Reading Comprehension

     The annual campaign to make Singapore's three million people more polite ended yesterday and was immediately followed by another drive to get them to be punctual.
     Tardiness is not yet a criminal offence in the island republic, and the National Punctuality Work-ing Committee can only use gentle persuasion. "Being on time means being considerate," said com-mittee chairman Toh Weng Cheng. Previous drives made little headway in changing a deeply rootedhabit that seems oddly out of place in this otherwise efficient city-state. Tardiness at dinner parties isusually attributed to Chinese tradition, a belief that older and more important guests were expected tomake an entrance after the others.
     Meanwhile, officials will assess the results of the 15th annual courtesy (礼貌) campaign, a HK$ 2.4 million drive to persuade Singaporeans to mind their manners. Earlier courtesy campaigns usedposters, films, advertisements in newspapers and magazines to portray considerate behavior. The pub-licity this year stressed courtesy through examples of discourtesy. Few countries use elaborate publiccampaigns to change behavior and raise civic consciousness. It has been a way of life in Singapore formore than 30 years. Some, like the courtesy drive, deal with basic habits and culture. October wasfirst declared "Speak Mandarin Month" in 1978, an effort to wipe out regional Chinese dialects in fa-vor of the official tongue.
     Others focus on problems of the day. The police launched a drive in 1989 to stop abuse of theemergency phone number 999, because one call in five was of the nuisance or non-emergency variety.Some campaigns have been so successful that they have been reversed. Family planners urged parentsto "Stop at Two" in 1978. Birth rates dropped from 3.5 percent in 1960 to 1.2 percent in 1980, andfamilies who can afford it are now encouraged to "Have Three or More". By the early 1980s, thegrowth of campaigns inspired one exhausted newspaper columnist to suggest a "take your campaignsseriously campaign".

Reading Comprehension

     We all know that it is possible for ordinary people to make their homes on the equator, although often they may feel uncomfortably hot there. Millions do it, but as for the North Pole --- we know that it is not only a dangerously cold place, but that people like you and me would find it quite impossible to live there. At the present time only the scientists and explorers can do so, and they use special equipment. Men have been traveling across and around the equator on wheels, on their feet or in ships for thousands of years; but only a few men, with great difficulty and in very recent time, have ever crossed the ice to the North Pole. So it may surprise you to learn that, when traveling by air, it is really safer to fly over the North Pole than over the equator. Of course, this is not true about landings in the polar region (which passenger aeroplanes do not make), but the weather, if we are flying at a height of 5,000 meters above the Pole, is a delight. At 4,000 meters and more above the earth you can always be sure that you will not see a cloud in the sky as far as the eye can reach. In the tropics, on the other hand, you are not certain to keep clear of bad weather, even at such heights as 18,000 or 20,000 meters.
     Aeroplanes can’t climb as high or as quickly in cold air as in warm. Nor can clouds. In practice, this is an advantage to the aeroplane, which is already at a good height when it reaches the polar region and so does not need to climb, while at the same time cold air keeps the clouds down low.

Reading Comprehension

     As the Titanic was sinking and women and children climbed into lifeboats, the musicians from the ship’s band stood and played. They died when the ship went down. Men stood on the deck and smoked cigarettes. They died, too. This behavior is puzzling to economists, who like to believe that people tend to act in their own self interest. “There was no pushing, ”says David Savage, an economist at Queensland University in Australia who has studied witness reports from the survivors. It was “very, very orderly behavior”.
     Savage has compared the behavior of the passengers on the Titanic with those on the Lusitania, another ship that also sank at about the same time. But when the Lusitania went down, the passengers panicked. There were a lot of similarities between these two events. These two ships were both luxury ones, they had a similar number of passengers and a similar number of survivors.
     The biggest difference, Savage concludes, was time. The Lusitania sank in less than 20 minutes. But for the Titanic, it was two-and-a-half hours. “If you’ve got an event that lasts two-and-a-half hours, social order will take over and everybody will behave in a social manner, ”Savage says. “If you’re going down in under 17 minutes, basically it’s instinctual. ”On the Titanic, social order ruled, and it was women and children first. On the Lusitania, instinct won out. The survivors were largely the people who could swim and get into the lifeboats.
     Yes, we’re self-interested, Savage says. But we’re also part of a society. Given time, social norms can beat our natural self-interest. A hundred years ago, women and children always went first. Men were stoic. On the Titanic, there was enough time for these norms to become forceful.

