If teens could reduce the salt they take in every day by 3,000 milligrams (mg), they would cut their risk of heart disease and stroke(中风) greatly in adulthood, researchers say.
Based on the results of a computer modeling analysis, researchers found that a 3,000 mg reduction in sodium(钠) by teenagers could reduce hypertension by 30 percent to 43 percent when they become adults.
Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is a common condition that may have no symptoms for years, but can eventually cause serious health conditions, including heart attack and stroke.
Other benefits over time as teens hit 50 years of age include a 7-12 percent reduction in coronary heart disease(冠心病), an 8-14 percent reduction in heart attacks, and a 5-8 percent reduction in stroke.
Fast food typically contains too much sodium. One bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos has 310 milligrams. Pizza is one of the biggest problems for teens when it comes to sodium, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
“The additional benefit of lower salt intake early is that we can hopefully change the expectations of how food should taste, ideally to something slightly less salty,” says Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, the lead author of the study and associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Most of the salt we eat is not from our salt shaker(盐瓶), but salt that is already added in food that we eat.” she added.Which is a benefit of a low sodium diet according to the text?
| A．No risk of heart disease. | B．Smaller chance of stroke. |
| C．Low blood pressure. | D．Slightly more heart attacks. |
According to the text, 3,000 mg less salt intake daily will reduce hypertension by ________ in adulthood.
| A．7%-12% | B．8%-14% | C．30%-43% | D．5%-8% |
What does Dr Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo mean in the last two paragraphs?
| A．A lower sodium diet can get teenagers used to less salty food. |
| B．A good eating habit can help teens have less junk food. |
| C．Teens should avoid pizzas and other salty foods. |
| D．We can add more salt from our salt shaker to the food. |
Which of the following can be the best title for the text?
| A．Teens Cutting Salt for Healthier Adulthood |
| B．Diet and Health |
| C．Sodium Brings Health Concerns |
| D．A Cause of Hypertension |
A new study finds that the animal known as man’s best friend can also be a good friend to the heart. Researchers in California say they have found that even just a short visit with a dog helped ease the worries of heart patients.
The study divided the patients into three groups. In Group A, a dog and a person visited each patient for twelve minutes. Patients in Group B received just a human visitor for twelve minutes. And members of Group C received no visitor, human or canine(犬的).
The dogs would lie on the hospital bed so the heart patients could touch them. The researchers say some patients immediately smiled and talked to the dog and the human visitor. Dogs, in her words, “make people happier, calmer and feel more loved.”
The researchers examined the patients before, during and after the visits. They measured stress levels based on blood flow and heart activity. They say they found a twenty-four percent decrease in the group visited by both a dog and a person. They reported a ten percent decrease in the group visited by a person only. There was no change in the patients without any visit. These patients, however, did have an increase in their production of the hormone epinephrine (epinephrine肾上腺素). The body produces epinephrine during times of stress.
The increase was an average of seven percent. But the study found that patients who spent time with a dog had a seventeen percent drop in their levels of epinephrine. Patients visited by a human but not a dog also had a decrease, but only two percent.The author believes that _______.
| A．the dog can take the place of most medicines |
| B．the dog is the most popular pet for man |
| C．the findings of the research cannot be trusted |
| D．visits by a human work better than visits by a dog |
Which of the following best shows the stress level changes in the groups of patients? BACC
From the research findings we may conclude that _______.
| A．the less the body produces epinephrine, the better |
| B．the longer a visit lasts, the happier the patient should be |
| C．the patients enjoyed the dogs’ company more than the human visitors’ |
| D．it’s impossible for heart patients to recover without dogs’ visits |
Which of the following is the best title for the passage?
| A．Worried Heart Patients | B．Epinephrine and Stress |
| C．Good Friend to the Heart | D．Three Groups of Patients |
“Creativity is the key to a brighter future,” says education and business experts. Here is how schools and parents can encourage this important skill in children.
If Dick Drew had listened to his boss in 1925, we might not have a product that we now think of as of great importance: a new type of tape. Drew worked for the Minnesota Mining Company. At work he developed a kind of material strong enough to hold things together. But his boss told him not to think more about the idea. Finally, using his own time, Drew improved the tape, which now is used everywhere by many people. And his former company learned from its mistake. Now it encourages people to spend 15 percent of their work time just thinking about and developing new ideas.
