Icy Microbes

1　In ice that has sealed a salty Antarctic lake for more than 2,800 years, scientists have found frozen bacteria and algae that returned to life after thawing. The research may help in the search for life on Mars, which is thought to have subsurface lakes of ice.

2　A research team led by Peter Doran of the University of Illinois at Chicago drilled through more than 39 feet of ice to collect samples of bacteria and algae. When Doran’s team brought them back and warmed them up a bit, they sprang back to life.

3　Doran said the microbes have been age-dated at 2,800 years old, but even older microbes may live deeper in the ice sheet sealing the lake, and in the briny water below the ice.¹ That deeper ice and the water itself will be cautiously sampled in a later expedition that will test techniques that may one day be used on Mars.

4　Called Lake Vida, the 4.5-square-kilometer body is one of a series of lakes located in the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, some ² ,200 kilometers due south2 of New Zealand. This lake has been known since the 1950s, but people ignored it because they thought it was just a big block of ice. While at the site for other research in the 1990s, Doran and his colleagues sent³ radar signals into the clear ice covering the lake and were surprised to find that 62 feet below there was a pool of liquid water that was about seven times more salty than seawater.

5　That prompted the researchers to return in 1996 with equipment to drill a hole down to within a few feet of the water layer. At the bottom of this hole, researchers harvested specimens of algae and bacteria.

6　The researchers will return in 2004 equipped with instruments that are sterilized. They will then drill through the full 62 feet of ice and sample some of the briny water from the lake for analysis. The water specimen will be cultured to see if it contains life. Specimens from the water are expected to be even older than the life forms extracted from the ice covering.

 

词汇： 

alga / ’ælgə/ n．水藻（复数algae）

thaw / θɔ: / v．解冻

briny / ’braɪnɪ/ adj．咸的，海水的

specimen / ’spesɪmɪn / n．样本，标本

sterilize / ’sterɪlaɪz / v．杀菌，消毒

culture / ’kʌltʃə(r)/ v．培养（微生物等）

 

注释：

1．... live deeper in the ice sheet sealing the lake, and in the briny water below the ice：in the ice sheet sealing the lake和in the briny water below the ice是介词短语，用作状语，修饰live。

2．due south：正南

3．While at the site for other research in the 1990s, Doran and his colleagues sent ... ：While at the site for other research in the 1990s是省略句，写全了就是：While Doran and his colleagues were at the site for other research in the 1990s ...

A　is found to be a great deal higher than that of seawater

B　was of little scientific value

C　may be older than that collected below 39 feet of ice

D　might have come from Mars

E　is to collect some briny lake water for analysisy

F　may return to life sooner than microbes frozen in the surface ice

Scientists ignored Lake Vida because they thought that a lake of ice ________.

A:A B:B C:C D:D E:E F:F

Cabinet meetings outside London are rare and reluctant things. Harold Wilson held one in Brighton in 1966, but only because the Labour Party was already there for its annual conference. In 1921 David Lloyd George summoned the Liberals to Inverness because he didn’t want to cut short his holiday. Gordon Brown’s decision to hold his first cabinet meeting after the summer break in Birmingham, on September 8th, was born of a nobler desire to show the almost nine tenths of Britons who live outside London that they are not ignored. He will have to do better: constitutionally, they are more sidelined now than ever.
Many legislatures use their second chamber to strengthen the representation of sparsely populated areas (every American state, from Wyoming to California, gets two votes in the Senate, for example). Britain’s House of Lords, most of whose members are appointed supposedly on merit, has the opposite bias. A survey by the New Local Government Network (NLGN), a think-tank, finds that London and two of its neighbouring regions are home to more peers than the rest of Britain combined; even Birmingham, the country’s second-largest city, has just one.
Oddly, this distortion is partly thanks to reforms that were supposed to make the Lords more representative. By throwing out most of the hereditary peers in 1999, Labour paved the way for a second chamber that was less posh, less white and less male than before. But in booting out the landed gentry, it also ditched many of those who came from the provinces. The Duke of Northumberland (270th in the Sunday Times’s " Rich List") may not be a member of a downtrodden minority. But Alnwick Castle, his family pile, is in the North-east region, home to just 2% of the Lords’ members now. Geographically speaking, the duke and his fellow toffs were champions of diversity.
The government now wants to reintroduce some geographical fairness, but minus dukes. Long-incubated plans to reform the Lords would see it converted during the next parliament into a body that is mainly or entirely elected. A white paper in July outlined various electoral systems, all based on regional or sub-regional constituencies.
Some would like to see the seat of government prised out of the capital altogether, though in the past this has normally required a civil war or a plague. Southerners whisper that no one would show up if Parliament were based in a backwater such as Manchester. But many don’t now. The NLGN found that peers resident in Northern Ireland vote least often. But next from the bottom are the London-dwellers, who show up for less than a third of the votes on their doorstep. Even the eight who live abroad are more assiduous. The north may seem an awfully long way away, but apparently so is Westminster.
Why will Gordon Brown hold his first cabinet in Birmingham

A:Labour Party will have its annual conference there. B:To tell citizens outside London that they are not ignored. C:He did not want to cut short his holidays. D:Many British feel that they are more sidelined now than ever.

