The growing speed of a plant is influenced by a number of factors, ______ are beyond our control． A

A．it provides information at high speed and low cost

B．it creates many chances for enterprises

C．it helps to encourage technical innovations

D．enterprises are growing quickly

In addition to this, there is the growing mobility of people since World War II. As families move away from their stable community, their friends of many years, their extended family relationships, the informal flow of information is cut off, and with it the confidence that information will be available when needed and will be trustworthy and reliable has lost. The almost unconscious flow of information about the simplest aspects of living can be cut off. Thus, things once learned subconsciously through the casual communications of the extended family must be consciously learned.

Adding to social changes today is an enormous stockpile of information, The individual now has more information available than any generation, and the task of finding that one piece of information relevant to his or her specific problem is complicated, time-consuming and sometimes even overwhelming.

Coupled with the growing quantity of information is the development of technologies which enable the storage and delivery of more information with greater speed to more locations than has ever been possible before. Computer technology makes it possible to store vast amounts of data in machine-readable files, and to program computers to locate specific information, Telecommunications developments enable the sending of messages via television, radio, and very shortly, electronic mail to bombard people with multitudes of messages. Satellites have extended the power of communications to report events at the instant of occurrence. Expertise can be shared worldwide through teleconferencing, and problems in dispute can be settled without the participants leaving their homes and/or jobs to travel to a distant conference site. Technology has facilitated the sharing of information and the storage and delivery of information, thus making more information available to more people.

In this world of change and complexity, the need for information is of greatest importance. Those people who have accurate, reliable up-to-date information to solve the day-to-day problems, the critical problems of their business, social and family life, will survive and succeed. "Knowledge is power" may well be the truest saying and access to information may be the most critical requirement of all people.

The word "it" (Line 3, Para. 2) most probably refers to ______.

A．the lack of stable communities

B．the breakdown of informal information channels

C．the increased mobility of families

D．the growing number of people moving from place to place

The doctors expressed concern that patients were eating too much and were generally overweight. The doctors said this was particularly worrying as they were seeing more and more young people with weight problems. But it was not just their patients eating too much concerned doctors, but the quality of the food as well.

The doctors said that many of their patients led busy lives and did not have time to cook traditional meals. Because of this many of them were turning to unhealthy fast foods. Sales

of this type of food have been increasing steadily over the last decade, although there were signs that the rate of growth is declining. The doctors felt that there was a clear link between over- consuming of fast food and health problems among their patients.

But the report was not all bad news. The doctors interviewed also reported an increased awareness of the importance of healthy eating among their patients. Many reported an increase

in the number of patients they see who had switched to a healthy organic diet.

41.The report was_____________________.

A). mainly bad news B). all bad news C). all good news D). mainly good news 42. The doctors expressed concern about the problem of ___________________. A). patient’s eating too much B). patient’s quality of the food

C). both the patient’s eating too much and low quality of the food. D). old patients’ overweight

43.The doctors said that many of their patients didn’t cook traditional meals because__________________.

A). patients led busy lives and they have no time to cook the traditional meals. B). patients liked to have some fast food.

C). patients believed that traditional cook were not delicious D). patients often went out for dinner

44. At the moment sales of fast food______________. A). are growing rapidly B). are growing slowing C). are declining

D). are at the same speed as before

45. Doctors report that more of their patients _________________. A). are aware of the importance of healthy eating B). don’t care about healthy eating

C). are stopping eating fast foods D). turn to fast food more often

Benefit Payments to American Workers

German Chancellor (首相)Otto Von Bismarck may be most famous for his military and diplomatic talent, but his legacy (遗产) includes many of today's social insurance programs. During the middle of the 19th century, Germany, along with other European nations, experienced an unprecedented rash of workplace deaths and accidents as a result of growing industrialization. Motivated in part by Christian compassion (怜悯)for the helpless as well as a practical political impulse to undercut the support of the socialist labor movement.' Chancellor Bismarck created the world's first workers' compensation law in 1884.

By 1908, the United States was the only industrial nation in the world that lacked workers' compensation insurance. America's injured workers could sue for damages in a court of law, but they still faced a number of tough legal barriers. For example, employees had to prove that their injuries directly resulted from employer negligence and that they themselves were ignorant about potential hazards in the workplace. The first state workers' compensation law in the country passed in 1911, and the program soon spread throughout the nation.

After World War Ⅱ, benefit payments to American workers did not keep up with the cost of living. In fact, real benefit levels were lower in the 1970s than they were in the 1940s, and in most states the maximum benefit was below the poverty level for a family of four. In 1970, President Richard Nixon set up a national commission to study the problems of workers' compensation. Two years later, the commission issued 19 key recommendations, including one that called for increasing compensation benefit levels to 100 percent of the states' average weekly wages.

