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It is a familiar scene these days: employees taking newly laid-off co-workers out for a drink for comfort. But which side deserves sympathy more, the jobless or the still employed? On March 6, researchers at a conference at the University of Cambridge heard data suggesting it's the latter.

Brendan Burchell, a Cambridge sociologist, presented his analysis based on various surveys conducted across Europe. The data suggest that employed people who feel insecure in their jobs show similar levels of anxiety and depression as those who are unemployed. Although a newly jobless person's mental health may“bottom out" after about six months, and then even begin to improve, the mental state of people who are continuously worried about losing their job “just continues to get worse and worse", Burchell says.

Evolutionary psychologists support this theory by arguing that human beings feel more stress during times of insecurity because they sense an immediate but invisible threat. Patients have been known to experience higher levels of anxiety,for example, while waiting for examination results than knowing what they are suffering from-even if the result is cancer. It's better to get the bad news and start doing something about it rather than wait with anxiety. When the uncertainty continues, people stay in a nonstop “fight or flight" response, which leads to damaging stress.

But not every employee in insecure industries has such a discouraging view,Burchell says. In general, women get on better. While reporting higher levels of anxiety than men when directly questioned, women scored lower in stress on the GHQ 12, even when they had a job they felt insecure about losing. As Burchell explains, “For women, most studies show that any job-it doesn't matter

whether it is secure or insecure-gives psychological improvement over unemployment. " Burchell supposes that the difference in men is that they tend to feel pressure not only to be employed, but also to be the primary breadwinner, and that more of a man's self-worth depends on his job.

1.Why do researchers think the still employed deserve sympathy more?

A. They have to do more work since then.

B. They have no chance to find better jobs.

C. They have to work with inexperienced workers.

D. They constantly worry about losing their jobs.

2.What is most likely to cause a “fight or flight" response?

A. Not having a paid job.

B. Fierce competition for jobs.

C. Not knowing what will happen.

D. Pressure to work longer hours.

3.What will the writer talk about following the last paragraph?

A. Advice on preparing a job interview.

B. Advice to those in insecure industries.

C. Some knowledge of psychology.

D. Difference in men and women.

4. What could be the best title for the text?

A. Is it less stressful to get laid off than stay on?

B. Should greater sympathy be given to the jobless?

C. Do employees bear more stress than ever before?

D. Do men or women show higher levels of anxiety?

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At thirteen, I was diagnosed(诊所) with kind of attention disorder. It made school difficult for me. When everyone else in the class was focusing on tasks, I could not.

In my first literature class, Mrs.Smith asked us to read a story and then write on it, all within 45 minutes. I raised my hand right away and said,”Mrs.Smith, you see, the doctor said I have attention problems. I might not be able to do it.”

She glanced down at me through her glasses, “you are no different from your classmates, young man.”

I tried, but I didn’t finish the reading when the bell rang. I had to take it home.

In the quietness of my bedroom, the story suddenly all became clear to me. It was about a blind person, Louis Braille. He lived in a time when the blind couldn’t get much education. But Louis didn’t give up. Instead, he invented a reading system of raised dots(点), which opened up a whole new world of knowledge to the blind.

Wasn’t I the “blind” in my class, being made to learn like the “sighted” students? My thoughts spilled out and my pen started to dance. I completed the task within 40 minutes. Indeed, I was no different from others; I just needed a quieter place. If Louis could find his way out of his problems, why should I ever give up?

I didn’t expect anything when I handled in my paper to Mrs.Smith, so it was quite a surprise when it came back to me the next day- with an ”A” on it. At the bottom of the paper were these words:”See what you can do when you keep trying?”

1.The author didn’t finish the reading in class because.

A. He was new to the class

B. He was tried of literature

C. He had an attention disorder

D. He wanted to take the task home

2.What do we know about Louis Braille from the passage?

A. He had good sight

B. He made a great invention.

C. He gave up reading

D. He learned a lot from school

3.What was Mrs.Smith’s attitude to the author at the end of the story?

A. Angry B. Impatient

C. Sympathetic D. Encouraging

4.What is the main idea of the passage?

A. The disabled should be treated with respect.

B.A teacher can open up a new world to students.

C. One can find his way out of difficulties with efforts.

D. Everyone needs a hand when faced with challenges.

Scientists at Harvard University have recycled a kidney(‘肾)-in a rat. The researchers removed a kidney from a dead rat. Later, the renewed kidney was put into a living rat. It wasn't perfect. It did, however, show signs of working like a kidney should.

"It's really beautiful work," Edward Ross, a kidney researcher at the University of Florida in Gainesville, told Science News. He didn't work on the new study.

Kidneys are bean-shaped and act like guards in the body. They clean the blood by removing waste and extra water. Every day, an adult's kidneys filter(过滤) enough blood to fill a bathtub half full. Along the way, they produce eight cups of urine(尿) from that waste and water. When a person's kidneys fail, all of that waste stays in the body. Such patients can quickly become very sick and die, unless they are regularly connected to a machine that filters their blood.

