Scientific experiments can sometimes go wrong and when they do the results may range from the disastrous to the troubling. One such experiment took place in South America about fifty years ago. Whether its final consequences will cause serious damage or nothing more than a small trouble still remains to be seen.
The story began in 1956 when an American scientist working in Brazil decided to solve the problem of increasing the productivity of that country’s bees. He imported a very active type of African bee from Tanzania and mated (交配)it with the more easy-going native variety to produce a new kind of bees. The new bees worked harder and produced twice as much honey. It seemed that Professor Kerr, for that was the scientist's name, had a total success on his hands.www.zxxk.com
Then things began to go wrong. For some reason as yet unseen, but perhaps as a result of something in their environment, the new bees began to develop extremely attacking personalities. They became bad-tempered and easy to be angry, attacked the native bees and drove them from their living places.
But worse was to follow. Having taken over the countryside, the new bees, with their dangerous stings (叮) , began to attack its neighbors -- cats, dogs, horses, chickens and finally man himself. A long period of terror began that has so far killed a great number of animals and about 150 human beings.
This would have been bad enough if the bees had stayed in Brazil. But now they are on the move, heading northwards in countless millions towards Central and North America, and moving at the alarming speed of 200 miles a year. The countries that lie in their path are naturally worried because it looks as if nothing can be done to stop them.
【小題1】 The results of the South American experiment         .

Kids at the Interlake School Division were the first Canadian students to take part in a program to send experiments to the International Space Station.(ISS).
Jordan Schott and three other sixth grade students came up with the idea to test royal jelly(蜂王漿) in space . Their experiment came very close to be tested on the space station. “We were seeing if we could send it to space, and if it would lose its nutritional value” faster and or slower, ”said Schott. Schott is one of the 18 students in the Space Knights Club at Woodlands Elementary School, part of the Interlake School Division. Over 450 students from the Division took part in the program.
“I thought we were just students and we couldn’t do much in the way of that. It’s a way to communicate with people up there ,” said Braeden Clark, a seventh grade student who is also in the club.
The astronauts shared what they learned with their school with a full day of activities all about science and space.
Teacher Maria Nickel is the organizer of the club. She said the day was great for students to learn what they could do. “Space is one of those great things that get kids excited, but it also gives them the chance to do so much. They can be an astronaut; they can be an engineer, ”She said.
The day was held in honour of Chris Hadfield, a Canadian astronaut now in the Internal Space Station. “It gives kids someone more to look up to. Here’s a real hero to look up to who’s doing it all, doing it through education,” said Nickel.
Jordan Schott thinks it’s really cool. “To me it seems so cool how people can go up to space, and science is something I’ve always liked,” She said. Schott says she wants to follow in the footsteps of Hadfield and be an astronaut when she gets older.
One of the winning experiments in the competition was produced by students from Argyle, Manitoba. It will travel to the space station in the fall of 2013.
【小題1】The program at the Interlake School Division________-

Ask someone what they have done to help the environment recently and they will almost certainly mention recycling. Recycling in the home is very important of course. However, being forced to recycle often means we already have more material than we need. We are dealing with the results of that over-consumption in the greenest way possible, but it would be far better if we did not need to bring so much material home in the first place.
The total amount of packaging increased by 12% between 1999 and 2005. It now makes up a third of a typical household’s waste in the UK. In many supermarkets nowadays food items are packaged twice with plastic and cardboard.
Too much packaging is doing serious damage to the environment. The UK, for example, is running out of it for carrying this unnecessary waste. If such packaging is burnt, it gives off greenhouse gases which go on to cause the greenhouse effect. Recycling helps, but the process itself uses energy. The solution is not to produce such items in the first place. Food waste is a serious problem, too. Too many supermarkets encourage customers to buy more than they need. However, a few of them are coming round to the idea that this cannot continue, encouraging customers to reuse their plastic bags, for example.
But this is not just about supermarkets. It is about all of us. We have learned to associate packaging with quality. We have learned to think that something unpackaged is of poor quality. This is especially true of food. But it also applies to a wide range of consumer products, which often have far more packaging than necessary.
There are signs of hope. As more of us recycle, we are beginning to realise just how much unnecessary material are collecting. We need to face the wastefulness of our consumer culture, but we have a mountain to climb.
【小題1】What does the underlined phrase “over-consumption” refer to?