Reading Comprehension

     The old idea that child prodigies “burn themselves” or “overtax their brains” in the early years, therefore, suffer from failure and (at worst) mental illness is just a myth. As a matter of fact, the outstanding thing that happens to bright children is that they are very likely to grow into bright adults.
     To find this out, 1,500 gifted persons were followed up to their thirty-fifth years with these results:
     On adult intelligence tests, they scored as high as they did as children. They were, as a group, in good health, physically and mentally. Eighty-four percent of their group were married and seemed content with their life.
     About 70 percent had graduated from colleges, though only 30 percent had graduated with honors. A few had even flunked out (退学), but nearly half of these had returned to graduate.
     Of the men, 80 percent were in one of the professions or in business, managerial or semiprofessional jobs. The women who had remained single had offices, business, or professional occupations.
     The group had published 90 books and 1,500 articles in scientific, scholarly, and literary magazines and had collected more than 100 patents.
     In a material way they didn’t do badly either. Average income was considerably higher among the gifted people, especially the men, than for the country as a whole, despite their comparative youth when last surveyed.
     In fact, far from being strange, maladjusted (难以适应) people locked in an ivory tower, most of the gifted were turning their early promises into practical reality.

Reading Comprehension

　　It is difficult to imagine what life would be like without memory．The meanings of thousands of everyday perceptions, the basis for the decisions we make, and the roots of our habits and skills are to be found in our past experiences, which are brought into the present by memory.
　　Memory can be defined as the capacity to keep information available for later use．It not only includes "remembering" things like arithmetic or historical facts, but also involves any change in the way an animal typically behaves．Memory is involved when a rat gives up eating grain because he has sniffed something suspicious in the grain pile. 
　　Memory exists not only in humans and animals but also in some physical objects and machines．Computers, for example, contain devices for storing data for later use．It is interesting to compare the memory storage capacity of a computer with that of a human being．The instant access memory of a large computer may hold up to 100, 000 "words"－string of alphabetic or numerical characters－ready for instant use．An average U. S. teenager probably recognizes the meaning of about 100, 000 words of English. However, this is but a fraction of the total amount of information that the teenager has stored．Consider, for example, the number of faces and places that the teenager can recognize on sight.
　　The use of words is the basis of the advanced problem-solving intelligence of human beings．A large part of a person's memory is in terms of words and combinations of words.

Reading Comprehension

     Jarden Zinc Products, a large zinc plant a few miles outside Greeneville, Tennessee, has a special claim. Since 1982, it has been the only supplier of penny blanks for the U.S. Mint (铸币厂). It's a good business for Jarden-since 2000, the company has earned more than $ 800 million. But it may not be a good deal for the U.S.
     The value of the penny has been dropping for years. In 2006, it began to cost more than a penny to make a penny. It now costs 2 ￠ to produce a 1 ￠ coin. Many countries have stopped using pennies. Is it time for the U.S. to do the same? 

