I believe that animals possess greater intelligence than most people think. But plants? I've never considered the possibility of plant intelligence. The idea seems absurd.
Yet I've had friends argue that plant intelligence might exist. "What are the differences between plants and animals?" they ask, and then they argue about certain species that seem to share the intelligence of both plants and animals.
New research suggests that plants communicate via "networks". Plant communication is not a new idea, and cannot indicate that its is a kind of intelligence, but it is still interesting.
Recent research from Vidi researcher Josef Stuefer at the Radboud University Nijmegen shows that plants have their own chat systems that they can use to warn each other. Therefore plants are not boring and passive organisms that just stand there waiting to be cut down or eaten up. Many plants form internal communication networks and are able to exchange information networks and are able to exchange information efficiently.
Many herbal plants such as strawberries and clovers (三叶草)naturally form networks.
Individual plants remain connected with each other for a certain period of time by means of runners (plant stems that grow along the ground and put down roots to form new plants). These connections enable the plants to share information with each other via internal channels. They are therefore very similar to computer networks. But what do plants chat to each other about?
Recently Stuefer and his colleagues were the first to prove that clover plants warn each other via the network links if danger is nearby . If one of the plants is attacked by caterpillars (毛虫)，the other members of the network are warned via an internal signal. Once warned, the intact (完好无损的)plants strengthen their chemical and mechanical (机体的)resistance so that they are less attractive to advancing caterpillars. Thanks to this early warning system, the plants can stay one step ahead of their attackers. The research has shown that this significantly limits the damage to the plants.
Again, I don't believe this reflects intelligence, but it's is certainly fascinating.
1.The author thinks that the plant communication___________. .
A. is absolutely a new idea B. is a sign of plant intelligence
C. is related to animal communication D. is interesting and fascinating
2.Which of the following statements about the research is NOT true?
A. Most plants have no chat system and are passive organisms.
B. Individual plants can also remain connected with each other.
C. The communication between clover plants can protect them from damage.
D. The research is the first to show how clover plants warn each other.
3.The author's attitude towards plant intelligence is _______________.
A. unconcerned B. doubtful C. positive D. hopeful
4.What's the best title for the passage?
A. Does Plant Communication Really Exist?
B. Some Discoveries About Clover Plant
C. Does Plant Communication Imply Intelligence?
D. A New Study on Plant Communication
Men and women are still treated unequally in the workplace. Women continue to earn less, on average, for the same performance. Research has shown that both conscious(有意识的) and subconscious biases (偏见) contribute to this problem. But we’ve discovered another source of inequality: Women often don’t get what they want and deserve because they don’t ask for it. In three separate studies, we found that men are more likely than women to negotiate for what they want.
The first study found that the starting salaries of male MBAs who had recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon were 7.6%, or almost $4,000, higher on average than those of female MBAs from the same program. That’s because most of the women had simply accepted the employer’s salary offer; in fact, only 7% had attempted to negotiate. But 57% of their male counterparts--or eight times as many men as women—had asked for more.
Another study tested this gender difference in the lab. Subjects were told that they would be observed playing a word game and that they would be paid between $3 and $10 for playing. After each subject completed the task, an experimenter thanked the participant and said, “Here’s $3. Is $3 OK?” For the men, it was not OK, and they said so. Their requests for more money are nine times as many as the women’s.
The largest of the three studies surveyed several hundred people over the Internet, asking them about the most recent negotiations they’d attempted or started and when they expected to negotiate next. The study showed that men place themselves in negotiation situations much more often than women do.
There are several reasons accounting for the phenomenon. First, women often are taught from an early age not to promote their own interests and to focus instead on the needs of others. The messages girls receive—from parents, teachers, other children, the media, and society in general—can be so powerful that when they grow up they may not realize that they’ve made this behavior part of them, or they may realize it but not understand how it affects their willingness to negotiate. Women tend to think that they will be recognized and rewarded for working hard and doing a good job. Unlike men, they haven’t been taught that they can ask for more. According to this passage, what causes the inequality in the workplace?
| A．social bias |
| B．women’s poorer working ability |
| C．women’s worse academic background |
| D．women’s less negotiating |
Which can be the result of the following survey, according to Para 4?
When do you expect to negotiate next?Which of the following statements is NOT true?
| A．Women are more likely to accept the employer’s salary offer. |
| B．Men tend to ask for more money than woman. |
| C．Women care more about other’s interest instead of themselves’. |
| D．Men believe that the better they work, the better they’re paid. |
What will be discussed in the following paragraph?
| A．The suggestions given to women. |
| B．The warnings to men. |
| C．Another reason for women’s not asking. |
| D．Another reason for men’s asking. |
Below is a web page from http://www.parents.com/.
