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“I am not meddling.“ Mary said mildly,“I’m just curious.“ gently shyly weakly sweetly
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In 1816 it seemed inevitable that Southern states would break away from the Union. strange certain inconsistent proper
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Many of Carson McCuller’s characters are isolated, disappointed people. solitary gloomy feeble frugal
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The workers finally called off the strikes. put off ended cancelled participated in
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John has made up his mind not to go to the meeting. wanted promised decided agreed
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I catch a cold now and then. always occasionally constantly regularly
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He often finds fault with my work. criticizes praises evaluates. ’talks about
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The little girl grasped her mother’s hand as she crossed the street. understood had a hold over took hold of left hold of
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In the situation comedy, a traditional format for television shows, the same characters appear repeatedly in humorous episodes. respectively again and again simultaneously briefly
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The best olive oil is obtained from olives that are harvested just after they ripen. preserved squeezed sorted gathered
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Do not waste time on insignificant points. interesting dull unimportant boring
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The company issues an annual report every March. a long a yearly a financial a product
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As both a religion and a social force, Puritanism has made a widespread influence in the linked States. a far-reaching a disturbing an annoying a favorable
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When Washington DC was burned in 1814, Dollety Madison rescued many official papers from the White House. stole filed hid saved
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She was one of the leading writers in her age. successful major outstanding musical
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Want to Be 100? Listen to These 5 Centenarians(百岁老人)
Five neighbors at a central Missouri retirement community who are all centenarians get asked all the time:“How did you live to be 100?“
If you want to live to 100 or more, this rare group of five golden girls says the key to longevity (长寿)is working hard at a job you love and taking care of your body while you’re at it.
Even though an estimated 70,000 people in the country are currently at the century mark or beyond in age,it is unusual to find five 100-year-olds living in one place.
The average life-span(寿命) of Americans is about two or three years short of an 80th birthday party.And most people don’t want to cut out coffee, soda, alcohol, cigarettes, and eat healthy food.
“People tell me all the time, ’ I don’t want to live to be 100,’“said Mildred Leaver, who turned 100 in June.
“I think that’s just sad.Aging is attitude and I don’t feel old,“said Leaver,a former educator who still drives her Buick around town.
It doesn’t take long to see that Leaver and her neighbors Mildred Harris, Grace Wolfson, Gladys Stuart and Viola Semas, have a lot more in common than their longevity and lifelong healthy habits.All are 100 except Stuart,who is 101.
Even though their sight and hearing aren’t what they used to be, they’ve all avoided illnesses that many elderly people are stricken with.It’s been 50 years since Leaver beat cancer for the first and only time.
The common thread that connects these women is the decades of service to jobs each loved as a farmer,designer, school principal, bookkeeper and secretary.In the early years of their lives, gainfully employed women like them were just as rare as 100-year-old are today.
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Travelling Is My Life
1.I am very fortunate.I am now a much-travelled woman, but until I was 20 I had never been anywhere more remote than Londan.And coming from a country village in the far south I was struck by the architectural beauty of the capital.I understood immediately why foreign tourists descend on it in their thousands.
2.The first time I traveled abroad was when I went over to France on a cross Channel ferry.It was a school trip to Paris for a week,and I thought it was wonderful.The sights, the sounds,the smells,the language—they were all wonderful.I had never experienced anything like it, and the week had a profound effect on me. It gave me the travel bug!
3.As a young girl I was always shy of strangers.I certainly had no plans to travel a lot.I left school and trained as a journalist on a local paper, and somehow slowly began to concentrate on travel. I had a procession of jobs before I got this one with the magazine.Although I still write ar-
ticles on other subjects,my main occupation now is writing travel and tourism.
4.I can appreciate now why tourists go halfway across the world to visit a place.I was brought up in the vicinity of a major British tourist attraction, but never went there myself and couldn’t understand foreign visitors.You read about something halfway across the world and want to see it for yourself.I remember that was just why I went walking in the Himalayas and looked up at Everest, and why I went on a strange but wonderful cruise in the Antarctic.You can read about a place,but it is totally different to be there, to see, feel, smell and hear everything yourself.
