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The contribution genes make to intelligence increases as children grow older. This goes against thenotion that most people hold that as we age，environmental influences gradually overpower the geneticlegacy we are bom with and may have implications for education. “People assume the genetic influencegoes down with age because the environmental differences between people pile up in life,”says RobertPlomin. “What we found was quite amazing, and goes in the other direction.”Previous studies have shown variations in intelligence are at least partly due to genetics. To find out whether this genetic contribution varies with age, Plomin’s team pooled data from six separate studies carried out in the US, the UK, Australia and the Netherlands, involving a total of 11,000 pairs of twins. In these studies, the researchers tested twins on reasoning, logic and arithmetics to measure a quantity called general cognitive ability, or “G”. Each study also included both identical twins, with the same genes, and fraternal twins, sharing about half their genes, making it possible to distinguish the contributions of genes and environment to their G scores.Plomin’s team calculated that in childhood, genes account for about 41 percent of the variation inintelligence. In adolescence, this rose to 55 percent； by young adolescence, it was 66 percent. No one knows why the influence from genes should increase with age, but Plomin suggests that as children getolder，they become better at exploiting and manipulating their environment to suit their genetic needs,and says “ Kids with high G will use their environment to foster their cognitive ability and choose friendswho are like-minded. ” Children with medium to low G may choose less challenging pastimes andactivities, further emphasizing their genetic legacy.Is there any way to interfere with the pattern? Perhaps. “The evidence of strong heritability doesn’tmean at all that there is nothing you can do about it，” says Susanne Jaeggi，“From our own work, theones that started off with lower IQ scores had higher gains after training. ’’Plomin suggests that genetic differences may be more emphasized if all children share an identical curriculum instead of it being tailored to children’s natural abilities. “My inclination would be to give everyone a good education, but put more effort into the lower end,” he says. Intelligence researcher Paul Thompson agrees: “It shows that educators need to steer kids towards things drawing out their natural talents.”1.What is the common notion that people hold about genes?2.The study by Plomin’s team aims to find out ( )3.From the experiment with twins, Plomin’s team draws a conclusion that( ) .4.The word “pattern” in paragraph four is closest in meaning to( ) .5.Which of the following might Plomin’s team least agree to?

Information technology that helps doctors and patients make decisions has been around for a long time. Crude online tools like WebMD get millions of visitors a day. But Watson is a different beast. According to IBM, it can digest information and make recommendations much more quickly, and more intelligently, than perhaps any machine before it — processing up to 60 million pages of text per second, even when that text is in the form of plain old prose, or what scientists call “natural language” •That’s no small thing, because something like 80 percent of all information is “unstructured”. In medicine, it consists of physician notes dictated into medical records, long-winded sentences published in academic journals, and raw numbers stored online by public-health departments. At least in theory, Watson can make sense of it all. It can sit in on patient examinations, silently listening. And over time, it can learn and get better at figuring out medical problems and ways of treating them the more it interacts with real cases. Watson even has the ability to convey doubt. When it makes diagnoses and recommends treatments, it usually issues a series of possibilities, each with its own level of confidence attached.Medicine has never before had a tool quite like this. And at an unofficial coming-out party in Las Vegas last year, during the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management System Society, more than 1,000 professionals packed a large hotel conference hall, and an overflow room nearby, to hear a presentation by Marty Kohn, an emergency-room physician and a clinical leader of the IBM team training Watson for health care. Standing before a video screen that dwarfed his large frame, Kohn described in his husky voice how Watson could be a game changer — not just in highly specialized fields like oncology but also in primary care, given that all doctors can make mistakes that lead to costly, sometimes dangerous, treatment errors.Drawing on his own clinical experience and on academic studies, Kohn explained that about one- third of these errors appear to be products of misdiagnosis, one cause of which is “anchoring bias” ： human beings，tendency to rely too heavily on a single piece of information. This happens all the time in doctors，offices, clinics，and emergency rooms. A physician hears about two or three symptoms，seizes on a diagnosis consistent with those, and subconsciously discounts evidence that points to something else. Or a physician hits upon the right diagnosis, but fails to realize that it’s incomplete, and ends up treating just one condition when the patient is, in fact, suffering from several. Tools like Watson are less prone to those failings. As such, Kohn believes, they may eventually become as ubiquitous in doctors，offices as the stethoscope.“Watson fills in for some human limitations，” Kohn told me in an interview. “Studies show that humans are good at taking a relatively limited list of possibilities and using that list, but are far less adept at using huge volumes of information. That’s where Watson shines ； taking a huge list of information and winnowing it down. ”1.What is Watson?2.Which of the following is beyond Watsoif s ability?3.Marty Kohn( ).4.“Anchoring bias”( ).5.Which of the following may be the best title of the passage?

