雅思阅读部分
第一篇:北极探险失踪轮船
第二篇:Stress of Workplace(人类工作压力) A
How busyis too busy? For some it means having to miss the occasional long lunch; forothers it means missing lunch altogether. For a few, it is not being able totake a "sickie" (病假) once a month. Then thereis a group of people for whom working every evening and weekend is normal, andfrantic is the tempo of their lives. For most senior executives, workloadsswing between extremely busy and frenzied. The vice-president of the managementconsultancy AT Kearney and its head of telecommunications for the Asia-Pacificregion, Neil Plumridge, says his work weeks vary from a "manageable"45 hours to 80 hours, but average 60 hours.
B
Threewarning signs alert Plumridge about his workload: sleep, scheduling and family.He knows he has too much on when he gets less than six hours of sleep for threeconsecutive nights; when he is constantly having to reschedule appointments;"and the third one is on the family side", says Plumridge, the fatherof a three-year-old daughter, and expecting a second child in October. "IfI happen to miss a birthday or anniversary, I know things are out ofcontrol." Being "too busy" is highly subjective. But for anyindividual, the perception of being too busy over a prolonged period can startshowing up as stress: disturbed sleep, and declining mental and physicalhealth. National workers' compensation figures show stress causes the most losttime of any workplace injury. Employees suffering stress are off work anaverage of 16.6 weeks. The effects of stress are also expensive. Comcare, theFederal Government insurer, reports that in 2003-04, claims for psychologicalinjury accounted for 7% of claims but almost 27% of claim costs. Experts saythe key to dealing with stress is not to focus on relief - a game of golf or amassage - but to reassess workloads. Neil Plumridge says he makes it a priorityto work out what has to change; that might mean allocating extra resources to ajob, allowing more time or changing expectations. The decision may take severaldays. He also relies on the advice of colleagues, saying his peers coach eachother with business problems. "Just a fresh pair of eyes over an issue canhelp," he says.
C
Executive stress is not confined to bigorganisations. Vanessa Stoykov has been running her own advertising and publicrelations business for seven years, specialising in work for financial andprofessional services firms. Evolution Media has grown so fast that it debutedon the BRW Fast 100 list of fastest-growing small enterprises last year - justafter Stoykov had her first child. Stoykov thrives on the mental stimulation ofrunning her own business. "Like everyone, I have the occasional day when Ithink my head's going to blow off," she says. Because of the growth phasethe business is in, Stoykov has to concentrate on short-term stress relief -weekends in the mountains, the occasional "mental health" day -rather than delegating more work. She says: "We're hiring more people, butyou need to train them, teach them about the culture and the clients, so it'sactually more work rather than less."
D
Identifythe causes: Jan Elsnera, Melbourne psychologist whospecialises in executive coaching, says thriving on a demanding workload istypical of senior executives and other high-potential business people. She saysthere is no one-size-fits-all approach to stress: some people work best withhigh-adrenalin periods followed by quieter patches, while others thrive undersustained pressure. "We could take urine and blood hormonal measures andpass a judgement of whether someone's physiologically stressed or not,"she says. "But that's not going to give us an indicator of what theirexperience of stress is, and what the emotional and cognitive impacts of stressare going to be."
E
Eisner'spractice is informed by a movement known as positive psychology, a school ofthought that argues "positive" experiences - feeling engaged,challenged, and that one is making a contribution to something meaningful - donot balance out negative ones such as stress; instead, they help peopleincrease their resilience over time. Good stress, or positive experiences ofbeing challenged and rewarded, is thus cumulative in the same way as badstress. Eisner says many of the senior business people she coaches are relyingmore on regulating bad stress through methods such as meditation and yoga. Shepoints to research showing that meditation can alter the biochemistry of thebrain and actually help people "retrain" the way their brains andbodies react to stress. "Meditation and yoga enable you to shift the waythat your brain reacts, so if you get proficient at it you're in control.
F
The Australian vice-president of ATKeamey, Neil Plumridge, says: "Often stress is caused by our settingunrealistic expectations of ourselves. I'll promise a client I'll do somethingtomorrow, and then [promise] another client the same thing, when I really knowit's not going to happen. I've put stress on myself when I could have said tothe clients: ’Why don't I give that to you in 48 hours?' The client doesn'tcare." Overcommitting is something people experience as an individualproblem. We explain it as the result of procrastination or Parkinson's law:that work expands to fill the time available. New research indicates thatpeople may be hard-wired to do it.