5.Perhaps not surprisingly I have been to a lot of popular tourist resorts in Europe, Africa, the Far East and the West Indies,for example.But I like to try and find those unknown,inaccessible places—not only for myself, but also for people who want something different.Sometimes it’s frightening.I remember visiting a village on the side of a steep hill in Bolivia where the inhabitants stood motionless as I walked in and didn’t move until I walked out.
6.The career of the previous travel writer on the magazine I work for now came to an abrupt end when he quite simply disappeared somewhere in South America.He was on a special journey and had told someone at his hotel that he had found a native to ferry him up a river to some remote villages in the jungle.Nothing has been heard from him since then.One day I’d like to try and find out what happened to him.
A.The Tourist Mentality
B.Always Looking For the Unexpected
C.A Late Developer
D.The Road to Being A Travel Writer
E.A Sudden End to A Career
F.The First Taste of Travel
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A.those unexpected, unknown and inaccessible places.
B.a travel writer for a famous magazine tells us a little about her life and profession
C.never been anywhere
D.a journalist on a local paper
E.been to London the remotest place for me at that time
F.tells us some interesting tourist resorts all over the world
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Electronic Mail
During the past few years, scientists all over the world have suddenly found themselves productively engaged in task they once spent their lives avoiding—writing, any kind of writing, but particularly letter writing.Encouraged by electronic mail’s surprisingly high speed, convenience and economy, people who never before touched the stuff are regularly, skillfully, even cheerfully tapping out a great deal of correspondence.
Electronic networks, woven into the fabric of scientific communication these days, are the route to colleagues in distant countries, shared data, bulletin boards and electronic journals.Anyone with a personal computer, a modern and the software to link computers over telephone lines can sign on.An estimated five million scientists have done so with more joining every day, most of them communicating through a bundle of interconnected domestic and foreign routes known collectively as the Internet, or net.
E-mail is starting to edge out the fax, the telephone, overnight mail, and of course, land mail.It shrinks time and distance between scientific collaborators, in part because it is conveniently asynchronous (异步的) (Writer can type while their colleagues across time zones sleep; their message will be waiting).If it is not yet speeding discoveries, it is certainly accelerating communication.
Jeremy Bernstein, the physicist and science writer, once called E-mail the physicist’s umbilical cord (脐带).Later other people, too, have been discovering its connective virtues.Physicists are using it; college students are using it; everybody is using it; and as a sign that it has come of age, the New Yorker has celebrated its liberating presence with a cartoon—an appreciative dog seated at a keyboard, saying happily, “ On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.“
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“Salty“ Rice Plant Boosts Harvests
British scientists are breeding a new generation of rice plants that will be able to grow in soil containing salt water. Their work may enable abandoned farms to become productive once more.
Tim Flowers and Tony Yeo, from Sussex University’s School of Biological Sciences, have spent several years researching how crops, such as rice, could be made to grow in water that has become salty.
The pair have recently begun a three-year programme, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, to establish which genes enable some plants to survive salty conditions. The aim is to breed this capability into crops, starting with rice.
It is estimated that each year more than 10m hectares (公顷) of agricultural land are lost because salt gets into the soil and stunts (妨碍生长) plants.The problem is caused by several factors.In the tropics, mangroves (红树林) that create swamps (沼泽) and traditionally formed barriers to sea water have been cut down.In the Mediterranean, a series of droughts have caused the water table to drop, allowing sea water to seep (渗透) in.In Latin America, irrigation often causes problems when water is evaporated (蒸发) by the heat, leaving salt deposits behind.
Excess salt then enters the plants and prevents them functioning normally.Heavy concentrations of minerals in the plants stop them drawing up the water they need to survive.
To overcome these problems, Flowers and Yeo decided to breed rice plants that take in very little salt and store what they do absorb in cells that do not affect the plants’ growth.They have started to breed these characteristics into a new rice crop, but it will take about eight harvests before the resulting seeds are ready to be considered for commercial use.
Once the characteristics for surviving salty soil are known, Flowers and Yeo will try to breed the appropriate genes into all manners of crops and plants.Land that has been abandoned to nature will then be able to bloom again, providing much needed food in the poorer countries of the world.
