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The Metropolis Book Club
Membership
All you need to do is fill out the order form at the bottom of the page, select your first order from our book list and then post the completed form back to us.
Special offers for new members
As a special offer, you may choose any reduced-price books from our new members’ book list, to the value of 100 yuan in total. Tick the box on your form to order a free watch. Join before the end of this month and you receive another free book carefully chosen by our staff. Order an audio-book from the many on offer, at half the recommended retail price.
When you’ve joined
As a member you get around 50% off the publisher’s price of every book you buy, and what’s more, they come straight to your door. Your free club magazine arrives once a month to keep you up to date with the latest best-sellers we’ve added to our list. On the Internet, you can find all our titles for the year at our exclusive members’ website. Our website also has a book swap service where members can request or offer books for exchange.
Being a member
All you have to do is order four books during your first year. After that, you can decide on the number of books you wish to take. In each of your monthly club magazines, our experienced staff choose a “Book of the Month” for you, which is offered at an extra-special price. If you do not want this book, just say so in the space provided on the form and send it back to us. We always send the book if we do not receive this form.
Once we receive your order, your books are delivered within one week. And remember, you have up to a fortnight to decide if you wish to keep the books you have ordered. If they aren’t what you expected just send them back!
1.How can you become a member of the Metropolis Book Club?
A. By ordering a watch free of charge.
B. By sending the advertisement to the club.
C. By returning the completed order form
D. By choosing books with special prices.
2.What information does the monthly magazine give members?
A. The percentage saved on each book.
B. The names of all the books sold by the club.
C. The list of the newest books available to buy.
D. The books that can be swapped by club members.
3.What can we infer from the last part of the passage?
A. At least four books should be bought each year.
B. Members need to buy the “Book of the Month”.
C. The more books bought, the higher the member’s grade.
D. Members can look at the books before they buy them.
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Time flies, but the tracks of time remain in books and museums. This is what made a recent tragedy in Brazil even more terrible.
On Sept.2, a big fire ripped through the National Museum of Brazil. “ Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge were lost, ” Brazilian President Michel Temer wrote on Twitter after the fire. “It's a sad day for all Brazilians.”
Most of the 20 million pieces of history are believed to have been destroyed. Only as little as 10 percent of the collection may have survived, Time reported. Among all the items, there were Egyptian mummies, the bones of uniquely Brazilian creatures such as the long－necked dinosaur Maxakalisaurus, and an 11,500－year－old skull called Luzia, which was considered one of South America's oldest human fossils.
Besides these, Brazil's indigenous(本土的，土著的) knowledge also suffered. The museum housed world－famous collections of indigenous objects, as well as many audio recordings of local languages from all over Brazil. Some of these recordings, now lost, were of languages that are no longer spoken.
“The tragedy this Sunday is a sort of national suicide, a crime against our past and future generations,” Bernard Mello Franco, one of Brazil's best－known columnists, wrote on the O Globo newspaper site.
The cause of the fire is still unknown, as BBC News reported on Sept. 3. After the fire burned out, crowds protested outside the museum to show their anger at the loss of the irreplaceable items of historical value.
According to Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida, museums are living, breathing stores of who we are and where we've come from, and the world around us.
Just as underwater grass floats on the surface if it loses its roots, a nation is lost without its memories. The fire at the National Museum of Brazil teaches the world an important lesson: We should never neglect history.
1.What can be summarized as the main idea of the 3rd and 4th paragraphs?
A. Long history of South America. B. Remains from the fire.
C. Mysteries to be solved. D. History and knowledge burned up.
2.What opinion may be shared by Bernard Mello Franco and the protesters?
A. The government is to blame for the tragedy.
B. The museum should be rebuilt
C. The loss can't be made up for.
D. The criminal should be sentenced to death.
3.What does Emilio Bruna compare museums to?
A. Living stores of our past. B. Underwater grass.
C. The oldest fossils. D. National suicide.
4.What may be the best title of the passage?