G
A studyin the February issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology shows thatpeople always believe they will be less busy in the future than now. This is amisapprehension, according to the authors of the report, Professor GalZauberman, of the University of North Carolina, and Professor John Lynch, ofDuke University. "On average, an individual will be just as busy two weeksor a month from now as he or she is today. But that is not how it appears to bein everyday life," they wrote. "People often make commitments long inadvance that they would never make if the same commitments required immediateaction. That is, they discount future time investments relativelysteeply." Why do we perceive a greater "surplus" of time in thefuture than in the present? The researchers suggest that people underestimatecompletion times for tasks stretching into the future, and that they are bad atimagining future competition for their time.
Question 1-5
Use the information in the passage to match the people (listed A-D) withopinions or deeds below.
Write the appropriate letters A-D in boxes 14-18 on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
AJan Elsnera
BVanessa Stoykov
CGal Zauberman
DNeil Plumridge
1 Work stress usually happens in the high level of a business.
2 More people’s ideas involved would be beneficial for stressrelief.
3 Temporary holiday sometimes doesn’t mean less work.
4 Stress leads to a wrong direction when trying to satisfycustomers.
5 It is not correct that stress in the future will be eased morethan now.
Question 6-8
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answers in boxes 19-21 on your answer sheet.
6 Which of the following workplace stress is NOT mentioned accordingto Plumridge in the following options
A Not enough time spend on family
B Unable to concentrate on work
C Inadequate time of sleep
D Alteration of appointment
7 Which of the following solution is NOT mentioned in helping reducethe work pressure according toPlumridge
A Allocate more personnel
B Increase more time
C Lower expectation
D Do sports and massage
8 What is point of view of Jan Elsnera towards work stress
A Medical test can only reveal part of the data needed to cope withstress
B Index somebody samples will be abnormal in a stressful experience
C Emotional and cognitive affection is superior to physical one
D One well designed solution can release all stress
Question 9-14
Complete the following summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using NOMORE THAN TWO WORDS from the Reading Passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 9-14 on your answer sheet.
Statistics from National worker’s compensation indicate stress plays the mostimportant role in 9......... which cause the time losses. Staffs take about10........ for absence from work caused by stress. Not just time is our mainconcern but great expenses generated consequently. An official insurer wrotesometime that about 11...... of all claims were mental issues whereas nearly27% costs in all claims, Sports Such as 12....... as well as 13....... could bea treatment to release stress; However, specialists recommended anotherpractical way out, analyse 14....... once again.
答案:
14 A 15 D 16 B 17 D 18 C 19 B 20 D
21 A 22 workplace injury 23 16.6 weeks
24 7% 25 golf 26 a massage 27 workloads
第三篇:苦涩味道研究Biology of Bitterness 原文:
To manypeople, grapefruit is palatable only when doused insugar. Bitterblockers like adenosine monophosphate (单磷酸腺苷) couldchange that.
A
There is a reasonwhy grapefruit juice is served in little glasses: most people don’t want todrink more than a few ounces at a time. Naringin, a natural chemical compoundfound in grapefruit, tastes bitter. Some people like that bitterness in smalldoses and believe it enhances the general flavor, but others would rather avoidit altogether. So juice packagers often select grapefruit with low naringinthough the compound has antioxidant properties that some nutritionists contendmay help prevent cancer and arteriosclerosis.
B
It is possible,however, to get the goodness of grapefruit juice without the bitter taste. Ifound that out by participating in a test conducted at the LinguagenCorporation, a biotechnology company in Cranbury, New Jersey. Sets of twominiature white paper cups, labeled 304and 305, were placed before five peopleseated around a conference table. Each of us drank from one cup and then theother, cleansing our palates between tastes with water and a soda cracker. Eventhe smallest sip of 304 had grapefruit ‘s unmistakable bitter bite. But 305 wassmoother; there was the sour taste of citrus but none of the bitterness ofnaringin. This juice had been treated with adenosine monophosphate, or AMP, acompound that blocks the bitterness in foods without making them lessnutritious.
