselves. The impact that change has on each of us is incredible. The mere one-syllable word causes many of us to become fearful—at just the thought of doing something differently, trying something new or challenging ourselves in ways we never have before. The prospect of changing behaviors and thoughts that have stifled our progress should be something that we welcome. In casual conversations many people tell me they welcome change—but behind closed doors they admit they're terrified. They are afraid of the realization that what they are doing today could be altered dramatically in a mere twenty-four hours. I can say with confidence that change has such an impact on our lives simply because it is a universal element that we all must confront. Each moment of the day we are consciously and subconsciously taking in new information and reprocessing old information in our brains. This constant influx and exchange has the ability to alter the way we view situations in our lives. Perhaps we have changed a belief or come to terms with something, or maybe we now disagree with someone because, as they tell us, we've "changed." The transformation is brought on by something that resonates with us or encourages us to consider a new perspective. When this happens, it's a real breakthrough, isn't it!
Text 3 In 1981 Kenji Urada, a Japanese factory worker, climbed over a safety fence at a Kawasaki plant to carry out some maintenance work on a robot. In his haste, he failed to switch the robot off properly. Unable to sense him, the robot's powerful hydraulic arm kept on working and accidentally pushed the engineer into a grinding machine. His death made Urada the first recorded victim to die at the hands of a robot. This gruesome industrial accident would not have happened in a world in which robot behaviour was governed by the Three Laws of Robotics drawn up by Isaac Asimov, a science fiction writer. The laws appeared in I, Robot, a book of short stories published in 1950 that inspired a recent Hollywood film. But decades later the laws, designed to prevent robots from harming people either through action or inaction, remain in the realm of fiction. Indeed, despite the introduction of improved safety mechanisms, robots have claimed many more victims since 1981. With robots now poised to emerge from their industrial cages and to move into homes and workplaces, roboticists are concerned about the safety implications beyond the factory floor. To address these concerns, leading robot experts have come together to try to find ways to prevent robots from harming people. Inspired by the Pugwash Conferences—an international group of scientists, academics and activists founded in 1957 to campaign for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons—the new group of robo-ethicists met earlier this year in Genoa, Italy, and announced their initial findings in March at the meeting. Should robots that are strong enough or heavy enough to crush people be allowed into homes? Is "system malfunction" a justifiable defence for a robotic fighter plane that violates the Geneva Convention and mistakenly fires on innocent civilians? These questions may seem esoteric but in the next few years they will become increasingly relevant. According to the UN Economic Commission for Europe's World Robotics Survey, in 2002 the number of domestic and service robots more than tripled, nearly outstripping their industrial counterparts. By the end of 2003 there were more than 600,000 robot vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers. In light of all this, it is crucial that we start to think about safety and ethical guidelines now. Regulating the behaviour of robots is going to become more difficult in the future, since they will increasingly have self learning mechanisms built into them, says Gianmarco Veruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, Italy. As a result, their behaviour will become impossible to predict fully, since they will not be behaving in predefined ways but will learn new behaviour as they go.
