In the 1960s, medical researchers Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe developed a checklist of stressful events. They appreciated the tricky point that any major change can be stressful. Negative events like “serious illness of a family member” were high on the list, but so were some positive life-changing events, like marriage. When you take the Holmes-Rahe test you must remember that the score does not reflect how you deal with stress—it only shows how much you have to deal with. And we now know that the way you handle these events dramatically affects your chances of staying healthy.
    By the early 1970s, hundreds of similar studies had followed Holmes and Rahe. And millions of Americans who work and live under stress worried over the reports. Somehow, the research got boiled down to a memorable message. Women’s magazines ran headlines like “Stress causes illness!” If you want to stay physically and mentally healthy, the articles said, avoid stressful events.
    But such simplistic advice is impossible to follow. Even if stressful events are dangerous, many—like the death of a loved one—are impossible to avoid. Moreover, any warning to avoid all stressful events is a prescription (处方) for staying away from opportunities as well as trouble. Since any change can be stressful, a person who wanted to be completely free of stress would never marry, have a child, take a new job or move.
    The notion that all stress makes you sick also ignores a lot of what we know about people. It assumes we’re all vulnerable (脆弱的) and passive in the face of adversity (逆境). But what about human initiative and creativity? Many come through periods of stress with more physical and mental vigor than they had before. We also know that a long time without change or challenge can lead to boredom, and physical and metal strain.

    Most episodes of absent-mindedness—forgetting where you left something or wondering why you just entered a room—are caused by a simple lack of attention, says Schacter. “You’re supposed to remember something, but you haven’t encoded it deeply.”
    Encoding, Schacter explains, is a special way of paying attention to an event that has a major impact on recalling it later. Failure to encode properly can create annoying situations. If you put your mobile phone in a pocket, for example, and don’t pay attention to what you did because you’re involved in a conversation, you’ll probably forget that the phone is in the jacket now hanging in you wardrobe (衣柜). “Your memory itself isn’t failing you,” says Schacter. “Rather, you didn’t give your memory system the information it needed.”
    Lack of interest can also lead to absent-mindedness. “A man who can recite sports statistics from 30 years ago,” says Zelinski, “may not remember to drop a letter in the mailbox.” Women have slightly better memories than men, possibly because they pay more attention to their environment, and memory relies on just that.
    Visual cues can help prevent absent-mindedness, says Schacter. “But be sure the cue is clear and available,” he cautions. If you want to remember to take a medication (药物) with lunch, put the pill bottle on the kitchen table—don’t leave it in the medicine chest and write yourself a note that you keep in a pocket.
    Another common episode of absent-mindedness: walking into a room and wondering why you’re there. Most likely, you were thinking about something else. “Everyone does this from time to time,” says Zelinski. The best thing to do is to return to where you were before entering the room, and you’ll likely remember.

    It is hard to track the blue whale, the ocean’s largest creature, which has almost been killed off by commercial whaling and is now listed as an endangered species. Attaching radio devices to it is difficult, and visual sightings are too unreliable to give real insight into its behavior.
    So biologists were delighted early this year when, with the help of the Navy, they were able to track a particular blue whale for 43 days, monitoring its sounds. This was possible because of the Navy’s formerly top-secret system of underwater listening devices spanning the oceans.
    Tracking whales is but one example of an exciting new world just opening to civilian scientists after the cold war as the Navy starts to share and partly uncover its global network of underwater listening system built over the decades to track the ships of potential enemies.
    Earth scientists announced at a news conference recently that they had used the system for closely monitoring a deep-sea volcanic eruption (爆发) for the first time and that they plan similar studies.
Other scientists have proposed to use the network for tracking ocean currents and measuring changes in ocean and global temperatures.
    The speed of sound in water is roughly one mile a second—slower than through land but faster than through air. What is most important, different layers of ocean water can act as channels for sounds, focusing them in the same way a stethoscope (听诊器) does when it carries faint noises from a patient’s chest to a doctor’s ear. This focusing is the main reason that even relatively weak sounds in the ocean, especially low-frequency ones, can often travel thousands of miles.

    The fitness movement that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s centered around aerobic exercise (有氧操). Millions of individuals became engaged in a variety of aerobic activities, and literally thousands of health spas developed around the country to capitalize (获利) on this emerging interest in fitness, particularly aerobic dancing for females. A number of fitness spas existed prior to this aerobic fitness movement, even a national chain with spas in most major cities. However, their focus was not on aerobics, but rather on weight-training programs designed to develop muscular mass, strength, and endurance in their primarily male enthusiasts. These fitness spas did not seem to benefit financially form the aerobic fitness movement to better health, since medical opinion suggested that weight-training programs offered few, if any, health benefits. In recent years, however, weight training has again become increasingly popular for males and for females. Many current programs focus not only on developing muscular strength and endurance but on aerobic fitness as well.
    Historically, most physical-fitness tests have usually included measures of muscular strength and endurance, not for health-related reasons, but primarily because such fitness components have been related to performance in athletics. However, in recent years, evidence has shown that training programs designed primarily to improve muscular strength and endurance might also offer some health benefits as well. The American College of Sports Medicine now recommends that weight training be part of a total fitness program for healthy Americans. Increased participation in such training is one of the specific physical activity and fitness objectives of Healthy People 2000: National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives.

    As researchers learn more about how children’s intelligence develops, they are increasingly surprised by the power of parents. The power of the school has been replaced by the home. To begin with, all the factors which are part of intelligence—the child’s understanding of language, learning patterns, curiosity—are established well before the child enters school at the age of six. Study after study has shown that even after school begins, children’s achievements have been far more influenced by parents than by teachers. This is particularly true about learning that is language-related. The school rather than the home is given credit for variations in achievement in subjects such as science.
In view of their power, it’s sad to see so many parents not making the most of their child’s intelligence. Until recently parents had been warned by educators who asked them not to educate their children. Many teachers now realize that children cannot be educated only at school and parents are being asked to contribute both before and after the child enters school.
    Parents have been particularly afraid to teach reading at home. Of course, children shouldn’t be pushed to read by their parents, but educators have discovered that reading is best taught individually—and the easiest place to do this is at home. Many four-and five-year-olds who have been shown a few letters and taught their sounds will compose single words of their own with them even before they have been taught to read.
Questions: (注意：答题尽量简短，超过10个词要扣分。每条横线限写一个英语单词，标点符号不占格)

Directions: For this part, you are allowed thirty minutes to write a composition on the topic Student Use of Computers. You should write at least 120 words, and base your composition on the chart and the outline given below:
              
(1) 上图所示为1990年、1995年、2002年某校大学生使用计算机的情况，请描述其变化；
(2) 请说明发生这些变化的原因(可从计算机的用途、价格或社会发展等方面加以说明)；
(3) 你认为目前大学生在计算机使用中有什么困难或问题。

Student Use of Computers