Most scholars agree that Isaac Newton, while formulating the laws of force and gravity and inventing the calculus in the late 1600s, probably knew all the science there was to know at the time. In the ensuing 350 years an estimated 50 million research papers and innumerable books have been published in the natural sciences and mathematics. The modem high school student probably now possesses more scientific knowledge than Newton did, yet science to many people seems to be an impenetrable mountain of facts.One way scientists have tried to cope with this mountain is by becoming more and more specialized. Another strategy for coping with the mountain of information is to largely ignore it. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Sure, you have to know a lot to be a scientist, but knowing a lot is not what makes a scientist. What makes a scientist is ignorance. This may sound ridiculous, but for scientists the facts are just a starting place. In science, every new discovery raises 10 new questions.By this calculus, ignorance will always grow faster than knowledge. Scientists and laypeople alike would agree that for all we have come to know, there is far more we don’t know. More important, every day there is far more we know we don’t know. One crucial outcome of scientific knowledge is to generate new and better ways of being ignorant: not the kind of ignorance that is associated with a lack of curiosity or education but rather a cultivated, high-quality ignorance. This gets to the essence of what scientists do： they make distinctions between qualities of ignorance. They do it in grant proposals and over beers at meetings. As James Clerk Maxwell, probably the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, said, “Thoroughly conscious ignorance... is a prelude to every real advance in knowledge. ’’This perspective on science — that it is about the questions more than the answers — should come as something of a relief. It makes science less threatening and far more friendly and, in fact, fun. Science becomes a series of elegant puzzles and puzzles within puzzles — and who doesn’t like puzzles? Questions are also more accessible and often more interesting than answers; answers tend to be the end of the process, whereas questions have you in the thick of things.Lately this side of science has taken a backseat in the public mind to what I call the accumulation view of science — that it is a pile of facts way too big for us to ever hope to conquer. But if scientists would talk about the questions, and if the media reported not only on new discoveries but the questions they answered and the new puzzles they created, and if educators stopped trafficking in facts that are already available on Wikipedia — then we might find a public once again engaged in this great adventure that has been going on for the past 15 generations.1.Which of the following would most scholars agree to about Newton and science?2.Which of the following is best supported in this passage?3.Why is it a relief that science is about the questions more than the answers?4.The expression “take a backseat”（Line 1，Paragraph 5） probably means ( ) 5.What is the author’s greatest concern in the passage?

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. The new isolation is not of the kind that Americans once idealized, the lonesomeness of the proudly nonconformist, independent-minded, solitary stoic, or that of the astronaut who blasts into new worlds. Facebook’s isolation is a grind. What’s truly staggering about Facebook usage is not its volume — 750 million photographs uploaded over a single weekend — but the constancy of the performance it demands. More than half its users — and one of every 13 people on Earth is a Facebook user — log on every day. Among 18-to-34-year- olds, nearly half check Facebook minutes after waking up, and 28 percent do so before getting out of bed. The relentlessness is what is so new, so potentially transformative. Facebook never takes a break. We never take a break. Human beings have always created elaborate acts of self-presentation. But not all the time, not every morning, before we even pour a cup of coffee.Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature — and this is not a minor revelation — is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self- reinvention. But now we are left talking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.1.Which of the following statements regarding the power of Facebook can be inferred from the passage?2.hich of the following statements about the underside of Facebook is supported by theinformation contained in this passage?3.Which of the following best states “the new isolation” mentioned by the author?4.Which of the following belongs to the category of “everything that matters” according to the passage?5.Which of the following conclusions about Facebook does the author want us to draw?

