全国职称英语等级考试阅读判断6-10

第六篇P58 Microchip Research Center Created

A research center has been set up in this Far Eastern country to develop advanced micro-chip production technology. The center, which will start out with about US $14 million, will help the country develop its chip industry without always depending on imported technology.

The center will make use of its research skills and facilities to develop new technology for domestic chip plants. The advent of the center will possibly free the country from the situation that it is always buying almost-outdated technologies from other countries, said the country’s flagship chipmaker. Currently, chip plants in this country are in a passive situation because may foreign governments don’t allow them to import the most advance technologies, fearing they will be used for military purposes. Moreover, the high licensing fees they have to pay to technology providers are also an important reason for their decision of self-reliance.

As mainstream chip production technology shifts from one generation to the next every three to five years, plants with new technology can make more powerful chips at lower costs, while plants with outdated equipment, which often cost billions of dollars to build, will be marginalized by the maker.

More than 10 chip plants are being built, each costing millions of US dollars. The majority of that money goes to overseas equipment vendors and technology owners—mainly from Japan and Singapore.

Should the new center play a major role in improving the situation in the industry, the country admits the US $14 million investment is still rather small. This country is developing comprehensive technologies. Most of the investment will be spent on setting alliances with technology and intellectual property owners.

第七篇P60 Moderate Earthquake Strikes England

A moderate earthquake struck parts of southeast England on 28 April 2007, toppling chimneys from houses and rousing residents from their beds. Several thousand people were left without power in Kent Country. One woman suffered minor head and neck injuries.

“If felt as if the whole house was being slid across like a fun-fair rid,” said the woman.

The British Geological Survey said the 4.4-magnitude quake struck at 8:19 a.m. and was centered under the English Channel, about 8.5 miles south of Dover and near the entrance to the Channel Tunnel.

Witnesses said cracks appeared in walls and chimneys collapsed across the county. Residents said the tremor had lasted for about 10 to 15 seconds.

“I was lying in bed and it felt as if someone had just got up from bed next to me,” said Hendrick van Eck, 27, of Canterbury about 60 miles southeast of London. “I then heard the sound of cracking, and it was getting heavier and heavier. If felt as if someone was at the end of my bed hopping up and down.”

There are thousands of moderate quakes on this scale around the world each year, but they are rare in Britain. The April 28 quake was the strongest in Britain since 2002 when a 4.8-magnitude quake struck the central city of Birmingham.

The country’s strongest earthquake took place in the North Sea in 1931,measuring 6.1 on the Richter scale. British Geological Survey scientist Roger Musson said the quake took place on 28 April in an area that had seen several of the biggest earthquakes ever to strike Britain, including one in 1580 that caused damage in London and was felt in France. Musson predicted that it was

only a matter of time before another earthquake struck this part of England. However, people should not be scared too much by this prediction, Musson said, as the modern earthquake warning system of Britain should be able to detect a forthcoming quake and announce it several hours before it takes place. This would allow time for people to evacuate and reduce damage to the minimum.

第八篇Easy Learning

Students should be jealous. Not only do babies get to doze their days away, but the y’ve also mastered the fine art of learning in their sleep.

By the time babies are a year old they can recognize a lot of sounds and even simple words. Marie Cheour at the University of Turku in Finland suspected that they might progress this fast because they learn language while they sleep as well as when they are awake.

To test the theory, Cheour and colleagues studied 45 newborn babies in the first few days of their lives. They exposed all the infants to an hour of Finnish vowel sounds-one that sounds like “00”, another like “ee” and a third boundary vowel peculiar to Finnish and similar languages that sounds like something in between. EEG recordings of the infants brains before and after the session showed that the newborns could not distinguish the sounds.

Fifteen of the babies then went back with their mothers, while the rest were split into two sleep-study groups. One group was exposed throughout their night-time sleeping hours to the same three vowels, while the others listened to other, easier-to-distinguish vowel sounds. When tested in the morning, and again in the evening, the babies who’d heard the tricky boundary vowel all night showed brainwave activity indicating that they could now recognize this new sound. They could identify the sound even when its pitch was changed, while none of the other babies could pick up the boundary vowel at all.

