Just not a long time ago did I finish my blog about the unforgettable snowy storm that I had on Monday night in November. I got another big   36   in Seattle again. But this time, it's not snow, but the wind and rain. I have   37   seen such a strong wind before even though I had    38   the typhoon every summer when I was still in my home country.

That    39   storm was so powerful that it    40   the whole big Seattle area out of    41   . 700,000 people had no electricity, and    42   13 people have died. Seattle is famous for its evergreen trees, but those trees made a big   43   this time. They broke down the power line above the ground,   44   the road and streets, and    45   the houses.

As the last storm was still   46   in my mind, I had another personal   47   about this new storm.   48   , this time, it was not good either. I was    49   to have my TOEFL test on the second day of the stormy night. Since the whole city had no electricity, my test had to be    50   off, and I had to prepare for another one later. It was my last test for the   51    , and I already made a plan for the time after the test, but now    52   is changed.

I guess sometimes, the way that the thing    53   is not always what you    54   . And what I can do now is to fit for it.   55   , we got a free hotel room from my husband's cousin and met my lovely nephew from San Francisco. 

Wings of Angel 

I used to hate myself because I wasn’t “normal”. Everyone else could play on the monkey bars and ride on a bicycle, but not   21  . I had a severe spinal cord disorder (脊髓病) and I knew I would always be much   22   than others.

I hated going to school and I hated people   23   at me. I hated seeing others smiling broadly and standing   24   and tall. And most of all, I hated looking in the   25   and seeing an ugly hunchback (驼背).

My friends found me   26   because I didn’t let others get close to me. I thought I was going to go on like this for the rest of my life   27   Angela appeared.

That afternoon, I was sitting by myself in a corner of the school — a spot where no one would   28   me. That’s when I first heard her voice.

“Hi. Can I sit down?”

I raised my head and there she was, with an irresistible smile on her round face.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Ants.”

“What are they doing?”

“No   29  .”

“I bet they’re playing games and making friends. Don’t you think so?”

That was how our   30   started and it didn’t stop. We talked about everything under the sun—the ants, the clouds, my little niche (处境) — until it was sunset.

Then suddenly, she saw my   31  . She just stared.

    My heart   32  . What I feared most had happened and I knew for sure she would   33   me now.

She stood up, pointed at my back and said, “I know   34   your back is hunched.”

I closed my eyes like a criminal waiting to be   35  . I begged in my heart for her to   36  , but she just kept on going. “I know what you’ve got in there. Do you?”

“No,” I answered   37  .

She bent and whispered in my ears.

“Your back is hunched because you’ve got a pair of wings from the angels.”  

I was   38  . I looked into her eyes and her   39   touched my heart. From that day on, I started to learn to   40   myself because I have the wings of an angel and a kind-hearted friend.

1.A. them            B. it               C. me             D. her  

2.A. sadder            B. shorter                 C. weaker             D. slower

3.A. looking          B. smiling          C. aiming            D. glaring  

4.A. still     B. alone           C. straight           D. together

5.A. street            B. sun               C. corner            D. mirror

6.A. distant           B. disappointed   C. hopeless          D. unlucky 

7.A. after             B. while         C. since               D. until

8.A. disturb          B. seek              C. comfort            D. ignore

9.A. wonder          B. idea               C. way               D. problem

10.A. games           B. performance   C. conversation        D. competition

11.A. face             B. back                C. eyes              D. wings

12.A. sank            B. beat              C. broke              D. ached

13.A. look up to   B. catch up with   C. look down upon D. put up with

14.A. that            B. how              C. whether           D. why

15.A. tied            B. arrested                C. punished      D. sentenced

16.A. relax          B. leave              C. stop               D. forbid

17.A. shyly   B. weakly           C. proudly       D. firmly  

18.A. astonished  B. ashamed           C. annoyed          D. upset

19.A. wisdom        B. beauty             C. honesty       D. kindness 

20.A. control         B. like              C. forgive        D. forget

A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech integrated systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.
“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components (元件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.
They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.
While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers’ fields or on the battlefield. “Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.
Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”
(392 words)
【小题1】The difficulty the team of engineers met with while making the robotic fly was that __________.

Warning: reading too much Cinderella to your daughter may damage her emotional health in later life. A paper to be developed at the international congress of cognitive psychotherapy(认知心理疗法) in Gothenburg suggests a link between the attitudes of women abused by their parents and early exposure to the wrong sort of fairy tales. It says girls who identified with Cinderella, Rapunzel and Beauty in Beauty and the Beast were more likely to say in destructive relationships as adults.