Text 3 Last week, Utah federal Judge Paul G. Cassell handed a 22-year sentence to a man who beat an elderly woman to death with a log. A few hours later, Judge Cassell sentenced a 25-year-old first-time drug offender to 55 years. If you think Judge Cassell liked sentencing a small-change drug dealer to more time than a violent killer, guess again. The judge had no choice. Federal law demanded the sentence, despite Judge Cassell’s pointed questioning if there was a "rational basis" for sentencing Weldon H. Angelos, the father of two young children, to more time than he could sentence a hijacker, murder or rapist. Blame federal mandatory minimum sentencing rules. A jury found Angelos guilty on three separate charges of possessing a firearm while he sold a half-pound of marijuana for ＄ 350. The first charge of possessing a gun during a drug transaction brought a five-year sentence--the second two charges brought 25 years each. That adds up to 55 years, so even if Angelos were found guilty of selling ＄1,050 of drugs, Judge Cassell had to follow the rules and sentence him to 55 years on the gun charges. (The judge did use a recent federal ruling in reducing the sentence for the drug-selling crimes to one day. ) Judge Cassell was right to impose the draconian sentence. If he ignored federal law, he would place himself above it. Instead, Judge Cassell sentenced Angelus as the law directed, even as he righteously hectored Congress to rewrite federal drug laws so first-time offenders don’t serve more time than dangerous career criminals. The judge also urged Angelus’ attorney, Jerome H. Mooney, to appeal the sentence and, if appeals fail, seek a presidential commutation. While civil-rights advocates across America protested the sentence, the Utah US Attorney’s office defended the system. To prosecutors, Angelus is no Buy Scout. Officials found some 26 empty duffel hags with marijuana residue. Local feds believed Angelus was a big drug dealer, Assistant US Attorney Robert Lund told me, and associated with a violent street gang. Let me say this: Angelus never was a good poster boy for the movement to humanize draconian federal drug laws. Angelus turned down a plea-bargain sentence of 16 years. He is considered a first-time offender only because a juvenile gun conviction was expunged from his record. And even if Angelos didn’t wave his gun in people’s faces, he nonetheless brought a gun with him during the transactions. But Angelos has become a national cause celebre because of Judge Cassell. There are more egregious examples of first-time offenders sentenced to decades for petty dealing, but they didn’t come before a judge vocally opposed to the heavy handed nature of federal drug sentencing. That said, it simply doesn’t make sense that federal sentences often are tougher on small-time drug offenders than on violent criminals. But it happens all the time.

We can learn from the text that Judge Cassell（　）

A:ignored the federal law. B:sentenced Angelos according to the federal law he wrote. C:was a friend of Jerome H. Mooney. D:thought his sentence was tough.

Text 4 So far as I know, Miss Hannah Arendt was the first person to define the essential difference between work and labor. To be happy, a man must feel, firstly, free and, secondly, important. He cannot be really happy if he is compelled by society to do what he does not enjoy doing, or if what he enjoys doing is ignored by society as of no value or importance. In a society where slavery in the strict sense has been abolished, the sign that what a man does is of social value is that he is paid money to do it, but a laborer today can rightly be called a wage slave. A man is a laborer if the job society offers him is of no interest to himself but he is compelled to take it by the necessity of earning a living and supporting his family. The antithesis to labor is play. When we play a game, we enjoy what we are doing, otherwise we should not play it, but it is a purely private activity; society could not care less whether we play it or not. Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his own point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener: or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer. Which a means can be seen from his attitude toward leisure. To a worker, leisure means simply the hours he needs to relax and rest in order to work efficiently. He is therefore more likely to take too little leisure than too much; workers die of coronaries and forget their wives’ birthdays. To the laborer, on the other hand, leisure means freedom from compulsion, so that it is natural for him to imagine that the fewer hours he has to spend laboring, and the more hours he is free to play, the better. What percentage of the population in a modem technological society are, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers At a guess I would say sixteen percent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get bigger in the future. Technology and the division of labor have done two things: by eliminating in many fields the need for special strength or skill, they have made a very large number of paid occupations which formerly were enjoyable work into boring labor, and by increasing productivity they have reduced the number of necessary laboring hours. It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful. Indeed, the problem of dealing with boredom may be even more difficult for such a future mass society than it was for aristocracies. The latter, for example, ritualized their time; there was a season to shoot grouse, a season to spend in town, etc. The masses are more likely to replace an unchanging ritual by fashion which it will be in the economic interest of certain people to change as often as possible. Again, the masses cannot go in for hunting, for very soon there would be no animals left to hunt. For other aristocratic amusements like gambling, dueling, and warfare, it may be only too, easy to find equivalents in dangerous driving, drag-taking, and senseless acts of violence. Workers seldom commit acts of violence, because they can put their aggression into their work, be it physical like the work of a smith, or mental like the work of a scientist or an artist. The role of aggression in mental work is aptly expressed by the phrase" getting one’s teeth into a problem".

