How the Grand Canyon (大峡谷) was created remains one of the geology’s greatest mysteries. Some evidence suggests that the process was a gradual one in which the Colorado River (which runs through the canyon) slowly cut deeper and deeper into the ground over millions of years. But volcanic rock samples taken from the canyon now suggest that the canyon was down-cut instead.
Down-cutting is when a flood of water rushes over a landscape (地形) with enough force to cut deeply into the ground and leaves behind a canyon. Such a flood is usually released when a natural or man-made dam (堤坝) bursts.
Robert Webb, a research geologist, says natural dams seem to have formed and broken across the Colorado River several times during the last million years. The dams were built when lava(熔岩) from the eruptions of nearby volcanoes flowed into the river. The lava hardened into hard rocks and blocked the river, causing it to back up and form a lake. Each time the lake grew so huge that it broke the rock dam, releasing a flash flood that furthered the down-cutting process and deepened the canyon.
Down-cutting is not just an earthly event. Satellite photos sent back from Mars suggest that the process has happened there, too, say many other researchers.
The photos, taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, indicate that an enormous lake existed on Mars 3.5 billion years ago. The lake spilled into a large nearby hole. One edge of the hole broke, releasing a flash flood that quickly carved out a grand canyon.
The existence of down-cutting on Mars is just one more piece of evidence that the cold, dry planet was once warm and wet.
【小题1】In the past, deep canyons were believed to have formed _______.
| A．as a result of a sudden break of volcanoes |
| B．due to river flows over millions of years |
| C．owing to the burst of artificial dams |
| D．thanks to our ancestors’ creative work |
| A．Several volcanoes broke out on Mars directly creating grand canyons. |
| B．Several great lakes existed on the upper parts of the Colorado River. |
| C．People built high dams on the upper parts of the Colorado River. |
| D．The Colorado River crossed the Grand Canyon to form down-cutting. |
| A．there are great lakes on Mars |
| B．there are active volcanoes on Mars |
| C．there might be cities on Mars |
| D．there might be life on Mars |
| A．Lakes on Earth and Mars |
| B．The Cause of Lake Formation |
| C．The Force of Dam Breaking |
| D．Canyons—Results of Flood Cutting |
【小题1】B
【小题2】B
【小题3】D
【小题4】D
解析试题分析：和以往人们的想法不同的是，这篇文章的作者认为大峡谷的形成是洪水下切侵蚀造成的，主要是上游的湖泊泛滥强大的力量造成了峡谷，文章还介绍在火星也有这种现象。
【小题1】细节题：从文章第一段的句子：Some evidence suggests that the process was a gradual one in which the Colorado River (which runs through the canyon) slowly cut deeper and deeper into the ground over millions of years.可知过去深深的峡谷据相信是由于多年的河流造成的，选B
【小题2】细节题：从文章第三段的句子：The lava hardened into hard rocks and blocked the river, causing it to back up and form a lake.可知在Colorado 河的上游有几个大湖，选B
【小题3】细节题：从文章最后一段的句子：The existence of down-cutting on Mars is just one more piece of evidence that the cold, dry planet was once warm and wet.可知在火星上可能有生命，选D
【小题4】标题确定题：从文章的内容和第二段的句子：Down-cutting is when a flood of water rushes over a landscape (地形) with enough force to cut deeply into the ground and leaves behind a canyon.可知这篇文章讲的是峡谷是由洪水下切侵蚀造成的，选D
考点：考查科普类短文
科目：高中英语 来源： 题型：阅读理解
If you want to help children develop language and speech skills, UCLA researchers say, listening to what they have to say is just as important as talking to them. 
The effect of a conversation between a child and an adult is about six times as great as the effect of adult speech input(输入)alone, the researchers found. “Adults speaking to children helps language develop, but what matters much more is the interaction, ”said the study’s lead author, Frederick Zimmerman, an associate professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. The researchers also found that TV viewing didn’t have much of an effect—positively or negatively—as long as it wasn’t displacing conversations between an adult and a child.
The UCLA study included 275 families with children between 2 months and 48 months old. They represented a variety of incomes and education. The researchers found that, in an average day, children heard about 13, 000 spoken words from adults and participated in about 400 adult-child conversations a day.
Assessed separately, factors positively associated with language development included each additional 100 conversations a day and each 1, 000 words increase in the number of words spoken by adults and heard by children. When looked at alone, TV was negatively associated with language development. But, when these three factors were analyzed together, the only one that stood out was conversation between adults and children.
