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Jean left Alice Springs on Monday morning with regret, and flew all day in a “Dragonfly” aircraft; and it was a very instructive day for her. The machine did not go directly to Cloncurry, but flew to and fro across the wastes of Central Australia, depositing small bags of mail at cattle stations and picking up cattlemen and travelers to drop them off after a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles. They landed eight or ten times in the course of the day, at places like Ammaroo and Hatches Creek and many other stations; at each place they would get out of the plane and drink a cup of tea and have a talk with the station manager or owner, and get back into the plane and go on their way. By the end of the day Jean Paget knew exactly what a cattle station looked like, and she was beginning to have a very good idea of what went on there.They got to Cloncurry in the evening, a fairly extensive town on a railway that ran eastward to the sea at Townsville. Here she was in Queensland, and she heard for the first time the slow deliberate speech of the Queens lander that reminded her at once of her friend Joe Harman. She was driven into town in a very old open car and deposited at the Post Office Hotel; she got a bedroom but tea was over, and she had to go down the wide, dusty main street to a cafe for her evening meal. Cloncurry, she found, had none of the clean attractiveness of Alice Springs; it was a town which smelt of cattle, with wide streets through which to drive them down to the stockyard, many hotels, and a few shops. All the houses were of wood with red-painted iron roofs; the hotels had two floors, but very few of the other houses had more than one.She had to spend a day here, because the air service to Normanton and Willstown ran weekly on a Wednesday. She went out after breakfast while the air was still cool and walked in one direction up the huge main street for half a mile till she came to the end of the town, then came back and walked down it a quarter of a mile till she came to the other end. Then she went and had a look at the railway station, and, having seen the airfield, with that she had seen all there was to see in Cloncurry. She looked in at a shop that sold toys and newspapers, but they were sold out of all reading matter except a few books about dressmaking; as the day was starting to warm up she went back to the hotel. She managed to borrow a copy of the Australian Women’s Weekly from the manageress of the hotel and took it to her room, and took off most of her clothes and lay down on her bed to seat it out during the heat of the day. Most of the other citizens of Cloncurry seemed to be doing the same thing.She felt like moving again shortly before tea and had a shower, and went out to the café for an ice. Weighed down by the heavy meal of roast beef and plum pudding that the Queenslanders call “tea” she sat in a folding chair for a little outside in the cool of the evening, and went to bed again at about eight o’clock. She was called before daybreak, and was out at the airfield with the first light.1. When Jean had to leave Alice Springs, she ______.2. How did Jean get some idea of Australian cattle stations?3. Jean’s main complaint about Cloncurry, in comparison with Alice Springs, was ______.4. For her evening meal on the second day Jean had ______.5. Jean left Cloncurry ______.

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Over the years, Allan Rechtschaffen has killed a lot of rats just by keeping them awake. In his sleep laboratory at the University of Chicago, Rechtschaffen places each rat on an enclosed turntable contraption that begins spinning whenever the rodent’s brain waves suggest it is beginning to nod off-forcing the rodent to keep moving so that it doesn’t bump into a wall. After about a week of enforced consciousness, the rat begins showing some signs of strain. Odd lesions break out on its tail and paws. It becomes irritable. Its body temperature drops even as it attempts to make itself warmer than usual. It eats twice as much food as normal but loses 10 to 15 percent of its body weight. After about 17 days of sleeplessness, the rat dies.What kills it? “We don’t know,” says Rechtschaffen.Thus it goes in the science of sleep. Rats can last about 16 days without eating, suggesting that sleep is nearly as vital to life as is food. Yet scientists are far from answering the seemingly simple question of what, exactly, sleep is good for.Of course, there’s no shortage of hypotheses; insomniacs hoping for some shut-eye might do well to count sleep theories instead of sheep. Many of the most popular theories are extensions of common-sense propositions from human experience. Since we feel rested after sleep, some researchers argue-that sleep must be for rest. Harold Zepelin, professor emeritus in psychology at Michigan’s Oakland University, regards sleep as a period of mandatory energy conservation. “We can’t afford to be active 24 hours per day,” says Zepelin, so evolution dictated this daily period of hibernation. (Some even argue that one reason sleep evolved in humans was to keep us unconscious and out of harm’s way during the night, when we are not exactly the king