Many years ago there lived in Holland a boy named Peter. Peter's father was one of the men who tended the gates in the dikes(堤坝)，called sluices. He opened and closed the sluices so that ships could pass out of Holland's canals into the great sea.
One afternoon in the early fall, when Peter was eight years old, his mother called him from his play. “Come, Peter,” she said. “I want you to go across the dike and take these cakes to your friend, the blind man. Remember that you shall be home before dark.”The little boy was glad to go on such an errand (跑腿)， and started off with a light heart. He stayed with the poor blind man a little while to tell him something about his walk along the dike-the sun, the flowers and the ships far out at sea. Then he remembered his mother's wish that he should return before dark. Bidding his friend goodbye, he set out for home.
As he walked beside the canal, he noticed how the rains had swollen the water, and how they beat against the side of the dike, and he thought of his father's gates. “I am glad they are so strong,” he said to himself.“If the dike gave way what should we do? These pretty fields would be covered with water.” As he walked along the dike he sometimes stopped to pick the pretty blue flowers that grew beside the road, or to listen to the rabbits' soft tread as they rustled through the grass.
Suddenly he heard a noise. It was the sound of trickling water! He stopped and looked down. There was a small hole in the dike, through which a tiny stream was flowing. Any child in Holland is frightened at the thought of a leak in the dike. Peter understood the danger at once. If the water ran through a little hole it would soon make a larger one, and the whole country would be flooded. In a moment he saw what he must do. Throwing away his flowers, he climbed down the side of the dike and thrust his finger into the tiny hole. The flowing of the water was stopped! “Oh!” he said to himself. “I can keep the water back with my finger. Holland shall not be drowned while I am here. ”
This was all very well at first, but soon it grew dark and cold. The little fellow shouted and screamed. “Come here; come here,” he called. But no one heard him; no one came to help him.
It grew still colder, and his arm ached, and began to grow stiff and numb.
The moon and stars looked down on the child crouching (蹲) on a stone on the side of the dike.
Why make a film about Ned Kelly? More ingenious crime than those committed by the reckless Australian bandit are reported every day. What is there in Ned Kelly to justify dragging the mesmeric Mick Jagger so far into the Australian bush and away from his natural haunts? The answer is that the film makers know we always fall for a bandit, and Jagger is set to do for bold Ned Kelly what Brando once did for the arrogant Emiliano Zapata.
The bandit inhabits a special realm of legend where his deeds are embroidered by others; where his death rather than his life is considered beyond belief; where the men who bring him to“justice” are afflicted with doubts about their role.
The bandits had a role to play as definite as that of the authorities who condemned them. These were men in conflict with authority, and, in the absence of strong law or the idea of loyal opposition, they took to the hills. Even there, however, many of them obeyed certain unwritten rules.
There robbers, who claimed to be something more than mere thieves, had in common, firstly, a sense of loyalty and identity with the peasants they came from. They didn’t steal the peasant’s harvest; they did steal the lord’s.
And certain characteristics seem to apply to “social bandits” whether they were in Sicily or Peru. They were generally young men under the age of marriage, predictably the best age for dissidence. Some were simply the surplus male population who had to look for another source of income; others were runway serfs or ex-soldiers; a minority, though the most interesting, were outstanding men who were unwilling to accept the meek and passive role of peasant.
They usually operated in bands between ten and twenty strong and relied for survival on difficult terrain and bad transport. And bandits proposed best where authority was merely local —over the next hill and they were free. Unlike the general run of peasantry they had a taste for flamboyant dress and gesture; but they usually shared the peasants’ religious beliefs and superstitions.
The first sign of a man caught up in the Robin Hood syndrome was when he started out, forced into outlawry as a victim of injustice; and when he then set out to “right wrongs”, first his own and then other people’s. The classic bandit then “take from the rich and gives to the poor” in conformity with his own sense of social justice; he never kills except in self-defense or justifiable place; his people admire and help to protect him; he dies through the treason of one of them; he behaves as of invisible and invulnerable; he is a “loyalist”, never the enemy of the king but only of the local oppressors.
None of the bandits lived up fully to this image of the “noble robber” and for many the claim of larger motives was often a delusion.
Yet amazingly, many of these violent men did behave at least half the time in accordance with this idealist pattern. Pancho Villa in Mexico and Salvatore Giuliano in Italy began their careers harshly victimized. Many of their charitable acts later became legends.
The bandit in the real world is rooted in peasant society and when its simple agricultural system is left behind so is he. But the tales and legends, the books and films continue to appear for an audience that is neither peasant nor bandit. In some ways the characters and deeds of the great bandits could so readily be the stuff of grand opera — Don Jose on “Carmen” is based on the Andalusian bandit El Empranillo. But they are perhaps more at home in folk songs, in popular tales and the ritual dramas of films. When we sit in the darkness of the cinema to watch the bold deeds of Ned Kelly we are caught up in admiration for their strong individuality, their simple gesture of protest, their passion for justice and their confidence that they cannot be beaten. This sustains us nearly as much as it did the almost hopeless people from whom they sprang.
