大一英语阅读练习文档
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Listening and Note-takingSleepIt’s clear that everyone needs to sleep. Most people rarely think about how or why they sleep, however. We know that if we sleep well we feel rested. If we don’t sleep enough, we often feel tired and irritable. It seems that there are two purposes of sleep: physical rest and emotional or psychological rest. We need to rest our bodies and our minds. Both are important in order for us to be healthy.Each night we alternate between two kinds of sleep: active sleep and passive sleep. The passive sleep gives our body the rest that is needed and prepares us for active sleep in which dreaming occurs. And we are beginning to understand the importance of the dream stage in our sleep cycles. Let’s look at the different kinds of sleep. They’re quite different. In passive sleep, the body is at rest. The heart slows down. The body processes become very slow. We move very little. And the brain becomes very inactive. This stage of sleep is known as slow-wave sleep because the brain waves move in a very slow regular rhythm.If a person continues to sleep, she or he enters a new stage, a more active stage. The body goes through several changes: the brain temperature rises, the amount of blood in the brain increases, the body becomes very, very still, and the brain goes from being very inactive to being active. And as the brain becomes more active, the eyes begin to move rapidly. When the eyes begin to move, this is a sign of another change—the change is that the person is dreaming.Throughout the night, people alternate between passive and active sleep. The brain rests, then it becomes active, then dreaming occurs. The cycle is repeated: the brain rests, then it becomes active, then dreaming occurs. This cycle is repeated several times throughout the night. During eight hours of sleep people dream for a total of one and a half hours, on the average.All people experience these dream cycles. Many people say they don’t dream, or that they rarely dream. Doctors have studied the sleep cycle and have found that everyone dreams—in fact, that everyone needs to dream in order to stay healthy. It appears we need both kinds of sleep. We need passive sleep in order to rest our bodies. We need active sleep in order to dream. And dreaming helps us to rest our minds.Passage 1 what is a black hole?A black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape, even light. To see why this happens, imagine throwing a tennis ball into the air. The harder you throw the tennis ball, the faster it is traveling when it leaves you hand and the higher the ball will go before turning back. If you throw it hard enough it will never return; the gravitational attraction will not be able to pull it back down. The velocity the ball must have to escape is known as the escape velocity and for the earth is about 7miles a second.As a body is crushed into a smaller and smaller volume, the gravitational attraction increases, and hence the escape velocity gets bigger. Things have to be thrown harder and harder to escape. Eventually a point is reached when even light, which travels at 186 thousand miles a second, is not traveling fast enough to escape. At this point, nothing can get out as nothing can travel faster than light. This is a black hole.It is impossible to see a black hole directly because no light can escape from them; they are black. But there are good reasons to think they exist.When a large star has been built all its fuel it explodes into a supernova. The stuff that is left collapses down to an extremely dense object known as a neutron star. We know that these objectsexist because several have been found using radio telescopes.If the neutron star is too large, the gravitational forces overwhelm the pressure gradients and collapse cannot be halted. The neutron star continues to shrink until it finally becomes a black hole. This mass limit is only a couple of solar masses, that is about twice the mass of our sun, and so we should expect at least a few neutron stars to have this mass. Our sun is not particularly large; in fact it is quite small.A supernova occurs in our galaxy once every 300 years, and in neighboring galaxies about 500 neutron stars have been identified. Therefore we are quite confident that there should also be some black holes.Passage 2 My Ancestor Was a RhinocerosAt one time I thought my family was very different from every other family in the world. It happened because I had trouble with a word. That word was ancestor. Today, I know what it means. An ancestor is someone, a man or woman, in your family. That person is now dead, and died many years, even hundreds of years, ago.I first heard the word in a story my mother told me one night.“what,” I asked her, “is an ancestor?”My mother never made things easy for me. She went to a box and brought out a photograph. “That,” she said, “is your ancestor.”I looked at the photograph. Lying on the ground was a large animal. It had two small eyes, a big white horn on its nose, and a small tail. The animal was not asleep, I was sure of that. It was dead. So ,that was my ancestor. I went to sleep and dreamt of large animals.The next day I went to my mother and said, “ Are ancestors always dead?”