“The more a child speaks and interacts with an adult, the better idea a parent has about where the child is”, Zimmerman said. “Although it’s mostly done unconsciously, parents will provide feedback and correct mistakes. They’ll also tailor their speech to the child. Parents can give the children words by talking to them about what they’re doing, such as, ‘I’m putting on your pajamas now’. But give your child the opportunity to talk, hopefully without the rest of the noise in the environment, ”she added. “If parents can carve out some conversation time—maybe at bath time or at dinner time—that’s a wonderful thing. ”
【小题1】 The researchers also found that TV viewing .
| A．could have a positive effect on a child’s language development |
| B．had a little effect on a child’s language development |
| C．affected a child’s language development more negatively than positively |
| D．affected a child’s language development both negatively and positively |
| A．parents should let their children talk most of the time |
| B．children should watch TV programs selectively |
| C．the conversation between parents and children should be two-way |
| D．it’s no good for parents to correct their children’s mistakes when they are speaking |
| A．parents should let a child repeat what he or she says |
| B．bath time or dinner time is the best chance for parents to talk to a child |
| C．parent-child conversation can be carried out at any proper time |
| D．parents should leave a child talking alone |
| A．Talk with kids, not at them |
| B．Let your children voice their own opinions |
| C．How to develop a child’s language ability |
| D．The importance of early child language development |
| A．control | B．improve |
| C．pass | D．adjust |
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科目：高中英语 来源： 题型：阅读理解
Can software bring dead tongues back to life? Probably yes.
A computer algorithm（计算程序）works almost as well as a trained linguist（语言学家） in reconstructing how dead "protolanguages" would have sounded, says a new study.
"Our computer system is doing a basic job right now," says Alex Bouchard-Côté, an assistant professor in the department of statistics at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the paper describing the algorithm. But the program does a good enough job that it may be able to give linguists a head start, the statistician added.
For centuries, scholars have reconstructed languages by hand: looking at the same word in two or more languages and making educated guesses about what that word's "ancestor" may have sounded like. For example, the Spanish word for man （"hombre"） and the French word for man （"homme"） developed from the Latin word "homo." The way linguists compare words from descendant（后代）languages to reconstruct the parent language is called, appropriately, the comparative method.
The early 19th-century linguist Franz Bopp was the first to compare Greek, Latin and Sanskrit using this method. Jacob Grimm, one of the Brothers Grimm of fairy tale fame, used the comparative method to show how Germanic languages developed from a common ancestor.
The difference between that and Bouchard-Côté's program, the statistician says, "is we do it on a larger scale." As a proof of concept, Bouchard-Côté fed words from 637 Austronesian languages （spoken in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and more） into the new algorithm, and the system came up with a list of what the ancestor words of all those languages would have sounded like. In more than 85 percent of cases, the automated reconstruction came within one character of the ancestor word commonly accepted as true by linguists.
The algorithm won't replace trained human linguists, but could speed up language analysis.
Using a computer to do large-scale reconstruction offers another advantage. Bouchard-Côté says, “With big data sets, you can really start finding regularities … You might find that certain sounds are more likely to change than others."
So Bouchard-Côté's team tested the "functional load hypothesis（假设）," which says that sounds that are more important for two clearly different words are less likely to change over time. A formal test of this hypothesis in 1967 looked at four languages; Bouchard-Côté's algorithm looked at 637.
"The revealed pattern would not be obvious if we had not been able to reconstruct large numbers of protolanguages," Bouchard-Côté and his coauthors write in the new study.
In addition to simply helping linguists understand how people spoke in the past, studying ancient languages can perhaps answer historical questions. For example, Bouchard-Côté says, "Say people are interested in finding out when Europe was settled. If you can figure out if the language of the settling population had a word for wheel, then you can get some idea of the order in which things occurred, because you would have some records that show you when the wheel was invented.”
【小题1】The underline word “protolanguages” in the first paragraph probably refers to __________.
| A．the languages that couldn’t be reconstructed by hand |
| B．parent languages that existed in the past |
| C．languages developed from a common ancestor |
| D．languages used to explain things that occurred in the past |
| A．is commonly accepted as false |
| B．dates back to the 19th century |
| C．focuses on European languages |
| D．is conducted using the comparative method |
| A．arouse people’s interest in when Europe was settled |
| B．allow us to find answers to some historical questions |
| C．enable us to picture the way linguists communicated |
| D．help figure out how the wheel was invented |
| A．will bring every dead language back to life |
| B．can take the place of linguists in language analysis |
| C．is of great help to promote language analysis with big data sets |
| D．can merely reconstruct Asian-Pacific “protolanguages” |
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科目：高中英语 来源： 题型：阅读理解
Many of our favorite travel destinations are in danger of being changed badly by increased temperatures and rising seas. The following are some of the places that may be in danger and some that are already experiencing the effects of global warming.