A man is happy when（）

A:he has to do what he does not enjoy doing B:what he enjoys doing is ignored by society C:he is compelled to take a job by the necessity of earning a living D:he feels free and important

Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D．
Text 1

Why will Gordon Brown hold his first cabinet in Birmingham

A:Labour Party will have its annual conference there. B:To tell citizens outside London that they are not ignored. C:He did not want to cut short his holidays. D:Many British feel that they are more sidelined now than ever.

Cabinet meetings outside London are rare and reluctant things. Harold Wilson held one in Brighton in 1966, but only because the Labour Party was already there for its annual conference. In 1921 David Lloyd George summoned the Liberals to Inverness because he didn’t want to cut short his holiday. Gordon Brown’s decision to hold his first cabinet meeting after the summer break in Birmingham, on September 8th, was born of a nobler desire to show the almost nine tenths of Britons who live outside London that they are not ignored. He will have to do better: constitutionally, they are more sidelined now than ever.
Many legislatures use their second chamber to strengthen the representation of sparsely populated areas (every American state, from Wyoming to California, gets two votes in the Senate, for example). Britain’s House of Lords, most of whose members are appointed supposedly on merit, has the opposite bias. A survey by the New Local Government Network (NLGN), a think-tank, finds that London and two of its neighbouring regions are home to more peers than the rest of Britain combined; even Birmingham, the country’s second-largest city, has just one.
Oddly, this distortion is partly thanks to reforms that were supposed to make the Lords more representative. By throwing out most of the hereditary peers in 1999, Labour paved the way for a second chamber that was less posh, less white and less male than before. But in booting out the landed gentry, it also ditched many of those who came from the provinces. The Duke of Northumberland (270th in the Sunday Times’s " Rich List") may not be a member of a downtrodden minority. But Alnwick Castle, his family pile, is in the North-east region, home to just 2% of the Lords’ members now. Geographically speaking, the duke and his fellow toffs were champions of diversity.
The government now wants to reintroduce some geographical fairness, but minus dukes. Long-incubated plans to reform the Lords would see it converted during the next parliament into a body that is mainly or entirely elected. A white paper in July outlined various electoral systems, all based on regional or sub-regional constituencies.
Some would like to see the seat of government prised out of the capital altogether, though in the past this has normally required a civil war or a plague. Southerners whisper that no one would show up if Parliament were based in a backwater such as Manchester. But many don’t now. The NLGN found that peers resident in Northern Ireland vote least often. But next from the bottom are the London-dwellers, who show up for less than a third of the votes on their doorstep. Even the eight who live abroad are more assiduous. The north may seem an awfully long way away, but apparently so is Westminster.

Why will Gordon Brown hold his first cabinet in Birmingham（）

A:Labour Party will have its annual conference there B:To tell citizens outside London that they are not ignored C:He did not want to cut short his holidays D:Many British feel that they are more sidelined now than ever

