题目内容

Step Back in Time Do you know that we live a lot longer now than the people who were born before us One hundred years ago the average woman lived to be 45. But now, she can live until at least 80. One of the main reasons for people living longer is that we know how to look after ourselves better. We know which foods are good for U. S. and what we have to eat to make sure our bodies get all the healthy things they need. We know why we sometimes get ill and what to do to get better again. And we know how important it is to do lots of exercise to keep our hearts beating healthily. But in order that we don’t slip back into bad habits, let’s have a look at what life was like 100 years ago. Families had between 15 and 20 children, although many babies didn’t live long. Children suffered from lots of diseases, especially rickets (佝偻病) and scurvy (坏血病), which are both caused by bad diets. This is because many families were very poor and not able to feed their children well. Really poor families who lived in crowded cities like London and Manchester often slept standing up, bending over a piece of string, because there was no room for them to lie down. People didn’t have fridges until the 1920s. They kept fresh food cold by storing it on windowsills (窗台板), blocks of ice, or even burying it in the garden. Some children had to start work at the age of seven or eight to earn money for their parents. If you had lived 100 years ago, you might well be selling matchsticks (火柴杆) (a job done by many children)or working with your dad by now. People now enjoy longer lives for unknown reasons.

A. Right
B. Wrong
C. Not mentioned

查看答案
更多问题

Pool Watch Swimmers can drown in busy swimming pools when lifeguards fail to notice that they are in trouble. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents says that on average 15 people drown in British pools each year, but many more suffer major injury after getting into difficulties. Now a French company has developed an artificial intelligence system called Poseidon that sounds the alarm when it sees someone in danger of drowning. When a swimmer sinks towards the bottom of the pool, the new system sends an alarm signal to a poolside monitoring station and a lifeguard’s pager. In trials at a pool in Ancenis, near Nantes, it saved a life within just a few months, says Alistair McQuade, a spokesman for its maker, Poseidon Technologies. Poseidon keeps watching through a network of underwater and overheard video cameras. AI software analyses the images to work out swimmers’ trajectories. To do this reliably, it has to tell the difference between a swimmer and the shadow of someone being cast onto the bottom or side of the pool. "The underwater environment is a very dynamic one, with many shadows and reflections dancing around," says McQuade. The software does this by "projecting" a shape in its field of view onto an image of the far wall of the pool. It does the same with an image from another camera viewing the shape from a different angle. If the two projections are in the same position, the shape is identified as a shadow and is ignored. But if they are different, the shape is a swimmer and so the system follows its trajectory. To pick out potential drowning victims, anyone in the water who starts to descend slowly is added to the software’s "pre-alert" list, says McQuade. Swimmers who then stay immobile on the pool bottom for 5 seconds or more are considered in danger of drowning. Poseidon double-checks that the image really is of a swimmer, not a shadow, by seeing whether it obscures the pool’s floor texture when viewed from overhead. If so, it alerts the lifeguard, showing the swimmer’s location on a poolside screen. The first full-scale Poseidon system will be officially opened next week at a pool in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. One man who is impressed with the idea is Travor Baytis, inventor of the clockwork radio. Baylis runs a company that installs swimming pools, and he was once an underwater escapologist with a circus. "I say full marks to them if this works and can save lives," he says. But he adds that any local authority spending £30,000 plus on a Poseidon system ought to be investing similar amounts in teaching children to swim. What is required of AI software to save a life

A. It must be able to swim.
B. It must keep walking round the pool.
C. It can distinguish between a swimmer and a shadow.
D. It can save a life within a few months.