The Everglades, Florida: Perhaps no region of the country is as unprotected to climate change as Florida. Even a slight increase in temperature and water level could devastate popular destinations like the Everglades, Miami Beach and the Keys.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef: One of the most impressive natural habitats in the world, the Great Barrier Reef could be killed by increased water temperatures and the resulting coral bleaching (漂白法). Australia is particularly easily damaged by global warming because of its large number of fragile (脆弱的) ecosystems, uncertain water sources and a large group of people gathering on the coast.
Dalian, China: Fast-growing China, shown here during a heat wave last year, is opening about one coal factory every day this year. Along with the U.S., China is one of the world's leading contributors to the greenhouse gases , which can lead to the increase in the Earth's temperature.
Venice, Italy: No stranger to flooding, Venice has invested $4.5 billion in a floodgate system that is due to open in 2012. But the frequent changing ocean levels have made people question the floodgates' ability to hold out the rising waters.
London, England: Designed to protect London from storms and extremely high tides, the Thames Barrier was opened in 1984. Some analysts fear that rising oceans will create conditions beyond the capabilities the barrier was designed to meet.
【小题1】The word “devastate” in paragraph 2 means “_____________”.
| A．protect | B．destroy | C．swallow | D．enlarge |
| A．Fragile ecosystem |
| B．Uncertain water sources. |
| C．The large group of people. |
| D．Increased water temperatures and the coral bleaching |
| A．flooding is common in Venice |
| B．everyone is familiar with flooding |
| C．it is strange for Venice to experience flooding |
| D．there is no flooding in Venice |
| A．the dangerous destinations |
| B．the most popular destinations |
| C．the fascinating destinations |
| D．the endangered destinations |
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科目：高中英语 来源： 题型：阅读理解
“iPhone 5”, the tallest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone
We don’t want to change your phone, we want to make you say, “Wow, that is a bigger change than I expected”. “iPhone 5” is a result of that desire to surprise.
It’s been completely redesigned. For the first time ever, we’ve increased the size of display (显示) by making the screen taller but not wider.
You can see more of your content without the need to scroll. We are making scrolling the thing of the past. It is more comfortable to use and reduces tiredness from scrolling when you read long documents.
Even with the larger display, it is the thinnest iPhone we ever built. To achieve the design this tall, we have to look at it and completely redesign the architecture inside. It’s 18% thinner and 79.5% taller than the previous iPhone. It makes everything you do on “iPhone5” easier. No more hidden menus, no confusing gestures. Everything is right at your fingertips.
The panorama feature (全景拍照) is simply awesome. The ultra HD (超高清) widescreen display lets you get your entire shot in a single snap (快门). You can also use its creative design for picture stabilization.
With an iPhone this tall, reception of signals has never been better. And of course, all your favorite applications are still available. In fact you will find your old favorites also benefit from the new experiencing handsome ultra HD widescreen. We found while many previous iPhone owners were using Facetime, they only used it for the faces. That’s why we are introducing Bodytime. With its ultra HD widescreen display, Bodytime lets you see a person’s entire body.
It took all of our learning and all of our thinking to realize something so simple, so clear, and yet so tall.
And I wish your pocket were tall enough to hold such a perfect invention!
【小题1】How is the screen of “iPhone 5” different from the previous ones?
| A．Wider. | B．Taller. | C．Easier. | D．Thinner. |
| A．Update the webpage. | B．Download new documents. |
| C．Refresh the content. | D．Move the content upward. |
| A．It is really necessary for you to hide menus. |
| B．The reception of signals is bad due to its length. |
| C．Bodytime is popular with previous iPhone owners. |
| D．New applications of “iPhone 5” are unbelievable. |
| A．humorous | B．objective | C．scientific | D．serious |
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科目：高中英语 来源： 题型：阅读理解
The color red often means danger --- and by paying attention, accidents can be prevented. At railroad crossings, flashing red fights warn cars to stay back. A red light at a traffic crossing tells cars to stop, so they don't run into other cars.
In the future, the color red also may help prevent danger at construction sites. Thanks to new work by engineers, bridge supports --- or other kinds of materials --- could one day contain a color-changing material. It will turn red before a structure collapses(倒塌) or falls apart.
