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A Dolphin and an Astronomer One day in 1963, a dolphin named Elvar and a famous astronomer, Carl Sagan, were playing a little game. The astronomer was visiting an institute which was looking into the way dolphins communicate with each other. Sagan was standing on the edge of one of the tanks where several of these friendly, highly intelligent creatures were kept. Elvar had just swum up alongside him and had turned on his back. The dolphin wanted Sagan to scratch his stomach again, as the astronomer had done twice before. Elvar looked up at Sagan, waiting. Then, after a minute or so, the dolphin leapt up through the water and made a sound just like the word "more". The astonished astronomer went to the director of the institute and told him about the incident. "Oh, yes. That’s one of the words he knows," the director said, showing no surprise at all. Dolphins have bigger brains in proportion to their body size than humans have, and it has been known for a long time that they can make a number of sounds. What is more, these sounds seem to have different functions, such as warning each other of danger. Sound travels much faster and much further in water than it does in air. That is why the parts of the brain that deal with sound are much better developed in dolphins than in humans. But can it be said that dolphins have a "language", in the real sense of the word Scientists don’t agree on this. Parts of the dolphin’s brain are particularly well developed to handle different kinds of sound. A．Right B．Wrong C．Not mentioned

A language is not just a collection of sounds, or even words. A language has a structure and what we call a grammar. The structure and grammar of a language help to give it meaning. For example, the two questions "Who loves Mary" and "Who does Mary love" mean very different things. If you stop to think about it, you will see that this difference doesn’t come from the words in the question but from the difference in structure. That is why the question "Can dolphins speak" can’t be answered until we find out if dolphins not only make sounds but also arrange them in a grammatical order which affects their meaning.

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Living with Computer The passage implies that the writer and her boyfriend live in A．England. B．different countries. C．the same city. D．the same country.

After too long on the Net, even a phone call can be a shock. My boyfriend’s Liverpudlian accent suddenly becomes hard to understand after the clarity of his words on screen; a secretary’s tone seems more rejecting than I’d imagined it would be. Time itself becomes fluid—hours become minutes, and alternately seconds stretch into days. Weekends, once a highlight of my week, are now just two ordinary days.
B. For the last three years, since I stopped working as a producer for Charlie Rose, I have done much of my work as a tele-commuter (远程交谈者). I submit articles and edit them via E-mail and communicate with colleagues on Internet mailing lists. My boyfriend lives in England, so much of our relationship is computer-mediated.
C. If I desired, I could stay inside for weeks without wanting anything. I can order food, and manage my money, love and work. In fact, at times I have spent as long as three weeks alone at home, going out only to get mail and buy newspapers and groceries. I watched most of the blizzard (风) of ’96 on TV.
D. But after a while, life itself begins to feel unreal. I start to feel as though I’ve merged with my machines, taking data in, spitting them back out, just another node (节点) on the Net. Others on line report the same symptoms. We start to strongly dislike the outside forms of socializing. It’s like attending an A.A. meeting in a bar with everyone holding a half-sipped drink. We have become the Net opponents’ worst nightmare.
E. What first seemed like a luxury, crawling from bed to computer, not worrying about hair, and clothes and face, has become an avoidance, a lack of discipline. And once you start replacing real human contact with cyber-interaction (网上交流), coming back out of the cave can be quite difficult.At times, I turn on the television and just leave it to chatter in the background, something that I’d never done previously. The voices of the programs soothe (安危) me, but then I’m jarred (使感不快) by the commercials. I find myself sucked in by soap operas, or compulsively (强制性地) needing to keep up with the latest news and the weather. "Dateline," "Frontline," "Nightline," CNN, every possible angle of every story over and over and over, even when they are of no possible use to me. Work moves from foreground to background.

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Living with Computer Compared with the clear words of her boyfriend on screen, his accent is A．obscure. B．distinct. C．unreal. D．misleading.