In fact, the average compensation benefit in America has climbed from 55 percent of the states' average weekly wages in 1972 to 97 percent today. But, as most studies show, every 10 percent increase in compensation benefits results in a 5 percent increase in the numbers of workers who file for claims. And with so much more money floating in the workers' compensation system, it's not surprising that doctors and lawyers have helped themselves to a large slice of the growing pie.

The world's first workers' compensation law was introduced by Bismarck______.

A．for fear of losing the support of the socialist labor movement

B．out of religious and political considerations

C．to speed up the pace of industrialization

D．to make industrial production safer

完型填空Climate change is one of the most fundamental challenges ever to confront humanity. Its impacts are already showing and will intensify over time ___1___ left unchecked. There is overwhelming scientific evidence, ___2___ shown in the Fourth Assessment Report (第四次评估报告的综合报告 ) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (政府间气候变化专门委员会), that climate change will threaten ___3___ growth and long-term prosperity, as well as the very survival of the most vulnerable populations. IPCC projections indicate that if emissions continue to rise at their current ___4___ and are allowed to double from their pre-industrial level, the world will face an average temperature ___5___ of around 3℃this century. Serious impacts are associated ___6___ this scenario (情景), including sea-level rise, shifts in growing seasons, and an ___7___ frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as storms, floods and droughts. The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December in 2009 offers a ___8___ opportunity to step up international action on climate change. A Copenhagen deal is ___9___ the global transition into green economic growth, and, most urgently, to help the world, especially the most vulnerable, to adapt to impacts ___10___ are now inevitable.

1.A. if B. whether C. when D. which

2.A. because B. as C. while D. when

3.A. economics B. economical C. economy D. economic

4.A. speed B. rate C. pace D. rhythm

5.A. rising B. rise C. raise D. raising

6.A. with B. to C. from D. in

7.A. being increased B. increased C. increase D. increasing

8.A. history B. historical C. historic D. historically

9.A. necessary B. inevitable C. essential to D. basic

10.A. that B. of which C. who D. what

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer's disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful. "It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing," said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind. "

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it. When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

"For the young people, it's as if the distraction never happened," said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. "But for older adults, because they've retained all this extra data, they' re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they've soaked up from one situation to another. "

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others'yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker's real impact.

From the first two paragraphs, we learn that______.

A．aging brains tend to process more information simultaneously

B．one becomes forgetful when he gets old

C．older people don't think their brainpower is declining

D．the aged always stress long-term benefit

The question is no mere academic one. The ease, for example, with which people can change from working in the day to winking at night is a question of growing importance in industry where automation calls for round-the-clock working of machines. It normally takes from five days to one week for a person to adapt to a reversed routine of sleep end wakefulness, sleeping during the day end working at night. Unfortunately, it is often the case in industry that shifts are changed every week; a person may work from 12 midnight to 8 a.m. one week, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. the next, and 4 p. m. to 12 midnight the third and so on. This means that no sooner bas he got used to one routine than he has to change to another, so that much of his time is spent neither working nor sleeping very efficiently.

The only real solution appears to be to hand over the night shift to a number of permanent night workers. An interesting study of the domestic life and health of night-shift workers was carried out by Brown in 1957. She found a high incidence of disturbed sleep and other disorders among those on alternating day and night shifts, but no abnormal occurrence of these phenomena among those on permanent night work.

This latter system then appears to be the best long-term policy, but meanwhile something may be done to relieve the strains of alternate day and night work by selecting those people who can adapt most quickly to the changes of routine. One way of' knowing when a person has adapted is by measuring his body temperature. People engaged in normal daytime work will have a high temperature during the hours of wakefulness and a low one at night; when they change to night work the pattern will only gradually go back to match the new routine and the speed with which it does so parallels, broadly speaking, the adaptation of the body as a whole, particularly in terms of performance. There from, by taking body temperature at intervals of two hours throughout the period of wakefulness it can be seen how quickly a person can adapt to a reversed routine, and this could be used as a basis for selection. So far, however, such a form. of selection does not seem to have been applied in practice.

Why is the question of "how easily people can get used to working at night？" not a mere academic question？

A．Because few people like to reverse the cycle of sleep aud wakefulness.

B．Because sleep normally coincides with the hours of darkness.

C．Because people are required to work at night in some fields of industry.

D．Because shift work in industry requires people to change their sleeping habits.

Look at that ______ car. It is moving in a high ______ .(speed)