At any given time, about 100,000 people in the United States are waiting for a replacement kidney. But healthy donated kidneys are difficult to get. Either a living person must donate one, or a kidney must be removed from someone who just died and earlier had agreed to the donation. In either case, people receiving new kidneys face the risk that their bodies will reject the donated ones.

But there may be another option. Researchers use knowledge of living things to grow or improve tissue that can aid human health. Harald Ott's team at Harvard started with a "used" kidney.

Scientists added kidney cells from rats and blood vessel cells from people to the matrix(母体). These cells attached themselves and began to multiply. Before long, they formed new kidney tissue.

The scientists placed this renewed kidney into another rat. There it produced a small amount of urine. This experiment shows that the lab-grown kidney can do at least some of the work performed by a healthy kidney.

The results are a promising first step toward helping people with serious kidney problems. "This is still very early, but they've come a long way," Ross said.

1.What can we infer from Paragraph l?

A. Biology is a new and helpful science.

B. It's hard to put the rebuilt kidney into the rat.

C. Kidneys are very important to our life.

D. A used kidney may be recycled for new life.

2.What does Paragraph 3 mainly talk about?

A. The relationship between kidneys and health.

B. The difficulty of curing serious kidney diseases.

C. The function and importance of kidneys.

D. The methods of curing kidneys diseases.

3.For what purpose does the author use the figure 100,000 in Paragraph 4?

A. To stress used kidneys are hard to get.

B. To show the great need for healthy kidneys.

C. To explain many American people get kidney diseases.

D. To call on people to donate kidneys.

4.Which of the following is true according to the text?

A. The scientists are satisfied with the result of the experiment.

B. Ross is a kidney expert who is involved in the experiment.

C. The function of the renewed kidney is the same as a healthy kidney.

D. The renewed kidney produced a great deal of urine.

A four-year-old girl sees three biscuits divided between a stuffed crocodile and a teddy bear.The crocodile gets two; the bear one.“Is that fair?” asks the experimenter.The girl judges that it is not.“How about now?” asks the experimenter, breaking the bear’s single biscuit in half.The girl cheers up: “Oh yes, now it’s fair.They both have two.” Strangely, children feel very strongly about fairness, even when they hardly understand it.

Adults care about fairness too --- but how much? One way to find out is by using the ultimatum (最后通牒) game, created by economist Werner Guth.Jack is given a pile of money and proposes how it should be divided with Jill.Jill can accept Jack’s “ultimatum”, otherwise the deal is off, and neither gets anything.

Suppose Jack and Jill don’t care about fairness, just about accumulating cash.Then Jack can offer Jill as little as he likes and Jill will still accept.After all, a little money is more than no money.But imagine, instead, that Jack and Jill both care only about fairness and that the fairest outcome is equality.Then Jack would offer Jill half the money; and Jill wouldn’t accept otherwise.

What happens when we ask people to play this game for real? It turns out that people value fairness a lot.Anyone offered less than 20-30% of the money is likely to reject it.Receiving an unfair offers makes us feel sick.Happily, most offers are pretty equitable; indeed, by far the most common is a 50-50 split.

But children, and adults, also care about a very different sort of (un)fairness, namely cheating.Think how many games of snakes and ladders have ended in arguments when one child “accidentally” miscounts her moves and another child objects.But this sense of fairness isn’t about equality of outcome: games inevitably have winners and losers.Here, fairness is about playing by the rules.

Both fairness-as-equality and fairness-as-no-cheating matter.Which is more important: equality or no-cheating? I think the answer is neither.The national lottery(彩票), like other lotteries, certainly doesn’t make the world more equal: a few people get rich and most people get nothing.Nevertheless, we hope, it is fair --- but what does this mean? The fairness-as-no-cheating viewpoint has a ready answer: a lottery is fair if it is conducted according to the “rules”.But which rules? None of us has the slightest idea, I suspect.Suppose that buried in the small print at lottery HQ is a rule that forbids people with a particular surname (let’s say, Moriarty).So a Ms Moriarty could buy a ticket each week for years without any chance of success.

How would she react if she found out? Surely with anger: how dare the organisers let her play, week after week, without mentioning that she couldn’t possibly win! She’d reasonably feel unfairly treated because ___________________.

To protest(抗议) against unfairness, then, is to make an accusation of bad faith.From this viewpoint, an equal split between the crocodile and the bear seems fair because (normally, at least), it is the only split they would both agree to.But were the girl to learn that the crocodile doesn’t like biscuits or that the bear isn’t hungry, I suspect she’d think it perfectly fair for one toy to take the whole.Inequality of biscuits (or anything else) isn’t necessarily unfair, if both parties are happy.And the unfairness of cheating comes from the same source: we’d never accept that someone else can unilaterally(单方面地) violate agreements that we have all signed up to.

So perhaps the four-year-old’s intuitions(直觉) about fairness is the beginnings of an understanding of negotiation.With a sense of fairness, people will have to make us acceptable offers (or we’ll reject their ultimatums) and stick by the (reasonable) rules, or we’ll be on the warpath.So a sense of fairness is crucial to effective negotiation; and negotiation, over toys, treats etc, is part of life.

