The bizarre antics of sleepwalkers have puzzled police, perplexed scientists, and fascinated writers for centuries. There is an endless supply of stories about sleepwalkers. Persons have been said to climb on steep roofs, solve mathematical problems, compose music, walk through plate-glass windows, and commit murder in their sleep. How many of these stories have a basis in fact, and how many are pure fakery No one knows, but if some of the most sensational stories should be taken with a barrel of salt, others are a matter of record. In Revere, Massachusetts, a hundred policemen combed a waterfront neighborhood for a lost boy who left his home in his sleep and woke up five hours later on a strange sofa in a strange living room, with no idea how he had got there. There is an early medical record of a somnambulist who wrote a novel in his sleep. And the great French writer Voltaire knew a sleepwalker who once got out of bed, dressed himself, made a polite bow, danced a minuet, and then undressed and went back to bed. What does the phrase "taken with a barrel of salt" mean at the end of the second paragraph A. "Suspected". B. "Justifiable". C. "Inconsistent". D. "Ignored".
At the University of Iowa, a student was reported to have the habit of getting up in the middle of the night and walking three-quarters of a mile to the Iowa River. He would take a swim and then go back to his room to bed.
B. The world’s champion sleepwalker was supposed to have been an Indian, Pandit Ramrakha, who walked sixteen miles along a dangerous road without realizing that he had left his bed. Second in line for the title is probably either a Vienna housewife or a British farmer. The woman did all her shopping on busy streets in her sleep. The farmer, in his sleep, visited a veterinarian miles away.
C. The leading expert on sleep in America claims that he has never seen a sleepwalker. He is Dr. Nathaniel Kleitman, a physiologist at the University of Chicago. He is said to know more about sleep than any other living man, and during the last thirty-five years has lost a lot of sleep watching people sleep. Says he, "Of course, I know that there are sleepwalkers because I have read about them in the newspapers. But none of my sleepers ever walked, and if I were to advertise for sleepwalkers for an experiment, I doubt that I’d get many takers."
D. Sleepwalking, nevertheless, is a scientific reality. Like hypnosis, it is one of those dramatic, eerie, awe-inspiring phenomena that sometimes border on the fantastic. It lends itself to controversy and misconceptions. What is certain about sleepwalking is that it is a symptom of emotional disturbance, and that the only way to cure it is to remove the worries and anxieties that cause it. Doctors say that somnambulism is much more common than is generally supposed. Some have estimated that there are four million somnambulists in the United States. Others set the figure even higher. Many sleepwalkers do not seek help and so are never put on record, which means that an accurate count can never be made.
E. The simplest explanation of sleepwalking is that it is the acting out of a vivid dream. The dream usually comes from guilt, worry, nervousness, or some other emotional conflict. The classic sleepwalker is Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. Her nightly wanderings were caused by her guilty conscience at having committed murder. Shakespeare said of her, "The eyes are open but their sense is shut. "
F. The age-old question is: ls the sleepwalker actually awake or asleep Scientists have decided that he is about half-and-half. Like Lady Macbeth, he has weighty problems on his mind. Dr. Zeida Teplitz, who made a ten-year study of the subject, says, "Some people stay awake all night worrying about their problems. The sleepwalker thrashes them out in his sleep. He is awake in the muscular area, partially asleep in the sensory area." In other words, a person can walk in his sleep, move around, and do other things, but he does not think about what he is doing.
G. There are many myths about sleepwalkers. One of the most common is the idea that it’s dangerous or even fatal to waken a sleepwalker abruptly. Experts say that the shock suffered by a sleepwalker suddenly awakened is no greater than that suffered in waking up to the noise of an alarm clock. Another mistaken belief is that sleepwalkers are immune to injury. Actually most sleepwalkers trip over rugs or bump their heads on doors at some time or other.
