An exercise method (Gyrotonics) designed to stretch muscles and improve strength and balance is becoming popular in the United States. Here's more about Gyrotonics and the man who invented this special form of exercise. Gyrotonics is a kind of exercise that combines the movements of dancing and swimming with the mental and physical practice called yoga. It helps lengthen muscles, improve balance, and exercise the joints, the parts of the body where bones are joined. A Hungarian dancer named Juliu Horvath developed this special form of exercise. After he was injured in dancing, Mr. Horvath studied yoga intensely. In the 1980s, he developed a new exercise method as a special kind of yoga to strengthen dancers. According to Mr. Horvath, his method was based on the octopus ,monkey and cat. He says these animals have no restrictions. They can move in any direction the Gyrotonic movements to help the human body move more freely. A special machine made of wood and weights helps guide the body through the Gyrotonics exercises. You sit or lie on a flat board. You put your legs or hands through special cloth handles attached to a line with weights. With the tension created by the weights, you must try to move through the exercises. Seven kinds of backbone movements form the base of Gyrotonics. For example, you can stretch your back to the left and right or forward and backward. While moving your back, you can also work on arm or leg motions. These movements must be done in a smooth way. Often the motions are circular . When Juliu Horvath first developed Gyrotonics, he was the only teacher. Since then, he has taught almost 70 trainers. Now, there are more then 800 official schools in the world where you can learn Gyrotonics. According to the passage, what made it possible for Horvath to develop Gyrotonics? A) His dancing-related injury. B) His failure in practicing yoga. C) His good skills of dancing D) His wish to be a Gyrotonics trainer.
A

In its early history, Chicago had floods frequently, especially in the spring, making the streets so muddy that people, horses, and carts got stuck. An old joke that was popular at the time went something like this: A man is stuck up to his waist in a muddy Chicago street. Asked if he needs help, he replies, "No, thanks. I've got a good horse under me." The city planner decided to build an underground drainage system, but there simply wasn't enough difference between the height of the ground level and the water level. The only two options were to lower the Chicago River or raise the city. An engineer named Ellis Chesbrough convinced me the city that it had no choice but to build the pipes above ground and then cover them with dirt. This raised the level of the city's streets by as much as 12 feet. This of course created a new problem: dirt practically buried the first floors of every building in Chicago. Building owners were faced with a choice: either change the first floors of their buildings into basements, and the second stories into main floors, or _ the entire buildings to meet the new street level. Small wood-frame buildings could be lifted fairly easily. But what about large, heavy structures like Tremont Hotel, which was a six-story brick building? That's where George Pullman came in. He had developed some house-moving skills successfully. To lift a big structure like the Tremont Hotel, Pullman would place thousands of jackscrews beneath the building's foundation. One man was assigned to operate each section of roughly 10 jackscrews. At Pullman's signal each man turned his jackscrew the same amount at the same time, thereby raising the building slowly and evenly. Astonishingly, the Tremont Hotel stay open during the entire operation, and many of its guests didn't even notice anything was happening. Some people like to say that every problem has a solution. But in Chicago's early history, every engineering solution seemed to create a new problem. Now that Chicago's waste water was draining... The passage is mainly about the early Chicago's _ . A) popular life styles and their influences B) environmental disasters and their causes C) engineering problems and their solutions D) successful businessmen and their achievements
C

We bet that on cold wintry days, many of you love to stay in your warm home and, every now and then, come out into the kitchen for a snack. Unfortunately, plenty of creepy-crawly critters like to do the same thing! Winter is the time when bugs invade your house without an invitation. The season can be tough for such creatures. In winter the air is cold, the ground is hard and many trees have no leaves. So bugs do what they have to do to survive. Monarch butterflies head south to warmer climates. Ants crowd in deep underground colonies and eat food they have been storing all year. Many insects go into a deep sleep called diapause. There're different kinds of diapause, but all are similar to hibernation, a time when bigger animals become inactive in the cold. Insects go into an inactive period, too, but it often isn't when the temperature drops. They rely on more dependable signals in the environment. For example, many insects can tell how much sunlight there's each day. They use that to tell themselves when to shut down. Bugs are cold-blood-ed, meaning that their inside temperature is the same as the outside. They can't move much when it gets below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So they search for any warm place. They're looking for protection. These guys have been doing this for 300 million years, so they don't really know they're coming into your house. The home is a recent event in terms of their evolutionary behav-ior. They enter through tiny cracks or come in unnoticed on your clothes or shoes. Remember that they may be invading your homes for warmth and food, but they don't care about humans. According to the text, what is diapause? A) It is the same as the animals' hibernation B) It often appears in warm areas all the year. C) It is done to keep bugs active in winter. D) It is a deep sleep similar to hibernation.
D