Dye (染料) can bring a little color to life. Most clothing is colored with dyes. Modern, manufactured dyes can be costly. Natural dyes from plant and animal products have been used since ancient times. So this week, we describe a natural way to dye wool.
There are several methods to put dye onto material. The vat method, for example, can be used to dye wool with onionskins. For this example, use one hundred grams of natural wool. The wool must be clean. Leave it overnight in water and liquid soap. Then wash it with clean water that is a little warm. Gently squeeze out the extra water.
A solution called a mordant (媒染) is used in the dying process. A mordant helps fix the dye to the material. Traditionally, mordants were found in nature. Wool ash is one example. But chemical mordants such as alum are popular today. Alum is sold in many stores. It is often mixed with cream of tartar, a fine powder commonly used in cooking.
Mix eight grams of alum with seven grams of cream of tartar in a small amount of hot water. Add the solution to a metal pan of cool water. Next, add the wool and place the mixture over heat. Slowly bring the liquid to eighty-two degrees Celsius. Heat the mixture for forty-five minutes. After it cools, remove the wool and wash it.
To prepare the dye solution, cover thirty grams of onionskins with water. Use only the dry, brown outer skins. Boil the liquid until the onionskins lose their color, about forty-five minutes. Remove the skins after the dye cools.
Now it is time to dye the wool. Place the wool into the dye and heat the mixture. Bring it to a boil, then immediately reduce the heat to eighty-two degrees. Now heat the dye for about forty-five minutes or until the wool is the desired color. Keep in mind that wet wool looks darker than it is.
Once the dye cools, remove the wool and wash it. Now the wool is orange or yellow. Or at least it should be.
57. According to the passage, mordants are ________.
A. dyes used in the dying process
B. materials which will be put dye to
C. wood ashes used in the dying process
D. not dyes but play an important role in the dying process
58. Which of the following statements about “natural dyes” is true?
A. They might be cheaper than chemical dyes.
B. They are more expensive than chemical dyes.
C. They have been used for only recent years.
D. They are all made from animal products.
59. As for the vat method, which of the following statements is NOT necessarily needed?
A. Ash. B. Water. C. Mordant. D. Temperature.
60. Choose the proper order of dying wool:
a. boil the liquid with onionskins.
b. add mordants to a metal pan of cool water.
c. wash the wool with clean water.
d. put the wool into the liquid and heat it
e. heat the mixture and then wash it.
A. c, b, e, a, d B. e, b, c, d, a C. b, e, a, d, c D. a, b, e, c, d
Here is your best chance to travel around the UK in 2012: More than 200 B&Bs（bed & breakfast）across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are selected to offer you amazing services for your stay at their lowest prices! Don’t miss it. Just collect the vouchers（活动券）in our B&B Daily printed from 01/04/2012 to 07/04/2012 and book the stays for your travel following the terms and conditions below:
● The offer includes a room for the night and a breakfast the next morning.
● The offer is of two kinds: ￡20 per room, valid（有效的）during stay period of 02/04/2012—31/05/2012 and then again 01/09/2012—31/10/2012；￡35 per room, per night, valid during stay period of 01/06/2012—31/08/2012.
● The offer is valid for a basic twin or double room only.
● The stay must be booked directly with the chosen B&Bs before 28/04/2012.
● Each voucher can only be used by the holder to book one room for one night.
● If voucher holders book either the ￡20 or ￡35 per room per night, any additional services such as lunch, evening meal or activities may require an extra charge. But these are not required in order to take up the offer. Please check directly with your chosen B&Bs to see what extra services are available.
● Vouchers must be presented on arrival. If no vouchers are presented, the B&Bs may reserve（保留）the right to charge at full price for every night of stay.
● Vouchers may not be used together with any other offer.
● The voucher holders must pay for the stay in full at the time of booking. Additional ￡10 may be paid to confirm（确认）the booking and will be returned on arrival.