     Jarden and the zinc industry are fighting to keep the penny. Since 2006, Jarden has given $1.2 million to Americans for Common Cents (ACC). The group's mission is to keep the penny in use. Mark Weller is ACC's executive director. He argues that there are three main reasons for keeping the penny: Without it, we would become more reliant on the five-cent coin, which also has problems; charities that depend on penny drives would not be able to raise as much money; and a 2012 survey shows that 67% of Americans want to keep the penny. (77) Many people surveyed said they feared they would end up paying more for products.
     Many experts disagree with ACC, They point to the dozens of countries that have gotten rid of their lowest-value coins without raising prices for consumers. And charities don't seem too concerned either.
     President Barack Obama says the mint could explore using cheaper metals to make pennies. Steel is less expensive than zinc. Pennies are 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper. But no matter what it is made of, the penny's days may be numbered. Most in-store purchases are now made with credit cards, not cash. Is it time for a change?

Reading Comprehension

     No country in the world has more daily newspapers than the USA. There are almost 2,000 of them, as compared with 180 in Japan, 164 in Argentina and 111 in Britain. The quality of some American papers is extremely high and their views are quoted all over the world. Famous dailies like the Washington Post or the New York Times have a powerful influence all over the country. However, they are not national newspapers in the sense that The Times is in Britain or Le Monde is in France, since each American city has its own daily newspaper. The best of these present detailed description of national and international news, but many tend to limit themselves to state or city news. 

     Like the press in most other countries, American newspapers range from the “sensational” which feature crime and gossip, to the “serious”, which focus on factual news and the analysis of world events. But with few exceptions, American newspapers try to entertain as well as give information, for they have to compete with the attraction of television.
     Just as American newspapers satisfy all tastes, so do they also try to attract readers of all political parties. A few newspapers support extremist groups on the far right and on the far left, but most daily newspapers try to attract middle-of-the-road Americans who are moderate. Many of these papers print columns by well-known journalists of different political and social views, in order to present a balanced picture.
As in other countries, American newspapers can be either responsible or irresponsible, but it is generally accepted that the American press serves its country well and that it has more than once courageously exposed political scandals or crimes, for instance, the Watergate Affair. The Newspapers drew the attention of the public to the horrors of the Vietnam War.

Reading Comprehension

     The top of the world is a wonderland. In winter, the temperature often fails to -30°F and the sun never rises. The ocean is surrounded by frozen ground. There are few people or trees, but to polar bears, the Arctic is home.
     Polar bears have thick fur, big paws and other features that make them well prepared for life in their tough environment. In fact, they need the Arctic sea ice for survival. But climate change is causing larger and larger areas of summer sea ice to melt. Experts say that if warming pat-terns continue, the Arctic could be free of summer sea ice by 2050. That may cause two-thirds of the word's 20,000 polar bears to be gone by then too.
     Polar bears can't survive for long on land. Seals are their main source of food. The only place where polar bears can hunt seals is on the ice. Although these bears are strong swimmers, they are no match for lighming swift seals in the water. A polar bear has brilliantly clever strategies to overcome this disadvantage. In winter the bear waits motionless beside a sea’ls breathing hole, which is a narrow tunnel through the ice. Often many hours pass before the seal comes up for air and the bear kills it with a powerful blow of its paw. In summer, the polar bears that live on land eat very little and wait for the sea ice to return.
     With the sea ice forming later in the year and melting earlier, polar bears do not have enough opportunity to hunt and eat. Less sea ice makes it harder for the bears to catch the seals. The bears must swim longer distances between ice packs, and they can't always make it.. The ice is also getting thinner. These conditions can cause polar-bear cubs to become separated :from their mothers, who provide them with food.
     Steven Amstrup is the chief scientist of Polar Bear International. The group aims to save the bears and their home. "The more people who see polar bears and understand their difficult situations, the better the chance we'll alter our warming path in time to save them," he says.

