Siri. The intelligent assistant that helps you get things done. All you have to do is ask. 
Now you can use your voice to use your iPhone 4S. Just talk to Siri as you would to a person: “Do I need an umbrella?” or “Where’s the closest ATM?” Siri not only understands what you say, it knows what you mean. It figures out the right apps to use to find the right answer. Then, just like a personal assistant, it answers you. Siri makes phone calls, sends messages, schedules meetings, sets reminders, and more. How much more? Just ask, and Siri tells you that, too.
Dual-core A5 chip: the most powerful iPhone ever. 
Two cores in the A5 chip provide up to two times more power and up to seven times faster graphics. And you’ll feel the effects. iPhone 4S is quick and responsive, which makes all the difference when you’re launching apps, surfing the web, gaming, an doing just about everything. And no matter what you’re doing, you can keep on doing it. Because the A5 chip is so power-efficient, iPhone 4S has outstanding battery life.
FaceTime. It’s even better face-to-face.
FaceTime of iPhone 4S lets you hear a voice and see the face that goes with it—iPhone to iPhone, iPad 2, iPod touch, or Mac over Wi-Fi. So no matter where they are, no matter where you are, you’ll always be there. Making a FaceTime call is just as easy as making a phone call. And it’s even easier with Siri. Just tell Siri “FaceTime with Mom” and you show up, smile and wave hello. You’ll never miss a big event, an important meeting or a good laugh. And who wouldn’t be happy to see your face?
小题1:The passage is mainly about __________.| A．how to use iPhone 4S | B．some models of iPhone 4S | | C．some special uses of iPhone 4S | D．how to understand some pictures |
小题2:What is special about Siri? | A．It can take photos. | B．It can make videos. | | C．It can write messages. | D．It can answer questions. |
小题3:Which of the following helps iPhone 4S to perform fast? 小题4:Which of the following is NOT TRUE about FaceTime? | A．It can be used together with Siri. | | B．It allows you to see the other person’s face. | | C．It allows you to hear the other person’s voice. | | D．It can only be used between iPhone and iPhone. |
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小题1:C
小题2:D
小题3:B
小题4:D |
试题分析：文章是关于iPhone 4S的一篇科技短文，主要介绍了iPhone 4S的一些特殊功能。这篇文章比较新颖，比较贴近生活。
小题1:文章主要从Siri，Dual-core A5 chip和FaceTime三个方面介绍了iPhone 4S的一些特殊功能，故选C。
小题2:根据“just like a personal assistant, it answers you.”可知，Siri可以根据用户提问的问题查找相关应用程序并作出回答。故选D。
小题3:根据“Two cores in the A5 chip provide up to two times more power and up to seven times faster graphics. ...iPhone 4S is quick and responsive”可知，帮助加快iPhone 4S运行的是A5双核处理器，故选B。
小题4:根据“iPhone to iPhone, iPad 2, iPod touch, or Mac over Wi-Fi.”可知，FaceTime可以在iPhone, iPad 2, iPod touch, 和Mac之间通用，故选D。 |
核心考点
试题【Siri. The intelligent assistant that helps you get things done. All you have to 】；主要考察你对
题材分类等知识点的理解。
[详细]举一反三
Jerry Morris died on 28 October 2009. He was 99 years old. You have probably never heard of him. He was a professor of public health. More than 50 years ago he produced one of the most famous epidemiological (流行病学) papers of the 20th century.
His study showed that bus conductors were much less likely to die of heart disease than bus drivers. Why? Because the conductors spent their working day walking. It seems obvious now but in the middle of the last century doctors were puzzled by the rising numbers of people who got heart diseases. Jerry Morris found one of the main causes: a sedentary (久坐不动的) lifestyle. He started exercising for a few minutes each day and lived until his 100th year.
If you wish to protect your heart, you have to do more than wander in the garden. The exercise needs to be reasonable. Jogging is not for everyone and a round trip to the gym takes a couple of hours, plus the monthly membership fee is only good value if you visit regularly. The answer is simple: walk.
A half-hour purposeful walk five times a week will lower your risk of heart disease, diabetes and strokes. Older people sometimes feel they have left it too late. But it is never too late to start and there are no upper age limits. Start gently. Take your time: a 15-minute flat walk in the nearest park, four or five times a week. Within a month or so, you are already beginning to protect your heart. Build the walks up. When you can comfortably walk for half an hour in the park, go further: try following rivers and canals.