A. Death of a civilization B. Functions of museums
C. Gone with the fire D. Brazilians' memories
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Are you a procrastinator（拖拉者）? It’s a common problem. And it can be harmful, as previous research has shown that people who procrastinate have higher levels of stress and lower well-being, reported the Association for Psychological Science in the US. But a new study has found a way to deal with this problem: Be more connected to your future self.
Psychologists think that each person believes that they are really two people: “Present Me” and “Future Me”. “People act as if they prefer their current selves’ needs and desires to those of their future selves,” wrote psychologists Neil Lewis and Daphna Oyserman.
Oyserman and Lewis decided to try to find a way to make “Present Me” imagine exactly how “Future Me” would feel the night before a big paper was due, though “Present Me” hadn’t started yet. They made “Present Me” think about a far-off event as a number of days away, not months or years.
Thinking about events in this way meant that something like a friend’s wedding seemed 16.3 days sooner when considered in days rather than months and 11.4 months sooner when considered in months rather than years.
The researchers also tried to find out whether people would take action sooner if they were told a certain event was happening in X days rather than years. For example, participants imagined they had a newborn child, and that the child would need to go to college in either 18 years or 6,570 days. The researchers found those in the “days” condition planned to start saving four times sooner than those in the “years” condition.
So if you think of your life in days instead of years, you may get things done quicker.
1.What did Oyserman and Lewis intend to do through their study?
A. To work on a solution to test if someone is a procrastinator.
B. To find out whether human beings usually have two different characters.
C. To discover procrastinators are more likely to have a lower sense of well-being.
D. To prove it’s helpful to connect our current selves more with future selves.
2.The underlined part “this way” in Paragraph 4 refers to “_________”.
A. setting up tough deadlines
B. following schedules strictly
C. counting in smaller units of time
D. imagining how your future self will feel
3.What helps prevent people from procrastinating?
A. Comparing their future selves with present selves.
B. Considering their current selves’ needs and desires.
C. Thinking about far-off events in days rather than years.
D. Marking important events on a calendar as a reminder.
4.What does the passage mainly talk about?
A. A way to get things done in time.
B. The harmful effects of procrastination.
C. The reason to overlook future needs and desires.
D. The way to reduce stress and improve happiness.
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Cold weather during winter months may keep many people from leaving home and running in the open air.
However, a new study shows that the drop in temperature is a good reason to run. In fact, researchers say, running in cold weather helps improve one’s performance.
Many people say running in the winter can be difficult. Two reasons are the low temperatures and bitter winds. Yet many runners might find it easier than running in hot weather.
That could be because lower temperatures reduce stress on the body. When you run in cold weather, your heart rate and the body’s dehydration (脱水) levels are lower than in warmer conditions. The body needs less water on a cold day than in warm weather.
This information comes from sports scientists at St. Mary’s University in London. John Brewer is a professor of applied sport science at St. Mary’s.
For this study, he and other researchers put a group of people into a room they called an “environmental chamber.” The researchers then recreated summer and winter weather conditions in the room. The test subjects were asked to run 10,000 meters under both conditions. Brewer says he and his team recorded biological measurements of the runners.
“We’ve got a group of subjects into the environmental chamber, we’ve changed the conditions to replicate the summer or winter and we’ve got them to run a 10km under both of those conditions and taken various measurements on each runner while they’ve been completing their 10km.”
Brewer says every movement runners make produces heat. He explains that one way in which we lose heat is by sweating. The body loses heat through droplets of sweat. He says the body also loses heat by transporting the blood to the surface of the skin.
1.What can we know about running in winter?
A. It increases pressure of the body. B. It improves the function of body.
C. It makes your heart rate higher. D. It needs more water than in summer.
2.What can we know about the research according to the text?
A. Researchers interviewed the subjects
B. Subjects were asked to run in winter and summer.
C. Subjects built the “environmental chamber”.
D. Biological measurements of the runners were recorded.
3.Which of the following can replace the underlined word “replicate” in Paragraph 7?
A. Combine. B. Remember.
C. Copy. D. Decorate.
4.What’s the best title for the passage?
A. Environmental Chamber B. The Way of Losing Heat
C. Running in Cold Weather Improves Performance D. Biological Measurements of the Runners