Online Communication
In an age when technology moves faster than most can keep up with, a small group of people still remain in the time of old-fashioned letter. Frankly speaking, I was once certain that traditional letters could never be replaced by other means of communication.
But a story about online communication changed my mind.
An old man, who suffered a lot from Parkinson’s disease, was not able to talk clearly and could hardly write his name. Living totally alone, he managed to keep in touch with nearly all the members of his family. How did he achieve this? He clicked out words on his computer keyboard.
I, therefore, managed to get an E-mail box as soon as the opportunity came. My life changed. E-mail, and all online communication, is something truly different. It has capabilities（能力） that few other products can match.
E-mail is convenient. It takes less time with its fast speed and 24-hour connection. The slow postal service is no match. If you wouldn’t want to have a face-to-face talk with your manager, you might talk with him through E-mail even if you are in the same office.
Naming all the good things about online communication is not easy. But wait. E-mail can be inconvenient. It can waste time and energy. Just think what may happen when you take a short vacation and return to find your e-mail box filled with 200 unread messages. You could easily spend half a day clearing junk ads.
Then, online communication will keep us staying at our computer while it connects us to distant strangers. Once we throw ourselves into the machine, we may forget the human touches we once held so dear. I’m sure there is and always will be a place for the old-fashioned letter, phone call, and face-to-face meeting… even in the world of modern communication.
As I listen to the sound of the modem(調(diào)制解調(diào)器), I was excited at stepping out to the outside world but, at the same time, I sensed a loss of control over something valuable in my personal life.
【小題1】What is the most probable meaning of the underlined word “junk” in paragraph6?

Global warming is causing more than 300,000 deaths and about $125 billion in economic losses each year, according to a report by the Global Humanitarian Forum, an organization led by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general.
The report, to be released Friday, analyzed data and existing studies of health, disaster, population and economic trends. It found that human-influenced climate change was raising the global death rates from illnesses including malnutrition and heat-related health problems.
But even before its release, the report drew criticism from some experts on climate and risk, who questioned its methods and conclusions. Along with the deaths, the report said that the lives of 325 million people, primarily in poor countries,were being seriously affected by climate change. It projected that the number would double by 2030.
Roger Pielke Jr., a politicalscientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the Forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment” because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid（在...中間） the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable(易受傷害的) regions. Dr. Pielke said that “climate change is an important problem requiring our utmost attention.” But the report, he said, “will harm the cause for action on both climate change and disasters because it is so deeply flawed(有瑕疵的).”
However, Soren Andreasen, a social scientist at Dalberg Global Development Partners who supervised the writing of the report, defended it, saying that it was clear that the numbers were rough estimates. He said the report was aimed at world leaders, who will meet in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new international climate treaty.
In a press release describing the report, Mr. Annan stressed the need for the negotiations to focus on increasing the flow of money from rich to poor regions to help reduce their vulnerability to climate hazards while still controling the emissions of the heat-trapping gases. More than 90% of the human and economic losses from climate change are occurring in poor countries, according to the report.
【小題1】 What is the finding of the Global Humanitarian Forum?

About ten men in every hundred suffer from color blindness in some way. Women are luckier; only about one in two hundred is affected in this matter. Perhaps, after all, it is safer to be driven by a woman!
There are different forms of color blindness. In some cases a man may not be able to see deep red. He may think that red, orange and yellow are all shadows of green. Sometimes a person cannot tell the difference between blue and green. In rare cases an unlucky man may see everything in shades of green － a strange world indeed.
Color blindness in human beings is a strange thing to explain. In a single eye there are millions of very small things called “cones”. These help us to see in a bright light and to tell difference between colors. There are also millions of “rods”, but these are used for seeing when it is near dark. They show us shape but no color.
Some insects have favorite colors. Mosquitoes prefer blue to yellow. A red light will not attract insects, but a blue lamp will. In a similar way human beings also have favorite colors. Yet we are lucky. With the aid of the cones in our eyes we can see many beautiful colors by day, and with the aid of the rods we can see shapes at night. One day we may even learn more about the invisible colors around us.
【小題1】The passage is mainly about _____________.

“If you want to see a thing well, reach out and touch it!”
That may seem a strange thing to say. But touching things can help you to see them better.
Your eyes can tell you that a glass ball is round. But by holding it in your hands, you can feel how smooth and cool the ball is. You can feel how heavy the glass is. When you feel all these about the ball, you really see it. With your skin, you can feel better. For example, your fingers can tell the difference between two coins in your pocket. You can feel a little drop of water on the back of your hand, too. You can even feel sounds against your skin. Have you ever wanted to know why some people like very loud music? They must like to feel the sounds of music.
All children soon learn what “Don't touch!”means. They hear it often. Yet most of us keep on touching things as we grow up. In shops, we touch things we might buy: food, clothes. To see something well, we have to touch it. The bottoms of our feet can feel things, too. You know this when you walk on warm sand, cool grass or a hard floor. All feel different under your feet.
There are ways of learning to see well by feeling. One way is to close your eyes and try to feel everything that is touching your skin. Feel the shoes on your feet, the clothes on your body, the air on your skin. At first, it is not easy to feel these things. You are too used to them!
Most museums are just for looking. But today some museums have some things to touch. Their signs say, “Do touch!” There you can feel everything on show.
If you want to see better, reach out and touch. Then you will really see!
【小題1】By touching things,               .

