科普类阅读理解模拟训练(93570)-高三英语阅读(526)-21英语网

A

Overhearing a one-sided cell phone call is more distracting than eavesdropping on both sides of a conversation, a new study finds.

“People find cell phone conversations annoying – survey results indicate that up to 82 percent of people do,” Veronica Galván, a cognitive (认知的) psychologist at the University of San Diego, told TechNewsDaily. “We were curious to see what cognitive effects overhearing cell phone conversations might have, since they are now so pervasive in everyday life.”

To see how precisely cell phone chatter might distract people, Galván and her team had about 150 volunteers complete a task where they had to unscramble letters to form words – for instance, rearrange “suohe” to form “house”. As the volunteers performed the task, the scientists carried out a conversation in the background that volunteers were unaware was part of the study. Half the volunteers overheard one side of a chat carried out on a cell phone, while the rest overheard the conversation as a discussion between two people in the room with them. The discussions involved topics such as shopping for furniture, a birthday party and meeting a date at the mall.

The people who overheard the one-sided mobile phone call thought the background conversation was far more distracting than those who heard it as a chat between two people.

People not only thought cell phone conversations were more attention-catching, but they also remembered more words and content from the cell phone discussions than they did from two-sided conversations and made fewer errors recognizing which words were part of the phone call. Past research suggests this is due to how one-sided conversations are more unpredictable than ones where people can hear both sides of a discussion.

“Not knowing where the conversation is heading is what makes cell phone calls more distracting,” said study co-author Rosa Vessal at the University of San Diego.

Galván recalled how distracting cell phone calls could be in her own life. “We’d been doing the study for a couple of months, and I was at the store looking at clothes, and the lady next to me was on a cell phone saying, ‘Yeah, he was in jail last night,’” Galván said. “I had no idea what she was talking about – it was just a snipped-off conversation without context (语境), and it really was different from a conversation you could hear both sides of.”

1. What does the underlined word “distracting” mean in the first paragraph?

A. Annoying. B. Frightening.

C. Puzzling. D. Interesting.

2. Which of the following is TRUE about the experiment that Galván did according to the article?

A. Males and females were asked to perform the task separately.

B. The researchers told volunteers to ignore the distractions.

C. Volunteers were asked to unscramble letters while they were distracted.

D. Volunteers needed to recognize whether some words were part of the conversation they overheard.

3. According to the experiment’s results, when overhearing a one-sided cell phone call, people ______.

A. tended to be more aware of the loud voice of the speaker

B. usually felt annoyed that the speaker was using a cell phone in public

C. couldn’t help trying to figure out constantly where the conversation is heading

D. finished their unscrambling tasks faster than those who heard a chat between two people

4. How does the article mainly develop?

A. By providing examples. B. By making comparisons.

C. By following the order of time.

D. By presenting a result and analyzing its reasons.

B

Big dogs apparently die younger than smaller ones mainly because they age quickly, researchers say.

Normally, larger mammals live longer than smaller ones; for instance, elephants can get up to 70 years old in the wild, while house mice reach only 4 years. But the opposite seems true when you compare animals within one species – in mice, horses and perhaps even humans.

We can especially see how much it hurts to have a bigger body with dogs, a species that comes in various shapes and sizes. The heaviest known dog may have been Zorba, an English breed that weighed 155 kilograms, while the smallest dog alive may be Meyzi which is less than 110 grams.

Large breeds often die young compared with smaller ones, with a 70- kilogram Great Dane having an average life span (寿命) of about 7 years, while a 4-kilogram toy poodle can expect to live up to 14 years.

To figure out the possible tradeoffs of large size, researchers figured out at what age dogs from 74 breeds died, using data from more than 56,000 dogs that visited veterinary (兽医) teaching hospitals. The researchers focused on why large dogs lived shorter lives on average.

The scientists found that large breeds apparently aged more quickly; the speed at which the risk of death increased with age was greater with larger breeds than smaller ones. Indeed, among dog breeds, an increase of 2 kilograms in body mass leads to a loss of approximately 1 month of life expectancy. “Their lives seem to end in fast motion,” said researcher Cornelia Kraus, a biologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany.

The investigators now want to look at the growth and health histories of a large number of dogs and figure out the leading causes of death for large dogs. For instance, bigger canines apparently suffer from cancer more often, which could make sense; large dogs grow more than smaller breeds do, and cancer is rooted in abnormal cell growth.

These new findings might be able to help unravel (解密) the biological links between growth and death, the scientists added.

5. Which of the following is TRUE according to the article?

A. Smaller dogs usually age at faster rates than big dogs.

B. Dogs’ sizes don’t vary much compared to different species.

C. The life spans of dogs differ a lot based on their body sizes.

D. The biggest dog is about 100 times heavier than the smallest dog.

6. If a 70-kilogram Great Dane has an average life span of about 7 years, how long will an 80-kilogram dog be expected to live according to Paragraph 6?

A. 7 years and 5 months. B. 6 years and 7 months.

C. 7 years and 10 months. D. 6 years and 2 months.

7. The underlined word “tradeoffs” in Paragraph 5 is closest in meaning to ______.

A. disadvantages B. exchanges

C. chances D. improvements

8. According to the last three paragraphs, the scientists are planning to _____.

A. find out what larger dogs do to stay healthy

B. find out ways to extend the life spans of dogs

C. find out why cancer attacks bigger dogs more often

D. find out the most common causes of death for larger dogs

C

You know the feeling: you walk into a room and catch people looking at you. They’re staring, right? Not always. The fear that people are staring is often your brain playing tricks on you. Researchers at the University of Sydney have discovered that when your brain is unsure of what you’re seeing, it tells itself someone is looking at you and perhaps even passing judgment.

“Judging if others are looking at us may come naturally, but it’s actually not that simple – our brains have to do a lot of work behind the scenes,” said lead researcher Colin Clifford, a professor of psychology at the University of Sydney.

Our brains determine if someone is looking at us by figuring out where their eyes are pointing and the direction of their head, but without all the necessary information, the brain fills in the blanks using information from prior (以前的) experience.

Researchers tested this by creating images of faces and asking test subjects where they believed the people pictured were looking. They intentionally made it difficult to determine where the figures’ eyes were pointing. The test subjects’ brains made a lot of assumptions during the test.

“It turns out that we’re [built] to believe that others are staring at us, especially when we’re uncertain,” Clifford said. “So gaze perception doesn’t only involve visual cues (暗示) – our brains generate assumptions from our experiences and match them with what we see at a particular moment.” （下转A5版）