Ulcers Even though ulcers appear to run in families, lifestyle plays more of a role than genetic factors in causing the illness, according to a report in the April 13th Journal of Internal Medicine. In particular, smoking and stress in men and the regular use of pain releasing medicines in women were linked with an increased risk of developing all ulcers. Overall, 61% of ulcer risk appears to be due to environmental factors, such as smoking, and the remaining 39% is due to genes according to Dr. Ismo Raiha Of the University of Turky and colleagues at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Some researchers had suggested that families may spread Helicobacteria pylori, the bacteria that can cause ulcers. However, the new study suggests this is unlikely, according to the report. Raiha and colleagues studied data from more than 13,000 pairs of twins "to examine the roles of genetic and environmental factors in the origin of peptic ulcer disease", they explain. Both twins were more likely to develop an ulcer if the pair were genetically the same as compared with a pair of fraternal twins, suggesting that there must be some genetic susceptibility to ulcer development. However, the risk was no greater in twins living together compared with twins living apart, suggesting that shared exposure to H. pylori (幽门螺旋菌) was not to blame. "Environmental effects were not due to factors shared by family members, and they were related to smoking and stress in men and the use of analgesics in women," the authors wrote. "The minor effects of shared environment to disease liability do not support the concept that the grouping of risk factors, such as H. pylori infection, would explain the genetic factor of peptic ulcer disease, "they concluded. In relation to ulcers, experts study twins in order to examine ______.

A. the roles of genetic factors
B. the roles of environmental factors
C. the roles of both genetic and environmental factors
D. the roles of brotherhood

Step Back in Time Do you know that we live a lot longer now than the people who were born before us One hundred years ago the average woman lived to be 45. But now, she can live until at least 80. One of the main reasons for people living longer is that we know how to look after ourselves better. We know which foods are good for U. S. and what we have to eat to make sure our bodies get all the healthy things they need. We know why we sometimes get ill and what to do to get better again. And we know how important it is to do lots of exercise to keep our hearts beating healthily. But in order that we don’t slip back into bad habits, let’s have a look at what life was like 100 years ago. Families had between 15 and 20 children, although many babies didn’t live long. Children suffered from lots of diseases, especially rickets (佝偻病) and scurvy (坏血病), which are both caused by bad diets. This is because many families were very poor and not able to feed their children well. Really poor families who lived in crowded cities like London and Manchester often slept standing up, bending over a piece of string, because there was no room for them to lie down. People didn’t have fridges until the 1920s. They kept fresh food cold by storing it on windowsills (窗台板), blocks of ice, or even burying it in the garden. Some children had to start work at the age of seven or eight to earn money for their parents. If you had lived 100 years ago, you might well be selling matchsticks (火柴杆) (a job done by many children)or working with your dad by now. On average women lived longer than men 100 years ago.

A. Right
B. Wrong
C. Not mentioned

A Miracle Cancer Cure Unless you have gone through the experience yourself, or watched a loved one’s struggle, you really have no idea just how desperate cancer can make you. You pray, you rage, you bargain with God, but most of all you clutch at any hope, no matter how remote, of a second chance at life. For a few excited days last week, however, it seemed as if the whole world was a cancer patient and that all humankind had been granted a reprieve. Triggered by a front-page medical news story in the usually reserved The New York Times, all anybody was talking about on the radio, on television, on the Internet, in phone calls to friends and relatives—was the report that a combination of two new drugs could, as The New York Times put it, cure cancer in two years. In a matter of hours patients had jammed their doctors’ phone lines begging for a chance to test the miracle cancer cure. Cancer scientists raced to the phones and fax lines to make sure everyone knew about their research too, generating a new round of headlines. The time certainly seemed ripe for a breakthrough in cancer. Only last month scientists at the National Cancer Institute announced that they were halting a clinical trial of a drug called tamoxifen—and offering it to patients getting the placebo—because it had proved so effective at preventing breast cancer (although it also seemed to increase the risk of uterine cancer). Two weeks later came The New York Times’ report that two new drugs can shrink tumors of every variety without any side effects whatsoever. It all seemed too good to be true, and of course it was. There are no miracle cancer drugs, at least not yet. At this stage all the drug manufacturer can offer is some very interesting molecules, and the only cancers they have cures so far have been in mice. By the middle of last week, even the most breathless TV talk-show hosts had learned what every scientist already knew: that curing a disease in lab animals is not the same as doing it in humans. "The history of cancer research has been a history of curing cancers in the mouse," Dr. Richard Klausner, head of the National Cancer Institute, told the Los Angles Times. "We have cured mice of cancer for decades—and it simply didn’t work in people." The first paragraph describes people’s ______ after they know they or their loved ones have cancer.

A. complex feelings
B. desire to live long
C. hatred of God
D. love of their family

答案查题题库