Regular walkers have their own natural gymnasium. There is no membership fee, just some of the finest scenery in the world. Great Britain is the walker’s gym. When you have followed the rivers and canals, and are enjoying walking for a couple of hours, head for the coast. Once again, build it up slowly. When you are comfortable with long coastal walks, you can think of our national parks.
小题1:Jerry Morris is mentioned in the first paragraph mainly to __________.| A．make his epidemiological message known to the public | | B．praise his research into ways of improving public health | | C．introduce the topic of doing exercise and keeping healthy | | D．give an example of a person who lives a healthy and long life |
小题2:We can learn from the passage that __________.| A．bus conductors are more likely to die of heart disease than bus drivers. | | B．doctors in the 1950s knew why heart diseases kept happening to people. | | C．walking is better than doing sports in a gym because it saves time and money. | | D．British people love walking because they have free gymnasium with finest scenery. |
小题3:What suggestion does the writer give about walking? | A．Parks are the best place for walking. | | B．Starters should not push themselves too hard. | | C．A two-quarter walk a day is suitable for starters. | | D．People of old age might not be fit enough to start walking. |
小题4:What might be the best title for this passage? | A．Long Life Comes from Walking | | B．Walking Helps Cure Heart Disease | | C．A Walk a Day Keeps the Doctors away | | D．An Hour’s Walk in Nature is Worth Two in the Gym |
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Getting kids to share their toys is a never-ending battle, and forcing them to do so never seems to help. New research suggests that allowing children to make a choice to sacrifice their own toys in order to share with someone else makes them share more in the future. The new findings are published in Psychological Science.
These experiments were conducted by psychological scientists, Nadia Chernyak and Tamar Kushnir of Cornell University. They found that sharing things with others when they are given a difficult choice leads children to think of themselves as people who like to share. It also makes them more likely to act in a pro-social （亲社会的）manner in the future.
Previous research has explained why rewarding children for sharing can backfire. Children come to think of themselves as people who don"t like to share since they had to be rewarded for doing so. Because they don"t view themselves as "sharers", they are less likely to share in the future.
Chernyak and Kushnir were interested in finding out whether freely chosen sacrifice might have the opposite effect on kids" willingness to share. To test this, the researchers introduced five-year-old children to Doggie, a sad puppet. Some of the children were given a difficult choice: Share a precious sticker（贴纸） with Doggie, or keep it for themselves. Other children were given an easy choice between sharing and putting the sticker away, while children in a third group were required by the researcher to share.
Later on, all the children were introduced to Ellie, another sad puppet. They were given the option of how many stickers to share (up to three). The kids who earlier made the difficult choice to help Doggie shared more stickers with Ellie. The children who were initially faced with an easy choice or who were required to give their sticker to Doggie, on the other hand, shared fewer stickers with Ellie. Therefore, children did not benefit from simply giving something up, but rather from willingly choosing to give something up of value.
“You might imagine that making difficult, costly choices is demanding for young children or even that once children share, they don’t feel the need to do so again,” Chernyak says. “But this wasn"t the case: once children made a difficult decision to give up something for someone else, they were more generous, not less, later on.” Chernyak concludes.
小题1:_______ helps children to share more in the future.| A．Rewarding children for sharing | | B．Forcing children to share | | C．Allowing children to share precious things willingly | | D．Allowing children to share what they don’t need |
小题2:The underlined word “backfire” means _______.| A．have an opposite effect | B．serve as a push | | C．cause anger | D．avoid taking things back |
小题3:Those who were required to share give fewer stickers to Ellie because _______.| A．they regret what they did | B．it’s not their own choice | | C．Ellie is not as sad as Doggie | D．they like to share with a real person |
小题4:We can conclude from the passage that _______.| A．parents will never find a way to get children to share toys | | B．a gift should be given to make up for children’s sacrifice | | C．children pretend to be generous when they are being observed | | D．making difficult choices may influence sharing behavior |
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400-year-old plants from the Little Ice Age were brought back to life, which could help us understand how the Earth will deal with climate change.
Moss(藓类植物) found buried beneath the Teardrop glacier(冰川) on Ellesmere Island in Canada has been brought back to life. Findings suggest that these plants could help repopulate regions exposed by melting ice caps. Plants that were buried beneath thick ice in Canada more than 400 years ago and were thought to have frozen to death have been brought back to life by Canadian scientists.