of beasts.) Smaller animals such as rodents, which have high metabolisms and expend proportionately more energy to make up for the rapid loss of heat that is a geometric consequence of smallness, do tend to sleep more. Larger animals such as giraffes sleep less than five hours each day.But the energy savings from sleep in large animals are so small it is hard to see why they would sleep at all by this theory. Humans save merely 120 kilocalories a night (about the equivalent of an apple) by sleeping rather than staying awake. Moreover, even hibernating animals arouse themselves from torpor to enter sleep and then fall back into hibernation, suggesting that there is a deeper need for sleep than a mere recharging of the body’s batteries.Dennis McGinty believes part of the function of sleep is to cool off the brain. The chief of neurophysiology research at Los Angeles’s Sepulveda Veterans Hospital, McGinty points to a feedback loop in the brain that seems to trigger sleep when the brain gets too hot. When provided with a bar to increase cage temperature, rats that are kept awake jack up the heat about 10 degrees Celsius. By attempting to get warmer than usual, the rats may be hoping to trigger sleep-inducing neurons.The phenomenon also occurs in humans. “If you exercise in the extreme heat, it practically knocks you out,” McGinty notes. Well-trained athletes who are able to increase their body temperature during exercise—unlike us weekend workout warriors—sleep about one hour longer than normal. In essence, a jump in body temperature activates heat-sensitive neurons to slow down the body’s metabolism—preferably by sleep—and thus cool down the brain. The body’s minimum temperature comes during the deepest sleep, typically at around 5 a.m.1. Which of the following can be the best title for the passage?2. From the passage, we can infer the reason why Allan Rechtschaffen has killed a lot of rats just by keeping them awake is that he wants to ______.3. What does the word “enforced” in the sentence “After about a week of enforced consciousness, the rat begins showing some signs of strain.” mean?4. According to the passage, the reason why ______ is still unknown to the scientists.5. Though scientists are dubious about some experiments, they believe that ______.

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On March 26, 2014, I became a new staff member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, I committed the rest of my scientific future there despite the allegations of espionage leveled at one of its weapons scientists, Wen Ho Lee, who, notably, has never been and may never be officially charged. I valued the accomplishments of its distinguished scientists and was confident its able leaders would receive the political support they needed from Washington to cope with the potential damage to its programs arising from the scandal.But in the months since then that support has come into question—and the damage has become real. Washington’s reaction to the incident has created an atmosphere of suspicion, which, coupled with efforts to restrict scientific interchange and reduce funds for key research, threaten the essence of the lab—its ability to provide the kind of science-based security that has made it a national treasure.Los Alamos burst upon the national consciousness on Aug 6, 1945, the day it was announced that the atomic weapon dropped on Hiroshima had been developed by scientists working at the lab under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer. The secret of their success was an almost magical mix of three key ingredients: the quality and dedication of the researchers, an open scientific environment that promote collaboration and Oppenheimer’s brilliant leadership.That excellence, openness and leadership have largely been maintained in the ensuing 54 years under the enlightened management of the University of California. During the cold war, when national security demanded that we have a competitive edge over the Soviets in nuclear weapons and weapons-related research, Los Alamos led the way. When it became evident that science-based national security depended on world leadership in science, the lab rose to the challenge. It developed an outstanding program to attract the best young researchers and established world-class trans-disciplinary centers for pure and applied scientific research. Indeed, what brought me to Los Alamos was the new Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter, established to work on what promises to be the most exciting science of the new millennium—the search for the higher organizing principles in nature that govern emergent behavior in matter.But in the past six months members of Congress and the Washington bureaucracy have put the scientific environment at Los Alamos seriously at risk. With the laudable goal of improving the security of classified research, they have attempted to impose inefficient micromanagement strategies while decreasing funding for vital research. As Sen. Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, wrote recently to a House colleague: “The House action is irresponsible.” The damage, he said, “would be as serious and more assured than the suspected damage that may have been caused by Wen Ho Lee.”Some of that damage has already been done. By my count there’s been a 60 percent drop in the number of top researchers accepting postdoctoral fellowships at the lab. Promising young staffers are leaving for university and industry jobs, while leading university scientists have refused to be considered for key administrative positions at Los Alamos. Then, too, there’s the loss of the young scientist from China who wanted to come to the lab to work with me this fall. Despite his outstanding record of scientific publication and glowing letters of recommendation, I felt obligated to discourage him from entering the postdoctoral competition. In the current atmosphere, I felt his every move would be monitored. But I wonder whether we’ve lost a chance to attract to America a major contributor to science—and a potential Nobel laureate.Washington must never forget that science is done by scientists, not by computers. It is vital to build security barriers in physical space and cyberspace to protect classified information. But science is not done in isolation. We must not make it difficult for scientists, including those working on secret projects, to discuss unclassified research with colleagues inside and outside the lab whose expertise they need to solve their problems. Doing so will not only make it impossible for the staff at Los Alamos to do their best work, but will also make it impossible for lab to compete for the best and brightest researchers of the future.The damage that’s been done can be repaired. Scientific openness and support for basic research can be restored. The chill fog of suspicion can be dissipated. But as Congress considers its next steps, the unanimous message from the scientific community is very simple, the scientific environment at Los Alamos has worked extremely well. Don’t even think about trying to “fix” it.1. The author devoted himself to scientific studies at Los Alamos because ______.2. Washington put scientific environment at Los Alamos at risk except ______.3. The word “distinguished” in the first paragraph is closest in meaning to ______.4. What damage had Washington caused?5. In the last paragraph, the author’s tone is ______.

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Sometime soon, according to animal-right activities, a great ape will testify in an American courtroom. Speaking through a voice synthesizer, or perhaps in sign language, the lucky ape will argue that it has a fundamental right to liberty. “This is going to be a very important case.” Duke University law Prof. William Reppy Jr. told the New York Times.Reppy concedes that apes can talk only at the level of a human 4-year-old, so they may not be ready to discuss abstractions like oppression and freedom. Just last month, one ape did manage to say through a synthesizer: “Please buy me a hamburger.” That may not sound like crucial testimony, but lawyers think that the spectacle of an ape saying anything at all in court may change a lot of minds about the status of animals as property.One problem is that apes probably won’t be able to convince judges that they know right from wrong, or that they intend to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Since they are not persons, they don’t even have legal standing to sue. No problem, says Steven Wise, who taught animal law for 10 years at Vermont law school and is now teaching Harvard law school’s first course in the subject. He says lawyers should be able to use slavery-era statutes that authorized legal nonpersons (slaves) to bring lawsuits. Gary Francione, who teaches animal law at Rutgers University, says that gorillas “should be declared to be persons under the constitution.”Unlike mainstream animal-welfare activists, radical animal-rights activists think that all animals are morally equal and have rights, though not necessarily the same rights as humans. So the law’s denial of rights to animals is simply a matter of bias-speciesism. It’s even an expression of bias to talk about protecting wildlife, since this assumes that human control and domination of other species is acceptable. These are surely far-out ideas. “Would even bacteria have rights?” asks one exasperated law professor, Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School.For the moment, the radicals want to confine the rights discussion to apes and chimps, mostly to avoid the obvious mockery about litigious lemmings, cockroach liberation, and the issue of whether a hyena eating an antelope is committing a rights violation that should be brought before the world court in the Hague. One wag wrote a poem containing the line, “Every beast within his paws/Will clutch an order to show cause.”The news is that law schools are increasingly involved in animal issues. Any radical notion that vastly inflates the concept of rights and requires a lot more litigation is apt to take root in the law schools. (“Some lawyers say they are in the field to advance their ideology, but some note that it is an area of legal practice that could be profitable,” reports the New York Times.)A dozen law schools now feature courses on animal law, and in some cases at least, the teaching seems to be a simple extension of radical activism. The course description