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56. According to the passage, when in recovery position, the casualty is _________________.
A. lying on his/her back
B. lying on one side of his/her body D. being given initial breaths or CPR
C. in a relatively severe situation
57. Which of the following is NOT correct when giving first aid?
A. Make sure of your own safety before helping the casualty.
B. Call for an ambulance immediately if the casualty has no breathing. C. Make sure casualty?s chest rises when giving initial breaths. D. After every15 compressions, there should be one initial breath.
B
Decades ago, scientists had a much more fixed conception of the brain. They believed that how it develops when you?re a kid more or less determines your brain structure for the rest of your life.
But now we know that?s not true. A landmark study in 2000 looked at grey matter in London taxi drivers. The drivers had more grey matter volume in the hippocampus, a little seahorse-shaped part of the brain that deals with memory. Here was real evidence of neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to change and form new neural(神经的) connections.
In 2010, Swedish scientists tested a group of younger (21-30) and older (65-80) adults for six months, and ?did not detect any significant age-related differences in neuroplasticity of white-matter microstructure?. Translation: older brains can change too.
So what happens to the brain of an adult who learns languages? A group of adult students learning Chinese were tested over a nine-month period in 2012, during which they showed ?improved white-matter quality?. White matter is what connects neural cells, so the better connected, the better you can accomplish a cognitive(认知的) task.
Still want more? Oh, alright then. Language learning builds up your \reserve\which makes you more resistant to brain damage. If you?re bilingual(双语的), congratulations! You may have just delayed the beginning of dementia(痴呆) by several years.
If you?re upset about not being quite as quick as you used to be, or your memory, there?s a silver lining. You?ve got something going for you that no teenager has. You?ve learned how to learn. You know the strategies that work for you and what not to waste your time on. You have better \
A few years ago, scientists tried to test this. They got groups of older people and younger people and showed them words with points values attached, ranging from low to high. Then they allowed the subjects to review whatever they wanted. They noticed that the older subjects spent
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more time on the valuable words but their recall was just as good as the younger subjects. The scientists later discovered that they?d sneakily(偷偷地) reviewed the high-value words just before the test.
So, there you have it: there?s absolutely no reason why you can?t learn a language up to a ripe old age.
58. What is the main theme of this passage?
A.
C.
②③④ ⑤ ⑥⑦ ⑧ ①
D.
②③④ ⑤ ⑥⑦ ⑧ ① ⑧ ②③ A. Human brain structure can develop at any age.
B. A ripe old age is no excuse for quitting language learning.
C. There is little difference in the brain ability between the young and the old. D. Older people actually perform better in language learning than younger ones.
59. What is the structure of the passage?
① ④⑤ ⑥⑦
B. ③ ①② ④⑤ ⑦⑧ ⑥ 60. What can we infer from this article?
A. Grey matter is of less importance to the brain than white matter. B. Learning another language can bring benefits to your cognitive ability. C. Your childhood will determine your brain structure for the rest of your life.
D. Metacognitive skills have no significant influence in young people?s language learning.
C
Celine is a housewife and lives in a rural district in Sub-Saharan Africa. Six years ago, she participated in the clinical trial for HIV which was running in her health district. When I first met Celine, a little over a year ago, she had gone for 18 months without any antiretroviral(抗后病毒的) treatment, and she was very ill. She told me that she stopped coming to the clinic when the trial ended because she had no money for the bus fare and was too ill to walk the
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35-kilometer distance. During the clinical trial, she'd been given all her antiretroviral drugs, and her transportation costs had been covered by the research funds. All of these ended once the trial was completed, leaving Celine with no choices. She was unable to tell me the names of the drugs she'd received during the trial, or even what the trial had been about. Yet what puzzled me most was Celine had given her informed consent(同意) to be a part of this trial, yet she clearly did not understand the implications of being a participant or what would happen to her once the trial had been completed.
I do not stand here today to suggest in any way that conducting HIV clinical trials in developing countries are bad. On the contrary, they are extremely useful tools, and are much needed to address the burden of disease in developing countries. However, without an effective system for reviewing the ethical suitability of them, these clinical trials may be of great problem.
