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The president proposed that we should bring the meeting to a close. stated said announced suggested
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She is a highly successful teacher. fairly rather very moderately
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The weather is a constant subject of conversation in Britain. question problem tide topic
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It is the movement,not the color,of objects that excites the bull. frightens scares confuses arouses
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Their parents once lived under very severe conditions. tight strict hard sound
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I often do absent-minded things, particularly when I’m worried. inevitably especially obviously conventionally
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John is crazy about pop music. worried concerned mad sorry
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As soon as the cake is done, remove it from the oven. took away left aside took off washed off
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The resident of the area is unhappy about the noise. manager occupant landlord caretaker
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You will have a great conversation and maybe even get a date or make a new friend. talk speech debate discussion
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I have been trying to quit smoking. give up pick up build up take up
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He grasped both of my hands and begged me to help him out. understood had a hold over took hold of left hold of
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The flight eventually got away six hours later. nicely apparently finally firstly
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There is a growing gap between the rich and the poor. confrontation gulf tension conflict
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My friend’s reply was courteous but firm. well-informed respectful efficient respectable
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Step Back in Time
Do you know that we live a lot longer now than the people who were born before us? One hundred years ago the average woman lived to be 45. But now,she can live until at least 80.
One of the main reasons for people living longer is that we know how to look after ourselves better. We know which foods are good for US and what we have to eat to make sure our bodies get all the healthy things they need. We know why we sometimes get ill and what to do to get better again. And we know how important it is to do lots of exercise to keep our hearts beating healthily.
But in order that we don’t slip back into bad habits,let’s have a look at what life was like 100 years ago.
Families had between 15 and 20 children, although many babies didn’t live long. Children suffered from lots of diseases, especially rickets(佝偻病)and scurvy(坏血病), which are both caused by bad diets. This is because many families were very poor and not able to feed their children well.
Really poor families who lived in crowded cities like London and Manchester often slept standing up, bending over a piece of string,because there was no room for them to lie down.
People didn’t have fridges until the 1920s. They kept fresh food cold by storing it on window-sills(窗台板),blocks of ice,or even burying it in the garden.
Some children had to start work at the age of seven or eight to earn money for their parents. If you had lived 100 years ago,you might well be selling matchsticks(火柴杆)(a job done by many children)or working with your dad by now.
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A without pity
B sad and lonely
C emotionally healthy
D without real love for them
E a sense of security
F a lonely wolf
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Friendly Relations with the People Around
1 You depend on all the people closely around to give you the warm feeling of belongingness(归属)that you must have to feel secure. But, in fact, the members of all the groups to which you belong also depend on you to give that feeling to them. A person who shows that he wants everything for himself is bound(一定的)to be a lonely wolf.
2 The need for companionship is closely related to the need for a sense of belongingness. How sad and lonely your life would be if you had no one to share your feelings and experiences. You may take it for granted that there will always be people around to talk to and to do things with you and for you. The important point, however, is that keeping emotionally healthy does not depend so much upon having people around you as upon your ability to establish relationships that are satisfying both to you and to them.
3 Suppose you are in a crowd watching a football game. You don’t know them. When the game is over, you will all go your separate ways. But just for a while you had a feeling of companionship , of sharing the feelings of others who were cheering for the team you wanted to win.
4 An experience of this kind gives the clue(线索)to what companionship really is. It depends upon emotional ties of sympathy, understanding, trust, and affection. Companions become friends when these ties are formed.
5 When you are thrown in a new circle of acquaintances(熟人), you may not know with whom you will make friends, but you can be sure that you will be able to establish friendships if you show that you really like people.
A Making friends with new acquaintances
B Close link between companionship and belongingness
C How to satisfy other people’s needs
D An example of a satisfying relationship
E Difficulties in establishing friendships
F What companionship really is
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Late-Night Drinking
Coffee lovers beware. Having a quick “pick-me-up“ cup of coffee late in the day will play havoc with your sleep. As well as being a stimulant, caffeine interrupts the flow of melatonin, the brain hormone that sends people into a sleep.
Melatonin levels normally start to rise about two hours before bedtime. Levels then peak between 2 a. m. and 4 a. m. , before falling again. “ It’s the neurohormone that controls our sleep and tells our body when to sleep and when to wake,“ says Maurice Ohayon of the Stanford Sleep Epidemiology Research Center at Stanford University in California. But researchers in Israel have found that caffeinated coffee halves the body’s levels of this sleep hormone.
Lotan Shilo and a team at the Sapir Medical Center in Tel Aviv University found that six volunteers slept less well after a cup of caffeinated coffee than after drinking the same amount of decaf(脱因咖啡). On average, subjects slept 336 minutes per night after drinking caffeinated coffee, compared with 415 minutes after decaf. They also took half an hour to drop off—twice as long as usual—and jigged around in bed twice as much.
In the second phase of the experiment, the researchers woke the volunteers every three hours and asked them to give a urine sample, Shilo measured concentrations of a breakdown product of melatonin. The results suggest that melatonin concentrations in caffeine drinkers were half those in decaf drinkers. In a paper accepted for publication in Sleep Medicine, the researchers suggest that caffeine blocks production of the enzyme that drives melatonin production.
Because it can take many hours to eliminate caffeine from the body, Ohayon recommends that coffee lovers switch to decaf after lunch.
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Sleeplessness
Insomnia or sleeplessness is a common complaint of women as they enter into menopause. Insomnia means having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep or the feeling that your sleep was not adequate for you. For women who are having night sweats, their sleep is broken by frequent a-wakening and therefore not refreshing. Generally once the night sweats are controlled a normal sleep pattern returns. If’it doesn’t it may be, or have become chronic insomnia. How do you know?
If you suffer from insomnia every night or most nights for a period of one month then you have chronic insomnia. If you’re not having night sweats then it’s time to look for other causes of sleeplessness. Depression and anxiety disorders are the most common causes of chronic insomnia. If you feel depressed you need to be checked by a qualified health care provider. Movement disorders such as resdess leg syndrome are second on the list of insomnia for them, there are new medicines that may help. Other common causes are shift working, and pain.
In up to 30% of people with chronic insomnia no cause can be identified. Medical treatment of these people has generally been with sleeping pills. It is estimated that 25% of the adult population in America took some type of medicines for sleep last year. It is generally agreed that sleeping pills should only be in the lowest dose and for the shortest possible time.
Sleep hygiene is directed at changing bad sleep habits. The recommendations are: —Go to bed only when sleepy. —Do not wait up to a specified time. —Avoid caffeine and alcohol in the evening, etc.
