题目内容
Most children, even the youngest of children, are delighted to be around cats and dogs. But these pets carry plenty of germs and allergens（过敏原）,prompting researchers to ask: Are cats and dogs really safe for children？
A study finds that, contrary to many parents' fears, owning cats or dogs does not increase a child's risk of developing allergies, and in fact, may actually protect them. The study's lead author, Dr. Dennic Ownby of the Medical College of Georgia, says that even he was "very surprised" by the results. Ownby and colleagues followed more than 470 children from birth to age 6 or 7, comparing those exposed to cats and dogs during their first year of life to those who were not.
By using skin-prick tests for detecting common allergies, the researchers found that, contrary to what many doctors had been taught for years, children who had lived with a pet were not at greater risk.
Even more remarkable, children who had two or more dogs or cats had an even greater reduction, up to 77 percent, in risk of allergies. Researchers suggest this protective effect may be the result of early exposure to lots of bacteria that are carried by dogs and cats. Exposing young children to these bacteria helps" exercise" their immune systems early in life so that they're better able to resist allergic diseases later.
There's something very important in that first year of life when the immune system is developing that we can retrain it away from an allergic response, said Dr. William Davis.
And while researchers are not encouraging parents to buy dogs or cats just to reduce a child's allergy risk, they say if a family already has one or more animals, there's no need to get rid of them.
1.Why do the researchers feel “very surprised” by the results of the study?
A．Because the results are contrary to their expectation．
B．Because so many children are playing with cats and dogs．
C．Because parents are so much worried about their children．
D．Because children with animals may develop allergies easily．
2.Compared with children who have pets，those who haven’t ______.
A．will lose the chance to develop immune system
B．may suffer allergic diseases more often
C．will reduce the harm from bacteria
D．can keep doctors away
3.It can be inferred from the passage that ______．
A．pets are ill-treated by their owners
B．less families would like to own cats and dogs
C．keeping pets is a good way to keep children healthy
D．the results of the study can make families with pets feel at ease
4.The underlined word “it” in the fifth paragraph refers to________.
A．the early life
B．an allergic disease
C．immune system
D．something important
5.What may be the best title of the passage?
A．How to protect your kids from allergies
B．Your pets may be helping your kids
C．Bacteria do good to your kids
D．Advantages of owning pets
1.A
2.B
3.D
4.C
5.B
【解析】 略
To what degree can a computer achieve intelligence？The answer to this question may lie in a newly-developed US computer program called Smarter Child and the Internet.
If you ran into Smarter Child online, you would be surprised at this kid’s huge memory. It can recite many facts. For example, Smarter Child knows every baseball player in every team this season.
He knows every word in the dictionary and the weather in every major city areas across the US. However, if you ask Smarter Child other questions, you get strange answers. A question about Smarter Child’s age returns. “One year, 11 days, 16 hours, 7 minutes, and 47 seconds!” Asking where he lives gets, “In a clean room in a high-tech building in California.”
Smarter Child uses the vast information on the World Wide Web as his memory bank. To answer questions about spelling, for instance, Smarter Child goes to American Heritage Dictionary online. For the weather, he visits www.intellicast.com.
Some scientists believe that by joining the many systems of the Internet, an artificial being with the combined knowledge of, say, Albert Einstein, Richard Nixon and Britney Spears could be born. However, if Smarter Child wants to think and learn on his own like the boy-computer David in the movie A. I. Artificial Intelligence, he must overcome two problems.
The first is that computers find it difficult to read web pages because the files are labeled in different ways. That’s why programmers need to tell Smarter Child where to look for the weather. It would be a much more difficult task to let him find it himself.
Another problem is that while Smarter Child can process information more exactly and faster than any human, he lacks common sense—a basic grounding of knowledge that is obvious to any young child.
【小题1】From the text we can infer that www.intellicast.com is a website
| A．where we people can find Smarter Child |
| B．which is specially designed to help Smarter Child |
| C．where weather forecasts are made |
| D．which is about artificial intelligence |
| A．learn the ability to tell right behaviors from wrong ones. |
| B．tell us how to spell a difficult word |
| C．provide us with a famous poem by Shakespeare |
| D．tell us how the American government is run |
| A．where to look for the weather | B．Smarter Child. |
| C．a much more difficult task | D．to read web pages |
| A．A New Web Child | B．Intelligence Development |
| C．Smarter Child | D．The Future of Internet |
In recent years, the world has made progress in reducing deaths among children under the age of five. A new report says an estimated 6.9 million children worldwide died before their fifth birthday. That compares to about twelve million in1990.
The report says child mortality rates have fallen in all areas. It says the number of deaths is down by at least 50 percent in eastern, western and southeastern Asia. The number also fell in North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Ties Boerma is head of the WHO’s Department of Health Statistics and Informatics. He says most child deaths happen in just a few areas.
TIES BOERMA: “Sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia face the greatest challenges in child survival. More than eighty percent of child deaths in the world occur in these two regions. About half of child deaths occur in just five countries—India, which actually takes twenty-four percent of the global total; Nigeria, eleven percent; the Democratic Republic of Congo, seven percent; Pakistan, five percent and China, four percent of under-five deaths in the world.”
Ties Boerma notes that, in developed countries, one child in one hundred fifty-two dies before his or her fifth birthday. But south of the Sahara Desert, one out of nine children dies before the age of five. In Asia, the mortality rate is one in sixteen.
The report lists the top five causes of death among children under five worldwide. They are pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and problems both before and during birth.
Tessa Wardlaw is with the U-N Children’s Fund. She is pleased with the progress being made in Sub-Saharan Africa. The area has the highest under-five mortality rate in the world. But she says the rate of decline in child deaths has more than doubled in Africa.
TESSA WARDLAW: “We welcome the widespread progress in child survival, but we importantly want to stress that there’s a lot of work that remains to be done. There’s unfinished business and the fact is that today on average, around nineteen thousand children are still dying every day from largely preventable causes.”
The World Health Organization says one way to solve these problems is to make sure health care services are available to women. In this way, medical problems can be avoided or treated when identified.
【小题1】Since 1990, the number of the children who died before 5 in the world has dropped by about__________.
| A．6,900,000 | B．12,000,000 | C．1,200,000 | D．5,100,000 |
| A．illness | B．reduction | C．death | D．problem |
| A．child mortality rates have fallen just in five areas |
| B．Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest under-five mortality rate in the world |
| C．in developed countries, no children die before the age of five |
| D．the world has made little progress in reducing the rates of child mortality |
| A．Global warming | B．Malaria | C．Pneumonia | D．Diarrhea |
| A．Women do not want to have babies. |
| B．How more health care services are available to women. |
| C．Medical problems are completely solved. |
| D．The World Health Organization. |