The secret behind the color-changing material is a particular type of molecule(分子). Molecules come in all shapes and sizes, and make up everything you can see, touch or feel. How a molecule behaves depends on what kinds of atoms(原子) it contains, and how they're held together.
To get a rough picture of one way atoms are held together in a molecule, imagine you and your friends standing in a large circle, holding hands. Each person represents one atom, your clasped hands represent the bond, and the entire circle represents a molecule.
The molecule being used to turn the material red is called mechanophore(机械响应性聚合物). When one chemical bond in the mechanophore molecule breaks, the rest of the molecule turns red.
There is a way to get rid of~ the red color: light. When a bright light is shone on the mechanophore, the broken bond is fixed and the red color disappears. This "self-healing" may be a problem for engineers who want to use the color-changer in big construction projects that will be outside, in the sunlight. And if bright light keeps the red color from appearing, then the mechanophore's warning system will be useless.
Scientists still have a lot of work to do before the color-changing molecules can be used outside the lab. If mechanophore can be used in the real world, they are suggested to be employed in a new kind of paint.
【小题1】The first paragraph mainly tells us __________.
| A．the color red is widely used in our life |
| B．how to prevent car accidents |
| C．the color is an important signal of warning |
| D．how to use color red |
| A．tell different materials used in the building |
| B．warn people that the building is dangerous |
| C．make the building more beautiful |
| D．tell people the building is under construction |
| A．the way atoms are held together in a molecule |
| B．how a molecule behaves in an object |
| C．how to play an old game |
| D．how people get along with each other |
| A．Paints | B．Water | C．Poor building materials | D．The bright light |
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科目：高中英语 来源： 题型：阅读理解
What’s the greenest place in America? If you answered something like the warm sunlight of Santa Barbara, you’d be wrong. The greenest place in America has almost no sign of nature— the buildings outnumber the trees— and the air isn’t all that great. What it has is density(密度)and efficiency— the twin qualities that finally define green in the global warming time. Applying those standards，the greenest place in America is New York City— particularly，the overcrowded，overpriced island of Manhattan, which produces 30％ less per-capita(人均)greenhouse gas than that of the nation．
It’s that density that makes Manhattan so green. Manhattan’s population density is 800 times the national average. Density comes with negatives，certainly— small living spaces，air pollution— but it also enables amazing efficiencies．Over 80％ of Manhattanites travel to work by public transport, by bike or on foot— compared to an average of about 8％ everywhere else in the country. Manhattan’s apartment buildings are far more energy-efficient than the houses in the suburbs.
What’s true of New York City is more or less true of other American urban areas, which explains why a growing part of the environmental movement now focuses on greening cities, hoping to attract more Americans back downtown. There’s an effort to make cities more sustainable(可持续的)，by improving public transport，reducing air pollution and upgrading energy efficiency. But even more important, it is quite urgent to change decades of government policies that have been in favor of the suburbs，with disastrous consequences for energy，the environment and the climate.
That’s exactly the difficult point. For all the high efficiency and convenience and richness of living in a city，there are disadvantages too．New York，for example，has some of the highest childhood asthma(哮喘)rates in the U.S.
So it’s welcome news that New York has continued to push its P1aNYC scheme, a long-term program to make the city greener and more sustainable over the next decades. Recently it announced an update to the plan that includes phasing out heavy heating oils in New York City apartment buildings by 2030，to be replaced with cleaner natural gas.
【小题1】Manhattan is considered as the greenest place in America because of its__________
| A．buildings and trees | B．density and efficiency |
| C．sunlight and nature | D．transport and population |
| A．New Yorkers have urged the city government to carry out green policies |
| B．the public transport and living space are quite satisfactory in New York |
| C．life in the countryside is more comfortable and energy efficient than that in cities |
| D．the significance of making cities greener is gained in promoting energy efficiency |
| A．New York city | B．PlaNYC scheme |
| C．Manhattan | D．Santa Barbara |
| A．rapidly promoting dealing with |
| B．widely suggesting researching on |
| C．gradually stopping using |
| D．immediately forbidding producing |
| A．Manhattan the Greenest Place in America? |
| B．The Higher Density，the Greener City? |
| C．PlaNYC Scheme：New York City’s Future |
| D．Living in Cities Does Good to the Environment |
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科目：高中英语 来源： 题型：阅读理解
People from East Asia tend to have more difficulty than those from Europe in distinguishing facial expressions — and a new report published online in Current Biology explains why.