1.It can be inferred that in the ultimatum game, _____.

A. Jack keeps back all the money

B. Jill can negotiate fair division with Jack

C. Jack has the final say in the division of money

D. Jill has no choice but to accept any amount of money

2.From Paragraph 2 to 4, we can conclude _____.

A. people will sacrifice money to avoid unfairness

B. fairness means as much to adults as to children

C. something is better than nothing after all

D. a 30-70 split is acceptable to the majority

3.Which of the following does fairness-as-no-cheating apply to?

A. divisions of housework

B. favoritism between children

C. banned drugs in sport

D. schooling opportunities

4.Which of the following best fits in the blank in Paragraph 7?

A. the lottery didn’t follow the rules

B. she was cheated out of the money

C. the lottery wasn’t equal at all

D. she would never have agreed to those rules

5.The chief factor in preventing unfairness is to _____.

A. observe agreements

B. establish rules

C. strengthen morality

D. understand negotiation

6.The main purpose of the passage is to ______

A. declare the importance of fairness

B. suggest how to achieve fairness

C. present different attitudes to fairness

D. explain why we love fairness

In 2012, the Tower of London welcomed two new inhabitants: a pair of ravens(乌鸦) named Jubilee and Grip. Their arrival celebrated the bicentenary(二百周年) of Charles Dickens’s birth. This Grip was the third of the Tower ravens to be named after the novelist’s own pet bird.One of his predecessors(前辈) was resident during World War Two; he and his mate Mabel were the only ravens to survive a bombing attack on the Tower.

Dickens’s Grip, who had an impressive vocabulary, appears as a character in the author’s fifth novel, Barnaby Rudge. On 28 January 1841, Dickens wrote to his friend George Cattermole: “my notion is to have [Barnaby] always in company with a pet raven, who is immeasurably more knowing than himself. To this end I have been studying my bird, and think I could make a very distinctive character of him.”

Unfortunately, just a few weeks after Dickens wrote that letter, Grip died, probably as a result of having stolen and eaten paint some months earlier. The bird had developed a strange habit – tearing sections off painted surfaces (including the family's carriage) and even drinking a quantity of white paint out of a tin. Dickens mourned his loss and wrote a humorous letter to his friend, the illustrator Daniel Maclise, about the raven’s death.

He related how, when Grip began to show signs of sickness, the vet was called and “administered a powerful dose of castor(蓖麻) oil”. Initially this seemed to have a positive effect and the author was thrilled to see Grip restored to his usual personality when he bit the coachman (who was used to the raven and took it in good humor). The following morning, Grip was able to eat “some warm porridge”, but his recovery was short lived.

As Dickens wrote to Maclise, “On the clock striking twelve he appeared slightly upset, but soon recovered, walking twice or thrice along the coach-house, stopped to bark, exclaimed ‘Hello old girl’ (his favorite expression) and died.He behaved throughout with a decent manner, which cannot be too much admired.The children seem rather glad of it. He bit their ankles. But that was play.”

1.Which of the following is right about Dickens’s pet Grip?

A. he liked painting a lot.

B. he could speak English fluently.

C. he was quite ill before his death.

D. he and Mabel survived a bombing attack.

2.Why did Dickens study his bird Grip?

A. Because the bird was very strange looking.

B. Because Dickens liked the bird immeasurably.

C. Because Barnaby needs a companion who was always with him.

D. Because Dickens wanted to base one character of his novel on him.

3.What caused the death of Dickens’s Grip?

A. His old age.

B. His strange diet.

C. The killing of the coachman.

D. His bad habit of biting people.

4.Which of the following can be the best title of the passage?

A. A bird in a novel.

B. The writer’s bird.

C. The death of a bird.

D. Dickens and his bird

根据短文内容, 从短文后的选项中选出能填入空白处的最佳选项。选项中有两项为多余选项。

Article writing has been a way of conveying information through the web. If you’re a writer, being able to let them stay on your article for more than two seconds is already a success. Your writing style can create more readers for your content if you know how to capture the attention of readers. ___1.___

Be Direct-to-the-Point

Website writing differs from print writing. People do not want to spend much time on a website because they want to get the information they need. ___2.___

Be Informative

Articles for web content are briefly written. They flesh out the information without decorations. Be sure that your articles are not confusingly worded. _ 3. _ Make sure you organize your facts logically so that your reader can effectively process them.

Be Conversational

4. Be conversational so that readers can grasp what you mean in your article. With quality content, engage your readers so that your article will have that personal and human touch.

Be Connected

Most article writers just place sentences that state a certain fact to form a paragraph. However, in readers’ hopes, these writers fail to establish a human connection. 5. So it is important to make the connection smooth and not abrupt.

A. Stay away from decorations when writing online content.

B. Most readers like to read articles that “speak” to them.

C. Connection will allow the readers’ minds to effectively process what is written.

D. Get to your point directly so that your readers can process the information.

E. Here are some important points to consider before writing online.

F. Article writing is a fun way of establishing a connection with a reader and a writer.

G. Complex sentences tend to wrongly lead your reader and make them confused.

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