Cheour doesn’t know how babies accomplish this night-time learning, but she suspects that the special ability might indicate that unlike adults, babies don’t “turn off” their cerebral cortex while they sleep. The skill probably fades in the course of the first year of life, she adds-so forget the idea that you can pick up tricky French vowels as an adult just by slipping a language tape under your pillow. But while it may not help grown-ups, Cheour is hoping to use the sleeping hours to give remedial help to babies who are genetically at risk of language disorders.

第九篇Dangers Await Babies with Altitude

Women who live in the world’s highest communities tend to give birth to underweight babies, a new study suggests. These babies may grow into adults with a high risk of heart disease and strokes.

Research has hinted that newborns in mountain communities are lighter than average. But it wasn’t clear whether this is due to reduced oxygen levels at high altitudes or because their mothers are under-nourished-many people who live at high altitudes are relatively poor compared with those living lower down.

To find out more, Dino Giussani and his team at Cambridge University studied the records of 400 births in Bolivia during 1997 and 1998. The babies were born in both rich and poor areas of two cities; La Paz and Santa Cruz. La Paz is the highest city in the world, at 3.65 kilometers above sea level, while Santa Cruz is much lower, at 0.44 kilometers.

Sure enough, Giussani found that the average birthweight of babies in La Paz was significantly

lower than in Santa Cruz. This was true in both high and low-income families. Even babies born to poor families in Santa Cruz were heavier on average than babies born to wealthy families in lofty La Paz. “We were very surprised by this result,” says Giussani.

The results suggest that babies born at high altitudes are deprived of oxygen before birth. “This may trigger the release or suppression of hormones that regulate growth of the unborn child,” says Giussani.

His team also found that high-altitude babies tended to have relatively larger heads compared with their bodies. This is probably a fetus starved of oxygen will send oxygenated blood to the brain in preference to the rest of the body.

Giussani wants to find out if such babies have a higher risk of disease in later life. People born in La Paz might be prone to heart trouble in adulthood, for example. Low birthweight is a risk factor for coronary heart disease. And newborns with a high ratio of head size to body weight are often predisposed to high blood pressure and strokes in later life.

第十篇Irish Dolphins May Have a Unique Dialect

Irish scientists monitoring dolphins living in a river estuary in the southwest of the country believe they may have developed a unique dialect to communicate with each other.

The Shannon Dolphin and Wildlife Foundation(SDWF) has been studying a group of up to 120 bottle-nose dolphins in the River Shannon using vocalizations collected on a computer in a cow shed near the River Shannon.

As part of a research project, student Ronan Hickey digitized and analysed a total of 1882 whistles from the Irish dolphins and those from the Welsh dolphins on a computer and separated them into six fundamental whistle types and 32 different categories. Of the ategories, he found most were used by both sets of dolphins-but eight were only heard from the Irish dolphins. “We are building up a catalogue of the different whistle types they use and trying to associate them with behavior like foraging, resting, socializing and the communications of groups with calves,” project leader Simon Berrow said. “Essentially we are building up what is like dictionary of words the use or sounds they make.”

Berrow, a marine biologist, said the dolphins’clicks are used to find their way around and locate prey. The whistles are communications “They do a whole range of other sounds like barks, groans and a kind of gunshot,” he said. “The gunshot is an intense pulse of sound. Sperm whales use it to stun their prey.”

“When I first heard it I was surprised as I thought sperm whales were the only species who used it. We can speculate the dolphins are using it for the same reason as the sperm whales,”Berrow said.

References in local legend indicate there have been dolphins in the Shannon estuary for generations and they may even have been resident there as far back as the 6th century.

They are regularly seen by passengers on the Shannon ferry and an estimated 25000 tourists every year take special sightseeing tour on local boats to visit them.