long as they look both ways before crossing the road. The other popular parental fear—that your children might not get into an Ivy League college—is more rational. Academic success matters more than ever before. But beyond a certain point, parenting makes less difference than many parents imagine. Studies in Minnesota and Sweden, for example, found that identical twins grew up equally intelligent whether they were raised together or apart. A study in Colorado found that children that adopted and raised by brainy parents ended up no brainier than those adopted by average parents.
This doesn’t mean that parenting is irrelevant. The families who adopt children are carefully screened, so they tend to be warm, capable and middle-class. But the twin and adoption studies indicate that any child given a loving home and adequate stimulation is likely to fulfill her potential. Put another way, better-off parents can afford to relax a bit. And if you are less stressed, your children will appreciate it, even if you still make them eat their fruit and vegetables.
58. Which of the following statements is NOT a misguided idea of parenting mentioned in the passage?
A. Children should be protected from any dangers by their parents
B. The more conscientious parents are, the more children will surely benefit from parenting C. Children will die unless ceaselessly watched
D. Children are likely to fulfill their potential with a loving home and adequate stimulation
59. The underlined word “laggard” in Paragraph 2 probably means a country that __________. A. is ahead in development B. falls slow behind others C. is free from physical or mental disorder D. moves to a higher position 60. Which of the following can we learn from the passage?
A. Only warm, capable and middle-class people can adopt a child.
B. When it comes to child-raising, Economist readers will become more rational.
C. Children in rich countries are in greater danger due to the bad influence of crime dramas. D. Although poor parents spend more time with their kids than they once did, they spend less than rich parents do.
61. This passage is mainly written to __________.
A. urge American laws concerning parenting to be changed
B. advise modern parents to learn from their previous generations
C. persuade stressed parents to learn to relax and give more freedom to their children
D. call on the government to do more to help poor parents with school-age children
C
Are You Listening to What Your Heart Is Telling You?
Wearable technology is getting a lot of attention these days. These devices are becoming increasingly more integrated into our daily lives and are providing new insights into our personal activity and fitness levels. According to IDC Research, the worldwide wearables market will reach 45.7 million units shipped by the end of 2015 and 126.1 million units in 2019.
To date, the vast majority of that growth has been in basic activity trackers like the Fitbit One and the Jawbone UP that use an accelerometer (加速计) to measure movement and translate those measurements into estimates of step counts, calories burned, distance travelled and other metrics (度量标准). However, these devices won’t tell you how your body responded to that movement. In other words, while an activity tracker can estimate that you’ve taken 10,000 steps in a day, it can’t tell you how hard your body worked to take those 10,000 steps or how your body recovered from that effort. Measurements of both physical activity and the body’s response to physical activity are important components in determining whether you’re actually improving your health and fitness.
This can be explained by what exercise scientists refer to as workload. Workload is defined as the amount of time spent doing an activity or workout multiplied by the intensity (强度) of that activity. For example, to burn approximately 400 calories you can work out for an hour at low intensity or work out for
20 minutes at very high intensity. This may seem obvious, but while basic activity trackers can be good at measuring how many steps you’ve taken, they are incapable of telling you how your body actually responded to those steps. The best way to quantify your body’s true response to workload is by continuously and accurately measuring heart rate.
With accurate information about your workloads and level of effort you are on your way to getting much better insight into your health and fitness. For example, with training you will start to see improvements in your cardiac efficiency (心效率). Like any muscle, the heart and cardiovascular (心血管) system grow stronger and more efficient with exercise, so as you get in better shape your body is able to produce the same amount of work for less beats from your heart.
There are many other metrics that can be generated from accurate biometric sensors including maximal oxygen consumption (VO2 max) for cardiovascular fitness measurement, heart rate recovery, heart rate variability for monitoring training levels and stress, blood pressure, and breathing rate. This is why more companies are adding continuous heart rate monitoring to their next-gen wearable products. You can expect to see this trend continue as consumers get more value from the powerful insights that accurate heart rate data can provide.
62. What does the author mainly talk about in Paragraph 2? A. The disadvantages of basic activity trackers. B. The metrics of future wearable technology. C. The growth in wearable devices. D. Important physical activities.
63. According to the passage, the next-gen wearable products will be better than basic activity trackers in that ___________.
A. they are like the Fitbit One and the Jawbone UP B. they are good at measuring your physical activity
C. they are likely to have a sensor monitoring heart rate
D. they are able to estimate step counts, calories burned and distance travelled 64. In which column of the newspaper can this passage most probably be found? A. Advertisement. B. Finance. C. Medicine. D. Science. 65. We can learn from the passage that __________.
A. with training your cardiovascular system will be improved B. workload is the amount of time you spend working out C. Fitbit One can respond to physical activity as well as measuring the body’s movement D. measuring physical activity is more important than measuring the body’s response to it
D
Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to patients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was preparing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man. He is hardly taller than my eight-year-old son. The most shocking thing is his face-twisted from swelling, red and raw. Yet his voice was pleasant as he told me that he came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there’s no bus till morning. He’d been hunting for a room since noon but with no success. “I guess it’s my face... I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments...” For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: “I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.”
I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch. When I had finished the dishes, I talked with him. It didn’t take a long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was
hopelessly crippled (残疾的)from a back injury. He didn’t tell it by way of complaint. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going. At bedtime, we put a camp bed in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens (床单) were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch.
Before he left for his bus, he asked if he could come back and stay the next time he had a treatment. I told him he was welcome to come again. On his next trip he arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a gift, he brought a big fish and the largest oysters（牡蛎）I had ever seen. I knew his bus left at 4:00 a. m. and I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us. In the years he came to stay overnight with us, there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.
