The English are often described as unfriendly people who don't talk to strangers . But not London taxi drivers. I once asked one cabby to describe his life to me and he didn't stop talking until I arrived home half an hour later. He told me many interesting stories and this is one of them."Some strange things happen late at night. The other day I was taking a woman home from a party. She had her little dog with her. When we got to her house, she found that she'd lost her key. So, I waited in the cab with her dog while she climbed in through the window." "I waited and waited. After half an hour of ringing the bell I decided to find out what was going on. I tied the dog to a tree and started to climb in through the window. The next thing I knew was that the police came. They thought I was to rob the house! Luckily, the woman came downstairs. She'd gone to sleep and forgotten about me and the dog. I was in such a hurry to get away that I forgot to ask her for the fare." Why do you think the woman didn't go out of the house again. A) Because she didn't want to pay the taxi driver. B) Because she was so tired that she had forgotten about the taxi driver. C) Because she wanted to keep the taxi driver waiting. D) Because she wanted to go to sleep first.
B
(Question)
The immune system is the body's defender. It identifies, tracks down, and destroys troublemakers before they can hurt the body. Those troublemakers may be, for example, bacteria from a cut or splinter, a measles germ, a cold bug, or even a cancer cell. These invaders try to take over our tissues and feed off our bodies' nutrients. If they succeed, we become sick or, sometimes, even die. It's the job of our immune systems to destroy these invaders before they destroy us. Say you picked up a flu virus last week. Perhaps it entered your body through a cut, from a drinking glass, or from the air you breathe. Of course, you didn't feel it, but the virus made its way into your bloodstream. As soon as it entered your body, it began to reproduce. Viruses have only one goal: to take over your cells. Once inside your body, viruses try to enter cells and disrupt their normal work. If left alone, these viruses would hurt so many cells that you would weaken, or worse, get a serious illness. But this flu virus should not be so complacent as it seems to be. As it reproduces in your bloodstream, the virus is met by a certain kind of white blood cell, the lymphocytes. The _ are the foot soldiers that keep you alive. The number of lymphocytes in your body is hard to imagine. Thousands of them could fit in the period at the end of this sentence. Your body holds about a trillion --that's 1,000,000,000,000 of them, or about 3,000 in every drop of blood. _ Some of these lymphocytes pass through a small walnut-sized organ called the thymus. The thymus is the base of the neck. Here, special hormones turn lymphocytes into fighting cells, called T cells. T cells have one terrific talent: They can tell the difference between friend and foe; what should be in our bodies and what shouldn't. They do not affect the body 's healthy cells. Yet they attack everything that is foreign to our bodies, such as germs, transplants, and even our own cells which have become abnormal, as in the case of cancer. What is the function of our immune system? A) To prevent bacteria or germs from entering the body. B) To destroy the troublemakers in order that they might not hurt the body. C) To fight against T cells. D) To take over our tissues and feed off our bodies' nutrients.
(Answer)
B
Question: You never see him, but they're with you every time you fly. They record where you are going, how fast you're traveling and whether everything on your airplane is functioning normally. Their ability to withstand almost any disaster makes them seem like something out of a comic book. They're known as the black box. When planes fall from the sky, as a Yemeni airliner did on its way to Comoros Islands in the India ocean June 30, 2009, the black box is the best bet for identifying what went wrong. So when a French submarine detected the device's homing signal five days later, the discovery marked a huge step toward determining the cause of a tragedy in which 152 passengers were killed. In 1958, Australian scientist David Warren developed a flight-memory recorder that would track basic information like altitude and direction. That was the first mode for a black box, which became a requirement on all U.S. commercial flights by 1960. Early models often failed to withstand crashes, however, so in 1965 the device was completely redesigned and moved to the rear of the plane - the area least subject to impact - from its original position in the landing wells . The same year, the Federal Aviation Authority required that the boxes, which were never actually black, be painted orange or yellow to aid visibility. Modern airplanes have two black boxes: a voice recorder, which tracks pilots' conversations, and a flight-data recorder, which monitors fuel levels, engine noises and other operating functions that help investigators reconstruct the aircraft's final moments. Placed in an insulated case and surrounded by a quarter-inch-thick panels of stainless steel, the boxes can withstand massive force and temperatures up to 2,000degF. When submerged , they're also able to emit signals from depths of 20,000 ft. Experts believe the boxes from Air France Flight 447, which crashed near Brazil on June 1,2009, are in water nearly that deep, but statistics say they're still likely to turn up. In the approximately 20 deep-sea crashes... What does the author say about the black box? A) It ensures the normal functioning of an airplane. B) The idea for its design comes from a comic book. C) Its ability to ward off disasters is incredible. D) It is an indispensable device on an airplane.
Answer:
C