Read the following article and select the best answer. Article: It's 6 a.In.dark and damp.The gentle mist makes it somewhat difficult to find school bus No.330 parked by the east fence, even with my flashlight. For so many times.it's occurred to me that I've found a strange way of easing into retirement --wheeling a school bus around the streets of Minnetonka, _ elementary and middle-school kids to and from school. Having spent the past 10 years before retirement as a family counselor, I figured that driving a school bus would give me a chance to reconnect with young people, and get me out of the house more ofen. Anyway, I'm learning a lot driving a school bus and I've learned a lot form my fellow drivers. If the kids are paying attention, they can learn it, too. The course is Life 101. The title is Self-Awareness and Self-Management. And the school bus drivers are, for a few minutes each morning and evening, teachers. These drivers are in fact people from different backgrounds, including retired folks-like a onetime corporate CEO, a onetime lawyer, a former teacher, a former investment banker. Some are younger stay-at-home moms, displaced managers , and people throwing their shoulders into a challenging economy. If the kids are paying attention, they may learn important things form these drivers, like discipline, kindness, and courage. How can kids know the discipline that it takes to rise every morning before sunrise,to travel to a cold garage and enter a large box of iron--checking it out from beginning to end----ensuring that it allows all the kids a safe ride? Do they recognize the challenge of being kind and respectful when one's financial _ may be coming down? Do children really understand the courage it takes to get up when snow is piling high and drive a school bus,facing all ultimate fear----an injured child? While academics are vital, self--awareness, self--management and personal responsibility are life--changing. Question: The author decided to become a school bus driver to _ . - get connected with the young kids and stay active - provide counseling service for the school kids - avoid getting into financial trouble after retirement - guarantee that he has well--paid stable job
get connected with the young kids and stay active
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Read the following article and select the best answer. Article: I was fortunate enough to discover my love for flying when I was very young. Lucky that some things went my way: my eyesight, for example, was good enough to allow me to become a fighter pilot. And lucky that when I left the army, I found work as an airline pilot, when such jobs weren't plentiful. I still feel lucky, after all these years, to be able to follow my passion. The airline industry has its problems, and a lot of them can be troubling, but I still find purpose and satisfaction in flying. There's some freedom you feel when you're flying above the surface of the earth, no longer limited by gravity. Even at a thousand feet, you get a wider perspective. Problems that seem large down below feel smaller from that height, and smaller still by the time you reach thirty-five thousand feet. I love that flying is an intellectual challenge. If you change the angle of the nose by even one degree while traveling at a typical commercial airliner speed of seven miles a minute, it's enough to increase or decrease your rate of climb or descent by seven hundred feet per minute. I enjoy keeping track of all the calculations, staying aware of the weather conditions, working with a team while knowing closely what the plane can and cannot do. I like the challenge of that. I also like sharing my passion for flying. It's a disappointment to me that a lot of kids today aren't fascinated by flight. I've watched countless children walk past the plane without paying much attention; they're too focused on their video games or their iPods. When there are children who eagerly want a look inside "my office" at the front of the plane, it's so rewarding to see their excitement about something I care deeply about. If we aren't busy during boarding, the first officer and I enjoy inviting curious children to sit in our seats in the cockpit , ask questions, and let their parents take photos of them wearing a captain's hat. Being a pilot has a tangible end result that is beneficial to society. It feels good to take a planeload of 183... Question: What makes the author feel lucky is that _ . - he was able to find a job as a pilot - his job is satisfying and totally free of trouble - he began flying even when he was very young - his physical condition enables him to be a spaceman
he was able to find a job as a pilot
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Read the following article and select the best answer. Article: Imagine putting some bacteria in the freezer and taking them out millions of years later to find that they are still alive. That would be similar to what happened recently, when scientists brought eight-million-year-old bacteria back to life -- simply by thawing them out. The ancient bacteria were found frozen in the world's oldest known tracts of ice, the glaciers of Antarctica. Professor Bidle and his colleagues found and revived two samples of bacteria from the glacial ice. The first was a hundred thousand years old, and the second was around eight million years old. The eight-million-year-old bacteria were alive. But their genes were seriously damaged from long exposure to cosmic ( ) radiation, which is higher at the earth's poles. Most of the bacteria in the samples probably blew over from African deserts, said Paul Falkowski, a scientist at prefix = st1 /RutgersUniversity. Once the bacteria landed on the glacier's snowy surface, they combined with the snow to form ice. "These ices are actually gene banks," he added. As glaciers and ice caps melt as a result of increasing global warming, large amounts of bacterial genetic material might be washed into the ocean. These bacteria might get incorporated into today's bacteria in the ocean, or living bacteria from the ice might also grow and have an important effect on the ecosystem. "How that's going to play out, we don't know," Bidle said. He and Falkowski plan to focus their future work on how current ice melting influences modem bacteria's genetic diversity. Question: Professor Bidle found that the eight-million-year-old bacteria were _ . - alive with their genes damaged - as active as the one-hungred-thousand-year-old ones - totally the same as what they used to be - harder to revive than the one-hundred-thousand-year-old ones
alive with their genes damaged
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