Reading Comprehension

     A hundred years ago it was assumed and scientifically “proved” by economists that the laws of society made it necessary to have a vast army of poor and jobless people in order to keep the economy going. Today, hardly anybody would dare to voice this principle. It is generally accepted that nobody should be excluded from the wealth Western industrialized countries, a system of insurance has been introduced which guarantees everyone a minimum of subsistence in case of unemployment, sickness and old age. I would go one step further and argue that, even if these conditions are not present, everyone has the right to receive the means to subsist, in other words, he can claim this subsistence minimum without having to have any “reason”. I would suggest, however, that it should be limited to a definite period of time, let’s say two years, so as to avoid the encouraging of an abnormal attitude which refused any kind of social obligation.
     This may sound like a fantastic proposal, but so, I think, our insurance system would have sounded to people a hundred years ago. The main objection to such a scheme would be that if each person were entitled to receive minimum support, people would not work. This assumption rests on the fallacy of the inherent laziness in human nature, actually, aside from abnormally lazy people, there would be very few who would not want to earn more than the minimum, and who would prefer to do nothing rather than work.
     However, the suspicions against a system of guaranteed subsistence minimum are not groundless, from the standpoint of those who want to use ownership of capital for the purpose of forcing others to accept the work conditions they offer. If nobody were forced to accept work in order not to starve, work would have to be sufficiently interesting and attractive to induce one to accept it. Freedom of contract is possible only if both parties are free to accept and reject it; in the present capitalist system this is not the case.
     But such a system would not only be the beginning of real freedom of contract between employers and employees, its principal advantage would be the improvement of freedom in inter-personal relationships in every sphere of daily life.

Reading Comprehension

     In what now seems like the prehistoric times of computer history, the early postwar era, there was a quite widespread concern that computers would take over the world from man one day. Already today, less than forty years later, as computers are relieving us of more and more of the routine tasks in business and in our personal lives, we are facing with a less dramatic but also less foreseen problem. People tend to be over trusting of computers and are reluctant to challenge their authority. Indeed, they behave as if they were hardly aware that wrong buttons maybe pushed, or that a computer may simply malfunction(失灵).
     Obviously, there would be no point in investing in a computer if you had to check all its answers, but people should also rely on their own internal computers and check the machine when they have the feeling that something has gone wrong. Questioning and routine double checks must continue to be as much a part of good business as they were in pre computer days. Maybe each computer should come with the following warning: for all the help this computer may provide, it should not be seen as a substitute for fundamental thinking and reasoning skills.

Reading Comprehension

     Spending 50 minutes with a cell phone close to your ear is enough to change brain cell activity in the part of the brain closest to the antenna. But whether that causes any harm is not clear, scientists at the National Institute of Health said at a conference last month, adding that the study will not likely settle concerns of a link between cell phones and brain cancer. "What we showed is glucose(葡萄糖metabolism (a sign of brain activity) increases in the brain in people who were exposed to a cell phone in the area closest to the antenna," said Dr. Nora Volkow of the NIH, whose study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study was meant to examine how the brain reacts to electromagnetic fields caused by wireless phone signals.
     Volkow said she was surprised that the weak electromagnetic radiation from cellphones could affect brain activity, but she said the findings do not shed any light on whether cellphones cause cancer. "This study does not in any way indicate that. What the study does is to show the human brain is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation from cell phone exposures. " Use of the devices has increased dramatically since they were introduced in the early 1955s, with about 5billion cell phones now in use worldwide.
     Some studies have linked cell phone exposure to an increased risk of brain cancers, but a large study by the World Health Organization did not offer a clear answer to this. Volkow’s team studied 47 people who had their brain examined while a cell phone was turned on for 50 minutes and another while the phone was turned off. While there was no complete change in brain metabolism, they found a 7 percent increase in brain metabolism in the region closest to the cell phone antenna when the phone was on.
     Experts said the results were interesting, but urged that they be understood with great care. " Although the biological significance, if any, of increased glucose metabolism from too much cell phone exposure is unknown, the results require further investigation," Henry Lai of the University of Washington in the U. S. and Dr. Lennart Hardell of University Hospital in Sweden, wrote in an article in JAMA. "Much has to be done to further investigate and understand these effects." They wrote.

