A new study says that the faces on Lego minifigures have become less happy and more often mad or sad. The study was designed to find out if the Lego characters have become grumpier over the years.

Christoph Bartneck works at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He loves Lego and even worked for the company in the 1990s. He worked with another researcher on the project. They looked at all of the 6,000 figures made between 1975 and 2010. They made a note of each figure’s facial expression: happy, grumpy, afraid, surprised or satL They discovered that while in 1980, all of the figures were described as “smiley”, and that by 1990, only about 80 per cent of them had been “smiley” . And by 2010, just 50 per cent of the figures had had a smile on their little plastic faces.

The researchers are wondering how the increasingly sad, angry and unhappy faces on the Lego figures will affect the children who play with them. “Children’s toys can have an important influence on children,” said Bartneck on the university’s website. While Lego hasn’t issued an official response to the study, Bartneck said he thought the reason why Lego was producing angrier-faced characters was that children wanted them. He said it was likely that people wanted Lego characters to have different expressions, rather than just being sunny all the time. He said most of the unhappy faces were on characters based on a specific theme such as Harry Potter or pirates (海盗).

Bartneck will present his findings at the International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction in Sapporo.

【小题1】What does the underlined word “grumpier” probably mean?

A．Happier.	B．Angrier.
C．Smarter.	D．Prettier.

【小题2】It can be learned that since 1980 ________.

A．Bartneck has been studying Lego figures

B．the quality of Lego figures has gone from bad to worse

C．more and more Lego figures have lost their smiles

D．Lego figures’ facial expressions have become less rich

【小题3】What can we learn about Bartneck?

A．He likes to design different Lego figures.

B．He is a professor who studies facial expressions.

C．He wants to know the influence of unhappy figures on children.

D．He writes to the government to explain why children love angry Lego figures.

【小题4】The text mainly tells the readers ________ .

A．the history of the development of Lego figures

B．Lego characters are getting angrier

C．how Bartneck carried out his study

D．the angrier expressions on Lego figures do great harm to children

   What’s your opinion on spicy food? Some people cannot handle even the smallest amount of chili peppers in their dinner while others can’t get enough of them.

Scientists have long been puzzled by why some people love the chili while others loathe it. Plenty of research has been done on the subject, dating as far back as the 1970s. Previous results showed that a love of chilies is related to childhood experiences, and that cultural influences affect our taste too. But the latest study has found that a person’s love of spicy food may be linked to his or her personality (性格) more than anything else, CBC News reported.

“We have always assumed that liking drives intake — we eat what we like and we like what we eat. But no one has actually directly bothered to connect personality with intake of chili peppers,” said Professor John E. Hayes from Pennsylvania State University, who led the study.

But before you look at the study, you should first know that “spicy” is not a taste, unlike sour, sweet, bitter and salty taste. It is, in fact, a burning feeling that you feel on the surface of your tongue. This got scientists thinking that maybe a love of spicy food is brought about by people’s longing for thrill, something they usually get from watching action movies or riding a roller coaster.

In the study, 97 participants, both male and female, were asked to fill out questionnaires about their personality, for example, whether they like new experiences or tend to avoid risks. They were then given a glass of water with capsaicin (辣椒素), the plant chemical that makes a chili burn, mixed into it.

By comparing the answers to the questionnaire and what participants said they felt about the spicy water, researchers found that those who tended to enjoy action movies or take risks were about six times more likely to enjoy the spicy water.

Interestingly, we used to believe that the reason why some people can withstand (耐受) spicy food is that their tongues have become less sensitive to it. However, this latest study has found otherwise. “It’s not that it doesn’t burn as badly, but that you actually learn to like the burning feeling,” Hayes explained.

【小题1】What’s the meaning of the underlined word “loathe” in the second paragraph?

A．Dislike.	B．Fear.
C．Put up with.	D．Adapt to.

【小题2】What did Professor John

A．Hayes and his team discover from their study?

B．What we eat actually helps to develop our personality.

C．Males are more likely to enjoy spicy food than females.

D．Those trying to avoid risks tend to be less interested in spicy food.

E．People are wrong to treat " spicy" as a kind of taste rather than a feeling.

【小题3】Why do some people like spicy food according to the recent study?

A．Because their taste has become less sensitive.

B．Because they love the burning feeling.

C．Because they want to challenge themselves.

D．Because the more they try spicy food, the less it burns.

【小题4】What’s the main idea of the passage?

A．What one likes to eat mainly depends on one’s personality.

B．Whether one enjoys spicy food depends largely on one’s personality.

C．One’s personal experiences have nothing to do with their taste.

