Pigeons in London have a bad reputation. Some...

Pigeons in London have a bad reputation. Some people call them flying rats. And many blame them for causing pollution with their droppings. But now the birds are being used to fight another kind of pollution in this city of 8.5 million.

“The problem for air pollution is that it’s been largely ignored as an issue for a long time,” says Andrea Lee, who works for the London-based environmental organization Client Earth. “People don’t realize how bad it is, and how it actually affects their health.” London’s poor air quality is linked to nearly 10,000 early deaths a year. Lee says, citing(引用)a report released by the city manager last year. If people were better informed about the pollution they’ re breathing, she says, they could pressure the government to do something about it.

Nearby, on a windy hill in London’s Regent’s Park, an experiment is underway that could help—the first week of flights by the Pigeon Air Patrol. It all began when Pierre Duquesnoy, the director for DigitasLBi, a marketing firm, won a London Design Festival contest last year to show how a world problem could be solved using Twitter. Duquesnoy, from France, chose the problem of air pollution.

“Basically, I realized how important the problem was,” he says.　 “But also I realized that most of the people around me didn’t know anything about it.” Duquesnoy says he wants to better measure pollution, while at the same time making the results accessible to the public through Twitter.

“So”, he wondered, “how could we go across the city quickly collecting as much data as possible?” Drones were his first thought. But it’s illegal to fly them over London. “But pigeons can fly above London, right?” he says. “They live—actually, they are Londoners as well. So, yeah, I thought about using pigeons equipped with mobile apps. And we can use not just street pigeons, but racing pigeons, because they fly pretty quickly and pretty low.”

So it might be time for Londoners to have more respect for their pigeons. The birds may just be helping to improve the quality of the city’s air.

1.What can we infer about London’s air quality from Paragraph 2?

A. Londoners are very satisfied with it.

B. The government is trying to improve it.

C. Londoners should pay more attention to it.

D. The government has done a lot to improve it.

2.Duquesnoy attended the London Design Festival to _________.

A. entertain Londoners. B. solve a world problem.

C. design a product for sale. D. protect animals like pigeons.

3.Why did Duquesnoy give up using drones to fly across London?

A. Because they are too expensive. B. Because they fly too quickly.

C. Because they are forbidden. D. Because they fly too high.

4.Which can be the best title for the text?

A. Clean air in London. B. London’s dirty secret.

C. London’s new pollution fighter. D. Causes of air pollution in London.

高三英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

Pigeons in London have a bad reputation. Some people call them flying rats. And many blame them for causing pollution with their droppings. But now the birds are being used to fight another kind of pollution in this city of 8.5 million.

“The problem for air pollution is that it’s been largely ignored as an issue for a long time,” says Andrea Lee, who works for the London-based environmental organization Client Earth. “People don’t realize how bad it is, and how it actually affects their health.” London’s poor air quality is linked to nearly 10,000 early deaths a year. Lee says, citing(引用)a report released by the city manager last year. If people were better informed about the pollution they’ re breathing, she says, they could pressure the government to do something about it.

Nearby, on a windy hill in London’s Regent’s Park, an experiment is underway that could help—the first week of flights by the Pigeon Air Patrol. It all began when Pierre Duquesnoy, the director for DigitasLBi, a marketing firm, won a London Design Festival contest last year to show how a world problem could be solved using Twitter. Duquesnoy, from France, chose the problem of air pollution.

“Basically, I realized how important the problem was,” he says.　 “But also I realized that most of the people around me didn’t know anything about it.” Duquesnoy says he wants to better measure pollution, while at the same time making the results accessible to the public through Twitter.

“So”, he wondered, “how could we go across the city quickly collecting as much data as possible?” Drones were his first thought. But it’s illegal to fly them over London. “But pigeons can fly above London, right?” he says. “They live—actually, they are Londoners as well. So, yeah, I thought about using pigeons equipped with mobile apps. And we can use not just street pigeons, but racing pigeons, because they fly pretty quickly and pretty low.”

So it might be time for Londoners to have more respect for their pigeons. The birds may just be helping to improve the quality of the city’s air.

1.What can we infer about London’s air quality from Paragraph 2?

A.Londoners are very satisfied with it.

B.The government is trying to improve it.

C.Londoners should pay more attention to it.

D.The government has done a lot to improve it.

2.Duquesnoy attended the London Design Festival to _________.

A.entertain Londoners. B.solve a world problem.

C.design a product for sale. D.protect animals like pigeons.

3.Why did Duquesnoy give up using drones to fly across London?