● The B&Bs reserve the right to refuse voucher holders’ bookings for people under the age of 18.The voucher can be used for a stay at the chosen B&B on ______.
| A．09/01/2012 | B．04/02/2012 | C．01/03/2012 | D．28/04/2012 |
How much should be paid for a two-night stay in October 2012 at a chosen B&B?
| A．￡70 | B．￡40 | C．￡35 | D．￡30 |
What right do the B&Bs reserve?
| A．To charge extra ￡10 for bookings with no vouchers. |
| B．To refuse bookings for guest under the age of 18. |
| C．To charge at full price for stays not confirmed. |
| D．To request extra charges as tips. |
By taking up the offer, the voucher holders can choose to ______ .
| A．book either a basic twin or double room at the chosen B&Bs |
| B．have lunch or evening meal without paying extra money |
| C．use the B&B offer together with other offers |
| D．book the stays though B&B Daily |
On a hill 600 feet above the surrounding land, we watch the lines of rain move across the scene, the moon rise over the hills, and the stars appear in the sky. The views invite a long look from a comfortable chair in front of the wooden house.
Every window in our wooden house has a view, and the forest and lakes seldom look the same as the hour before. Each look reminds us where we are.There is space for our three boys to play outside, to shoot arrows, collect tree seeds, build earth houses and climb trees.
Our kids have learned the names of the trees, and with the names have come familiarity and appreciation. As they tell all who show even a passing interest, maple（枫树）makes the best fighting sticks and white pines are the best climbing trees.
The air is clean and fresh. The water from the well has a pleasant taste, and it is perhaps the healthiest water our kids will ever drink. Though they have one glass a day of juice and the rest is water, they never say anything against that.
The seasons change just outside the door. We watch the maples turn every shade of yellow and red in the fall and note the poplars'（杨树）putting out the first green leaves of spring. The rainbow smelt fills the local steam as the ice gradually disappears, and the wood frogs start to sing in pools after being frozen for the winter. A family of birds rules our skies and flies over the lake.
| 1． |
What can be learned from Paragraph 2?
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| 2． |
By mentioning the names of the trees, the author aims to show that.
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| 3． |
What does the underlined sentence in the last paragraph mean?
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| 4． |
What is the main purpose of the author writing the text?
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请认真阅读下列短文,并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。注意:请将答案写在答题卡上相应题号的横线上。每个空格只填一个单词。
“Happiness Advantage” Effect
In July 2010 Burt’s Bees, a personal-care products company, was going through enormous change as it began a global expansion into 19 new countries. In this kind of high-pressure situation, many leaders bother their assistants with frequent meetings or flood their in-boxes with urgent demands. In doing so, managers lift everyone’s anxiety level, which activates the part of the brain that processes threats and steals resources from the prefrontal cortex ( 大脑皮层), which is responsible for effective problem solving.
Burt’s Bees’s then-CEO, John Wolfgang, took a different approach. Each day, he’d send out an e-mail praising a team member for work related to global marketing. He’d interrupt his own presentations to remind his managers to talk with their teams about the company’s values. He asked me to further a three-hour session with employees on happiness in the course of the expansion effort. As one member of the senior team told me a year later, Wolfgang’s emphasis on developing positive leadership kept his managers actively involved and loyal as they successfully transformed the company into a global one.
That outcome shouldn’t surprise us. Research shows that when people work with a positive mind-set (思维模式), performance on nearly every level—productivity, creativity, involvement— improves. Yet happiness is perhaps the most misunderstood driver of performance. For one, most people believe that success comes before happiness. “Once I get a promotion, I’ll be happy,” they think. Or, “Once I hit my sales target, I’ll feel great. ”But because success is a moving target—as soon as you hit your target, you raise it again—the happiness that results from success does not last long.
In fact, it works the other way around: People who have a positive mind-set perform better in the face of challenge. I call this the “ happiness advantage”—every business outcome shows improvement when the brain is positive. I’ve observed this effect in my role as a researcher and lecturer in 48 countries on the connection between employee happiness and success. And I’m not alone: In an analysis of 225 academic studies, researchers found strong evidence of cause-and-effect relationship between life satisfaction and successful business outcomes.
Another common misunderstanding is that our genetics, our environment, or a combination of the two determines how happy we are. To be sure, both factors have an impact. But one’s general sense of well-being is surprisingly unstable. The habits you form, the way you interact with colleagues, how you think about stress—all these can be managed to increase your happiness and your chances of success.
Franz Kafka wrote that “a book must be the ax (斧子) for the frozen sea inside us. ”I once shared this sentence with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation.
We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she got out of her chair to take a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”
But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with imprisoned parents, abusive parents, irresponsible parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless; kids who grew up in violent neighborhoods. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible logic—the giving way of dreams to fate (命运).