C
Taste research is abooming business these days, with scientists delving into all fivebasics-sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami, the savory taste of protein.Bitterness is of special interest to industry because of its untapped potentialin food. There are thousands of bitter -tasting compounds in nature. Theydefend plants by warning animals away and protect animals by letting them knowwhen a plant may be poisonous. But the system isn’t foolproof. Grapefruit andcruciferous vegetable like Brussels sprouts and kale are nutritious despite-andsometimes because of-their bitter-tasting components. Over time, many peoplehave learned to love them, at least in small doses. “Humans are the only speciesthat enjoys bitter taste,” says Charles Zuker, a neuroscientist at theUniversity of California School of Medicine at San Diego. “Every other speciesis averse to bitter because it means bad news. But we have learned to enjoy it.We drink coffee, which is bitter, and quinine [in tonic water] too. We enjoyhaving that spice in our lives.” Because bitterness can be pleasing in smallquantities but repellent when intense, bitter blockers like AMP could make awhole range of foods, drinks, and medicines more palatable-and therefore moreprofitable.
D
People have varyingcapacities for tasting bitterness, and the differences appear to be genetic.About 75 percent of people are sensitive to the taste of the bitter compoundsphenylthiocarbamide and 6-n-propylthiouracil. and 25 percent are insensitive.Those who are sensitive to phenylthiocarbamide seem to be less likely thanothers to eat cruciferous vegetables, according to Stephen Wooding, ageneticist at the University of Utah. Some people, known as supertasters, areespecially sensitive to 6-n-propylthiouraci because they have an unusually highnumber of taste buds. Supertasters tend to shun all kinds of bitter-tastingthings, including vegetable, coffee, and dark chocolate. Perhaps as a result,they tend to be thin. They’re also less fond of alcoholic drinks, which areoften slightly bitter. Dewar’s scotch, for instance, tastes somewhat sweet tomost people. ” But a supertaster tastes no sweetness at all, only bitterness,”says Valerie Duffy, an associate professor of dietetics at the University ofConnecticut at Storrs.
E
In one recentstudy, Duffy found that supertasters consume alcoholic beverages, on average,only two to three times a week, compared with five or six times for the averagenontasters. Each taste bud, which looks like an onion, consists of 50 to 100elongated cells running from the top of the bud to the bottom. At the top is alittle clump of receptors that capture the taste molecules, known as tastants,in food and drink. The receptors function much like those for sight and smell.Once a bitter signal has been received, it is relayed via proteins known as Gproteins. The G protein involved in the perception of bitterness, sweetness,and umami was identified in the early 1990s by Linguagen’s founder, RobertMargolskee, at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. Known asgustducin, the protein triggers a cascade of chemical reactions that lead tochanges in ion concentrations within the cell. Ultimately, this delivers asignal to the brain that registers as bitter. “The signaling system is like abucket brigade,” Margolskee says. “It goes from the G protein to otherproteins.”
F
In 2000 Zuker andothers found some 30 different kinds of genes that code for bitter-tastereceptors. “We knew the number would have to be large because there is such alarge universe of bitter tastants,” Zuker says. Yet no matter which tastantenters the mouth or which receptor it attaches to, bitter always tastes thesame to us. The only variation derives from its intensity and the ways in whichit can be flavored by the sense of smell. “Taste cells are like a lightswitch,” Zuker says. “They are either on or off.”
G
Once they figuredput the taste mechanism, scientists began to think of ways to interfere withit. They tried AMP, an organic compound found in breast milk and othersubstances, which is created as cells break down food. Amp has no bitterness ofits own, but when put it in foods, Margolskee and his colleagues discovered, itattaches to bitter-taste receptors. As effective as it is, AMP may not be ableto dampen every type pf bitter taste, because it probably doesn’t attach to all30 bitter-taste receptors. So Linguagen has scaled up the hunt for other bitterblockers with a technology called high-throughput screening. Researchers startby coaxing cells in culture to activate bitter-taste receptors. Then candidatesubstances, culled from chemical compound libraries, are dropped onto thereceptors, and scientists look for evidence of a reaction.
