Recently a study, led by Pedro Hallal of the Federal University, suggests that nearly a third of adults, 31%, are not getting enough exercise. That rates of exercise have declined is hardly a new discovery. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, technology and economic growth have helped to create a world in which taking exercise is more and more an option rather than a necessity. But only recently have enough good data been collected from enough places to carry out the sort of analysis Dr Hallal and his colleagues have engaged in.
There are common themes in different places. Unsurprisingly, people in rich countries are less active than those in poor ones, and old people are less active than young ones. Less obviously, women tend to exercise less than men—34% are inactive, compared with 28% of men. But there are exceptions. The women of Croatia, Finland, Iraq and Luxembourg, for example, move more than their male countrymen.
Malta wins the race for most slothful country, with 72% of adults getting too little exercise, and Swaziland and Saudi Arabia are in close behind, with 69%. In Bangladesh, just 5% of adults fail to exercise enough. Surprisingly, six Americans in ten are active enough according to Dr Hallal’s study, compared with fewer than four in ten British.
These high rates of inactivity are worrying. Human beings seem to have evolved(进化) to benefit from exercise while deliberately avoiding it whenever they can. In a state of nature it would be impossible to live a life that did not provide enough of it. But that is no longer the case. Actually lack of enough activity these days has nearly the same effect on life span(寿命) as smoking.We may learn from Paragraph 1 that_________.
| A．the decline of exercise rates is newly discovered |
| B．the study suggests 31% of female adults get too little exercise |
| C．the good enough data has been collected from only one country |
| D．the industrial revolution has changed the way people live to some degree |
According to the study, women of Luxembourg_________.
| A．have little time to exercise |
| B．hate to get regular exercise |
| C．take more exercise to lose weight |
| D．exercise more than men in their country |
The underlined word “slothful” in Paragraph 3 most probably means_________.
| A．powerful | B．rich | C．lazy | D．unpopular |
What can be the best title for the text?
| A．Worldwide Lack of Enough Exercise |
| B．New Health Discovery |
| C．Evolvement of Human Beings |
| D．Benefits of Taking Exercise |
Tell a story and tell it well, and you may open wide the eyes of a child, open up lines of communication in a business, or even open people’s mind to another culture or race.
People in many places are digging up the old folk stories and the messages in them. For example, most American storytellers get their tales from a wide variety of sources, cultures, and times. They regard storytelling not only as a useful tool in child education, but also as a meaningful activity that helps adults understand themselves as well as those whose culture may be very different from their own.
“ Most local stories are based on a larger theme,” American storyteller Opalanga Pugh says, “ Cinderella(灰姑娘), or the central idea of a good child protected by her goodness, appears in various forms in almost every culture of the world.”
Working with students in schools, Pugh helps them understand their own cultures and the general messages of the stories. She works with prisoner too, helping them knowing who they are by telling stories that her listeners can write, direct, and act in their own lives. If they don’t like the story they are living, they can rewrite the story. Pugh also works to help open up lines of communication between managers and workers. “For every advance in business,” she says, “ there is a greater need for communication.” Storytelling can have a great effect on either side of the manager-worker relationship, she says.
Pugh spent several years in Nigeria, where she learned how closely storytelling was linked to the everyday life of the people there. The benefits of storytelling are found everywhere, she says.
“I learned how people used stories to spread their culture,” she says, “ What I do is to focus on the value of the stories that people can translate into their own daily world of affairs. We are all storytellers. We all have a story to tell. We tell everybody’s story.”What do we learn about American storyteller from Paragraph 2?
| A．They share the same way of storytelling. |
| B．They prefer to tell the stories from other cultures. |
| C．They learn their stories from the American natives. |
| D．They find storytelling useful for both children and adults. |
The underlined sentence (Paragraph 4) suggests that prisoners can _____.
| A．start a new life | B．settle down in another place |
| C．direct films | D．become good actors |
Pugh has practised storytelling with _____ groups of people.
| A．2 | B．3 | C．4 | D．5 |
What is the main idea of the text?
| A．Storytelling can influence the way people think. |
| B．Storytelling is vital to the growth of business. |
| C．Storytelling is the best way to educate children in school. |
| D．Storytelling helps people understand themselves and others. |
High school dropouts（辍学者）earn an average of $ 9,000 less per year than graduates. Now a new study dispels a common belief why they quit. It’s much more basic than flunking out（不及格）.
Society tends to think of high school dropouts as kids who just can’t cut it. They are lazy，and perhaps not too bright．So researchers were surprised when they asked more than 450 kids who quit school about why they left.
“The vast majority actually had passing grades and they were confident that they could have graduated from high school.” John Bridgeland, the executive researcher said. About 1 million teens leave school each year. Only about half of African-American and Hispanic（美籍西班牙的）student will receive a diploma（证书），and actually all dropouts come to regret their decision. So， if failing grades don’t explain why these kids quit, what does? Again，John Bridgeland："The most dependable finding was that they were bored.” “They found classes uninteresting; they weren’t inspired or motivated. They didn’t see any direct connection between what they were learning in the classroom to their own lives, or to their career aspirations.”
The study found that most teens who do drop out wait until they turn sixteen, which happens to be the age at which most states allow students to quit. In the US，only one state，New Mexico，has a law requiring teenagers to stay in high school until they graduate. Only four states: California, Tennessee, Texas and Utah, plus the District of Columbia, require school attendance until age 18, no exceptions, another researcher，says raising the compulsory（义务的）attendance age may be one way to keep more kids in school．
“As these dropouts look back，they realize they’ve made a mistake. And anything that sort of gives these people an extra push to stick it out and it through to the end, is probably helpful measure.”