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If pollution continues to increase at the present rate, formation of aerosols in the atmosphere will cause the onset of an ice age in about fifty years’ time. This conclusion, reached by Dr. S. I. Rasool and Dr. S. H. Schneider, of the United States Goddard Space Flight Center, answers the apparently conflicting question of whether an increase in the carbon di- oxide content of the atmosphere will cause the earth to warm up or increasing the aerosol content will cause it to cool down. The Americans have shown conclusively that the aerosol question is dominant. Two specters haunting conservationists have been the prospect that meddling with the environment might lead to the planet’s becoming unbearably hot or cold. One of these ghosts has now been laid, because it seems that even an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to eight times its present value will produce an increase in temperature of only 2(上标)C, which would take place over several thousand years. But the other problem, now looms larger than ever. Aerosols are collections of small liquid or solid particles dispersed in air or some other medium. The particles are all so tiny that each is composed of only a few hundred atoms. Because of this they can float in the air for a very long time. Perhaps the most commonly experienced aerosol is industrial smog of the kind that plagued London in the 1950s and is an even greater problem in Los Angeles today. These collections of aerosols reflect the sun’s heat and thereby caused the earth to cool. Dr. Rasool and Dr. Schneider have calculated the exact effect of a dust aerosol layer just above the earth’s surface on the temperature of the planet. As the layer builds up, the present delicate balance between the amount of heat absorbed from the sun and the amount radiated from the earth is disturbed. The aerosol layer not only reflects much of the sun’s light but also transmits the infrared radiation from below almost unimpeded. So, while the heat input to the surface drops, the loss of heat remains high until the planet cools to a new balanced state. Within fifty years, if no steps are taken to curb the spread of aerosols in the atmosphere, a cooling of the earth by as much as 3.5。C seems inevitable. If that lasts for only a few years, it would start another ice age, and because the growing ice caps at each pole would themselves reflect much of the sun’s radiation, it would probably continue to develop even if the aerosol layer were destroyed. The only bright spot in this gloomy forecast lies in the hope expressed by Dr. Rasool and Dr. Schneider that nuclear power may replace fossil fuels in time to prevent the aerosol content of the atmosphere from becoming critical. What might avert the danger of the building up of a high concentration of aerosols
A. Nuclear power. B. Fossil fuels. C. Carbon dioxide. D.Atom bombs.
Which of the following about the two robbers is NOT true
A. Both were wearing dark sweaters.
B. Neither was wearing glasses.
C. Both were about the same age.
D. One of them was marked by a scar.
Who makes the unknown-to-the-public linguistic theory become the foundation of cognitive science, psychology, computer technology and artificial intelligence’
August Schleicher.
B. H. G. Widdowson.
C. Avram Noam Chomsky.
D. John Lyons.
Scotland Yard’s top fingerprint expert, Detective Chief superintendent Gerald Lamhourne had a request from the British Museum’s Prehistoric department to force his magnifying glass on a mystery somewhat outside my usual beat. This was not a question of Whodunit, but Who Was lt. The blunt instruments, he pored over were the antlers of red deer, dated by radio-carbon examination as being up to 5,000 years old. They were used as mining picks by Neolithic man to hack flints and chalk, and the fingerprints he was looking for were of our remote ancestors who had last wielded them. The antlers were unearthed in July during the British Museum’s five-year-long excavation at Grime’s Graves. near Therford, Norfolk, a 93 acre site containing more than 600 vertical shafts in the chalk some 40 feet deep. From artifacts found in many parts of Britain it is evident that flint was extensively used by Neolithic man as he slowly learned how to farm land in the period from 3, 000 to 1, 500 B. C. Flint was especially used for ax-heads to clear forests for agriculture, and the quality of the flint on the Norfolk site suggests that the miners there were kept busy with many orders. What excited Mr. CT. Sieveking, the museum’s deputy director of the excavations, was the dried mud still sticking to some of them. "Our deduction is that the miners coated the base of the antlers with mud so that they could get a better grip," he says. "The exciting possibility was that fingerprints left in this mud might at last identify as individuals as people who have left few relics, who could not read or write, but who may have had much more intelligence than had been supposed in the past." Chief Superintendent Lambourne, who had "assisted" the British Museum by taking the fingerprints of a 4, 000-year-old Egyptian mummy, spent two hours last week examining about 50 antlers. On some he found minute marks indicating a human hand--that part of the hand just below the fingers where most pressure would be brought to bear the wielding of a pick. After 25 years’ specialization in the Yard’s fingerprints department, Chief Superintendent Lambourne knows all about ridge structures--technically known as the "tri-radiate section". It was his identification of that part of the hand that helped to incriminate some of the Great Train Robbers. In 1995 he discovered similar handprints on a bloodstained tee-maker on a golf-course where a woman had been brutally murdered. They eventually led to the killer, after 4, 065 handprints had been taken. Chief Superintendent Lamboure had agreed to visit the Norfolk site during further excavations next summer, when it is hoped that further hand-marked antlers will come to light, But he is cautious about the historic significance of his findings. "Fingerprints and handprints are unique to each individual but they can tell nothing about the age, physical characteristics, even sex of the person who left them," he says. "Even the finger prints of gorilla could be mistaken for those of a man. But if a number of imprinted antlers are recovered from given shafts on this site I could at least determine which antlers were handled by the same man, and from there might be deduced the number of miners employed in a team." "As an indication of intelligence I might determine which way up the miners held the antlers and how they wielded them." To Mr. Sieveking and his museum colleagues, any such findings will be added to their dossier of what might appear to the layman as trivial and unrelated facts but from which might emerge one day an impressive new image of our remote ancestors. (620) The idea that mud was applied to the antlers deliberately was ______.
A. the result of an inspired guess
B. a possibility based on reasoning from facts
C. an obvious conclusion
D. a conclusion based on other similar cases