D．Different people have different taste.

   Before I studied psychology，I used to think that people would laugh when funny things occurred. While I was right about that，I discovered there are lots of other psychological reasons that make people laugh other than the funny part of a joke. When someone laughs at a joke，there will usually be more than one reason that makes him laugh-and the more reasons there are，the more powerful the joke will be.

I was attending a stand-up comedy show in Egypt，and when the man started to make fun of pedestrians crossing streets，everyone laughed their head off. The main reason why those people strongly laughed was that almost all of them felt angry with pedestrians who crossed streets carelessly. The joke wasn't only funny，it also made the audience feel that they were right about being angry at those pedestrians. That is，people were laughing because of both the funny joke and the happiness experienced as a result of the psychological support they got.

The better a joke makes a person feel，the more it includes other psychological factors，and the more the person will like it. For example，if you envy one of your friends，and someone tells a joke that is funny and，at the same time，makes your friend seem stupid，then you will probably laugh at it louder than if you weren't jealous（嫉妒的）of him.

In short, we not only laugh when we hear something funny, but also laugh when we experience some kind of happiness that results from the other psychological factors involved in the joke. I strongly discourage making fun of anyone or belittling someone to make someone else laugh. All I want to explain is that if your joke supports a person's emotions, he will certainly like it a lot.

【小题1】What did the author find out after studying psychology?

A．Only good jokes make people laugh.

B．Many reasons lead to people laughing.

C．Funny things can make people laugh.

D．Laughter can make people healthy.

【小题2】Why did the audience laugh at the pedestrians?

A．Because they played a trick on the pedestrians.

B．Because the pedestrians behaved in a funny way.

C．Because they could feel the pedestrians' happiness.

D．Because their emotions were approved of by the show.

【小题3】What does the underlined word "belittling" probably mean？

A．Speaking highly of.	B．Getting close to.
C．Looking down on.	D．Feeling content with.

   Living near the ocean is good for health, but not a luxury all can afford. But those who can, certainly gain a lot of health benefits over common inland folks.

● 【小题1】 As we know, because people living near a coast get enough time to swim in the seawater, they naturally tend to be stronger. Physicians have been recommending visits to coasts that specialize in providing seawater cleansing treatment, which improves the immune system.

● Living near the ocean promotes physical activity. The seashore encourages outdoor activities like jogging on the sand, beach volleyball, scuba-diving, surfing, etc .【小题2】

● Fresh air helps get sleep. Fresh ocean air is composed of negatively charged ions that enable us to consume oxygen, adding to good health. These ions also aid in balancing the serotonin (血清素) level, which helps in feeling more relaxed. 【小题3】 Little by little, this leads to better sleep after spending a large amount of time near the ocean.

● Living near the ocean can help you absorb more vitamin

A．

【小题4】 Thus, natural sunlight, along with the sunrays which bounce back from the sand and the ocean, is an excellent supply for our everyday need for vitamin

A． ● Living near the ocean is helpful in meditation (冥想).

【小题5】 It helps the mind jolt (摇动) free from all worries of the past or the future. We get totally tuned into the present, and become calm, as we listen to the gradual rise and fall of the waves.

A．People living near a coast are healthier.

B．Sunshine is a major source of vitamin D.

C．How will living near the ocean help improve your health? D. Just sit near the seashore and observe the waves moving back and forth.

D．This serves in leading an active lifestyle for people living near or on beaches.

E．Vitamin D helps you absorb calcium, maintaining a normal immune system.

F．Besides, when you listen to the sound of waves, it relaxes the mind to a very calm state.

A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech integrated systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.
“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components (元件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. A few years ago, his team got the go-ahead to start piecing together the components. “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.
They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.
While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers’ fields or on the battlefield. “Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.
Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”
【小题1】The difficulty the team of engineers met with while making the robotic fly was that __________.

A．they had no model in their mind

B．they did not have sufficient time

C．they had no ready-made components

D．they could not assemble the components

【小题2】It can be inferred from paragraphs 3 and 4 that the robotic fly __________.

A．consists of a flight device and a control system

B．can just fly in limited areas at the present time

C．can collect information from many sources

D．has been put into wide application

【小题3】Which of the following can be learned from the passage?

A．The robotic flyer is designed to learn about insects.

B．Animals are not allowed in biological experiments.

C．There used to be few ways to study how insects fly.

D．Wood’s design can replace animals in some experiments.

【小题4】Which of the following might be the best title of the passage?

A．Father of Robotic Fly

B．Inspiration from Engineering Science

C．Robotic Fly Imitates Real Life Insect

D．Harvard Breaks Through in Insect Study