Last week, Utah federal Judge Paul G. Cassell handed a 22-year sentence to a man who beat an elderly woman to death with a log. A few hours later, Judge Cassell sentenced a 25-year-old first-time drug offender to 55 years.
If you think Judge Cassell liked sentencing a small-change drug dealer to more time than a violent killer, guess again. The judge had no choice. Federal law demanded the sentence, despite Judge Cassell’s pointed questioning if there was a "rational basis" for sentencing Weldon H. Angelos, the father of two young children, to more time than he could sentence a hijacker, murder or rapist.
Blame federal mandatory minimum sentencing rules. A jury found Angelos guilty on three separate charges of possessing a firearm while he sold a half-pound of marijuana for ＄ 350. The first charge of possessing a gun during a drug transaction brought a five-year sentence--the second two charges brought 25 years each. That adds up to 55 years, so even if Angelos were found guilty of selling ＄1,050 of drugs, Judge Cassell had to follow the rules and sentence him to 55 years on the gun charges. (The judge did use a recent federal ruling in reducing the sentence for the drug-selling crimes to one day. )
Judge Cassell was right to impose the draconian sentence. If he ignored federal law, he would place himself above it.
Instead, Judge Cassell sentenced Angelus as the law directed, even as he righteously hectored Congress to rewrite federal drug laws so first-time offenders don’t serve more time than dangerous career criminals. The judge also urged Angelus’ attorney, Jerome H. Mooney, to appeal the sentence and, if appeals fail, seek a presidential commutation.
While civil-rights advocates across America protested the sentence, the Utah US Attorney’s office defended the system. To prosecutors, Angelus is no Buy Scout. Officials found some 26 empty duffel hags with marijuana residue. Local feds believed Angelus was a big drug dealer, Assistant US Attorney Robert Lund told me, and associated with a violent street gang.
Let me say this: Angelus never was a good poster boy for the movement to humanize draconian federal drug laws. Angelus turned down a plea-bargain sentence of 16 years. He is considered a first-time offender only because a juvenile gun conviction was expunged from his record. And even if Angelos didn’t wave his gun in people’s faces, he nonetheless brought a gun with him during the transactions.
But Angelos has become a national cause celebre because of Judge Cassell. There are more egregious examples of first-time offenders sentenced to decades for petty dealing, but they didn’t come before a judge vocally opposed to the heavy handed nature of federal drug sentencing.
That said, it simply doesn’t make sense that federal sentences often are tougher on small-time drug offenders than on violent criminals. But it happens all the time.

We can learn from the text that Judge Cassell（）

A:ignored the federal law B:sentenced Angelos according to the federal law he wrote C:was a friend of Jerome Mooney D:thought his sentence was tough

Most of us walk and carry items in our hands every day. These are seemingly simple activities that the majority of us don’t question. But an international team of researchers, including Dr. Richmond from GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, have discovered that human walking upright, may have originated millions of years ago as an adaptation to carrying scarce, high-quality resources. The team of researchers from the US, England, Japan and Portugal investigated the behavior of modern-day chimpanzees as they competed for food resources, in an effort to understand what ecological settings would lead a large ape—one that resembles the 6 million-year old ancestor we shared in common with living chimpanzees—to walk on two legs.
"These chimpanzees provide a model of the ecological conditions under which our earliest ancestors might have begun walking on two legs ", said Dr. Richmond.
The research findings suggest that chimpanzees switch to moving on two limbs instead of four in situations where they need to monopolize a resource. Standing on two legs allows them to carry much more at one time because it frees up their hands. Over time, intense bursts of bipedal activity may have led to anatomical changes that in turn became the subject of natural selection where competition for food or other resources was strong.
Two studies were conducted by the team in Guinea. The first study was conducted by the team in Kyoto University’s "outdoor laboratory" in a natural clearing in Bossou Forest. Researchers allowed the wild chimpanzees access to different combinations of two different types of nut—the oil palm nut, which is naturally widely available, and the coula nut, which is not. The chimpanzees’ behavior was monitored in three situations: (a) when only oil palm nuts were available, (b)when a small number of coula nuts were available, and(c) when coula nuts were the majority available resource.
When the rare coula nuts were available only in small numbers, the chimpanzees transported more at one time. Similarly, when coula nuts were the majority resource, the chimpanzees ignored the oil palm nuts altogether. The chimpanzees regarded the coula nuts as a more highly-prized resource and competed for them more intensely.
In such high-competition settings, the frequency of cases in which the chimpanzees started moving on two legs increased by a factor of four. Not only was it obvious that bipedal movement allowed them to carry more of this precious resource, but also that they were actively trying to move as much as they could in one go by using everything available—even their mouths.
The second study, by Kimberley Hockings of Oxford Brookes University, was a 14- month study of Bossou chimpanzees crop-raiding, a situation in which they have to compete for rare and unpredictable resources. Here, 35 percent of the chimpanzees activity involved some sort of bipedal movement, and once again, this behavior appeared to be linked to a clear attempt to carry as much as possible at one time.

Kyoto University’s study discovered that chimpanzees（　）

A:regarded both types of nut as priced resources B:preferred oil palm nuts to coula nuts C:liked coula nuts better than oil palm nuts D:ignored both types of nut altogether

Many detectives ignored the {{U}}inconspicuous{{/U}} detail.

A:attractive B:unconscious C:unnoticeable D:unknowning