of next spring’s “Animal Law Seminar” at Georgetown University Law Center, for instance, makes clear to students which opinions are the correct ones to have, It talks about the plight of “rightless plaintiffs” and promises to examine how and why laws “purporting to protect” animals have failed.Ideas about humane treatment of animals are indeed changing. Many of us have changed our minds about furs, zoos, slaughterhouse techniques, and at least some forms of animal experimentation. The debate about greater concern for the animal world continues. But the alliance between the radicals and the lawyers means that, once again, an issue that ought to be taken to the people and resolved by democratic means will most likely be pre-empted by judges and lawyers. Steven Wise talks of using the courts to knock down the wall between humans and apes. Once apes have rights, he says, the status of other animals can be decided by other courts and other litigation.The advantage of the litigation strategy is that there’s no need to sell radical ideas to the American people. There are almost no takers for the concept of “nonhuman personhood,” the view of pets as slaves, or the notion that meat eating is part of “a specter of oppression” that equally afflicts minorities, women, and animals in America. You can supersede open debate by convincing a few judges to detect a “rights” issue that functions as a political trump card. The rhetoric is high-minded, but the strategy is to force change without gaining the consent of the public.Converting every controversy into a “rights” issue is by now a knee-jerk response. Harvard Law Prof. Mary Ann Glendon, author of Rights Talk, writes about our legal culture’s “lost language of obligation.” Instead of casting arguments in terms of human responsibility for the natural world, rights talkers automatically spin out tortured arguments about “rights” of animals and even about the “rights” of trees and mountains. This is how “rights talk” becomes a parody of itself. Let’s hope the lawyers and the law schools eventually get the joke.1. The author thinks that the issue whether animals should get the same rights as human beings should be ______.2. The author would agree that ______.3. Which of the following is true?4. The mainstream animal-welfare activists would agree that ______.5. According to the passage, the solution to the problem that apes don’t have legal standing is ______.

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There is severe classic tragedy within major-league baseball, tragedy which catches and manipulates the life of every athlete as surely as forces beyond the heaths manipulated Hardy’s simple Wes-sex folks into creatures of imposing stature.Major-league baseball is an insecure society; it pays a lavish salary to an athlete and then, when he reaches thirty-five or so, it abruptly stops paying him anything. But the tragedy goes considerably deeper than that. Briefly, it is the tragedy of fulfillment.Each major leaguer, like his childhood friends, always wanted desperately to become a major leaguer. Whenever there was trouble at home, in school, or with a girl, there was the sure escape of baseball; not the stumbling, ungainly escape of an ordinary ballplayer, but a sudden, wondrous metamorphosis into the role of a hero. For each major leaguer was first a star in his neighborhood or in his town, and each rived with the unending solace that there was one thing he could always do with grace and skill and poise. Somehow, he once believed with the most profound faith he possessed, that if he ever did make the major leagues, everything would then become ideal.A major-league baseball team is comprised of twenty-five youngish men who have made the major leagues and discovered that, in spite of it, life remains distressingly short of ideal. In retrospect, they were better off during the years when their adolescent dream was happily simple and vague. Among the twenty-five youngish men of a ball club, who individually held the common dream which came to be fulfilled, cynicism and disillusion are common as grass. So Willie Mays angrily announces that he will henceforth charge six hundred dollars to be interviewed, and Duke Snider shifts his dream-site from a ball park to an avocado farm overlooking the Pacific, and Peewee Reese tries to fight off a momentary depression by saying, “Sure I dreamt about baseball when I was a kid, but not the night games. No, sir. I did not dream about the fights.”For most men, the business of shifting and reworking dreams comes late in life, when there are older children upon whose unwilling shoulders the tired dreams may be deposited. It is a harsh, jarring thing to have to shift dreams at thirty, and if there is ever to be a major novel written about baseball, it will have to come to grips with this theme.1. The tragedy in major league baseball lies in the fact that ______.2. The individual’s urge to play major league baseball can usually be traced back to ______.3. According to the passage, each major league baseball player in his youth ______.4. In the opinion of the author, cynicism and disillusionment among baseball players are ______.5. According to the passage, Peewee Reese clearly believes that ______.