Creativity is not something one is just born with, nor is it necessarily a character of high intelligence. The fact that a person is highly intelligent does not mean that he uses it creatively. Creativity is the matter of using the resources one has to produce new ideas that are good for something.
Unfortunately, schools have not tried to encourage creativity. With strong attention to test results and the development of reading, writing and mathematical skills, many educators give up creativity for correct answers. The result is that children can give back information but can’t recognize ways to use it in new situations. They may know the rules correctly but they are unable to use them to work out practical problems.
It is important to give children choices. From the earliest age, children should be allowed to make decisions and understand their results. Even if it’s choosing between two food items for lunch, decision-making helps thinking skills. As children grow older, parents should let their children decide how to use their time or spend their money. This is because the most important character of creative people is a very strong desire to find a way out of trouble. What did the company where Drew once worked learn from its mistake?
| A．They should encourage people to work a longer time. |
| B．People should be discouraged to think freely. |
| C．People will do better if they spend most of their work time developing new ideas. |
| D．It is necessary for people to spend some of their work time considering and improving new ideas. |
According to the passage, creativity is ________.
| A．something that most people are born with |
| B．something that depends mainly on intelligence |
| C．a way of using what one has learned to work out new problems |
| D．something that is not important to the character of a person at all |
Why do schools tend to fail to encourage creativity?
| A．They give children too many choices. |
| B．They are not strict enough with children. |
| C．They care too much about examination marks. |
| D．They don’t understand the importance of education. |
Which of the following skills is the most important in developing creativity?
| A．Reading. | B．Writing. | C．Mathematical skill. | D．Decision-making. |
Fidenzio Salvatori is determined that the city of Toronto will have an outdoor marketplace for merchants from its immigrant community, complete with dancing and other forms of amusement form their native countries. “Toronto is truly multicultural (多元文化的)，” he said in a newspaper interview. “It’s a city from many places, and multicultural marketplace will help Torontonians to understand and appreciate the rich variety of cultural groups in our city.”
Salvatori, aged 23, will soon complete his studies at the University of Toronto. He was eleven years old when he came to Canada from Italy with his parents. “Most of Toronto’s immigrants are from lands where the marketplace has always been part of daily life,” he said.
Salvatori has been interested in getting an open-air market for Toronto for the last three years. This year, with the help of two fellow students, he prepared a proposal on the subject and presented it to the city’s Executive committee, asking for their support. The proposal pointed out Toronto’s rich variety of national groups, “whose customs include market shopping.”
Under a Canadian government program for multiculturalism, the three students have received two thousand dollars with which they will do a study to find out whether Toronto’s immigrant businessmen would support an open-air market. They hope the merchants will support the plan strongly. “A study done earlier this year showed that 90 percent of shoppers would be in favor of it,” Salvatori said. “At first it would be an experiment. But we think it will prove to be good business for the merchants, as well as tourist attraction.”What is Fidenzio Salvatori’s purpose of having an outdoor marketplace for Toronto?
| A．To provide different forms of amusement. |
| B．To keep the cultural variety of the city. |
| C．To inspire its immigrant community. |
| D．To satisfy its immigrant merchants. |
Fidenzio Salvatori, with two other students, has got two thousand dollars from the government ______.
| A．to make an experiment | B．to perform a research |
| C．to start a marketplace | D．to operate a business |
According to Salvatori, the marketplace may also help to improve Toronto’s ______.
| A．market management | B．travel industry |
| C．community service | D．city planning |
It can be inferred from the text that the Canadian government supports ______.
| A．the protection of different cultures | B．the plan of an open-air market |
| C．the request of merchants | D．the attitude of shoppers |
Last August, Joe and Mary Mahoney began looking at colleges for their 17-year-old daughter, Maureen. With a checklist of criteria in hand, the Dallas family looked around the country visiting half a dozen schools. They sought a university that offered the teenager’s intended major, one located near a large city, and a campus where their daughter would be safe.
