C

As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. “The woods” was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend’s house and found him not at home, his mother might say, “Oh, he’s out in the woods,” with a tone of airy acceptance. It’s similar to the tone people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I’m looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even “away from his desk.” For us ten-year-olds, “being out in the woods” was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring (探险). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though, seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Italian burial mound.

Often we got “lost” and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical: the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly — tall beeches, easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence (青春期). In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.

48. The author and his fiends were often out in the woods to ______.

A. spend their free time               B. play golf and other sports

C. keep away from their parents        D. escape from doing their schoolwork

49. What can we infer from paragraph 2?

A. The activities in the woods were well planned.

B. Human history is not the result of exploration.

C. The author explored in the woods aimlessly.

D. Exploration should be a systematic activity.

50. The underlined word “skeptical” in Paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to ______.

A. calm                 B. doubtful            C. serious              D. optimistic

51. From the last paragraph, we can learn that ________.

A. they usually didn’t go to the woods in winter

B. the author and his friends are of the same age

C. all high school students would go dancing on Friday evenings

D. they stopped going to the woods because they were adults now

52. How does the author feel about his childhood?

A. Happy but short.                                   B. Lonely but memorable.

C. Boring and meaningless.                 D. Long and unforgettable.

What do consumers really want? That’s a question market researchers would love to answer. But since people don’t always say what they think, marketers would need direct access to consumers’ thoughts to get the truth.

And now, in a way, that is possible．At the “Mind of the Market” laboratory at Harvard Business School, researchers are looking inside shoppers’ skulls to develop more effective advertisements and marketing styles．Using imaging techniques that measure blood flow to various parts of the brain, the Harvard team hopes to predict how consumers will react to particular products and to discover the most effective ways to present information．Stephen Kosslyn, a professor of psychology at Harvard, and business school professor Gerald Zaltman, oversee the lab．“The goal is not to influence people’s preferences,” says Kosslyn, “just to speak to their actual desires."

The group’s findings, though still preliminary （初步的）, could change how firms develop and market new products．The Harvard group use position emission tomography （PET） scans to monitor the brain activity．These PET scans, along with other imaging techniques, enable researchers to see which parts of the brain are active during specific tasks（such as remembering a word）.Correlations （相互关系） have been found between blood flow to specific areas and future behavior．Because of this, Harvard researchers believe the scans can also predict future purchasing patterns．According to an unpublished paper the group produced, “It is possible to use these techniques to predict not only whether people will remember and have specific emotional reactions to certain materials, but also whether they tend to want those materials months later.”

The Harvard group is now moving into the next stage of experiments．They will explore how people remember advertisements as part of an effort to predict how they will react to a product after having seen an ad．The researchers believe that once key areas of the brain are identified, scans on about two dozen volunteers will be enough to draw conclusions about the reactions of specific sections of the population．Large corporations-including Coca Cola, Eastman Kodak, General Motors, and Hallmark-have already signed up to fund further investigations.

For their financial support, these firms gain access to the experiments but cannot control them．If Kosslyn and Zahman and their team really can read the mind of the market, then consumers may find it even harder to get those advertising jingles-out of their heads.

1．Which of the following statements can be the best title for this passage?

A．Reading the Mind of the Market.

B．Influencing the Customers’ Choice.

C．Influencing the Style of Advertising．

D．Experimenting with the Way to Foretell

2．Why do the Harvard researchers use scientific technology in the experiments?

A．Because they want to find a better way to persuade people into purchasing patterns in the future in the different market.

B．Because they don’t trust the findings already done by other researchers.

C．Because they want to see how particular products can influence consumers and find out the most effective ways to advertise.

D．Because they think the marketing strategies can actually be changed after the experiments.

3．The following statements are true except that    

       A．People sometimes hide their true feelings when questioned by the marketing surveyors.

       B．Stephen Kosslyn and Gerald Zaltman are in charge of the experiment and think ill of the study.

       C．Harvard researchers have found some relation between people’s brain and future behavior.

       D．Many large companies finance the Harvard group’s further investigations.

4．What does “to speak to” in the 2nd paragraph mean?

A．To communicate with.                         B．To say to.

C．To talk to.                                         D．To respond to.

5．The last sentence of the passage implies that ___________.

A．it is very likely that customers will buy unnecessary things just depending on the ads in the future.

B．in fact, the real purpose of Harvard group’s research is to attract more consumers into the market.

C．Coca Cola or the General Motors can exploit the findings of the experiments in their own marketing.

D．consumers may find it more difficult to get out of the advertising jungle and it may cause them headaches.