Read the following passage and answer the questions below.
Most people would say they know what stress is. But for scientists who study stress, it has been surprisingly hard to define. This is because there are so many ways of looking at stress.
Some researchers have studied how our bodies react to stress. You know how your heart beats faster, you perspire more heavily, and your words do not come out right when you are placed in a stressful situation. But knowing how we feel when we experience stress does not explain it; nor does it tell us what causes it.
Other scientists have looked at stressors: events or situations that produce stress. A deadline, a poor test performance, or bothersome noises all may be thought of as stressors. Even pleasant events can be stressors. Planning a party or starting a new job can be just as stressful as being called to the principal's office.
Stress, then, can be caused by both negative and positive events, or stressors. Of course, whether an event is thought of as positive or negative is, in some ways, a matter of personal choice.
In sum, it is the way people interpret an event that makes it stressful or not stressful. This process of interpretation is called appraisal. Depending on how people appraise, or judge, circumstances, they may or may not consider them stressful.
What, specifically, causes people to appraise a situation as stressful? The answer depends on how much of a threat or challenge it appears to be. Circumstances that bring a threat or challenge to a person's sense of well-being produce stress. Those that do not threaten or challenge us are not stressful.
Looking at stress this way gives us a general definition of the concept of stress: Stress is a response to circumstances that seem threatening or challenging.
The circumstances that cause stress vary from one person to another. It all depends on how we appraise circumstances. In addition, the things that cause us stress today may not cause us stress at another time. And the opposite is true: things that once caused no stress may now be stressful.
Complete the summary below by choosing NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
It is hard for the scientists to define the word because there are many ways of looking at it. Your body reacts to stress with a fast-beating heart, heavy perspiration and so on when you are in . refer to events or situations that produce stress and they may even include such as and starting a new job. In general, stress can be caused by both negative and positive events.
Look at the following statements. Choose:
TRUE if the statement is true;
FALSE if the statement is false;
NOT GIVEN if the information is not given in the passage.
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Knowing our feelings about stress can explain what causes the stress. |
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Bothersome noises are more likely to cause stress than a poor test performance. |
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Negative events cause more stress than positive ones do. |
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Sometimes whether an event is negative or not is based on a personal decision. |
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Whether an event is considered stressful may be determined by the way people interpret it. |
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Sometimes those circumstances that are not threatening to us are also stressful. |
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An event or situation may not always be a stressor. |
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Read the passage and choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph A-F from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (I-VIII). Please note that there are more headings than you can use.
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I. Possible problems due to global warming II. Warmer summer in Dallas III. Help from methane IV. One important step V. Disagreement about temperatures VI. Warmer and warmer in some places VII. But possible benefits too VIII. Problems bigger than benefits |
Hot Days, Hot Nights
Paragraph A:
Here is what global warming could do in a few years: in Dallas, a doubled level of carbon dioxide would increase the number of days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees from nineteen to seventy-eight. On sixty-eight days, as opposed to the current four, the temperature wouldn't fall below 80 degrees at night. One hundred and sixty-two days a year, the temperature would top 90 degrees.
Paragraph B:
Although most scientists agree that increasing levels of carbon dioxide and other. Greenhouse gases will inevitably lead to global warming, no one is certain how fast and how much temperatures will rise and what the effects will be in any geographical areas. This gives policymakers an excuse for delaying action. Some experts predict that within two centuries glaciers in the North and South Poles will melt, ocean levels will rise, and much of what is now the coast of the United States will be underwater. They also predict great droughts and hurricanes, as a result of climate changes.
Paragraph C:
Other scientists think the changes will be much more gradual, even beneficial. After all, Canada would not complain if the productive corn-growing lands - now located in the U.S. Midwest - were shifted north across the border.
Paragraph D:
While many nations could end up with milder climates, the change - perhaps 100 times faster than at any time in human history- could be so drastic that many of the benefits would be lost. There could be crowds of environmental refugees, as well, making the tragedy of the Dust Bowl era seem mild in comparison.