Ironically, the intellectual tools currently being used by the political right to such harmful effect originated on the academic left. In the 1960s and 1970s a philosophical movement called postmodernism developed among humanities professors （1） being deposed by science, which they regarded as right- leaning. Postmodernism （2） ideas from cultural anthropology and relativity theory to argue that truth is （3）and subject to the assumptions and prejudices of the observer. Science is just one of many ways of knowing, they argued, neither more nor less （4） than others, like those of Aborigines, Native Americans or women. （5），they defined science as the way of knowing among Western white men and a tool of cultural （6） .This argument （7）with many feminists and civil-rights activists and became widely adopted, leading to the “political correctness” justifiably（8） by Rush Limbaugh and the “mental masturbation” lampooned by Woody Allen.Acceptance of this relativistic worldview （9） democracy and leads not to tolerance but to authoritarianism. John Locke, one of Jefferson’s “trinity of three greatest men,” showed （10） almost three centuries ago. Locke watched the arguing factions of Protestantism, each claiming to be the one true religion, and asked: How do we know something to be true? What is the basis of knowledge? In 1689 he （11）what knowledge is and how it is grounded in observations of the physical world in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Any claim that fails this test is “but faith, or opinion, but not knowledge.” It was this idea — that the world is knowable and that objective, empirical knowledge is the most （12）basis for public policy that stood as Jefferson’s foundational argument for democracy.By falsely （13） knowledge with opinion, postmodernists and antiscience conservatives alike collapse our thinking back to a pre-Enlightenment era, leaving no common basis for public policy. Public discourse is （14）to endless waning opinions, none seen as more valid than another. Policy is determined by the loudest voices, reducing us to a world in which might（15） right — the definition of authoritarianism.

The European Parliament has banned the terms “Miss” and “Mrs” they offend female members.

________ they think it will come to an end through the hands of God, or a natural disaster or a political event, whatever the reason, nearly 15 percent of people worldwide think the end of the world is coming, according to a new poll.

Some might consider it an ugly truth that attractive people are often more successful than those ________ blessed with looks.

The（） British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking once said in an interview that heaven is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

“Gangnam Style”，the （）popular song from South Korean recording artist PSY has just become the most watched video on YouTube ever.

Sales of mushrooms have hit an all-time high as Britons increasingly turn to the cheap and（） foodstuff for their cooking.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates has ( ) about being a parent, stating that 13 is an appropriate age for a child’s first cell phone.

It has been revealed that nearly one in five degree courses has been （）since the tripling of tuition fees to £ 9,000 a year.

Traditional fairytales are being ditched by parents because they are too （）for their young children, a study found.

The market for dust masks and air purifiers is（） in Beijing because the capital has been shrouded for several days in thick fog and haze.

The number of stay-at-home fathers reached a record high last year, new figures show, as families saw a(n) ________ in female breadwinners.

Love was in the air in a Tokyo park as normally staid Japanese husbands gathered to scream out their feelings for their wives, promising ________ and extra tight hugs.

Prince Charles, the longest-waiting( ) to the throne in British history, has spoken of his “impatience” to get things done.

这部分有几个阅读段落。每一段都有一些问题或未完成的陈述，请选择最佳答案

The total number of national holidays in China is stipulated by law. Yet people still argue about whether there should be “long holidays” or “short holidays” i.e. greater number of holidays concentrated around a great festival, or holidays scattered over a number of festivals. Which do you subscribe to, and why?

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