A.Because they are too expensive. B.Because they fly too quickly.

C.Because they are forbidden. D.Because they fly too high.

4.Which can be the best title for the text?

A.Clean air in London. B.London’s dirty secret.

C.London’s new pollution fighter. D.Causes of air pollution in London.

高三英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

Some people are bad at recalling names and faces, so it's possible that they have a condition called face blindness, ______ people suddenly have trouble recognizing family members, friends or even themselves．

A. for which　　　　 B. which

C. where　　　　　　　　 D. of which

高三英语单项填空中等难度题查看答案及解析

Some people are bad at recalling names and faces, so it's possible that they have a condition called face blindness, ______ people suddenly have trouble recognizing family members, friends or even themselves．

高三英语单项填空中等难度题查看答案及解析

Pigeons (鸽子) may be considered mice of the sky, but some scientists have found greater value in these urban birds: the blueprint for a new generation of flying machines.

Birds can transform the shape of their wings by fanning out their feathers or moving them closer together. Those adjustments allow birds to cut through the sky more flexibly than rigid drones (无人机). Now, using new insights into exactly how pigeons ‘joints control the spread of their wing feathers, researchers have built a robotic pigeon. This research paves the way for creating more light aircraft, says Dario Floreano, a roboticist in Switzerland not involved in the work.

“What’s really cool about this robot is that you can make adjustments in a robotic wing that you could never do when studying flight in a bird”, says David Lentink, an engineer and biologist at Stanford University. A controllable robotic pigeon solves that problem. In flight tests, Lentink’s team observed that bending only the fingers of one wing eased the robot into a banked turn-offering the first evidence that birds may sometimes use just their fingers to direct in flight. In a second study, Lentink’s group used their robotic wing design to confirm another insight into bird flight: how gaps are prevented from forming between feathers on extended wings.

This is the best set of robotic wings yet for testing how birds adjust their flight feathers to move through the air, says Tyson Hedrick, a biomechanist. But “there’s plenty of room for improvement.” For instance, a future flying robot could include a shoulder joint to investigate how waving a bird’s wings up and down influences flight, he says.

1.What is the newly-found worth of pigeons?

A.They help study other species.

B.They protect other urban birds.

C.They provide proof of mice’s harm.

D.They inspire a new aircraft.

2.What is Dario Floreano’s attitude to the research?

A.Negative. B.Positive.

C.Neutral. D.Critical.

3.What do the underlined words “that problem” in paragraph 3 refer to?

A.Pigeons in flight can hardly be observed.

B.People can’t make adjustments in birds’ wings.

C.It is difficult for pigeons to make a banked turn.

D.Pigeons fail to control the spread of their wing feathers.

4.Where does the text probably come from?

A.A travel journal.

B.A travel brochure.

C.A science fiction.

D.A science magazine.

高三英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

In recent years, Chinese arts have won the 　　　　 of a lot of people outside China.

A. reputation　　 B. enjoyment

C. appreciation　　 D. entertainment

高三英语单项填空中等难度题查看答案及解析

根据课文填空：

Before the middle of the 5th century, people in Britain all spoke a language called Celtic．Then three Germanic  __34____ from the __35____ mainland ---the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes---- invaded Britain．They each had their own language and Anglo-Saxon developed from_mixing these languages with Celtic．At the end of 9th century, the Vikings,people from Scandinavian countries,___36___Damark and Norway began to invade Britain．They __37____with them their languages,which also mixed with Anglo-Saxon．The language they____38__is what we now call Old English．

高三英语单词拼写中等难度题查看答案及解析

Some people are like homing pigeons: Drop them off anywhere, and they’ll find their way around. Other people, though, can’t tell when they’re holding a map upside down. Are the directionally challenged just bad learners?

Not all of your navigational (导航的)skills are learned. Research shows that your sense of direction is innate. An innate ability is something you are born with. Your brain has special navigational neurons—head-direction cells, place cells, and grid cells (网格细胞)—and they help program your inside compass when you’re just a baby.

In 2010, scientists carried out an experiment to study baby rats’ neural activity in their brains. Although the rats were newborns, the researchers discovered that their head-direction cells (which help them recognize the direction they’re facing) were fully grown and developed. The rats, it seemed, were born with a sense of direction. And they hadn’t even opened their eyes yet!

Humans, of course, are not rats. But the hippocampus—the brain area we use for navigation—is similar in most mammals. If the rat’s compass develops this way, then it’s likely that a human’s compass does, too.

