Passage Two
In 2000, with little but a bar and a church left to make it a destination, tiny St. James, Nebraska, was taken off state highway maps. Then the church closed, and the small farm village in the state’s northeast corner looked set to just disappear. Thanks to five devoted women, it didn’t.
In May 2001, after meeting with staff from the Center for Rural Affairs, the friends—Louis Guy, Vicky Koch, Jeanette Pinkelman, Mary Rose Pinkelman and Violet Pinkelman—opened a weekend market for vendors(小商贩) to sell handcrafts and local food.
“We felt like, what can we do to bring the community together?” says Mary Rose Pinkelman, “We decided to make a place to sell local goods.” They set up shop in the church school, which, though closed for nearly 40 years, had been well maintained. The first weekend, 16 vendors look over an old classroom. The result was an instant hit. Today, the market draws up to 70 vendors----who sell such items as homemade jellies, baked goods, hand-woven rugs, and farm-grown produce----and what Pinkelman calls an unexpected number of visitors. In the process, the market has made St. James a destination again, putting it back on the state road map.
40. According to Para. 1, what fate was St. James Nebraska suffering?
A The replacement of the church school
B The disappearance from highway maps
C The closedown of the bar
D The set-up of a market
Passage Five
Memory is the ability to keep track of things that have happened in the past. Memory really is leaning. One needs memory to ride a bicycle. A dog needs to remember if it is to come when called.
Memory is said to be stored in the brain as a “memory trace (记忆痕) .” What makes up this trace is not known. Some scientists believe that certain chemical substances may carry certain memories. For example, one substance, when given to rats, causes them to dear the dark.
Other research into memory has to do with how the brain works. Psychologists use three means to find out how a person remembers. For example, give a person a grocery list. Let the person memorize the list, then put it away. The most natural way to find out how much a person remembers of the grocery list is to ask what he or she remembers. This is called the method of recall. Another method is called recognition. Gibe the person another grocery list. Ask him or her to choose items on the first list from the items that are on only the second list. Often a person will be able to recognize thins that he or she cannot recall. A third method of finding how much a person remembers is called relearning. Here the person is asked to read over the first list. The person will probably learn the list the second time faster than he did the first time. The difference in the time it takes to relearn the list is thought of as a measure of how much a person has remembered.
One way of remembering something is to repeat it many times. Interest is very important. Boring lists of facts are much more difficult to remember than something that we understand and are interested in. Motivation, or wanting to do something, is also important. Motivation is linked with reward. For example, a hungry animal quickly learn how to do something if that action gets the animal food. In humans, wanting to learn is often motivation. The praise of a teacher or the knowledge that an answer is correct is rewarding.
52. We can learn from the 2nd paragraph that_____.
A bad memories may cause rats to fear the dark
B it is hard to tell what a memory trace consists of
C chemical substances carry certain memories
D memory is stored in the brain as a substance