“Oh, yes,” she told me. “They have to be dead. Y ou can’t have a live ancestor.”“Only dead ones?”“Y es.”Some days later I went to a friend’s house. “ Have you got any photographs of your ancestors?” I asked.“Lots,” he said.“Can I see?”His ancestors were different. His ancestors were all people. Men and women. I felt very bad that my ancestor was an animal.At school I asked the teacher a question. “what,” I asked, “is an ancestor?”“Ancestors,”the teacher said, “are the fathers and mothers of your grandmothers and grandfathers.”I knew then that I was different from everyone else in the world.For several months my dreams were full of large dead animals. I looked carefully at all my relatives, and stood a long time each day in front of the mirror. One day, I was sure, something was going to happen to my face.“Tell me about my ancestor,” I said to my mother. “ Did he really have a tail and a horn on the end of his nose?”She fetched the photograph down from the upstairs, and for the first time I saw a man with a gun, standing behind the animal.“There’s a man!” I shouted.My mother looked at me strangely.“My ancestor’s a man!” I shouted.Part 3 NewsNews Item 1A car bomb has exploded in eastern Columbia. At least five civilians have been killed. Two of them were children. The explosion took place near a military base where 70 United States special forces soldiers are training Columbian troops. Officials say a military security group that was passing by was the target. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack. Officials are offering a $17,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest. In another development reports say the president has increased his security. The move follows reports that Columbia’s largest rebel group is planning to kill the president.News item 2The government of Mali says all 14 Europeans held hostage by Algerian militants in the Sahara Desert have been released. A Milian official said the former hostages are within government officials. The hostages include 9 Germans, 4 Swiss and 1 Dutchmen. They were held for 5 months. Officials gave no details about the hostages’ condition. Officials also did not say if they paid the militants to release the hostages. The hostages were among 32 Europeans kidnapped by militants in southern Algeria in February. The Algerian army freed 17 of the hostages in a rescue operation in May. One hostage is said to have died of the extreme heat.News Item 3American’s Secretary of State Colin L. Powell says negotiators are close to an agreement for Libya to accept responsibility for the bombing of a passenger plane over Scotland. Mr Powell spoke Monday after talks in London between American, British and Libyan officials. Reports say Lybia would place almost $3,000 million in a Swiss bank for the families of those who died in the bombing. Libya would also declare that it accepts responsibility for the bombing of the Pam Am Airline in 1988. The explosion killed all 259 people on the plane. 11 others on the ground in Lockerbie were killed. A Libyan agent is in prison for life for placing a bomb on the plane. Dialogue 2 SnakesNow a lot of people will say, “oh ,dear this is something very significant….her dreaming of snakes”but it’s nothing to do with any kind of erm….double meaning that there may be. It’s because as a child, I lived in the East and I had many nasty experience with snakes. Once I was up on a tree…I was very little girl and down below a cobra and a rat snake, they actually were fighting, and they fought to death and I used to put my arms round the tree and I was stuck there and then after everything was finished, they had to send some people up the tree to prise my arms open and bring me down again. And another time we had just moved from one convent which was in a sort of a…fairly civilized part of the city to the outskirts and I reached out to get what I thought was a belt hanging up and of course it was a wretched snake. (terrible!) . Then we had patched roofs in some of the temporary school buildings and snakes liked to go up onto the roof. And I happened to be standing talking to a nun, and you know how in the course of conversation you tend to change places (Mm!) and we had just changed places when this wretched snake fell on my head and I went into hysterics….and I just can’t seem to get over this fear and I have this recurring nightmare….--is it always the same, is it… are you always in the same place and the same snakes and….--no, different places and they’re always so colorful and they always try to get my neck, round my neck or they try to get my knee and it’s….--whereabouts as a matter of interest, whereabouts was this, when you were a child?--This was in Sri Lanka. (Sri Lanka?) yes (Good heavens!....Extraordinary!) and as a result, I can be offered work if there’s anything to do with snakes I will just say no, I can’t…. you can offer me a million pounds and I will not do it. I can’t bear to see the picture of a snake on the screen or in a magazine. I can be all alone but I go into hysterics.。
