Losing weight can seem like an unwinnable war. You know you need to eat less and exercise more, but that’s (1) impossible when everything in your life—from job stress to the temptation of fast and (2) foods—encourages you to do the (3) . A healthy diet and regular exercise are certainly the best weapons against weight gain, (4) the fact is that sometimes they aren’t enough. And that’s (5) science may someday be able to help.
In various research labs, researchers are closely looking (6) the biological mechanisms of obesity, (7) why some bodies store fat so (8) , and why others are better at burning the calories they (9) . They are discovering a surprising (10) of metabolic and physiologic factors that contribute to weight: did you know, for instance, that your intestines are full of bacteria that can (11) or restrain weight gain to some extent Or that the brown fat—which is (12) in newborns—actually burns a lot of calories, (13) the traditional white fat commonly stored in bellies
These and other findings about the biology of weight gain could be the (14) to slimming our collective waistline, if scientists can someday use them to (15) better treatments for obesity. (16) we could use the help: in the decade between the year of 1991 and that of 2000, the (17) of overweight adults in the U.S. increased by 61%. Last year, 30% of children in 30 states (18) the scales as either overweight or obese. "We just don’t have enough physicians to treat all the obese people," says Dr. Michael Jensen, professor of medicine.
If the latest findings from obesity labs prove as (19) as they are promising, they could in the future make the job of fighting obesity easier for (20) and patients, and help all of us get an extra boost from our diet and exercise programs.

A:scientists B:physicians C:chiefs D:researchers

Whether to teach young children a second language is disputed among teachers, researchers and pushy parents. On the one hand, acquiring a new tongue is said to be far easier when young. On the other, teachers complain that children whose parents speak a language at home that is different from the one used in the classroom sometimes struggle in their lessons and are slower to reach linguistic milestones. Would a 15-month-old child, they wonder, not be better off going to music classes
A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may help resolve this question by getting to the point of what is going on in a bilingual child’s brain, how a second language affects the way he thinks, and thus in what circumstances being bilingual may be helpful. Agnes Kovacs and Jacques Mehler at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste say that some aspects of the cognitive development of infants raised in a bilingual household must be undergoing acceleration in order to manage which of the two languages they are dealing with.
The aspect of cognition in question is part of what is termed the brain’s “executive function”. This allows people to organise, plan, prioritise activity, shift their attention from one thing to another and suppress habitual responses. Bilingualism is common in Trieste which, though Italian, is almost surrounded by Slovenia. So Dr. Kovacs and Dr. Mehler looked at 40 “preverbal” seven-month-olds, half raised in monolingual and half in bilingual households, and compared their performances in a task that needs control of executive function.
First, the babies were trained to expect the appearance of a puppet on a screen after they had heard a set of meaningless words invented by the researchers. Then the words, and the location of the puppet, were changed. When this was done, the babies who speak only one language had difficulty overcoming their learnt response, even when the researchers gave them further clues that a switch had taken place. The bilingual babies, however, found it far easier to switch their attention — counteracting the previously learnt, but no longer useful response.
Monitoring languages and .keeping them separate is part of the brain’s executive function, so these findings suggest that even before a child can speak, a bilingual environment may speed up that function’s development. Before rushing your offspring into bilingual kindergartens, though, there are a few cautions. For one thing, these extraordinary cognitive benefits have been demonstrated so far only in “crib” bilinguals — those living in households where two languages are spoken routinely. The researchers speculate that it might be the fact of having to learn two languages in the same setting that requires greater use of executive function. So whether those benefits apply to children who learn one language at home, and one at school, remains unclear.

A:Parents B:Teachers C:Researchers D:Children themselves

The crowd stirred and whispered in awe as, on the stage, the horse slowly tapped out the beat. Everyone became tense and quiet as the number of taps neared the correct answer to the horse trainer’s question. After the final tap, the horse paused, seemed to look around and stopped. The crowd went wild!
The horse’s name was Clever Hans, the Educated Horse, and was featured in a vaudeville (杂耍) act in the early 1900s, in Europe. When asked a complicated mathematical question by his owner, Clever Hans would tap out the correct answer with his hooves. For example, if the answer was sixty-eight, Hans would tap out six with his left hoof and eight with his right hoof. Even more remarkable, the owner would leave the room after asking the question, so there could be no secret signal between owner and horse. A mere animal seemed to be accomplishing a highly technical skill of man’s!
It wasn’t until years later that the secret of the trick was revealed. The owner had trained Clever Hans to respond to slight signals. The horse became so sensitive that he learned when to stop from the crowd’s reaction. Members of the audience would start involuntarily, or give some unconscious signal, when Hans reached the right answer. Modern scientists now warn against the Clever Hans syndrome (综合征), whereby researchers unconsciously give clues to their animal subjects about the actions they like to see performed!

A:audience B:researchers C:veterinarians D:mathematicians

The crowd stirred and whispered in awe as, on the stage, the horse slowly tapped out the beat. Everyone became tense and quiet as the number of taps neared the correct answer to the horse trainer’s question. After The final tap, the horse paused, seemed to look around and stopped. The crowd went wild !
The horse’s name was Clever Hans, the Educated Horse, and was featured in a vaudeville(杂耍) act in the early 1900s, in Europe. When asked a complicated mathematical question by his owner, Clever Hans would tap out the correct answer with his hooves. For example, if the answer was sixty- eight, Hans would tap out six with his left hoof and eight with his right hoof. Even mere remarkable, the owner would leave the room after asking the question, so there could be no secret signal between owner and horse. A mere animal seemed to be accomplishing a highly technical skill of man’s !
It wasn’t until years later that the secret of the trick was revealed. The owner had trained Clever Hans to respond to slight signals. The horse became so sensitive that he learned when to stop from the crowd’s reaction. Members of the audience would start involuntarily, or give some unconscious signal, when Hans reached the right answer. Modern scientists now warn against the Clever Hans syndrome (综合征), whereby researchers unconsciously give clues to their animal subjects about the actions they like to see performed!
The Clever Hans syndrome is a danger to be avoided by ______.

