Imagine that the battery on your mobile phone has run out. You can't make any calls for help and no one can contact you. You are all alone--- well, not quite. Just reach into your pocket and take out a piece of sugar. Put it into the battery, wait a minute and you are back on the phone.

Thanks to a couple of American scientists, this situation could become real. Swadesh Chaudhuri and Derek Lovely have invented the “bacteria battery”. This kind of battery gets its power from bacteria that eats sugar and turns it into electricity.

“This is a special organism (有机体),”Lovely said. “You can get enough electricity to power a cell phone battery for about four days from a spoonful of sugar.”

In the past, bacteria batteries have been expensive and not long-lasting. But this battery uses a more efficient bacterium that can turn 80 percent of sugar into electrical energy. This is 30 percent more than similar batteries can manage.

The bacteria battery could become as small as a household battery. It is also cheap and stable, because sugar can be taken from waste and crops.

But the sugar-to-electricity process is slow: it could take weeks for the bacteria to change a cup of sugar into electricity.And it produces “greenhouse” gases which pollute the environment.

The scientists understand there is a lot more work to be done. “It is still young,” said Lovely.

“Where we are now is where solar power was 20 or 30 years ago.”

He also believes the battery will be used in scientific equipment at the bottom of the ocean.

Other ideas include using sugar in the blood to run medical devices in the human body and taking sugar from animal waste to provide energy to power homes in rural areas.

1.What's the passage mainly about?

A.How to change sugar into electricity. B.A scientific invention of a new type of battery.

C.How to use the new bacteria battery. D.A new kind of mobile phone and its future.

2.Which of the following is NOT the advantage of the newly-developed battery?

A.Convenient. B.Stable. C.Inexpensive. D.Quick.

3.Which of the following are the scientists working on to improve the new battery?

A.Increase the bacteria. B.Solve the pollution problem.

C.Bring down the price. D.Change the size of the battery.

4.What does the underlined sentence actually mean?

A.The bacteria battery shares some similarities with solar energy.

B.Scientists will continue their work until they find solar power.

C.There is still much room for the improvement of the bacteria battery.

D.The bacteria battery will be as popular as solar power in twenty or thirty years.

5.According to the last paragraph, who will find the bacteria battery less useful?

A.Divers. B.Farmers. C.Doctors. D.Architects.

It was December and the snow was falling quietly outside. The four March sisters were sitting around the fire in the living room. They were knitting(织)socks for soldiers(士兵).There was a war and everyone had to help.

Meg was the oldest of the four sisters. She was sixteen. She was very pretty and she loved pretty clothes. Jo was fifteen. She was very tall and thin. She was different from Meg. She didn't care about dresses or hairstyles. She was a tomboy(假小子).Beth was thirteen. She was very shy and quiet and she seemed to live in a happy world of her own. The youngest, Amy, looked like a snow princess with her blue eyes. She loved beautiful things and she was a little vain(虚荣的)?She also thought that she was a very important person.

"Christmas isn't Christmas without any presents," Jo said sadly. "I hate being poor!" Meg said, looking at her old dress.

"Some girls have lots of nice things, and other girls have nothing at all," said Amy. "I don't think it's fair!"

"But we've got Father and Mother, and each other," said Beth.

The four sisters looked happy for a moment when they remembered this.

"But we haven't got Father," said Jo. Their smiles suddenly disappeared. Mr March was far away with the soldiers.

"Mother says our men are suffering(受苦)and we mustn't spend money for pleasure," Meg said."That's why we can't have presents this year."

"Well, each of us has a dollar to spend," said Jo. "What can the army do with four dollars?

Nothing! I don't expect anything from Mother but I'd like to buy a book for myself !" Jo loved reading.

"I want to spend mine on some new music," said Beth. She played the piano and she loved singing.

"I'm going to buy a box of drawing pencils. I really need them!" said Amy. She wanted to be an artist.

"Mother didn't say anything about spending our own money," cried Jo. "We work hard for it so let's buy what we want and have a little fun."

It was true. The two older sisters had jobs. Meg worked as a teacher for the King family and Jo looked after Aunt March, their father's rich, bad-tempered(坏脾气的)old aunt. Beth and Amy helped with the housework.

1.What was Jo's hobby?

A.Knitting. B.Singing. C.Drawing. D.Reading.

2.On a snowy day, the March sisters are .

A.complaining about having no money for Christmas presents

B.talking about what presents they will buy with some money

C.expecting some nice Christmas presents from their parents

D.talking about what jobs they will have to make more money

3.The passage is probably from .

A.a poem B.a guide C.a novel D.an advertisement

A photo of a boy who arrived at school with a head full of icicles (冰柱) has drawn widespread attention to children from poor rural families.

Wearing only a thin jacket, Wang Fuman, 10, had braved -9℃ weather to travel over an hour from his village home to reach Zhuanshanbao Primary School in Zhaotong, Yunnan province. “After walking more than 4 kilometers through the freezing snow, he arrived with his hair and eyebrows completely frozen, causing laughter among his 16 classmates,” said Fu heng, the school’s principal, who uploaded Wang’s photos on Monday morning. Fu added that his classrooms do not have heating because of a lack of money.

After hearing Wang’s story, the Yunnan China Youth Development Foundation offered a public donation for children from poor families on Tuesday. It has promised to give each needy child 500 yuan ($75) to help them stay warm in winter. By 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, the provincial foundation had collected over 300,000 yuan in public donations according to their websites.

Wang, who has been nicknamed “Snowflake Boy” by netizens (网友), became well-known online. By Wednesday morning, his picture had been “liked” more than 260,000 times on Sina Weibo. “Many children in cities don’t have the strong willpower of this boy. I hope all his efforts will be rewarded,” a netizen wrote on SinaWeibo.

The name Fuman translates as “full of happiness”, but Wang does not come from a rich family. He lives in a mud hut (土坯房) with his grandmother and an elder sister, and seldom sees his parents because they are migrant workers in other cities.

“I love school. We can have bread and milk for lunch, and we learn lots of things in class,” Wang said. His village now has electricity and tap water, and my family is getting help to build a new house close to the school, he said. “I think our life will get better.”

1.Why did Wang’s classmates laugh when he came in?

A.Because they thought Wang was poor. B.Because they wanted to laugh at him.

C.Because he appeared with a head full of icicles. D.Because Wang was late for class again.

2.What did the netizens do according to the passage?

A.They took photos of Wang Fuman and uploaded them in time. B.They expressed their support and admiration.

C.They promised to give each needy child 500 yuan. D.They helped Wang return to school.

3.The underlined phrase “a lack of money” can be replaced by “ ________”.

A.being short of money B.losing money

C.plenty of money D.saving money

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