If we’re born with a sense of direction, then why are some people so good at getting lost? The scientists found that the two other cells—place and grid cells—developed within the first month. Place cells are thought to help us form a map in our mind, while grid cells help us navigate new and unfamiliar places. The two cells work together, and that’s where the trouble might be.

People who took part in a 2013 study played a video game that required them to travel quickly between different places. Monitoring their brains, the scientists found that grid cells helped the gamers recognize where they were—even without landmarks. According to researcher Michael Kahana, differences in how grid cells work may help explain why some people have a better sense of direction than others.

1.What did the 2010 research find?

A. Rats have a natural ability to recognize directions.

B. Rats’ hippocampus is different from that of humans.

C. Rats usually find their way without opening their eyes.

D. Baby rats have as many head-direction cells as grown-ups.

2.What do we know about our navigational neurons?

A. Place cells let us know how to read a map.

B. Grid cells help us reach the place we are going to.

C. They help us use a compass when we lose our way.

D. Place and grid cells grow later than head-direction cells.

3.Why are some people so good at getting lost?

A. They can’t remember landmarks.

B. Their grid cells can’t work very well.

C. They are unfamiliar with new places.

D. Their ability to follow directions is poor.

4.What is the text mainly about?

A. Human navigational skills.

B. The compass in rats’ body.

C. Why grid cells are useful.

D. How homing pigeons work.

高三英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

Ants have a reputation for strength,organization and teamwork.But researchers have now discovered that a key secret to the success of ants is their ability to identify the importance of age in the work place.

A study of Gentral American leaf-cutter ants has shown that the younger and stronger members are give the toughest job of cutting therough the leaves they harvest.Their sharp youn teeth do this job effectively,but as they get older their teeth become relatively worn and blunt.

But rather than being retired or abandoned by the group,the ageing ants are given a new role more suyted to their physical abilities.They become carriers and teansport the leaves back to the kingdom where they are harvested for food.

The findings by researchers from the University of Oregon and the Oregong State University support previous research showin the survival of a leaf-cutter kingdom depends on the efficiency(效率）of is workers.

“Cuting leaves is hard work,”said Dr.Robert Schofield,who led the research team.“Much of the cutting is done with a V-shaped blade(刀片）between teeth on their jaws.This blade starts out as sharp as the sharpest razor blade that humans have developed.”But over rime the teeth become blunter and the cutting job slows down.The team estimated that,because of this age-related wear,a colony(蚁群)spent twice the energy cutting leaves than it would if all the ants had sharp blades.Its findings support the idea that wear and break can be significant problems for insects as well as largre animals.

Like humans,leaf-cuttre ant recognize that older members of the group can still make a worhwhile contribution to society.“This study shows an advantage of social living that we are familiar with,”said Dr.Schofield.

1.The younger and stronger ants do the toughest job because________.

2.The undrelined word“blunt”in the second paragraph can be replaced by________.

3.What happens to the ants when they become old?

4.It can be learned from the passage that.

5.What can be the best title for the passage?

高三英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

Some people have travelled to Canada while others may have just heard of it . As is known to all, the Canadian red and white maple leaf flag is officially called The National Flag of Canada. The Canadian flag shows a stylized red maple leaf with 11 points on a white background, with red borders down each side. The Canadian flag is twice as long as its width. The white square containing the red maple leaf is the same width as the flag. Canada is a very large country, too. It is the second largest country in the world.By contrast, it has a very small population. There are only about 29 millinon people there. Most Canadians are of British or French origin, and French is an official language as well English. About 45 % of the people are of British origin, that is, they or their parents or grandparents, etc, come from Britain. Nearly 30 % are of French origin. Most of the French-Canadians live in the province of quebec. Over the years people have come to live in Canada from many countries in the world. They are mostly from European countries and also from China, as well as other Asian countries.

However , Canada was not an empty country when the Europeans began to arrive. Canadian-Indian lived along the coast, bythe rivers and lakes and in forests. Today there are only 350,000 Canadian-Indians in the whole country, with their own language. In the far north live the Inuits. There are only 27, 000 Canadian-Inuits. Their life is hard in such a harsh climate.

1.What is the populatin of Quebec?

A. More than 29, 000.000

B. About 30% of the total population.

C. Over 45% of th etotal population

D. Less than 30% of the French-Canadians.

2.Which of the following stands for Canada?

3.Which of the following is TRUE according to this passage?

A. The Canadian flag I stwice as wide as its length.

B. Most Indians are now forced to live along the coast.

C. Nowadays Inuit still have difficult living conditions.

D. Nobody existed when the Europeans began to arrive in Canada.

高三英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析