New Hampshire may be the next state to raise its school attendance age to 18. But critics say that forcing the students unwilling to continue their studies to stay in school misses the point－the need for reform. It's been called for to reinvent high school education to make it more challenging and relevant, and to ensure that kids who do stick it out receive a diploma that actually means something. Most high school students drop out of' school because＿＿．
| A．they have failing grades | B．they take no interest in classes |
| C．they are discriminated against | D．they are lazy and not intelligent |
Acceding to the passage，which state has a law requiring school attendance until they graduate?
| A．New Hampshire | B．Utah | C．New Mexico | D．The District of Columbia |
The underlined words “stick it out” probably means“＿＿”．
| A．complete schooling | B．solve the problem |
| C．love having classes | D．believe in themselves |
From the passage，we can infer the following EXCEPT that＿．
| A．the grades of most dropouts at school were acceptable |
| B．about 500, 000 high school dropouts are black and Spanish |
| C．classes don't appeal to dropouts |
| D．on average dropouts cannot get good jobs |
To many web-building spiders, most of whom are nearly blind, the web is their essential window on the world: their means of communicating, capturing prey（猎物）, meeting mates and protecting themselves. A web-building spider without its web is like a men cast away on an island of solid rock，totally out of touch and destined to
starve to death.
So important is the web to an orb-web spider's survival that the animal will continue to construct new webs daily even if it is being starved. For 16 days the starving spider builds completely normal webs. Then, as the animal gets scrawnier（憔悴的）， it constructs a wider-meshed web using fewer strands（线）. Such webs would only trap larger prey, which is more economical from the perspective of a starving spider.
The spider stores energy by recycling web protein. It simply eats its own web each evening and reuses it to produce new silk. In studies with radioactively，labeled materials, it was found that 95 percent of web protein reappears in the next day' web. Most of the energy needed for web-building is used in walking over the strands as they are laid down．
Scientists are impressed by the adaptability of the spider's highly preprogrammed brain, which is larger for its size than the brain of any other invertebrate（无脊推动物）．If web-building is interrupted, or if some of the existing strands are destroyed，the spider simply goes back to see where the web is left off and then finishes building a normal web. One spider will finish building the incomplete web of another. Which of the following best expresses the main ideas of the passage?
| A．Secrets of Spiders' Adaptability | B．Importance of Webs to Spiders |
| C．Secrets of the Spiders' Life | D．Spiders' Highly Preprogrammed Brain |
According to the passage, which of the following statements is TRUE?
| A．Most spiders will stop conducting webs when hungry. |
| B．One Web-building spider usually conducts one web. |
| C．Web-building spiders will probably die without their webs． |
| D．Web-building spiders have good eyesight. |
A spider conducts a wider-meshed web when____________.
| A．it is 16 days old | B．it is getting weaker |
| C．it has fewer wends | D．it hunts for food |
A spider's ability to finish an incomplete web proves that___________.
| A．it has a highly preprogrammed brain | B．it reuses its web protein to reproduce new silk |
| C．the web is everything for a spider | D．it is able to rebuild a destroyed web |
It's not a new phenomenon, but have you noticed how many nouns are being used as verbs? We all use them, often without noticing what we're doing.
I was arranging to meet someone for dinner last week, and I said “I’ll pencil it in my diary”, and my friend said “You can ink it in”, meaning that it was a firm arrangement not a tentative one!
Many of these new verbs are linked to new technology. An obvious example is the word fax, which is a shortening of facsimile originally, an exact copy of a book or document. We all got used to sending and receiving faxes, and then soon started talking about faxing something and promising we'd fax it immediately. So, nouns turn into verbs in two easy stages. Then along came email, and we were soon all emailing each other madly. How did we do without it? I can hardly imagine life without my daily emails.
Email reminds me, of course， of my computer and its software, which has produced another couple of new verbs. On my computer I can bookmark those pages from the World Wide Web that I think I'll want to look at again, thus saving all the effort of remembering their addresses and calling them up from scratch. I can do the same thing on my PC, but there I don't bookmark; I favorite—coming from “favorite pages”, so the verb is derived from an adjective not a noun． I wasn’t really sure whether people said this，but someone told me recently that they had favorited a site I was looking for and so they could easily give me its address.
In the late 1980s I noticed that lots of my friends had acquired pagers, and kept saying things like “I’ll page you as soon as I know what time we’re meeting”. They couldn't say it to me, though; 1 refused to have one． So my children bought me a mobile phone, now known simply as a mobile and I had to learn yet more new verbs. I can message someone, that is, I can leave a message （either spoken or written）for them on their phone．Or I can text them, write a few words suggesting when and where to meet, for example. How long will it be before I can mobile them, that is, phone them using my mobile? I haven’t heard that verb yet, but I’m sure I will soon. Perhaps I’ll start using it myself! “I’ll pencil it in my diary” in the second paragraph probably means .
| A．it was a firm arrangement | B．it was an uncertain arrangement |
| C．the arrangement should be written as a diary | D．he prefers a pencil to a pen |
A website address can be easily found if it has been＿____.
| A．emailed | B．messaged | C．favorited | D．texted |
Which of the following has not been used as a verb, yet?
| A．message | B．page | C．email | D．mobile |
The best title for this passage is____．
| A．New Verbs from Old Nouns | B．The Development of the English language |
| C．New Technology and New words | D．Technology and Language. |
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If you happen to be the 200th customer to buy Cholestrolblock, you will .
| A．be able to buy it at a low price | B．be the luckiest one online |
| C．try it free of charge | D．change your diet |
Liptor®，Zocor®，Crestor® are．
| A．diseases | B．side effects | C．medicines | D．cholesterol |
Where can you most probably read this passage?
| A．In a travel guide book． | B．On a university bulletin board． |
| C．In a health magazine. | D．In a doctor's prescription. |