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The Body Clock Why is it that flying to New York from London will leave you feeling less tired than flying to London from New York The answer may be a clear case of biology not being able to keep up with technology. Deep inside the brain there is a "clock" that governs every aspect of the body’s functioning: sleep and wake cycles, levels of alertness, performance, mood, hormone levels, digestion, body temperature and so on. It regulates all of these functions on a 24-hour basis and is called the biological clock. This body clock programmes us to be sleepy twice a day, between 3-5 am and again between 3-5 pm. Afternoon tea and nap are all cultural responses to our natural biological sleepiness in the afternoon. One of the major causes of the travellers’ malady known as jet lag is the non-alignment of a person’s internal body clock with clocks in the external world. Crossing different time zones confuses the biological clock, which then has to adjust to the new time and patterns of light and activity. To make matters more complex, not all internal body functions adjust at the same rate. So your sleep/wake may adjust to a new time zone at one rate, while your temperature adjusts at a different pace. Your digestion may be on a different schedule altogether. Though we live in a 24-hour day, the natural tendency of the body clock is to extend our day beyond 24 hours. It is contrary to our biological programming to "shrink" our day’. That is why traveling in a westward direction is more body-clock friendly than flying east. NASA studies of long haul pilots showed that westward travel was associated with significantly better sleep quantity and quality than eastward flights. When flying west, you are "extending" your day, thus traveling in the natural direction of your internal clock. Flying eastward will involve "shrinking" or reducing your day and is in direct opposition to your internal clock’s natural tendency. One of the more common complaints of travelers is that their sleep becomes disrupted. There are many reasons for this, changing time zones and schedules, changing light and activity levels, trying to sleep when your body clock is programmed to be awake, disruption of the internal biological clock and working longer hours. It is often suggested that you adjust your watch as soon as you board a plane, supposedly to try to help you adjust to your destination’s schedule as soon as you arrive. But it can take the body clock several days to several weeks to fully adjust to a new time zone. So, our body clock truly can "govern" us. The role of the body clock is to

A. enable us to sleep 6 hours a day.
B. help us adapt to a 24-hour cycle.
C. regulate the body’s functions.
D. interfere with the body’s functions.

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"Salty" Rice Plant Boosts Harvests British scientists are breeding a new generation of rice plants that will be able to grow in soil containing salt water. Their work may enable abandoned farms to become productive once more. Tim Flowers and Tony Yeo, from Sussex University’s School of Biological Sciences, have spent several years researching how crops, such as rice, could be made to grow in water that has become salty. The pair have recently begun a three-year programme, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, to establish which genes enable some plants to survive salty conditions. The aim is to breed this capability into crops, starting with rice. It is estimated that each year more than 10m hectares (公顷) of agricultural land are lost because salt gets into the soil and stunts (妨碍生长) plants. The problem is caused by several factors. In the tropics, mangroves (红树林) that create swamps (沼泽) and traditionally formed barriers to sea water have been cut down. In the Mediterranean, a series of droughts have caused the water table to drop, allowing sea water to seep (渗透) in. In Latin America, irrigation often causes problems when water is evaporated (蒸发) by the heat, leaving salt deposits behind. Excess salt then enters the plants and prevents them functioning normally. Heavy concentrations of minerals in the plants stop them drawing up the water they need to survive. To overcome these problems, Flowers and Yeo decided to breed rice plants that take in very little salt and store what they do absorb in cells but do not affect the plants’ growth. They have started to breed these characteristics into a new rice crop, but it will take about eight harvests before the resulting seeds are ready to be considered for commercial use. Once the characteristics for surviving salty soil are known, Flowers and Yeo will try to breed the appropriate genes into all manners of crops and plants. Land that has been abandoned to nature will then be able to bloom again, providing much needed food in the poorer countries of the world. Flowers and Yeo have started a programme

A. to find ways to prevent water pollution.
B. to identify genes that promote growth in salty soil.
C. to breed rice plants that taste salty.
D. to find ways to remove excessive salt from soil.

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