英语 热门试卷

                         A

Jumanji（勇敢者的游戏）is a story for children about a very strange game—a game that becomes far too real and frightening for the players.  It was a story by Chris Van Allsburg, which was later filmed in 1996, starring the famous American actor Robin Williams.

The story begins in 1869 in New Hampshire, America. Two young brothers bury a box under some trees. A hundred years later, in 1969, a boy, Alan Panish, finds the box and takes it home. He is unhappy that his father may want to send him to a boarding school. Alan’s friend, Sarah, arrives, and they open the box. Inside is a board game. At the start of tile game, some words appear: “Do you want to leave the world behind and go back to the past? Then this is the game for you.” Suddenly Alan finds that he is disappearing into the game.

The story has a deep meaning. Through his adventures Alan learns something important—if you face your fears, your problems will go away. Alan turns to face Van Pelt, the hunter who is trying to kill him. In doing so, he completes the game and returns to reality. Then he finds that his father is not going to send him to a boarding school after all.

In Jumanji, time is flexible. The film director Stephen Spielberg’s “Back to the Future” films play with time in the same way.  Top scientists even tell us now that time travel is theoretically possible !

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                     B

It’s that time of year when people need to lock their cars. It’s not because there are a lot of criminals running around stealing cars. Rather, it’s because of good-hearted neighbors who want to share their harvest.  Especially with this year’s large crop, leaving a car unlocked in my neighborhood is an invitation for someone to fill it with zucchini（西葫芦）.

My sister, Sharon, recently had a good year for tomatoes. She and her family had eaten and canned so many that they had begun to feel their skin turn slightly red. That’s when she decided it was time to share her blessings. She started calling everyone she knew. When that failed, she began asking everyone in the neighborhood, eventually finding a neighbor delighted to have the tomatoes. “Feel free to take whatever you want,” Sharon told her. Later that day, Sharon found that her garden had indeed been harvested. She felt happy that she could help someone and that the food didn’t go to waste.

A few days later, Sharon answered the door. There was the neighbor, holding a hot loaf of bread. The neighbor smiled pleasantly, “I wanted to thank you for all of the tomatoes, and I have to admit that I took a few other things and hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

Sharon couldn’t think of anything else in her garden that had been worth harvesting and said so. “Oh, but you did,” the neighbor said. “You had some of the prettiest zucchini I’ve ever seen.”

Sharon was confused. They hadn’t even planted any zucchini. But her neighbor insisted that there really were bright-green zucchini in her garden. Sharon felt curious and decided to go to see where the zucchini had grown. The two of them walked together into the backyard. When the neighbor pointed at the long green vegetables, Sharon smiled.  “Well, actually, those are cucumbers（黄瓜）that we never harvested, because they got too big, soft and bitter for eating.”

The neighbor looked at Sharon, shock written all over her face. She gulped（哽住）a few times, and then, smiling, held out the bread, part of a batch she had shared all over the neighborhood. “I brought you a nice loaf of cucumber bread. I hope you like it.”

                             C

Land Art, sometimes referred to as Earth Art or Earthworks, is a form of art which involves using physical landscapes to create art, taking art out of the museum and into the outside world.  Modern Land Art movement really got going in the 1960s, when American artists began creating Land Art on a large scale. Today, works of modern Land Art can be seen all over the world, sometimes right alongside much older pieces of Land Art created by people who lived thousands of years ago.

Land Art, which is not necessarily unchangeable, can take a number of forms. For example, in 1970 Robert Smithson created the Spiral Jetty （螺旋状防波堤）, made of a collection of stones and mud, in the Great Salt Lake. The American artist made a large jetty in a spiral shape which sticks out into the waters of the lake.

Reshaping the landscape is a common characteristic of Land Art, which can be created by moving parts around. People can also add things to the environment to create Land Art, like salt, which is added to the Spiral Jetty.  It is possible to use plants.  In all cases, Land Art is immovable.

Land Art is designed to gradually form, change, and eventually decay（衰落）. That’s one of the biggest differences between Land Art and most of the art one sees in the museums. Some works of art can exist only for a few hours or days. Others are exposed to rain and wind so that they develop and decay over time, which is part of the attractiveness in the eyes of the artists.

                              D

People have been wondering why elephants do not develop cancer even though they have lifespans（寿命）that are similar to humans, living for around 50 to 70 years.

Now scientists believe they know why. A team at the University of Chicago, US has found that elephants carry a large number of genes that stop tumors（肿瘤）developing. To be precise, they found 20 copies of an anti-tumor gene called TP53 in elephants.  Most other species, including humans, only carry one copy.

According to the research, the extra copies of the gene improved the animal’s sensitivity to DNA damage, which lets the cells quickly kill themselves when damaged before they can go on to form deadly tumors.

“An increased risk of developing cancer has stood in the way of the evolution of large body sizes in many animals ,” the study author Dr Vincent Lynch told The Guardian. If every living cell has the same chance of becoming cancerous（癌变的）, large creatures with a long lifespan like whales and elephants should have a greater risk of developing cancer than humans and mice. But across species, the risk of cancer does not show a connection with body mass.

This phenomenon was found by Oxford University scientist Richard Peto in the 1970s and later named “Peto’s paradox（悖论）”. Biologists believe it results from larger animals using protection that many smaller animals do not.  In the elephant’s case, the making of TP53 is nature’s way of keeping this species alive.

The study also found that when the same genes were brought to life in mice, they had the same cancer resistance as elephants. This means researchers could use the discovery to develop new treatments that can help stop cancers spreading or even developing in the first place.

“Nature has already figured out how to prevent cancer,” said Joshua Schiffman, a biologist at the School of Medicine, University of Utah, US. “It’s up to us to learn how different animals deal with the problem so that we can use those strategies to prevent cancer in people.”