Paragraph E:
What can we do? Humanity's contribution to the greenhouse effect comes from so many basic activities that we can't hope to eliminate it completely. Some steps have already been taken. Since the 1970s, the use of CFCs as aerosol-can propellants has been banned in the United States.
Read the following passage and answer the questions below.
A recent e-trade advertisement shows a baby speaking directly to the camera: 'Look at this,' he says, 'I'm a free man. I can go anywhere I want now.' He describes his stock-buying activities, and then his phone rings. This advertisement proves what comedians have known for years: few things are as funny as a baby who talks like an adult. But it also raises an important question: Why don't young children express themselves clearly like adults?
Many people assume children learn to talk by copying what they hear. In other words, they listen to the words adults use and the situations in which they use them and imitate accordingly. Behaviourism, the scientific approach that dominated American cognitive science for the first half of the 20th century, made exactly this argument.
However, this 'copycat' theory can't explain why toddlers aren't as conversational as adults.
After all, you never hear literate adults express themselves in one-word sentences like 'bottle' or 'doggie'. In fact, it's easy for scientists to show that a copycat theory of language acquisition can't explain children's first words. What is hard for them to do is to explain these first words, and how they fit into the language acquisition pattern. Over the past half-century, scientists have settled on two reasonable possibilities. The first of these is called the 'mental-developmental hypothesis'. It states that one-year-olds speak in baby talk because their immature brains can't handle adult speech. Children don't learn to walk until their bodies are ready. Likewise, they don't speak multi-word sentences or use word endings and function words ('Mummy opened the boxes') before their brains are ready.
The second is called the 'stages-of-language hypothesis', which states that the stages of progress in child speech are necessary stages in language development. A basketball player can't perfect his or her jump shot before learning to (1) jump and (2) shoot. Similarly, children learn to multiply after they have learned to add. This is the order in which children are taught - not the reverse. There's evidence, for instance, that children don't usually begin speaking in two-word sentences until they've learned a certain number of single words. In other words, until they've crossed that linguistic threshold, the word-combination process doesn't get going.
The difference between these theories is this: under the mental-development hypothesis, language learning should depend on the child's age and level of mental development when he or she starts learning a language. Under the stages-of-language hypothesis, however, it shouldn't depend on such patterns, but only on the completion of previous stages.
In 2007, researchers at Harvard University, who were studying the two theories, found a clever way to test them. More than 20,000 internationally adopted children enter the US each year. Many of them no longer hear their birth language after they arrive, and they must learn English more or less the same way infants do - that is, by listening and by trial and error. International adoptees don't take classes or use a dictionary when they are learning their new tongue and most of them don't have a well-developed first language. All of these factors make them an ideal population in which to test these competing hypotheses about how language is learned.
Neuroscientists Jesse Snedeker, Joy Geren and Carissa Shafto studied the language development of 27 children adopted from China between the ages of two and five years. These children began learning English at an older age than US natives and had more mature brains with which to tackle the task. Even so, just as with American-born infants, their first English sentences consisted of single words and were largely bereft of function words, word endings and verbs. The adoptees then went through the same stages as typical American-born children, albeit at a faster clip. The adoptees and native children started combining words in sentences when their vocabulary reached the same sizes, further suggesting that what matters is not how old you are or how mature your brain is, but the number of words you know.
This finding - that having more mature brains did not help the adoptees avoid the toddler-talk stage - suggests that babies speak in babytalk not because they have baby brains, but because they have only just started learning and need time to gain enough vocabulary to be able to expand their conversations. Before long, the one-word stage will give way to the two-word stage and so on. Learning how to chat like an adult is a gradual process. But this potential answer also raises an even older and more difficult question. Adult immigrants who learn a second language rarely achieve the same proficiency in a foreign language as the average child raised as a native speaker. Researchers have long suspected there is a 'critical period' for language development, after which it cannot proceed with full success to fluency. Yet we still do not understand this critical period or know why it ends.
What is the writer's main purpose in the seventh paragraph?
Snedeker, Geren and Shafto based their study on children who _____
What aspect of the adopted children's language development differed from that of US-born children?
What did the Harvard finding show?