Reading Comprehension

     Concerning money or anything else, conflicts between husband and wife usually reflect a power struggle. Conflicts between parent and child often center around the same issue. As children enter adolescence, they begin to demand greater freedom to go where they please, do what they please, and make decisions without parental interference. Many American parents do not know how to deal with their teenagers and seek advice from books, lectures, and parent training courses. Parents want to maintain a friendly relationship with their teenagers and also want to guide them so that their behavior. will be whatever the parents consider proper and constructive.
But in a society of rapidly changing social and moral values, parents and children often disagree about what is important and what is fight.
     Arguments may concern such unimportant matters as styles of dress or hairdos. But quarrels may also concern school work, after school jobs, decisions, use of the family car, dating, and sex behavior. Some families have serious problems with teenagers who drop out of school, run away from home, or use illegal drugs. Because so much publicity is given to the problem teenager, one gets the impression that all teenagers are troublemakers. Actually, relatively few adolescents do anything wrong, and nearly all grow up into "solid citizens" who fulfill most of their parents’ expectations. In fact, recent studies show that the "generation gap" is narrowing. The vast majority of teenagers share most of their parents’ values and ideas. Many parents feel that they get along with their adolescents quite well.

Reading Comprehension

     When the United States Congress created Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the goal was to set aside a place where Americans could enjoy the beauty of nature for years to come. Now, 142 years later, there are hundreds of national parks across the country, and technology is changing the way people experience them. Should park visitors be able to use cell phones, or should their use be restricted?
     "Connectivity presents a real challenge to all of us." Al Nash says. He is a public affairs officer at Yellowstone National Park. He says cell phone service at Yellowstone is available in parts of the park with stores and campgrounds. This makes it easy for visitors to share photos of their trip on social networking sites and to stay in touch with friends and family members. (80) If a nark visitor is hurt or in danger, cell phones make it easier to get help. Some say the ability to download applications that provide information about plants and animals in the park can enrich a visitor’s experience.
     Others say cell phones disturb people’s enjoyment of our national parks. In their view, cell phone towers are an eyesore, and they’d rather hear the sound of birds than the ring of an incoming call. Can you imagine looking out a peaceful lake or field of grass only to be disturbed by a person shouting into their phone, "Can you hear me now?"
     Nash says Yellowstone tries to strike a balance. "Ultimately, our job is to let visitors understand and enjoy nature better while protecting what people find special about Yellowstone, and one of those things that’s special is the ability to get away from the hustle and bustle of one’s daily life."

Reading Comprehension

     Is that 6 a.m. workout getting in the way of good sleep? Don’t think your fat cells won’t notice. A new study published in The Annals of Internal Medicine (a medical journal) finds that inadequate shut-eye has a harmful effect on fat cells, reducing their ability to respond to insulin (胰岛素) by about 30 percent. Over the long-term, this decreased response could set the stage for type-2 diabetes (a medical condition in which someone has too much sugar in his or her blood), fatty liver disease and weight gain. 
   The study adds to a growing body of evidence that there’ “an intimate relationship between the amount of sleep we get and our ability to maintain a good, healthy body weight,” says sleep expert Helene Emsellem, director of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, Maryland. But Americans don’t seem to be getting the message that we need seven to nine hours par night. More than 1 in 5 of us, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is getting six or fewer hours of sleep per night, on average. 
   So how did researchers study fat cells in the Annals paper? Matthew Brady of the University of Chicago and a group of colleagues selected and persuaded seven volunteers to take part in the research project. They were all young, thin and healthy and agreed to sleep for eight nights in a sleep lab. “For four nights they were allowed to stay in bed for 8.5 hours a night,” says Brady. Then, a month later, they came back for four additional nights——but this time they were allowed just 4.5 hours of sleep per night. And after each visit, researchers got a sample of their fat. Brady explains that the fat cells responded significantly to the loss of sleep. “I was very surprised to be honest,” he says. 
   Bad things can happen when fat cells become less responsive to insulin. “Fat cells are actually your friend,” he says. “They’re there to store lipids (血脂).” When lipids stay inside the cells, your body can utilize the fat when you’re exercising or sleeping or going about your day. “However, when fat cells stare to become insulin resistant, the lipids star to leach out of the fat cells and rise in the bloodstream,” Brady says.

