On a dark night, 11-year-old Joe was playing hide-and-seek with his friends in the backyard when he thought he saw Magellan—a huge housecat. However, when the cat suddenly jumped on his head, Joe found it turned out a young cougar. He backed away from the animal, then turned and ran inside the house.
Cougar encounters like this one are becoming increasingly common in the U.S. Most people assume that’s because cougar populations are growing, or because the big cats are coming into closer contact with the expanding web of human suburbs. But Professor Robert Wielgus at Washington State University argues that poorly designed hunting policies might be causing an increase in cougar-human conflicts.
Wielgus’s research teams have been fitting the big cats with radio collars and monitoring their movements. They find that the cougar population is actually declining rapidly and almost no male cougars are over four years of age. And a study shows that the heavily hunted area has five times as many cougar complaints as the lightly hunted area—even though the density of cougars is about the same in both areas.
Wielgus suspects that hunting policies, which allow older males to be killed to keep cougar populations in check, were the culprit and teenage cougars in the heavily hunted area may be responsible for most of the trouble. To test his theory, he adds two more groups of cougars to the tracking program—one in a heavily hunted area and another in a comparable but lightly hunted area. He concludes that heavy hunting indeed almost wipes out older males and the population structure in the heavily hunted area shifts toward younger animals.
With these findings, Wielgus believes without adults to keep them under control, the disorderly teens are more likely to come into conflict with humans, farm animals and pets.
Wielgus’s ideas don’t sit well with everyone. “Hunting definitely does cause lots of teenage males to flow in, but I don’t yet see solid proof that they are more likely to cause trouble than older cats,” says the University of Montana’s Robinson. “In many cases, the new arrivals have been squeezed out of remote wilderness habitat and forced into areas where they are more likely to encounter humans. I think humans are primarily responsible for all the interaction you see. We’re moving into these areas where cougars and deer are,” according to Alldredge, a researcher at the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
We may not understand what makes 18-year-old males more likely than 48-year-old men to do dangerous things, Wielgus says, but we know that the world would be a different place, if teenagers were in charge.
1．The passage begins with a story to ________.| A．lead into the topic | B．describe an incident |
| C．show the author’s attitude | D．warn of the dangers of cougars |
| A．effect | B．evidence | C．cause | D．target |
| A．Alldredge agrees hunting results in the arrival of lots of teens. |
| B．Robinson doubts whether age is a key factor in human-cougar conflicts. |
| C．Alldredge believes killing older males may cause a bigger threat. |
| D．Robinson holds humans are to blame for the fall of older males. |
| A．Driving teenage cougars back into their natural habitat. |
| B．Getting people to move out of the areas where cougars are. |
| C．Forbidding children to play in the backyard by themselves. |
| D．Changing hunting policies to ensure a healthy cougar population. |
Wealth
When I was a child, my parents gave me a piggy bank to teach me that, if I wanted something, I should save money to buy
Have you ever wondered how the trainers at Sea World get the 19,000-pound whale to jump 22 feet out of water and perform tricks? They get that whale to go over a rope farther out of the water than most of us can imagine.
So how do the trainers at Sea World do it? The first thing they do is reinforce(强化) the behavior that they want repeated --- in this case, to get the whale to go over the rope.
Positive reinforcement is the key of that simple principle that produces such splendid results. And as the whale begins to go over the rope more often than under, the trainers begin to raise the rope. It must be raised slowly enough so that the whale doesn’t starve.
So we need to set up the circumstances so that people can’t fail. Over-celebrate, under-criticize…and know how far to raise the rope.
| A．This is a great challenge |
| B．And the whale stays right where it is |
| C．If we figure out a way to motivate the whale |
| D．They start with the rope below the surface of the water |
| E．If we under-criticize, punish and discipline less than expected |
| F．Whales are taught that their negative behavior won’t be acknowledged |
| G．The simple lesson to be learned from the whale trainers is to over-celebrate |
I’m glad to know that you enjoyed volunteer activity very much.
Yours,
Li Hua
Yours,
LiHua
Yours,
Li Hua
Yours,
Li Hua
The Hardest Novel I’ve Ever Read
For the last three months, I have glared at its fat heavy form on my floor with a vague sense of personal failure. I have opened Ulysses twice, determined to finish it, and managed to get all the way to page 46. I have read so little both times that I have never bothered using a bookmark.
Why do I get stuck?
There are a few other “worthy” works of literature I have yet to read, including Infinite Jest and War and Peace.
The English writer Virginia Woolf thought Ulysses was nonsense as she complained in her diaries about the pressure to finish reading it. By contrast, Vladimir Nabokov, the author who wrote Lolita expressed deep love for it.
Some people love Ulysses, so where am I getting wrong? My ultimate hope is that the struggle will be worth the effort and I can proceed victorious onto page 800 or so, on my third fourth, eighteenth try. Something tells me I will get there in the end.
| A．I’m not entirely sure myself |
| B．A lot of them are weighty tomes (巨著), but I like big books |
| C．It seems that reading Ulysses is a big different experience for everyone. |
| D．Even when staring at pages without absorbing a word, I thought nice thoughts about it |
| E．They, however, only cause me a slight sense of shame that I have not read or enjoyed them |
| F．I have been amused and charmed by the first two or three chapters, and then puzzled and bored. |
For humans, ignorance (无知) is inevitable (不可避免的) : It's our natural state. There's too much complexity in the world for any individual to master. Ignorance can be frustrating, but the problem is not ignorance itself.
According to David Dunning, ignorant people don't know how ignorant they are. If you give a group of people a task to do and then ask them how well they think they've done on the task. Poor performers overestimate how well they've done; strong performers often underestimate their performance: This is because those who lack skills also lack the knowledge of what skills they're missing.
Our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do what they don't know.
This is a fact of life.
| A．Ignorance means you have neither. |
| B．So they think they're pretty good. |
| C．It’s the trouble we get into by not recognizing it. |
| D．But ignorance has costs. |
| E．It's knowledge of possibilities that makes us miss them. |
| F．We can't choose what we don't know about. |
| G．In that way, ignorance channels the course we take in life. |
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