“The safety issue is a big one,” says Joe Mahoney, who quickly discovered he wasn’t alone in his worries. On campus tours other parents voiced similar concerns, and the same question was always asked: what about crime? But when college officials always gave the same answer — “That’s not a problem here.” — Mahoney began to feel uneasy.
“No crime whatsoever?” comments Mahoney today. “I just don’t buy it.” Nor should he: in 1999 the U.S. Department of Education had reports of nearly 400,000 serious crimes on or around our campuses. “Parents need to understand that times have changed since they went to colleges,” says David Nichols, author of Creating a Safe Campus. “Campus crime mirrors the rest of the nation.”
But getting accurate information isn’t easy. Colleges must report crime statistics （统计数字) by law, but some hold back for fear of bad publicity, leaving the honest ones looking dangerous. “The truth may not always be obvious,” warns S. Daniel Carter of Security on Campus, Inc., the nation’s leading campus safety watchdog group.
To help concerned parents, Carter promised to visit campuses and talk to experts around the country to find out major crime issues and effective solutions.The Mahoneys visited quite a few colleges last August ______.
| A．to express the opinions of many parents |
| B．to choose a right one for their daughter |
| C．to check the cost of college education |
| D．to find a right one near a large city |
It is often difficult to get correct information on campus crime because some colleges
______.
| A．receive too many visitors | B．mirror the rest of the nation |
| C．hide the truth of campus crime | D．have too many watchdog groups |
The underlined word “buy” in the third paragraph means ______.
| A．mind | B．admit | C．believe | D．expect |
We learn from the text that “the honest ones” in the fourth paragraph most probably
refers to colleges ______.
| A．that are protected by campus security | B．that report campus crimes by law |
| C．that are free from campus crime | D．the enjoy very good publicity |
What is the text mainly about?
| A．Exact campus crime statistics. | B．Crimes on or around campuses. |
| C．Effective solutions to campus crime. | D．concerns about kids’ campus safety. |
Increasingly, Americans are becoming their own doctors, by going online to diagnose their symptoms, order home health tests or medical devices, or even self-treat their illnesses with drugs from Internet pharmacies(药店). Some avoid doctors because of the high cost of medical care, especially if they lack health insurance. Or they may stay because they find it embarrassing to discuss their weight, alcohol consumption or couch potato habits. Patients may also fear what they might learn about their health, or they distrust physicians because of negative experiences in the past. But playing doctor can also be a deadly game.
Every day, more than six million Americans turn to the Internet for medical answers – most of them aren’t nearly skeptical enough of what they find. A 2002 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 72 percent of those surveyed believe all or most of what they read on health websites. They shouldn’t. Look up “headache”, and the chances of finding reliable and complete information, free from a motivation for commercial gain, are only one in ten, reports an April 2005 Brown Medical School study. Of the 169 websites the researchers rated, only 16 scored as “high quality”. Recent studies found faulty facts about all sorts of other disorders, causing one research team to warn that a large amount of incomplete, inaccurate and even dangerous information exists on the Internet.
The problem is most people don’t know the safe way to surf the Web. “They use a search engine like Google, get 18 trillion choices and start clicking. But that’s risky, because almost anybody can put up a site that looks authoritative(权威的), so it’d hard to know if what you’re reading is reasonable or not,” says Dr. Sarah Bass from the National Cancer Institute.According to the text, an increasing number of American _____.
| A．are suffering from mental disorders |
| B．turn to Internet pharmacies for help |
| C．like to play deadly games with doctors |
| D．are skeptical about surfing medical websites |
Some Americans stay away from doctors because they _____.
| A．find medical devices easy to operate |
| B．prefer to be diagnosed online by doctors |
| C．are afraid to face the truth of their health |
| D．are afraid to misuse their health insurance |
According to the study of Brown Medical School, ______.
| A．more than 6 million Americans distrust doctors |
| B．only 1/10 of medical websites aim to make a profit |
| C．about 1/10 of the websites surveyed are of high quality |
| D．72% of health websites offer incomplete and faulty facts |
Which of the following is the author’s main argument?
| A．It’s cheap to self-treat your own illness. |
| B．It’s embarrassing to discuss your bad habits. |
| C．It’s reasonable to put up a medical website. |
| D．It’s dangerous to be your own doctor. |