For the last seven years, I have worked as a reading enrichment teacher, reading classic works of literature with small groups of students from grades six to eight. I originally proposed this idea to my headmaster after learning that a former excellent student of mine had transferred out of a selective high school—one that often attracts the literary-minded children of Manhattan’s upper classes—into a less competitive setting. The daughter of immigrants, with a father in prison, she perhaps felt uncomfortable with her new classmates. I thought additional “cultural capital” could help students like her develop better in high school, where they would unavoidably meet, perhaps for the first time, students who came from homes lined with bookshelves, whose parents had earned Ph. D.’s.
Along with Of Mice and Men, my groups read: Sounder, The Red Pony, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. The students didn’t always read from the expected point of view. About The Red Pony, one student said, “it’s about being a man, it’s about manliness. ”I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies (独白) read as raps (说唱), but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck’s writing, one boy went on to read The Grapes of Wrath and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical view was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year, former students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their first year in college as a result of the classes.
Year after year, however, we are increasing the number of practice tests. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, not for emotional punch (碰撞) but for text complexity. Yet, we cannot enrich (充实) the minds of our students by testing them on texts that ignore their hearts. We are teaching them that words do not amaze but confuse. We may succeed in raising test scores, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.The underlined words in Paragraph 1 probably mean that a book helps to __________.
| A．realize our dreams | B．give support to our life |
| C．smooth away difficulties | D．awake our emotions |
Why were the students able to understand the novel Of Mice and Men?
| A．Because they spent much time reading it. |
| B．Because they had read the novel before. |
| C．Because they came from a public school. |
| D．Because they had similar life experiences. |
The girl left the selective high school possibly because__________.
| A．she was a literary-minded girl | B．her parents were immigrants |
| C．she couldn’t fit in with her class | D．her father was then in prison |
To the author’s surprise, the students read the novels__________.
| A．creatively | B．passively | C．repeatedly | D．carelessly |
The author writes the passage mainly to__________.
| A．introduce classic works of literature |
| B．advocate teaching literature to touch the heart |
| C．argue for equality among high school students |
| D．defend the current testing system |
Medical drugs sometimes cause more damage than they cure. One solution to this problem is to put the drugs inside a capsule, protecting them from the body-and the body from them-until they can be released at just the right spot. There are lots of ways to trigger (引发) this release, including changing temperature, acidity, and so on. But triggers can come with their own risks-burns, for example. Now, researchers in California have designed what could be a harmless trigger to date: shining near-infrared light (NIR, 近红外线) on the drug in the capsule.
The idea of using light to liberate the drug in the capsule isn't new. Researchers around the globe have developed polymers (聚合物) and other materials that begin to break down when they absorb either ultraviolet (UV, 紫外线) or visible light. But tissues also readily absorb UV and visible light, which means the drug release can be triggered only near the skin, where the light can reach the capsule. NIR light largely passes through tissues, so researchers have tried to use it as a trigger. But few compounds (化合物) absorb NIR well and go through chemical changes.
That changed last year when Adah Almutairi, a chemist at the University of California, San Diego, reported that she and her colleagues had designed a polymer that breaks down when it absorbs NIR light. Their polymer used a commercially available NIR-absorbing group called o-nitrobenzyl (ONB). When they catch the light, ONB groups fall off the polymer, leading to its breakdown. But ONB is only a so-so NIR absorber, and it could be poisonous to cells when it separates from the polymer.
So Almutairi and her colleagues reported creating a new material for capsules that's even better.This one consists of a long chain of compounds called cresol groups linked in a polymer. Cresol contains reactive(易反应的) components that make it highly unstable in its polymeric form, a feature Almutairi and her colleagues use to their advantage. After polymerizing the cresols, they cap each reactive component with a light-absorbing compound called Bhc. When the Bhcs absorb NIR light, the reactive groups are exposed and break the long polymer into two short chains. Shining additional light continues this breakdown, potentially releasing any drugs in the capsule. What's more, Almutairi says, Bhc is 10 times better at absorbing NIR than is ONB and is not poisonous to cells.
| 1． |
According to the passage, which of the following could be the best trigger?
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| 2． |
Why is ONB unsatisfactory?
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| 3． |
Which word can be used to complete the following process of changes?
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