Samples of the moss plant, covered by the glacier during the Little Ice Age of 1550 to 1850 AD, were replanted in a lab at the University of Alberta and grew new stems(茎). Researchers now think these findings can give indication as to how regions can recover as the ice covering them melts.
Biologist Dr. Catherine La Farge and her team at the University of Alberta were exploring the region around the Teardrop glacier on Ellesmere Island. Ice on Ellesmere Island region has been melting at around four meters each year for the past nine years. This means that many areas of land that were previously covered by ice have since been exposed. Many ecosystems that were thought to have been destroyed during the Little Ice Age between 1550 and 1850 AD can now be studied, including many species that have never been studied before.
While examining an exposed area of land, La Farge and her team discovered a small area of moss called Aulacomnium turgidum. It is a type of bryophyte(苔藓类植物) plant that mainly grows across Canada, the US and the Highlands of Scotland.
Dr La Farge noticed that the moss had small patches of green stems, suggesting it is either growing again or can be encouraged to repopulate. Dr La Farge told the BBC, “When we looked at the samples in detail and brought them to the lab, I could see some of the stems actually had new growth of green branches, suggesting that these plants are growing again, and that blew my mind. When we think of thick areas of ice covering the landscape, we’ve always thought that plants have to come from refugia(濒绝生物保护区), never considering that land plants come from underneath a glacier. It’s a whole world of what’s coming out from underneath the glacier that really needs to be studied. The ice is disappearing pretty fast. We really have not examined all the biological systems that exist in the world; we don’t know it all.”
Dr La Farge took samples of the moss and, using carbon-dating techniques, discovered that the plants date back to the Little Ice Age. Dr La Farge’s team took the samples, planted them in dishes full of nutrient-rich potting soil and fed them with water.
The samples were from four separate species including Aulacomnium turgidum, Distichium capillaceum, Encalypta procera and Syntrichia ruralis. The moss plants found by Dr La Farge are types of bryophytes. Bryophytes can survive long winters and regrow when the weather gets warmer.
However, Dr La Farge was surprised that the plants buried under ice have survived into the twenty-first century. Her findings appear in proceedings（论文集）of the National Academy of Sciences.
小题1:Dr La Farge’s research is of great importance to ________.| A．knowing what the plants during the Little Ice Age were like | | B．understanding how ecosystems recover from glaciers. | | C．regrowing many species that have been destroyed before. | | D．figuring out the effects of melting ice caps on moss. |
小题2:The underlined part “blew my mind” in Paragraph 6 can best be replaced by “________”.| A．surprised me | B．greatly frightened me | | C．put my doubt out of my mind | D．was exactly what I had in my mind |
小题3:According to the passage, Aulacomnium turgidum ________.| A．lives better in small groups | | B．is very active in hot weather | | C．is strong enough to survive coldness | | D．is chosen from Canadian refugia |
小题4:Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?| A．Bryophyte ecology is greatly affected by climate change. | | B．400-year-old moss’s survival is a mystery to solve. | | C．Moss in ancient times was discovered in Canada. | | D．400-year-old plants were brought back to life. |
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Even though Danish students have equal access to education, their choice of studies is still influenced by social class. Young people from working class backgrounds are by studies with a clear job profile侧面，半面，外形，轮廓and high income, prestige and studies with a strong identity interest young people of parents with university degrees when choosing which studies to . This is what researchers from the University of Copenhagen in a new study. Students who have chosen to study medicine, architecture, economy and sociology often come from homes where the parents have higher education, whereas business studies and pharmacy often young people with a working class background. This is by a research team from the University of Copenhagen and Aalborg University in a new study.
“There is a between the studies chosen by young Danes and their background. Even for the young people who have very good grades in their A-level exams, and who could successfully admission to a large variety of studies, the parents’ of education and social class play an important role in their choice,” says Education Sociologist Jens Peter Thomsen, who is one of the researchers behind the study.
The study “The Educational Strategies of Danish University Students from Professional and Working-Class Backgrounds” is 60 interviews with Danish students from six different university level study programmes: Medicine, architecture, sociology, economy, pharmacy and business studies.
The young people bring with them the they get from their families. If you grow up in a home with parents who are doctors or architects with a strong professional , it is an obvious choice to follow the path as your parents when you grow up.