In order for a clinical trial to produce valid and widely applicable results, they need to be conducted with large numbers of study participants and preferably on a population with a high rate of new HIV infections. Sub-Saharan Africa largely fits this description, with 22 million people living with HIV, an estimated 70 percent of the 30 million people who are infected worldwide. Also, research within the continent is a lot easier to conduct due to widespread poverty and inadequate health care systems. A clinical trial that is considered to be potentially beneficial to the population is more likely to be authorized, and in the absence of good health care systems, almost any offer of medical assistance is accepted as better than nothing.
The high occurrence of HIV drives researchers to conduct research scientifically acceptable but on many levels ethically questionable. To ensure that, in our search for the cure, we do not take an unfair advantage of those who are already most affected becomes the most urgent as a matter of fact.
61. From the first paragraph, we know that Celine participated in the clinical trial __________.
A. against her will C. due to her poverty
A. political
B. at her personal expense for it D. without a basic knowledge of it
C. academic
C. physical
62. Developing countries are so attractive to HIV clinical trials due to ___________ reasons.
B. educational
B. moral
D. charitable D. social
63. What does the underlined word “ethical” most probably mean?
A. psychological
64. What might the following paragraph(s) after the last most probably talk about?
A. The solutions to guarantee the ethic of HIV clinical trials in developing countries. B. The steps of conducting research to find the cure for AIDS in developing countries. C. The efforts that should be made by the developing countries for ethical suitability. D. The measures to protect people in developing countries from being affected by AIDS.
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D
The domestic cat is a contradiction. No other animal has developed such a close relationship with human, while at the same time demanding and getting such self-determining movement and action. The cat manages to remain a tame(驯化的) animal because of the process of its upbringing. By living both with other cats (its mother and brother and sisters) and with human (the family that has adopted it) during its babyhood, it is considered to belong to both species. It is like a child that grows up in a foreign country and as a consequence becomes bilingual(双语的). The young cat becomes bimental. It may be a cat physically but mentally it is both feline(猫科的) and human. Once it is fully adult, however, most of its responses are feline ones, and it has only one major reaction to its human owners. It treats them as pseudo(假的) parents.
This is rather different from the kind of bond that develops between human and dog. The dog sees its human owners as pseudo parents, as does the cat. On that score the process of attachment is similar. But the dog has an additional link. Canine(犬科的) society is group-organized; feline society is not. Dogs live in packs with tightly controlled status relationships among the individuals. There are top dogs, middle dogs, and bottom dogs and under natural circumstances they move around together, watching and following one another the whole time. So the adult pet dog sees its human family both as pseudo parents and as the dominant(主宰的) members of the pack, hence its well-known reputation for obedience and loyalty. Cats do have a complex social organization, but they never hunt in packs. In the wild, most of their day is spent in individual stalking(潜行追踪). Going for a walk with a human, therefore, has no appeal for them. And as for “coming to heel” and learning to “sit” and “stay,” they are simply not interested. Such drills have no meaning for them. Because of this difference between domestic cats and domestic dogs, cat-lovers tend to be rather different from dog-lovers. As a rule cat-lover have a stronger personality bias(偏向) toward working alone, away from larger group. Artists like cats; soldiers like dogs. The highly-praised “group loyalty” phenomenon can?t be seen in both cats and cat-lovers. If you are a company person, a member of the gang, or a person picked for the military team, the chances are that at home there is no cat curled up in front of the fire. The ambitious politician, the professional athlete, these are not typical cat-owners. It is hard to picture football players with cats in their laps—much easier to imagine them taking their dogs for walks.
Those who have studied cat-owners and dog-owners as two distinct groups report that there is also a gender bias. The majority of cat-lovers are female. This bias is not surprising in view of the division of labor obvious in the development of human societies. Prehistoric males became specialized as group-hunters, while the females concentrated on food-gathering and childbearing. This difference contributed to a human male “pack mentality” that is far less marked in females.
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