Kid of the Year Photo Competition
Enter your kid’s photo today and win! We’re giving away 52 weekly $250 prizes from Readers’ Choice votes. PLUS our editors will select one entry to win our grand prize of $7,000.
Official Competition Rules
No purchase necessary to enter or win.
The Kid of the Year Photo Competition entry period begins at 12:00 a.m. January 23, 2011, and ends January 21, 2012 (“Entry Period”). Entries must arrive by 9:00 p.m. on January 21, 2012 (“Entry Deadline”). Entries will not be acknowledged or returned.
SPONSOR(赞助商): Meredith Corporation, 1716 Locust Street, Des Moines, Iowa.
ENTRY: There will be two methods of entry.
Share My Entry:
Visit http://www.parents.com/photos/photo-contests-1/kid-of-the-year/ and click the button to enter.
Facebook Entry:
Visit http://Facebook.com/ParentsMagazine and click the Kid of 2011 tab.
Then complete the registration form and follow the instructions to upload one album of up to six photos of your child aged three months to eight years. You may provide one description and one album title that will be applied to all photos. Photos, without any brand names or trademarks, must be taken by participants, non-professional, unpublished and may not have won any prize or award. Photos must be .jpeg or .bmp image formats (格式) and cannot be over 3 MB.
This promotion is in no way sponsored, supported or run by, or associated with Facebook. You are providing your information to Parents Magazine and not to Facebook. The information you provide will only be used to run the promotion and register for Parents.com.
LIMIT: One entry per family, per child, per week. One weekly prize per child. For entries of more than one child in a family, the entry process must be completed separately for each child. No group entries.We can learn from the passage that ___________.
| A．you should buy something first before you enter the contest |
| B．your entry will not be returned even if you don’t win the contest |
| C．you should send your entry before 9:00 p.m. on January 21, 2011 |
| D．the editors of the contest will decide who will win the 20,000 dollars in prizes |
Linda, a mother with seven-year-old twins, wants to enter the competition. She must ___________.
| A．provide a description and an album title for the kid’s photos |
| B．go to Meredith Corporation to fill out the registration forms |
| C．complete the entry process separately for each of her kids |
| D．provide the information to Facebook if she chooses Facebook Entry |
To enter the competition, photos must ___________.
| A．be taken by non-professional participants |
| B．have won some prize or award |
| C．contain brand names or trademarks |
| D．contain parents’ personal information |
The purpose of the passage is ___________.
| A．to advertise the website Facebook. com |
| B．to attract photographers’ interest in a photo contest |
| C．to introduce two methods of entering a photo contest |
| D．to encourage parents with children to enter a photo contest |
I lost my sight when I was four by falling off a box car in a freight（货物）yard in Atlantic City. Now I am thirty two. I can slightly remember what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a disaster can do strange things to people. I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn’t been blind. I don’t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.
Life, I believe, asks constant adjustments to reality. The adjustment is never easy. I was totally confused and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me—a potential to live, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself, I mean: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the intricate（错综复杂的） pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.
It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was making fun of me and I was hurt. “I can’t use this.” I said. “Take it with you,” he urged me, “and roll it around.” The words stuck in my head. “Roll it around!” By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a new kind of baseball. We called it ground ball.
All my life I have set a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good trying for something that I knew at the start was out of reach. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.We can learn from the beginning of the passage that _______
| A．the author lost his sight because of a car crash. |
| B．the author wouldn’t love life if the disaster didn’t happen. |
| C．the disaster made the author appreciate what he had. |
| D．the disaster strengthened the author’s desire to see. |
What’s the most difficult thing for the author?
| A．How to adjust himself to reality. |
| B．Building up assurance that he can find his place in life. |
| C．Learning to manage his life alone. |
| D．How to invent a new kind of baseball. |
According to the context, “a chair rocker on the front porch” in paragraph 3 means that the author _________.
| A．would sit in a rocking chair and enjoy his life. |
| B．would be unable to move and stay in a rocking chair. |
| C．would lose his will to struggle against difficulties. |
| D．would sit in a chair and stay at home. |
What is the best title for the passage?
| A．A Miserable Life | B．Struggle Against Difficulties |
| C．A Disaster Makes a Strong Person | D．An Unforgettable Experience |
When Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, it was a revolution in communication. For the first time, people could talk to each other over great distances almost as clearly as if they were in the same room. Nowadays, though, we increasingly use Bell’s invention for taking photographs, accessing the internet, or watching video clips, rather than talking. Over the last two decades a new means of spoken communication has appeared: the mobile phone.