“For young people whose parents are university educated, such as fame and mastery of expert knowledge are important. They are by an educational culture in which you are a diligent student, and where leisure activities are to the identity that lies within your studies. These young people have also grown up with discussions around the dinner table which also prepare them for their lives as students,” says Jens Peter Thomsen.
He also added, “Young people who come from a working class background, and have good grades have to the full range of opportunities they have. But the effort to reach this goal must start early”.
| 小题1: | | A．monitored | B．motivated | C．motioned | D．multiplied |
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| 小题2: | | A．while | B．although | C．when | D．if |
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| 小题3: | | A．pursue | B．engage | C．involve | D．conduct |
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| 小题4: | | A．calculate | B．suspect | C．conclude | D．achieve |
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| 小题5: | | A．required | B．confirmed | C．refused | D．completed |
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| 小题6: | | A．subscribes to | B．caters to | C．sticks to | D．appeals to |
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| 小题7: | | A．inquired | B．proved | C．extended | D．acquired |
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| 小题8: | | A．connection | B．comparison | C．difference | D．contradiction |
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| 小题9: | | A．educational | B．political | C．social | D．professional |
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| 小题10: | | A．balance | B．develop | C．identify | D．seek |
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| 小题11: | | A．situation | B．judgment | C．level | D．preference |
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| 小题12: | | A．connected with | B．based on | C．committed to | D．combined with |
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| 小题13: | | A．resources | B．experiences | C．finance | D．memory |
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| 小题14: | | A．degree | B．identity | C．success | D．responsibility |
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| 小题15: | | A．perfect | B．usual | C．common | D．same |
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| 小题16: | | A．changes | B．problems | C．factors | D．characters |
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| 小题17: | | A．disturbed | B．moved | C．puzzled | D．attracted |
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| 小题18: | | A．tied | B．accustomed | C．transferred | D．copied |
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| 小题19: | | A．practical | B．topical | C．physical | D．medical |
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| 小题20: | | A．take charge of | B．take control of | C．take advantage of | D．take care of |
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At the moment, there are two reliable ways to make electricity from sunlight. You can use a panel of solar cells to create the current directly, by liberating electrons from a semiconducting material such as silicon. Or you can concentrate the sun’s rays using mirrors, boil water with them, and employ the steam to drive a generator.
Both work. But both are expensive. Gang Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Zhifeng Ren of Boston College therefore propose an alternative. They suggest that a phenomenon called the thermoelectric（热电）effect might be used instead—and they have built a prototype（原型）to show that the idea is practical.
Thermoelectric devices are not new. They are used, for example, to capture waste heat from car engines. They work because certain materials generate an electrical potential difference within themselves if one part is hotter than another. That can be used to drive a current through an external circuit.
The reason thermoelectric materials have not, in the past, been applied successfully to the question of solar power is that to get a worthwhile current you have to have a significant temperature difference. (200℃ is considered a good starting point.) In a car engine, that is easy. For sunlight, however, it means concentrating the heat in some way. And if you are going to the trouble of building mirrors to do that, you might as well go down the steam-generation route, which is a much more efficient way of producing electricity. If the heat concentration could be done without all the equipment of mirrors, though, thermoelectricity’s inefficiency would be balanced by the cheapness of the equipment.
In their view, three things are needed to create a workable solar-thermoelectric device. The first is to make sure that most of the sunlight which falls on it is absorbed, rather than being reflected. The second is to choose a thermoelectric material which conducts heat badly but electricity well. The third is to be certain that the temperature gradient（梯度）which that badly conducting material creates is not wasted by poor design.
小题1:The following methods can be adopted to make electricity from sunlight EXCEPT .| A．putting a panel of solar cells into use | | B．concentrating sun’s rays with mirrors | | C．creating a solar-thermoelectric device | | D．building a practical solar prototype |
小题2:Why was the application of thermoelectric materials a failure in the past?| A．Because it’s hard for them to build enough mirrors to make it work. | | B．Because 200℃ was hard to reach at that time even in a car engine. | | C．Because of the failure of having a significant temperature difference. | | D．Because it was hard to focus the sun’s rays with equipment of mirrors. |
小题3:Which of the following is the best title for this passage?| A．Thermoelectric Device --- the Best Method of All | | B．A New Method of Making Electricity from Sunlight | | C．How to Create a Workable Thermoelectric Device | | D．Solar Power --- a New Energy Trend in the Future |
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