In April 2014, the world's oldest known message in a bottle was discovered floating in the Baltic Sea. It had spent 101years lost in the ocean! The message was finally sent to the author's granddaughter. A German fisherman named Konrad Fischer found the brown bottle near Kiel, Germany. He said he nearly threw the bottle back into the water after pulling it out of a fishing net. Then he noticed something inside. The bottle in good condition contained a Danish postcard with two German stamps, dated May 17, 1913. Although dampness had made most of the writing illegible , the readable part of the message asked whoever found it to return it to an address in Berlin. It even contained two stamps to pay for postage. From the address, researchers found that the postcard was written by a man named Richard Platz, who was 20 years old when he wrote the message. While he was hiking on the Baltic coast with a nature appreciation group, he threw the bottle into the sea. Then the researcher began a research for any living s of his. Sure enough, they were able to find his 62-year-old grandfather, Angela Erdmann, who still lives in Berlin. "It was almost unbelievable," Erdmann said upon being presented with her grandfather's bottle and message, as quoted in The Local. "That was a pretty moving moment. Tears rolled down my face." Erdmann never knew her grandfather, who died in 1946, but says that the discovery of the bottle has made her want to learn more about him. The bottle remained on display at the International Maritime Museum Hamburg until May 1. After that, the researchers examined the postcard and tried to figure out the meaning of the rest of the message. Previously, the oldest message found in a bottle spent nearly 98 years at sea and was discovered in April 2012, according to Guinness World Records. When Konrad picked up the bottle from the sea, _ . A) he thought it would bring him good luck. B) he noticed the postcard inside immediately. C) he decided to uncover the secret of the bottle. D) he wanted to throw it back into the sea at first.
D
(Question)
Exercise seems to be good for the human brain,with many recent studies suggesting that regular exercise improves memory and thinking skills.But an interesting new study asks whether the apparent cognitive benefits from exercise are real or just a placebo effect -- that is,if we think we will be "smarter" after exercise,do our brains respond accordingly?The answer has significant implications for any of us hoping to use exercise to keep our minds sharp throughout our lives. While many studies suggest that exercise may have cognitive benefits,recently some scientists have begun to question whether the apparently beneficial effects of exercise on thinking might be a placebo effect.So researchers at Florida State University in Tallahassee and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign decided to focus on expectations,on what people anticipate that exercise will do for thinking.If people's expectations jibe closely with the actual benefits,then at least some of those improvements are probably a result of the placebo effect and not of exercise. For the new study,which was published last month in PLOS One,the researchers recruited 171 people through an online survey system,they asked half of these volunteers to estimate by how much a stretching and toning regimens performed three times a week might improve various measures of thinking.The other volunteers were asked the same questions,but about a regular walking program. In actual experiments,stretching and toning program generally have little if any impact on people's cognitive skills.Walking,on the other hand,seems to substantially improve thinking ability. But the survey respondents believed the opposite,estimating that the stretching and toning program would be more beneficial for the mind than walking.The estimates of benefits from walking were lower. These data,while they do not involve any actual exercise,are good news for people who do exercise."The results from our study suggest that the benefits of aerobic exercise are not a placebo effect,"... Why did the researchers at the two universities conduct the research? A) To discover the placebo effect in the exercise. B) To prove the previous studies have a big drawback. C) To test whether exercise can really improve cognition. D) To encourage more scientists to get involved in the research.
(Answer)
C
Ques: Sydney Australia--Mobile phone has become a problem for middle schools. Some middle schools in Australia have banned students from carrying mobile phones during school hours. Mobile phone use among children has become a problem for the school this year. Several children have got mobile phones as Christmas gifts, and more students want them. Mary Bluett, an official, said mobile phone use is a distraction to students during school hours and it also gives teachers so much trouble in their classrooms. Teachers were also saying that sometimes students might use phone messages to cheat during exams. She said some schools had tried to ban mobile phones. Some parents felt unhappy because they couldn't get in touch with their children. Many teachers said students should not have mobile phones at school, but if there was a good reason, they could leave their phones at school offices. They also said there were many reasons why the students should not have mobile phones at school: _ were easy to lose and were a distraction from studies. Many people say that they understand why parents would want their children to have phones, but they think schools should let the students know when they can use their mobile phones. Some parents felt unhappy because they couldn't _ during school hours. A) use their mobile phones B) leave their mobile phones C) help the teachers with their work D) get in touch with their children
Ans: D
Mary Somerville was born in 1780 in Burntisland, Scotland. Her contribution to mathematics was in both algebra and differential and integral calculus . Mary was one of the world's first famous female mathematicians. She became interested in mathematics and decided to study it at the time when it was considered unacceptable for a woman to do so. She bought books on algebra and geometry and read them at night. In spite of disapproval from people around her, she firmly went on with her struggle to learn. She won a prize for her solution to an algebra problem. She went on to write several books on mathematics. Later in her life, she thought deeply about the years in which she had persevered almost without hope and said, "It taught me never to lose heart." Mary's way of learning remains useful today. If she worked for a while on a problem without coming up with an idea, she stopped working and turned her attention to the piano, her needlework, or a walk outdoors. She then returned to the problem with a fresh mind and a solution turned up. If she could not understand a passage while reading, she would forget about it and read on; several pages later, the meaning of the puzzling passage would become clear to her. According to the passage, if you have been puzzled by a math problem, you'd better _ . A) keep working on it until it is solved B) just forget about the problem C) turn to your math teacher for help D) listen to light music for a while and then continue working on it
D