The first real mobile telephone call was made in 1973 by Dr Martin Cooper, the scientist who invented the modem mobile handset（手机）. Within a decade, mobile phones became available to the public. The streets of modem cities began to feature sharp-suited characters shouting into giant plastic bricks. In Britain the mobile phone quickly became the same with the “yuppie”, the new type of young urban professionals who carried the expensive handsets as status symbols. Around this time many of us said that we would never own a mobile phone.
But in the mid-90s, something happened. Cheaper handsets and cheaper calling rates meant that, almost overnight, it seemed that everyone had a mobile phone. And the giant plastic bricks of the 80s had changed into smooth little objects that fitted nicely into pockets and bags.
Moreover, people’s timekeeping changed. Younger readers will be amazed to know that, not long ago, people made spoken arrangements to meet at a certain place at a certain time. But later Meeting time became approximate under the new order of communication: the Short Message Service （SMS） or text message. Going to be late? Send a text message! It takes much less effort than arriving on time, and it’s much less awkward than explaining your lateness face to face and the text message has changed the way we write in English. Traditional rules of grammar and spelling are much less important when you’re sitting on the bus, hurriedly typing “Will B 15mm late - C U @ the bar. Sorry! -).”
Alexander Graham Bell would be amazed if he could see how far the science of telephony has progressed in less than 150 years. If he were around today, he might say “That’s gr8! But I’m v busy rite now. Will call U 2nite.”What does the underlined part in Para.2 refer to?
| A．Houses of modern cities. | B．Sharp-suited characters. |
| C．New type of professionals. | D．Mobile phones. |
According to Paragraph 4, why did Meeting time become approximate?
| A．People were more likely to be late for their meeting. |
| B．SMS made it easier to inform each other. |
| C．Young people don’t like unchanging things. |
| D．Traditional customs were dying out. |
If you want to meet your friend at the school gate this evening, which of the following message can you send him?
| A．Call U@ SKUg8 2nite. | B．IM2BZ2CU 2nite. |
| C．CU@ the bar g8 2nite. | D．W84U@ SKUg8 2nite. |
What does the passage mainly tell us about?
| A．Alexander Graham’s invention. |
| B．SMS as a new way of communication. |
| C．New functions of the mobile telephone. |
| D．The development of the mobile phone. |
Usually, when your teacher asks a question, there is only one correct answer. But there is one question that has millions of correct answers. That question is “What’s your name?” Everyone gives a different answer, but everyone is correct.
Have you ever wondered about people’s names? Where do they come from? What do they mean?
People’s first names, or given names, are chosen by their parents. Sometimes the name of a grandparent or other member of the family is used. Some parents choose the name of a well-known person. A boy could be named George Washington Smith; a girl could be named Helen Keller Jones.
Some people give their children names that mean good things. Clara means “bright”; Beatrice means “one who gives happiness”; Donald means “world ruler”; Leonard means “as brave as a lion”.
The earliest last names, or surnames, were taken from place names. A family with the name Brook or Brooks probably lived near a brook (小溪); someone who was called Longstreet probably lived on a long, paved road. The Greenwood family lived in or near a leafy forest.
Other early surnames came from people’s occupations. The most common occupational name is Smith, which means a person who makes things with iron or other metals. In the past, smiths were very important workers in every town and village. Some other occupational names are: Carter—a person who owned or drove a cart; Potter—a person who made pots and pans.
The ancestors of the Baker family probably baked bread for their neighbors in their native village. The Carpenter’s great-great-great-grandfather probably built houses and furniture.
Sometimes people were known for the color of their hair or skin, or their size, or their special abilities. When there were two men who were named John in the same village, the John with gray hair probably became John Gray. Or the John who was very tall could call himself John Tallman. John Fish was probably an excellent swimmer and John Lightfoot was probably a fast runner or a good dancer.
Some family names were made by adding something to the father’s name. English-speaking people added –s or –son. The Johnsons are descendants of John; the Roberts family’s ancestor was Robert. Irish and Scottish people added Mac or Mc or O. Perhaps all of the MacDonnells and the O’Donnells are descendants of the same Donnell. Which of the following aspects do the surnames in the passage NOT cover?
| A．Places where people lived. | B．People’s characters. |
| C．Talents that people possessed. | D．People’s occupations. |
According to the passage, the ancestors of the Potter family most probably _______.
| A．owned or drove a cart | B．made things with metals |
| C．made kitchen tools or containers. | D．built houses and furniture. |
Suppose an English couple whose ancestors lived near a leafy forest wanted their new-born son to become a world leader, the baby might be named ________.
| A．Beatrice Smith | B．Leonard Carter |
| C．George Longstreet | D．Donald Greenwood |