1．Which of the following words is NOT intended to suggest approval of bandits?| A．Bold (Para. 1). |
| B．Claimed (Para. 4). |
| C．Legend (Para. 2). |
| D．Loyalty (Para. 4). |
| A．They liked theatrical clothes and behavior. |
| B．They wanted to help the poor country folk. |
| C．They were unwilling to accept injustice. |
| D．They had very few careers open to them. |
| A．had received excessive ill-treatment |
| B．were severely punished for their crimes |
| C．took to violence through a sense of injustice |
| D．were misunderstood by their parents and friends |
| A．are sure they are invincible |
| B．possess a theatrical quality |
| C．retain the virtues of a peasant society |
| D．protest against injustice and inequality |
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| A．boring | B．profitable | C．dangerous | D．surprising |
| A．evident | B．mysterious | C．peculiar | D．infectious |
| A．updated | B．transformed | C．established | D．infected |
| A．moderately | B．easily | C．cautiously | D．gradually |
| A．compares | B．implies | C．devotes | D．limits |
| A．personal | B．targeted | C．random | D．surprising |
| A．variety | B．timing | C．punishment | D．detection |
| A．thrown away | B．take in | C．shut down | D．carried out |
| A．exhaustion | B．result | C．disappearance | D．mistrust |
| A．For example | B．By comparison | C．What’s more | D．In summary |
| A．hacker | B．customer | C．retailer | D．website |
| A．unchanged | B．varying | C．unpredictable | D．avoidable |
| A．curves | B．characters | C．dictionaries | D．accounts |
| A．record | B．suspend | C．crack | D．ruin |
| A．Investigate | B．Consult | C．Avoid | D．Guarantee |
People with a rare genetic disorder known as Prader-Willi syndrome never feel full, and this excess hunger can lead to life-threatening obesity (肥胖症). Scientists studying the problem have now found that the fist-shaped structure known as the cerebellum (小脑) -- which had not previously been linked to hunger -- is key to regulating satiation (饱食) in those with this condition.
This finding is the latest in a series of discoveries revealing that the cerebellum, long thought to be primarily involved in movement harmony, also plays a broad role in cognition, emotion and behavior. “We’ve opened up a whole field of cerebellar control of food intake,” says Albert Chen, a neuroscientist at the Scintillon Institute in California.
The project began with an accidental observation: Chen and his team noticed they could make mice stop eating by activating small pockets of neurons (神经元) in regions known as the anterior deep cerebellar nuclei (aDCN), within the cerebellum. Fascinated, the researchers gathered data using functional MRI to compare brain activity in 14 people who had Prader-Willi syndrome with activity in 14 unaffected people while each testee viewed images of food -- either immediately following a meal or after fasting (禁食) for at least four hours.
New analysis of these scans revealed that activity in the same regions Chen’s group had accurately pointed out in mice, the aDCN, appeared to be significantly disturbed in humans with Prader-Willi syndrome. In healthy individuals, the aDCN were more active in response to food images while fasting than just after a meal, but no such difference was identifiable in participants with the disorder. The result suggested that the aDCN were involved in controlling hunger. Further experiments on mice, conducted by researchers from several different institutions, demonstrated that activating the animals’ aDCN neurons dramatically reduced food intake by weakening how the brain’s pleasure center responds to food.
For years neuroscientists studying appetite focused mainly either on the hypothalamus, a brain area involved in regulating energy balance, or on reward-processing centers such as the nucleus accumbens (伏隔核). But this group has identified a new feeding center in the brain, says Elanor Hinton, a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved with the study. “I’ve been working in appetite research for the past 15 years or so, and the cerebellum has just not been a target,” Hinton says. “I think this is going to be important both for Prader-Willi syndrome and, much more widely, to address obesity in the general population.”
1．Before the recent study, scientists had assumed that the cerebellum ________.| A．helps control everyday food intake |
| B．plays a minor role in movement harmony |
| C．has nothing to do with appetite regulation |
| D．has a direct link to behavioral development |
| A．the healthy testees were more likely to overeat after fasting |
| B．food images increased the appetite of the testees with Prader-Willi syndrome |
| C．the aDCN in the healthy testees responded to food images more actively after fasting |
| D．the aDCN in the testees with Prader-Willi syndrome made no response to food images |
| A．It may help in the early diagnosis of Prader-Willi syndrome. |
| B．It will have broader implications for the treatment of obesity. |
| C．The potential feeding center in human brain remains to be discovered. |
| D．More studies are needed to understand the link between appetite and reward-processing. |
| A．How our brain controls overeating. |
| B．How the aDCN works up our appetite. |
| C．How Prader-Willi syndrome can be prevented. |
| D．How lowering food intake benefits our overall health. |
Hello, my name is Li Hua.
Thanks for your attention!
DRUMMING WITH GRANDPA
Roger was filled with excitement as his mother told him his grandfather was on his way over. He always had fun together with his grandfather who once drummed in a band. They could make the whole house shake with their joyful music. Roger got excited and practiced drumming all morning.
Finally, Dad's car pulled up in front of the house. Upon hearing the car door opened. Roger shouted for joy from his bedroom window, "Hi, Grandpa! Listen to this!” Taking a deep breath, he raised his drumsticks and began rocking and rolling, just like Grandpa had taught him. Jumping up. he raced outside to his grandfather and asked, "Grandpa. what do you think? Are you ready to drum together?" Grandpa, giving Roger a hug, said. "It was wonderful, but I'm afraid I can't play right now.” Dad smiled at Roger, telling him some of Grandpa's finger joints were hurting him and that maybe he would want to play after a short rest. Roger didn't ask again.
After lunch, Roger went to his room to get his skateboard, finding someone had already stepped into the room. It was Grandpa who stood near the drum set. He picked up a drumstick and began to play. Thump! Thump! But just with two thumps, the drumstick fell onto the floor. Grandpa reached for it, trying to pick it up, but the drumstick fell out of his hand. He tried again and the same thing happened. Grandpa moved his red and swollen fingers, looking upset. Seeing this, Roger shut the door noiselessly. He walked to the sitting room where Dad was reading and asked Dad to drive him to his friend's house. "David has a drum with the pedal （踏板）and I'd like to borrow it," Roger told Dad about his plan. Dad got the car keys and off they went.
''Grandpa, a surprise!” Roger shouted when they returned with a big box.
Slowly, Grandpa reached out his foot and pushed the pedal as Roger did.
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