Rachael Jack, University of Glasgow researcher, said that rather than scanning evenly(均匀的) across a face as Westerners do, Easterners fix their attention on the eyes.
"We show that Easterners and Westerners look at different face features to read facial expressions," Jack said. "Westerners look at the eyes and the mouth in equal measure, whereas Easterners favor the eyes and neglect (忽略) the mouth."
According to Jack and her colleagues, the discovery shows that human communication of emotion is more complex than previously believed. As a result, facial expressions that had been considered universally recognizable cannot be used to reliably convey emotion in cross-cultural situations.
The researchers studied cultural differences in the recognition of facial expressions by recording the eye movements of 13 Western Caucasian and 13 East Asian people while they observed pictures of. expressive faces and put them into categories: happy, sad, surprised, fearful, disgusted, angry, or neutral. They compared how accurately participants read those facial expressions using their particular eye movement strategies.
It turned out that Easterners focused much greater attention on the eyes and made significantly more errors than did Westerners. "The cultural difference in eye movements that they show is probably a reflection of cultural difference in facial expressions," Jack said. "Our data suggest that whereas Westerners use the whole face to convey emotion, Easterners use the eyes more and mouth less."
In short, the data show that facial expressions are not universal signals of human emotion. From here on, examining how cultural factors have diversified these basic social skills will help our understanding of human emotion. Otherwise, when it comes to communicating emotions across cultures, Easterners and Westerners will find themselves lost in translation.
【小题1】 The discovery shows that Westerners .
| A．pay equal attention to the eyes and the mouth |
| B．consider facial expressions universally reliable |
| C．observe the eyes and the mouth in different ways |
| D．have more difficulty in recognizing facial expressions |
| A．To make a face at each other. | B．To get their faces impressive. |
| C．To classify some face pictures. | D．To observe the researchers' faces. |
| A．The participants in the study. |
| B．The researchers of the study. |
| C．The errors made during the study. |
| D．The data collected from the study. |
| A．do translation more successfully |
| B．study the mouth more frequently |
| C．examine the eyes more attentively |
| D．read facial expressions more correctly |
| A．The Eye as the Window to the Soul |
| B．Cultural Differences in Reading Emotions |
| C．Effective Methods to Develop Social Skills |
| D．How to Increase Cross-cultural Understanding |
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科目：高中英语 来源： 题型：阅读理解
Many people believe that teaching children music makes them smarter, better able to learn new things. But the organizers of a new study say there's no scientific evidence that early musical training affects the intelligence of young people.
An estimated 80 percent of American adults think music lessons improve children's abilily to learn or their performance in school. They say that the satisfaction for learning to play a new song helps a child express creativity.
Researchers at Harvard University, however, have found that there's one thing musical training does not do. They say it does not make children more intelligent. Samuel Mehr is a graduate student at Harvard's School of Education. He said it is wrong to think that learning to play a musical instrument improves a child's intellectual development. He says the evidence comes from studies that measured the mental ability of two groups of 4-year-olds and their parents. One group attended music class, the other went to a class that places importance on the visual arts—arts that can be seen.
"The evidence there is 'no'. We found no evidence for any advantage on any of these tests for the kids participating in these music clases," said Mehr.Samuel Mehr says researchers have carried out many studies in an effort to learn whether musical training can make children smarter. He says the results have been mixed. He says only one study seems to show a small percentage increase in IQ, intellectual scores among students after one year of music lessons. He does not believe that IQ is a good measure of child's intelligence. He says researchers in his study compared how well children in the musical training group did on mental processing tasks or projects, then the results were compared to those of children who did not take lessons. There was no evidence that the musical training group did much better on the mental tasks than the other group.
The researchers comfirmed the results with a larger group of children and their parents.Mr Mehr says music lessons may not offer children a fast easy way to gain entry to the best schools later of their life. But he says the training is still important for cultural reasons. In his words, "We teach music because music is important for us."
【小题1】According to the new study, musical training______.
| A．makes children smarter |
| B．helps a child express creativity |
| C．does not make children more intelligent |
| D．improve children's ability to learn in school |
| A．the children who attended music class are smarter than those who attended arts class |
| B．IQ is a good measure of a child's intelligence |
| C．we needn't to teach children music |
| D．music training is still important for cultural reasons |
| A．conducted more than one research |
| B．interviewed many American adults |
| C．taught two groups of 4-yetr-olds music and arts |
| D．offered children a fast way to be admitted to the best schools |
| A．health | B．education | C．culture | D．economy |
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