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More than ten years ago, Ingmar Bergman announced that the widely acclaimed Fanny and Alexander would mark his last hurrah as a filmmaker. Although some critics had written him off as earnest but ponderous, others were saddened by the departure of an artist who had explored cinematic moods—from high tragedy to low comedy—during his four-decade career.What nobody foresaw was that Bergman would find a variety of ways to circumvent his own retirement—directing television movies, staging theater productions, and writing screenplays for other filmmakers to direct. His latest enterprise as a screenwriter, Sunday’s Children, completes a trilogy of family-oriented movies that began with Fanny and Alexander and continued with The Best Intentions written by Bergman and directed by Danish filmmaker Bille August.Besides dealing with members of Bergman’s family in bygone times—it begins a few years after The Best Intentions leaves off—the new picture was directed by Daniel Bergman, his youngest son. Although it lacks the urgency and originality of the elder Bergman’s greatest achievements, such as The Silence and Persona, it has enough visual and emotional interest to make a worthy addition to his body of work.Set in rural Sweden during the late 1920s, the story centers on a young boy named Pu, dearly modeled on Ingmar Bergman himself. Pu’s father is a country clergyman whose duties include traveling to the capital and ministering to the royal family. While this is an enviable position, it doesn’t assuage problems in the pastor’s marriage. Pu is young enough to be fairly oblivious to such difficulties, but his awareness grows with the passage of time. So do the subtle tensions that mar Pu’s own relationship with his father, whose desire to show affection and compassion is hampered by a certain stiffness in his demeanor and chilliness in his emotions.The film’s most resonant passages take place when Pu learns to see his father with new clarity while accompanying him on a cross-country trip to another parish. In a remarkable change of tone, this portion of the story is punctuated for flash-forwards to a time 40 years in the future, showing the relationship between parent and child to be dramatically reversed: The father is now cared for by the son, and desires a forgiveness for past shortcomings that the younger man resolutely refuses to grant.Brief and abrupt though they are, these scenes make a pungent contrast with the sunny landscapes and comic interludes in the early part of the movie.Sunday’s Children is a film of many levels, and all are skillfully handled by Daniel Bergman in his directional debut. Gentle scenes of domestic contentment are sensitively interwoven with intimations of underlying malaise. While the more nostalgic sequences are photographed with an eye-dazzling beauty that occasionally threatens to become cloying, any such result is foreclosed by the jagged interruptions of the flash-forward sequences—an intrusive device that few filmmakers are agile enough to handle successfully, but that is put to impressive use by the Bergman team.Henrik Linnros gives a smartly turned performance as young Pu, and Thommy Berggren—who starred in the popular Elvira Madison years ago—is steadily convincing as his father. Top honors go to the screenplay, though, which carries the crowded canvas of Fanny and Alexander and the emotional ambiguity of The Best Intentions into fresh and sometimes fascinating territory.1. Bergman completed a trilogy of family-oriented movies during ______.2. Over the years critical views of Bergman’s work have ______.3. In the reviewer’s opinion, Sunday’s Children ______.4. The reviewer thinks that the “flash forward” technique is ______.5. From the passage we can infer that Pu’s father is portrayed as a ______.

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