Mark and his brother Jason both were looking at the shining new computer enviously. Jason was determined not to go against their father’s wishes but Mark was more adventurous than his brother. He loves experimenting and his aim was to become a scientist like his father.
“Dad will be really mad if he finds out you’ve been playing with his new computer” Jason said, “He told us not  to touch it.”
“He won’t find out,” Mark said, “I’ll just have a quick look and shut it down.”
Mark had been scolded before for touching his father’s equipment. But his curiosity was difficult to control and this new computer really puzzled him.
It was a strange-looking machine — one his dad had brought home from the laboratory where he worked. “It’s an experimental model,” his father had explained, so don’t touch it under any circumstances.” But his father’s warning only served to make Mark more curious. Without any further thought, Mark turned on the power switch. The computer burst into life and seconds later, the screen turned into colours, shifting and changing, and then two big white words appeared in the centre of the screen: “SPACE TRANSPORTER.”
“Yes!” Mark cried excitedly, “It’s a computer game. I knew it! Dad’s only been pretending to work. He’s really been playing games instead!” A new message appeared on the screen:
“ENTER NAMES
VOYAGE�。�
VOYAGE　２
Mark’s finger flew across the keyboard as he typed in both of their names.
“INPUT ACCEPTED.
START  TRANSPORT  PROGRAM.
AUTO-RETRIEVE  INITIATED(自動回收程序已啟動).”
The screen turn even brighter and a noise suddenly rose in volume.
“I think we’d better shut it off, Mark,” Jason yelled out in terror, reaching for the power switch. A beam(光束) of dazzling white light burst out of the computer screen, wrapping the boys in its glow(光芒)，until they themselves seemed to be glowing. Then it died down just as suddenly as it had burst into life. And the boys were no longer there. On the screen, the letters changed：
“TRANSPORT SUCCESSFUL．
DESTINATION:  MARS.
RETRIEVE DATE:  2025
【小題1】Why did Mark touch the computer against his father’s warning?

Modern inventions have speeded up people's lives amazingly. Motor cars cover a hundred miles in light more than an hour, aircraft cross the world inside a day, while computers operate at lightning speed. Indeed, this love of speed seems never ending. Every year motor cars are produced which go even faster and each new computer boasts(吹噓) of saving precious seconds in handling tasks.
All this saves time, but at a price.When we lose or gain half a day in speeding across the world in an airplane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfortable feeling known as jet lag；our bodies feel that they have been left behind in another time zone. Again, spending too long at computers results in painful wrists and fingers. Mobile phones also                   , according to some scientists；too much use may put harmful radiation into our brains, a consequence we do not like to think about.
However, what do we do with the time we have saved? Certainly not relax, or so it seems. We are so accustomed to constant activity that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing or even just one thing at a time. Perhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story on the radio, letting imagination take us into another world.
There was a time when some people's lives were devoted simply to the cultivation(耕耘) of the land or the care of cattle. No multi tasking there；their lives went on at a much gentler pace, and in a familiar pattern. There is much that we might envy about a way of life like this. Yet before we do so, we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors faced: they farmed with bare hands, often lived close to hunger, and had to make tools from wood and stone. Modern machinery has freed people from that primitive existence.
【小題1】What's the passage mainly about?(within 10 words)
                                                                       
【小題2】List the difficulties our ancestors met according to the text.(within 15 words)
①                                                                      
②                                                                      
③                                                                      
【小題3】Fill in the blank in the 2nd paragraph with proper words or phrases.
                                                                       
【小題4】Why do we make new products more and more time-saving according to Paragraph 1 of this passage?
                                                                       
【小題5】Translate the underlined sentence in the 3rd paragraph into Chinese.
                                                                       
                                                                       

A few degrees can make a big difference when it comes to food storage. Foods can go bad if they get too warm. But for many of the world’s poor, finding a good way to keep food cool is difficult. Refrigerators are costly and they need electricity.
Yet spoiled food not only creates health risks but also economic losses. Farmers lose money when they have to throw away products that they cannot sell quickly.
But in nineteen ninety-five a teacher in northern Nigeria named Mohammed Bah Abba found a solution. He developed the “Pot-in-Pot Preservation/Cooling System.” It uses two round containers made of clay. A smaller pot is placed inside a larger one. The space between the two pots is filled with wet sand. The inner pot can be filled with fruit, vegetables or drinks. A wet cloth covers the whole cooling system.
Food stored in the smaller pot is kept from spoiling through a simple evaporation(蒸發(fā)) process. Water in the sand between the two pots evaporates through the surface of the larger pot, where drier outside air is moving.
The evaporation process creates a drop in temperature of several degrees. This cools the inner pot and helps keep food safe from harmful bacteria. Some foods can be kept fresh this way for several weeks.
People throughout Nigeria began using the invention. And it became popular with farmers in other African countries. Mohammed Bah Abba personally financed the first five thousand pot-in-pot systems for his own community and five villages nearby.
In two thousand, the Rolex Watch Company of Switzerland honored him with the Rolex Award for Enterprise. This award recognizes people trying to develop projects aimed at improving human knowledge and well-being. A committee considers projects in science and medicine, technology, exploration and discovery, the environment and cultural history. Winners receive financial assistance to help develop and extend their projects.
【小題1】Which is the best title of the passage?