H
Tin time, sometaste researchers believe, compounds like AMP will help make processed foodsless unhealthy. Consider, for example, that a single cup of Campbell’s chickennoodle soup contains 850 milligrams of sodium chloride, or table salt-more thana third of the recommended daily allowance. The salt masks the bitternesscreated by the high temperatures used in the canning process, which causesugars and amino acids to react. Part of the salt could be replaced by anothersalt, potassium chloride, which tends to be scarce in some people’s diets.Potassium chloride has a bitter aftertaste, but that could be eliminated with adose of AMP. Bitter blockers could also be used in place of cherry or grapeflavoring to take the harshness out of children’s cough syrup, and they coulddampen the bitterness of antihistamines, antibiotics, certain HIV drugs, andother medications.
I
A number offoodmakers have already begun to experiment with AMP in their products, andother bitter blockers are being developed by rival firms such as Senomyx in LaJolla, California. In a few years, perhaps, after food companies have taken thebitterness from canned soup and TV dinners, they can set their sights onsomething more useful: a bitter blocker in a bottle that any of us can sprinkleon our brussels sprouts or stir into our grapefruit juice.
Questions 1-8
The reading Passagehas seven paragraphs A-I.
Which paragraphcontains the following information?
Write the correctletter A-I, in boxes 1-8 on your answer sheet.
1 Experiment onbitterness conducted
2 Look into thefuture application
3 Bitterness meansdifferent information for human and animals
4 Spread process ofbitterness inside of body
5 How AMP blocksbitterness
6 Some bitternessblocker may help lower unhealthy impact
7 Bitternessintroduced from a fruit
8 Genetic featuredetermines sensitivity
Question 9-12
Summary
Complete thefollowing summary of the paragraphs of Reading Passage, using no more than twowords from the Reading Passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes9-12 on your answer sheet.
The reason whygrapefruit tastes bitter is because a substance called 9 containedin it. However,bitterness plays a significant role for plants. It gives a signalthat certain plant is 10 .For human beings,differentperson carries various genetic ability of tasting bitterness.According to a scientist at theUniversity of Utah, 11 haveexceptional plentyof 12 ,which allows them to perceivebitter compounds.
Questions 13-14
Choose the correctletter, A, B, C or D.
Write your answersin boxes 13-14 on your answer sheet.
13 Whatis the main feature of AMP according to thispassage?
A offsetbitter flavor in food
B only existin 304 cup
C tastes likecitrus
D chemicalreactionwhen meets biscuit
14 Whatis the main function of G protein?
A collectingtaste molecule
Bidentifying different flavors elements
Cresolving large molecules
D transmittingbitter signals to the brain
雅思听力部分
Part 1 租房场景
题型:填空
1. there is a small swimming pool
2. Dining room
3. there is a supermarket nearby
4. near a park
5. there is a primary school
6. single parking space: garage
7. Include the maintenance of gardens
8. house will be emptied on 21st, but it will be available on: 23rd April
9. time to view the house:10.15 am
10. Address: 127, Spring street
Part 2 工作介绍
11. 公司在淡旺季有什么不同政策?
A. two different finishing times
12. 员工休假的相关规定
B. you have to leave at fixed time
13. 在建筑物内
B. sit in your place for work
14-20. 地图
14. bathroom: I 左下角
15. locker room: J 入口右边
16. load dock: G 中间第二个房间
17. B. 左上角第二个房间
18. media room: E. 右侧
19. production manager's office: C. 右上角右数第二个房间
20、 cafeteria: H 中间第三个房间
Part 3 单词教学
题型:选择+匹配
21-26 选择
21. What is common among all participants
B. same level of language ability
22. what is the major difference between two researches?
C. the second research has no interviewee
23. what should the participants learn in the first stage?
A. know the words but not know how to use
24. why would they apply the special words series?
A. interviewees had never seen before
25. what should they pay attention to
A. avoid using too much statistics
26. what is the recommended subject for the next step?
A. phrases
27-30 匹配
27. introduction: D. should be shorter
28. data analysis: A. referring to related materials
29. methodology: B. be more critically thinking
30. conclusion: C. has appeared in multiple parts
Part 4 三种穴居动物
31. Troglophile like the entrance twilight
32. have a better sense of smell than their surface-dwelling counterparts
33. some Troglodyte to find water in the area
34. during the day of winter for hibernation
35. they always like dry and dark environment
36. other animals will eat their eggs
37. colourless and blind
38. some cave fish will have reduced eyes
39. these species always rely on cave soil
40. They are affected by the disease