When I received these little gifts, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning. “Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away! You can lose roomers by putting up such people!” Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could have known him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear. I know our family will always be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.
Recently I was visiting a friend, who has a greenhouse, as she showed me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum (菊花), bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old, rusty (生锈的) bucket. “I ran short of pots,” she explained, and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn’t mind starting out in this old bucket. It’s just for a little while, till I can put it out in the garden.\
She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was imagining just such a scene in heaven. “Here’s an especially beautiful one,” God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman. “He won’t mind starting in this small body.”
All this happened long ago—and now, in God’s garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.
66. Which of the following is true about the man mentioned in the story? A. He is a tall but terrible looking man.
B. He failed to find a room because no room was available. C. He lives a tough life for he has a big family to support.
D. He suffered a lot of pain from skin cancer but he never complained.
67. The reason why the author agreed to let the man spend the night in her house at last is that_______ A. his voice is pleasant.
B. he came from the eastern shore. C. she didn’t want to lose roomers.
D. he promised not to cause much inconvenience.
68. What does the author want to show by saying the underlined words in Paragraph 5? A. The man’s skill of curing diseases. B. The man’s great influence on others. C. Her determination to know him. D. Patients’ regret for not being with him. 69. The author’s family will be grateful to have known the man because he __________. A. stayed only overnight with them B. often brought precious gifts to them C. paid them a lot of money for his staying
D. taught them how to accept the bad without complaint 70. Which of the following is the best title of the story? A. The Beautiful Flower in the Old Bucket B. The Broken Heart in a Tiny Body
C. The Wonderful Scene in Heaven D. The Strange Neighbor in My Life
第II卷（非选择题，共两大题，35分）
第四部分：任务型阅读（共10小题；每小题l分，满分l0分）
请认真阅读下列短文，并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。注意：每个空格只填1个单词。请将答案写在答题纸上相应题号的横线上。
Social signature
So what did the detailed data that we collected reveal? This question is best answered in terms of a characteristic that we decided to call the “social signature” of an individual, and in particular by looking at how this “social signature” changed over time. Imagine one of our participants during the first six-month observation window call some people very frequently, and others only occasionally, where the people called are likely to include relatives, close friends, and more distant acquaintances. If we now put the people called by our participant, with the person most frequently called in first position, the second-most frequently called person in second position, and so on, then we can build a profile (简况) of how the participant allocated calls between all of their different social relationships. This profile is in fact what we call the “social signature,” and it reflects what fraction (部分) of calls a given participant placed to the person they call most, the fraction of calls the participant placed to the person they call second-most, right down to the least frequently called person. So what was the “social signature” able to tell us?
First, let me describe a general property that applied to the “social signatures” of all participants. The number of people that participants called frequently, with whom they had a strong relationship, was comparatively small. We may have five close friends and 20 acquaintances, but we are very unlikely to have 20 close friends and five acquaintances. If we look at the “social signature” in greater detail, we find that there were differences between different participants, so that one individual may have had three close friends and another seven. That is in fact why we chose the term “signature”.
Perhaps most interestingly, if we looked at the “social signature” of a given participant over the three consecutive six-month observation windows, we found that it remained quite stable. It is worth taking a moment to reflect why this should be surprising. The social world of our participants was undergoing a significant transition, with changes in both close and less close friendships. By the end of our study, the identity of some of the close friends of the participants had changed, and so these relationships were now with entirely different individuals, but the fraction of the calls participants placed to a counterpart almost didn’t change.
How can we understand the persistence of an individual’s “social signature”? The key is that the pattern of our social relationships is shaped by a number of critical constraints (限制).
?Time: The first very general and quite inescapable constraint is that we only have a limited amount of time to maintain social relationships.
?Emotional Capital: The second constraint reflects the fact that a strong social relationship requires considerable emotional investment, and our stock of emotional capital is limited.
?Cognitive Limitations: The third constraint is biological in nature, and reflects the fact that they also limit the social relationships.
Can the new social technologies that are accessible significantly change the three factors that we believe shape the patterns of our social interactions? Based on the behavior that we observed for our participants, at this point I would tend to answer no.
Title: Social signature
●The “social signature” is a profile which is built according to how (71) The concept of the “social ________ participants call people with different social relationships and it reflects the fraction of calls a given participant places to the person they call. signature” ●There are variations between different participants. *Participants call a comparatively (72) __________ number of people with whom they have a strong relationship. *A large number of people are called less frequently, where the relationship is Features of the weak. “social signature” *We are likely to have more (73) __________ than close friends. ●It remains quite stable. *It is (74) ________ to spend time reflecting why this should be surprising. *(75) ________ the fact that the relationships change, the fraction of the calls participants place to a counterpart remains largely (76) __________. ●The key to (77) __________ the persistence of an individual’s “social signature” is that the pattern of our social relationships is shaped by some critical The constraints. persistence of an *Time: We only have a limited amount of time to maintain social relationships. individual’s “social *Emotional Capital: Considerable (78) ________ investment is required, and signature” our stock is limited. *Cognitive (79) __________: They also limit the social relationships. Conclusion The new social technologies that we have (80) __________ to are unlikely to change the three factors that may shape the patterns of our social interactions. 第五部分：书面表达（满分25分）
请根据你对以下两幅图的理解，用英语写一篇作文。 中国父亲 英国父亲 你的作文应包括以下内容: 1.简要描述两幅图的内容；
2.概述你对两幅图中不同做法的理解； 3.阐述两幅图对你的启示。 注意：
1.可参照图片适当发挥； 2.作文词数150左右；