1. The word "gruesome" (Para. 2) probably means ______
A.unexpected
B.robotic
C.horrible
D.initial
A B C D
C
[解析] This gruesome industrial accident当然是指第一段提到的事故,第一段讲述了Kenji Urada惨死在机器人手下的经过。gruesome意为causing horror or fright。
2. By saying that "the Three Laws of Robotics...remain in the realm of fiction", the author means that ______
A.new kinds of robots keep cropping up in science fictions
B.filmmakers are still keen on adapting science fictions to movies
C.robots that are based on safety laws are not yet a reality
D.today's science fiction still depicts people dying at robots' hands
Text 4 Higher demand from developing countries and oil producers is offsetting the lower demand of wealthy countries. Consumption in these countries will rise 3 percent in 2008, or 1.2 million barrels a day, projects the International Energy Agency. Many of these countries subsidize fuel so that final customers are insulated from price increases. Gasoline is about 25 cents a gallon in Venezuela and about 60 cents in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran. There's been a huge transfer of power to oil producers. Even at $100 a barrel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates will earn almost $8 trillion in oil revenues between now and 2020, estimates the McKinsey Global Institute. More troubling are the political implications. "This has really strengthened the Iranians, Russians and Venezuelans to be more provocative in the world," says Larry Goldstein of the Energy Policy Research Foundation. Although governments control crude supplies, private companies have dominated distribution. Anyone can buy oil at a price. Now oil could become a political commodity, used by governments to cement their alliances, offered to friends at a discount; withheld from rivals. How can we retrieve some of our lost power? The first thing is to get out of denial. Stop blaming oil companies, "speculators" and other scapegoats for a situation not of their making. Next, we need to expand oil and natural-gas drilling in the United States, including Alaska. No, we can't "drill our way" out of this problem. But we can augment oil supplies and lessen price strains on global markets. It might take 10 years or more, because new projects are huge undertakings. But delay will only aggravate our future problems, just as past errors aggravate present problems. Finally, we need to let high prices work. Aside from encouraging fuel-efficient vehicles and disciplining driving habits, they may also stimulate development of new biofuels from wood chips, food waste and switch grass. Production costs of these fuels may be in the range of $1 a gallon. If true, that's well below today's wholesale gasoline prices. To assure new producers that they wouldn't be wiped out if oil prices plunged, we should set a floor price for oil of $50 to $80 a barrel, about 40 percent to 60 percent of today's levels. It's a worthy idea and can be done with a standby tariff. It would activate only if prices hit the threshold. We know that oil prices are unpredictable, and should a price collapse occur, Americans wouldn't be deluded into thinking we've returned permanently to cheap energy. We've made that mistake before.
1. In the first paragraph the author implies that ______
A.the oil shock is caused by increased overall petroleum demand
B.developing countries are not economical in their use of oil
C.the price of gasoline in oil-producing countries should be raised
D.it is necessary for rich countries to subsidize oil to protect the consumers
Text 5 Once upon a time, the only ideologically acceptable explanations of mental differences between men and women were cultural. Any biologist who dared to suggest in public that perhaps evolution might work differently on the sexes, and that this might perhaps result in some underlying neurological inequalities, was likely to get tarred and feathered. Today, by contrast, biology tends to be an explanation of first resort in matters sexual. So it is beneficiary to come across an experiment which shows that a newly discovered difference which fits easily, at first sight, into the biological-determinism camp, actually does not belong there at all. Writing in Psychological Science, a team led by ran Spence of the University of Toronto describes a test performed on people's ability to spot unusual objects that appear in their field of vision. Success at spatial tasks like this often differs between the sexes, so the researchers were not surprised to discover a discrepancy between the two. The test asked people to identify an "odd man out" object in a briefly displayed field of two dozen otherwise identical objects. Men had a 68% success rate. Women had a 55% success rate. Had they left it at that, Dr. Spence and his colleagues might have concluded that they had uncovered yet another evolved difference between the sexes, come up with a "Just So" story to explain it in terms of division of labour on the African savannah, and moved on. However, they did not leave it at that. Instead, they asked some of their volunteers to spend ten hours playing an action-packed, shoot-'em-up video game, called "Medal of Honour: Pacific Assault". As a control, other volunteers were asked to play a decidedly non-action-packed puzzle game, called "Ballance", for a similar time. Both sets were then asked to do the odd-man-out test again. Among the Ballancers, there was no change in the ability to pick out the unusual. Among those who had played "Medal of Honour", both sexes improved their performances. That is not surprising, given the different natures of the games. However, the improvement in the women was greater than the improvement in the men—so much so that there was no longer a significant difference between the two. Moreover, that absence of difference was long-lived. When the volunteers were tested again after five months, both the improvement and the lack of difference between the sexes remained. Though it is too early to be sure, it looks likely that the change in spatial acuity—and the abolition of any sex difference in that acuity—induced by playing "Medal of Honour" is permanent. That has several implications. One is that playing violent computer games can have beneficial effects. Another is that the games might provide a way of rapidly improving spatial ability in people such as drivers and soldiers. And a third is that although genes are important, upbringing matters, too. In this instance, exactly which bit of upbringing remains unclear. Perhaps it has to do with the different games that boys and girls play. But without further research, that suggestion is as much of a "Just So" story as those tales from the savannah.
1. In the past, if a research suggested that sex differences were biological, he would ______