Satellites(卫星) are an important part of our ordinary lives．For example, the information for weather forecasts is sent by satellite．Some satellites have cameras which take photographs of the Earth to show how clouds are moving．Satellites are also used to connect our international phone calls．
Computer connections of the World Wide Web and Internet also use satellites. Many of our TV programs come to us through satellites．Airplane pilots also sometimes use a satellite to help them find their exact location．
We use satellites to send television pictures from one part of the world to another．They are usually 35，880 kilometers above the equator（赤道）．Sometimes we can see a satellite in the sky and it seems to stay in the same place．This is because it is moving around the world at 11，000 kilometers an hour—exactly the same speed that the earth rotates．A satellite must orbit the Earth with its antennae(天线)facing the earth．Sometimes, it moves away from its orbit（轨道），So there are little rockets on it which are used to put the satellite back in the right position．This usually happens about every five or six days．
Space is not empty! Every week, more and more satellites are sent into space to orbit the Earth．A satellite usually works for about 10-12 years．Satellites which are broken are sometimes repaired by astronauts or sometimes brought back to Earth to be repaired．Often，very old or broken satellites are left in space to orbit the Earth for a very long time．This is very serious because some satellites use nuclear power and they can crash（撞）into each other．
【小题1】Which of the following is NOT done by satellites according to the passage?

A．Sending information for weather forecast．

B．Taking photographs of the Earth．

C．Sending TV pictures．

D．Providing food for airplane pilots．

【小题2】What’s the speed the earth rotates at?

A．35,880 kilometers per hour．

B．335,880 kilometers per hour．

C．11,000 kilometers per hour．

D．110,000 kilometers per hour

【小题3】Why does the satellite move around the world at the same speed as the Earth rotates?

A．In order to take photographs．

B．In order to stay in a certain position in the orbit．

C．In order to move away from its orbit．

D．In order to send television pictures．

【小题4】What does the underlined word “This” in the 3rd paragraph refer to?

A．A satellite．

B．A little rocket．

C．A satellite seems to stay in the same place in the sky．

D．The satellite puts the rockets in the right position．

   Just like humans, birds rely on sound to communicate, too. Often, birds recognize their mates or young by sound rather than sight. Hungry young birds use begging calls to let their mothers know it is feeding time, and warning calls are other sounds given out frequently by the adults. In addition to all these regular calls, some male birds develop beautiful songs intended（打算）to attract the females.

A new study carried out by an American university shows that songbirds practice their songs even in their sleep. The research team discovered that the electrical brain activity of the birds that were asleep was similar to the brain activity produced when the birds were awake and singing. Clearly the bird stores a song after hearing it, then practices it later in its sleep. Scientists now believe the birds dream of songs to help them master the fine art of singing and that sleep plays a key role in the learning process！

It is commonly known that many songbirds learn to sing by listening to adult birds of the same species. If taught the song of an adult of another bird species, the chick grows up singing the new song and passes on the foreign song to its chicks. For instance, researchers carried out an experiment in which a male bullfinch（红腹灰雀）was raised by a female canary（金丝雀）. The bullfinch soon learned the canary's songs and when it was later mated to a female bullfinch, Mr. Bullfinch taught his children the canary's songs.

Early last year, a British survey of London's songbirds showed that the city's birds are losing their melodies. Birds could hardly hear one another over the traffic noise；as a result they had difficulty in learning songs and communicating with potential mates. And instead of copying the sweet notes of the adults, chicks were copying sounds, which they heard most often—namely car horns（喇叭）and mobile phones！

【小题1】What can we learn according to Paragraph 2？

A．Sleep helps songbirds master new songs.

B．Songbirds can even hear songs in their dreams.

C．The study was carried out by Australian scientists.

D．The brain activity of songbirds would stop in their sleep.

【小题2】Why does Mr. Bullfinch teach his children the canary's songs？

A．Because he wants to help them learn a foreign language.

B．Because he can't sing bulfinches' songs.

C．Because he wants to make them get along well with other birds.

D．Because the canary's songs are more attractive.

【小题3】What's the problem of the city's birds according to the passage？

A．They have lost their voices.

B．They are losing their habitats.

C．They are bothered by the city's noises.

D．They tend to refuse to learn songs from adults.

【小题4】What conclusion can we draw from the passage？

A．The city's birds can learn more songs.

B．All birds learn foreign songs during their life.

C．It may be difficult for the city's birds to find their mates.

D．Young birds can tell the difference between songs and noises.

   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.

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

   Storing food is common in members of the crow family. A new study tested the birds outside for this naturally occurring behavior, which may have evolved（进化）specifically because it gives crows a survival advantage. Some crow species are known to naturally use tools to recover food. So the researchers tested whether the birds could store and recover a tool so they could use it to find their food after a gap of 17 hours — something we wouldn’t expect them to do naturally. But they were able to instantly select the tool out of a number of unnecessary items.

In another experiment, the researchers taught crows to select a token（礼品券）from a number of items so that they could then exchange it for food. Again, the birds then showed that they could plan for the future using this new behaviour. This is different from all of the previous studies in future planning, which have focused on naturally occurring behaviour. For example, we know that chimpanzees select, transport and save appropriate tools for future needs.

These studies have shown that animals can plan for the future — but they leave an important question open for debate. Are animals only able to plan to use abilities that have evolved to give them a specific advantage, or can they flexibly and intelligently apply planning behaviour across various actions? Most critics would say the former, as the animals were tested in naturally occurring behaviour.

But the new research provides the first evidence that animal species can plan for the future using behaviour that doesn’t typically occur in nature. This supports the view that at least some recognitive（认知的）abilities in animals don’t evolve just in response to specific problems. Instead, it suggests that animals can apply these behaviour flexibly across problems in a similar way to humans. We need to study how flexible behaviour evolved. Then we might be able to see how crows’ ability to plan for the future fits in with their broader cognitive powers.

【小题1】What’s the new finding about some crows according to Paragraph 1?

A．They can store food.	B．They can use tools to recover food.
C．They can store and recover tools.	D．They can select and store food.

【小题2】What are crows trained by researchers to do when given a token?

A．Reject it casually.	B．Exchange it for food.
C．Save it as their food.	D．Build a nest with it.

【小题3】What can we infer about the studies that animals can plan for the future?

A．They are debatable.	B．They are disappointing.
C．They are logical.	D．They are convincing.

【小题4】What can be learned about flexible behaviour in animals?

A．It develops only with age.	B．It is unclear how it evolved.
C．No animals but crows benefit from it.	D．It helps plan for the future.