noble gases because of the low chemical reactivity of these said gases.
A. what is the periodic table?B. What are noble gases?C. What causes the low chemical reactivity of noble gases? D. How were noble gases discovered?E. How were noble gases understood in the past?F. what are the applications of noble gases?
5 because of their properties, noble gases have many important applications. They are widely used in medicine and industries. For instance, liquid Helium is used for superconducting magnets(磁体). These magnets are very important in physics and medicine. When a doctor suspects that a person’s brain has been damaged, he might request for Magnetic Resonance Imaging(MRI). MRI allows the doctor to “see” the brain, without operating on the patient.
23. paragraph 2__ E ___
24. paragraph 3__ B____
25. paragraph 4___C____
26. paragraph 5___F_____
27. Noble gases are not very chemically A
28. Among the elements of noble gases Helium is the B
29. The required number of electrons in noble gases’ outer shell is D
30. MRI may make operating on the patient F
A. reactive B. lightestC. important D. complete E. flammableF. Unnecessary
四、阅读理解
第一篇 Gross National Happiness
In the last century, new technology improved the lives of many people in many countries. However, one country resisted these changes. High in the Himalayan mountains of Asia, the kingdom of Bhutan remained separate. Its people and Buddhist(佛教) culture had not been affected for almost a thousand years. Bhutan, however, was a poor country. People died at a young age. Most of its people could not read, and they did not know much about the outside world. Then, in 1972, a new ruler named King Jigme Singye Wangchuck decided to help Bhutan to become modern, but without losing its traditions.
King Wangchuck looked at other countries for ideas. He saw that most countries measured their progress by their Gross National Product (GNP). The GNP measures products and money. When the number of products sold increases, people say the country is making progress. King Wangchuck had a different idea for Bhutan. He wanted to measure his country’s progress by people’s happiness. If the people’s happiness increased, the king could say that Bhutan was making progress. To decide if people were happier, he created a measure called Gross National Happiness (GNH).
GNH is based on certain principles that create happiness. People are happier if they have health care, education, and jobs. They are happier when they live in a healthy, protected environment. They are happier when they can keep their traditional culture and customs. Finally, people are happier when they have a good, stable government.
Now there is some evidence of increased GNH in Bhutan. People are healthier and are living longer. More people are educated and employed. Teenty-five percent of the land has become national parks, and the country has almost no pollution. The Bhutanese continue to wear their traditional clothing and follow their ancient Buddhist customs. Bhutan has also become a democracy. In 2008, King Wangchuck gave his power to his son. Although the country still had a king, it held its first democratic elections that year. Bhutan had political parties and political candidates for the first time. Finally, Bhutan has connected to the rest of the world through television and internet.
Bhutan is a symbol for social progress. Many countries are now interested in Bhutan’s GNH. These countries are investigating their own ways to measure happiness. They want to create new policies that take care of their people, cultures, and land.
Brazil may be the nest country to use the principles of GNH. Brazilian leaders see the principles of GNH as a source of inspiration. Brazil is a large country with a diverse population. If happiness works as a measure of progress in Brazil, perhaps the rest of the world will follow.
31. Who was Jigme Singye Wangchuck?
A. A president.
B. A Buddhist priest.
C. A king.
D. A general.
32. Apart from modernizing Bhutan, what else did Wangchuck want to do for Bhutan?
A. To make its population grow.
B. To keep it separate from the world.
C. To keep its traditions and customs.
D. To encourage its people to get rich.
33. A country shows its progress with GNP by
A. selling more products.
B. spending more money.
C. spending less money.
D. providing more jobs.
34. According to GNH, people are happier if they
A. have new technology.
B. have a good, stable government.
C. can change their religion.
D. have more money.
35. Today many countries are
A. using the principles of GNH to measure their progress.
B. working together to develop a common scale to measure GNH.
C. taking both Bhutan and Brazil as symbols for social progress.
D. trying to find their own ways to measure happiness.
第二篇 Download Knowledge Directly to Your Brain
For the first time, researchers have been able to hack into the process of learning in the brain, using induced brain patterns to create a learned behavior. It’s not quite as advanced as an instant kung-fu download, and it’s not as sleek as cognitive inception, but it’s still an important finding that could lead to new teaching and rehabilitation techniques.
Future therapies could decode the brain activity patterns of an athlete or a musician, and use them as a benchmark for teaching another person a new activity, according to the researchers.
Scientists from Boston University and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto used functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to study the learning process. They were examining the adult brain’s aptitude for visual perceptual learning, or VPL, in which repetitive training improves a person’s performance on a particular task. Whether adults can do this as well as young people has been an ongoing debate in neuroscience.
Led by BU neuroscientist Takeo Watanabe, researchers used a method called decoded fMRI neurofeedback to stimulate the visual cortex. First they showed participants circles at different orientations. Then they used fMRI to watch the participants’ brain activity. The researchers were then able to train the participants to recreate this visual cortex activity.
The volunteers were again placed in MRI machines and asked to visualize shapes of certain colors. The participants were asked to “somehow regulate activity in the posterior part of the brain” to make a solid green disc as large as they could. They were told they would get a paid bonus proportional to the size of this disc, but they weren’t told anything about what the disc meant. The researchers watched the participants’ brain activity and monitored the activation patterns in their visual cortices.
“Participants can be trained to control the overall mean activation of an entire brain region,” the study authors write, “or the activation in one region relative to that in another region.”
This worked even when test subjects were not aware of what they were learning, the researchers said.
“The most surprising thing in this study is that mere inductions of neural activation patterns corresponding to a specific visual feature led to visual performance improvement on the visual feature, without presenting the feature or subjects' awareness of what was to be learned,” Watanabe said in a statement.
Watanabe and colleagues said this method can be a powerful tool.
“It can ‘incept’ a person to acquire new learning, skills, or memory, or possibly to restore skills or knowledge that has been damaged through accident, disease, or aging, without a person’s awareness of what is learned or memorized,” they write.
36. what |