A:audience B:researchers C:veterinarians D:mathematicians

The crowd stirred and whispered in awe as, on the stage, the horse slowly tapped out the beat. Everyone became tense and quiet as the number of taps neared the correct answer to the horse trainer’s question. After The final tap, the horse paused, seemed to look around and stopped. The crowd went wild !
The horse’s name was Clever Hans, the Educated Horse, and was featured in a vaudeville(杂耍) act in the early 1900s, in Europe. When asked a complicated mathematical question by his owner, Clever Hans would tap out the correct answer with his hooves. For example, if the answer was sixty- eight, Hans would tap out six with his left hoof and eight with his right hoof. Even mere remarkable, the owner would leave the room after asking the question, so there could be no secret signal between owner and horse. A mere animal seemed to be accomplishing a highly technical skill of man’s !
It wasn’t until years later that the secret of the trick was revealed. The owner had trained Clever Hans to respond to slight signals. The horse became so sensitive that he learned when to stop from the crowd’s reaction. Members of the audience would start involuntarily, or give some unconscious signal, when Hans reached the right answer. Modern scientists now warn against the Clever Hans syndrome (综合征), whereby researchers unconsciously give clues to their animal subjects about the actions they like to see performed!

A:audience B:researchers C:veterinarians D:mathematicians

Passage 4
When men get stick，they act like babies ，say women . But maybe the fairer sex should learn something useful from these guys ——it could save their lives， say researchers at the University of Michigan.
When women have a heart attack ,they’re more likely to put off seeking help the men ,and after an attack,they’re less likely to take steps to improve their health . What’s the reason for the different responses The results of a survey suggest that women are too tough; they think heart problem are simply not a big deal . When Steven Erickson and his colleagues asked 348 men and 142 women who had been admitted to the hospital for a heart attack about their symptoms and medication (用药情况)，they found that even though the women had more symptoms and were taking more medicine they rated their disease as being no more severe than the men did . For more on women and heart disease ,go to www. americanheart. org.
The underlined expression "the fairer sex" in Paragraph 1 refers to ______ .

A:men B:babies C:women D:researchers

Nearly three in 10 men have experienced violence at the hands of an intimate partner during their lifetimes, according to one of the few studies to look (1) domestic violence and health among men.
"Many men actually do experience domestic violence, although we don’t hear about it (2) , " Dr. Robert J. Reid of the University of Washington in Seattle, one of the study’s authors, told Reuters Health. "They often don’t tell (3) we don’t ask. We want to get the message out to men who (4) experience domestic violence that they are not alone and there are resources available to (5) . "
The researchers asked study participants about physical abuse and non-physical (6) , such as threats that made them (7) for their safety, controlling behavior (for example, being told who they could associate with and where they could go), and constant name-calling.
Among men 18 to 54 years old, 14.2 percent said they had experienced intimate partner (8) in the past five years, while 6.1 percent reported domestic violence in the previous year.
Rates were lower for men 55 and (9) , with 5.3 percent reporting violence in the past five years and 2.4 percent having experienced it in the past 12 months.
Overall, 30.5 percent of men younger than 55 and 26.5 percent of older men said they had been victims of (10) violence at some point in their lives. About half of the violence the men (11) was physical.
However, the physical violence men reported wasn’t as harsh as (12) suffered by women in a previous study; 20 percent to 40 percent of the men rated it as severe, compared to 61 percent of (13) .
Men who reported experiencing domestic violence had more emotional and mental health problems (14) those who had not, especially older men, the (15) found.

A:victims B:participants C:researchers D:partners

? ?阅读下面的短文，文中有15处空白，每处空白给出了4个选项，请根据短文的内容从4个选项中选择1个最佳答案。

A:victims B:participants C:researchers D:partners

Scientists Develop Ways of Detecting Heart Attack German researchers have come up with a new generation of defibrillators (除颤器) and early-warning software aimed at offering heart patients greater_________(51) from sudden death from cardiac arrest (心脏停搏). In Germany alone, around 100,000 people die annually_________ (52) a result of cardiac arrest and many of these cases are caused by disruption to the heart’s rhythm. Those most at_________ (53) are patients who have already suffered a heart attack, and for years the use of defibrillators has proved useful in _________ (54) life-threatening disruptions to heart rhythms and correcting them automatically by intervening within seconds. These devices_________(55) on a range of functions, such as that of pacemaker（起搏器） Heart specialists at Freiburg’s University Clinic have now achieved a breakthrough with an implanted defibrillator _________ (56) of generating a six-channel electrocardiogram (ECG,心电图）within the body. This integrated systemallows _________(57) diagnosis of severe blood-flow problems and a pending (即将发生的）heart attack. It will. be implanted in _________(58) for the first time this year. Meanwhile, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Mathematics in Kaiserslautern have developed new computer software that_________(59) the evaluation of ECG data more precise. The overwhelming majority of patients at risk will not have an implanted defibrillator and must for this _________ (60) undergo regular ECGs. "Many of the current programs only take into_________(61) a linear correlation of the data. We are, however, making use of a non-linear process_________(62) reveals the chaotic patterns of heart beats as an open and complex system," Hagen Knaf says. "In this way changes in the heart_________ (63) over time can be monitored and individual variations in patients taken into account." An old study of ECG data, based upon 600 patients who had to compare risks and to show that the new software evaluates the considerably better.

A:doctors B:researchers C:patients D:nurses