The theory was developed by Susan Darker Smith, a psychotherapist at the University of Derby. She interviewed 67 female abuse survivors and found that 61 put up with severe abuse because they believed they could change their partners with patience, composition and love. The same view was taken by male survivors who had been abused as children. Hardly any of the women in a control group, who had not experienced abuse, thought they could change their partners in this way.

    The same view was taken by male survivors who had been abused as children. These women and men said they would leave a relationship rather than put up with abuse from a partner. Ms Darker Smith found the abused women were much more likely to identify with Cinderella and other submissive female characters in fairytales, who were later rescued by a stranger prince or hero.

Although most girls heard the stories, damage appeared to be done to those who adopted the characters as role models. “They believe if their love is strong enough they can change their parents’ behaviors,” she said.” Overexposure in children to stories that emphasize the transformational qualities of love may make women believe they can change their partners.” For example, they might never have understood the obvious flaw in the story of Rapunzel, who remained locked in a high tower until rescued by a knight on a white horse, who broke the door down. “The question,” said Ms Darker Smith, “is why she did not break the door down herself.”

The passage is especially intended for _________.

       A．parents with young daughters

       B．girls who like reading fairy stories

       C．girls who think they can change their partners

       D．parents with grown-up daughters

Cinderella, Rapunzel and Beauty in Beauty and the Beast are similar in that _________.

       A．They all married some princes

       B．They all changed their partners with love

       C．They were all abused by their partners

       D．They all put up with abuse

Which of the following statements is true of the women in a control group?

       A．They don’t believe in fairy tales.

       B．They don’t believe in the transformational qualities of love.

       C．They have also experienced abuse.

       D．They survived abuse.

What does the underlined word “submissive”in the 3rd paragraph probably mean?

       A．kind-hearted    B．passive     C．gentle      D．easy-going

A team of US psychologists have found that talking to another person for ten minutes a day helps with memory.
"Socializing is just as effective as more traditional kinds of mental exercise in boosting memory and intellectual performance," Oscar Ybarra, a psychologist at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, said in a statement.
In one investigation, they analyzed data on 3610 people, aged 24 to 96.
They found that the higher their level of social interaction (交流), the better their cognitive (认知的) functioning.  Social interaction includes getting together or having phone chats with relatives, freinds and neighbors.
In another experiment, the researchers conducted lab tests on 76 college students, aged 18 to 21, to evaluate how social interactions and intellectual exercises affected the results of memory and mental performance tests.
The students were divided into three groups: the social interaction group had a discussion of a social issue for 10 minutes before taking the tests; the intellectual activities group completed three tasks (including a reading comprehension exercise and a crossword puzzle) before the tests; and a control group (对照组) watched a 10-minute clip (电源片段) of the Seinfeld television show.
"We found that short-term social interaction lasting for just 10 minutes improved participants’ intellectual performance as much as engaging in so-called ’intellectual’ activities for the same amount of time," Ybarra said.
The study was expected to be published in the February issue of the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

1. 1.

   The underlined word "boosting" in the second paragraph can be replaced by ______.

   1. A.
      improving
   2. B.
      decreasing
   3. C.
      preventing
   4. D.
      training
2. 2.

   Which is not included in social interaction?

   1. A.
      Having a talk with a neighbor.
   2. B.
      Attending a birthday party.
   3. C.
      Watching TV at home alone.
   4. D.
      Calling your classmates
3. 3.

   What’s the purpose of the experiment on 76 college students?

   1. A.
      To judge the effect of social interaction on memory and intelligence.
   2. B.
      To find out what is real social interaction.
   3. C.
      To learn how much time is needed for social interaction.
   4. D.
      To show the function of people’s cognition.
4. 4.

   Which of the following questions may be asked in the social interaction group in the experiment?

   1. A.
      What does the author want to show us?
   2. B.
      Do you like living in a big city or a small one?
   3. C.
      Which word can be used to fill in the blank?
   4. D.
      What is the main idea of the second paragraph?
5. 5.

   What’s the main idea of the passage?

   1. A.
      Intellectual exercises improve memory.
   2. B.
      Different people have different ways of communication
   3. C.
      Communicating with others keeps you healthy.
   4. D.
      Social interaction makes you smart