Reading Comprehension

     There was one thought that air pollution affected only the area immediately around large cities with factories and heavy automobile traffic. At present, we realize that although these are the areas with the worst air pollution, the problem is literally worldwide. On several occasions over the past decade, a heavy cloud of air pollution has covered the east of the United States and brought health warnings in rural areas away from any major concentration of manufacturing and automobile traffic. In fact, the very climate of the entire earth may be infected by air pollution. Some scientists consider that the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the air resulting from the burning of fossil fuels (coal and oil) is creating a “greenhouse effect”— conserving heat reflected from the earth and raising the world’s average temperature. If this view is correct and the world’s temperature is raised only a few degrees, much of the polar ice cap will melt and cities such as New York, Boston, Miami, and New Orleans will be in water.
     Another view, less widely held, is that increasing particular matter in the atmosphere is blocking sunlight and lowering the earth’s temperature — a result that would be equally disastrous. A drop of just a few degrees could create something close to a new ice age, and would make agriculture difficult or impossible in many of our top farming areas. Today we do not know for sure that either of these conditions will happen (though one recent government report drafted by experts in the field concluded that the greenhouse effect is very possible). Perhaps, if we are lucky enough, the two tendencies will offset each other and the world’s temperature will stay about the same as it is now. 

Reading Comprehension

     The top of the world is a wonderland. In winter, the temperature often fails to -30°F and the sun never rises. The ocean is surrounded by frozen ground. There are few people or trees, but to polar bears, the Arctic is home.
     Polar bears have thick fur, big paws and other features that make them well prepared for life in their tough environment. In fact, they need the Arctic sea ice for survival. But climate change is causing larger and larger areas of summer sea ice to melt. Experts say that if warming pat-terns continue, the Arctic could be free of summer sea ice by 2050. That may cause two-thirds of the word's 20,000 polar bears to be gone by then too.
     Polar bears can't survive for long on land. Seals are their main source of food. The only place where polar bears can hunt seals is on the ice. Although these bears are strong swimmers, they are no match for lighming swift seals in the water. A polar bear has brilliantly clever strategies to overcome this disadvantage. In winter the bear waits motionless beside a sea’ls breathing hole, which is a narrow tunnel through the ice. Often many hours pass before the seal comes up for air and the bear kills it with a powerful blow of its paw. In summer, the polar bears that live on land eat very little and wait for the sea ice to return.
     With the sea ice forming later in the year and melting earlier, polar bears do not have enough opportunity to hunt and eat. Less sea ice makes it harder for the bears to catch the seals. The bears must swim longer distances between ice packs, and they can't always make it.. The ice is also getting thinner. These conditions can cause polar-bear cubs to become separated :from their mothers, who provide them with food.
     Steven Amstrup is the chief scientist of Polar Bear International. The group aims to save the bears and their home. "The more people who see polar bears and understand their difficult situations, the better the chance we'll alter our warming path in time to save them," he says.

Reading Comprehension​

       Dr. James Barry was the first woman in England to go to medical school. When she was grow-ing up, women could not go to medical school. So how did she become a doctor? She simply pretended that she was a man.
　　No one knows Dr. Barry' s real name, her birth date, of her family' s background. Some re-cords show that she was born in 1795 in London. Some people say she was the daughter of a rich man or a royal prince. One fact we know is that in 1810, James Barry became a medical student at the University of Edinburgh.
　　James Barry' s classmates made fun of her because she didn' t have a beard and she was only five feet tall. But no one thought she was a girl. At the age of 20, James Barry graduated from the University of Edinburgh as a Doctor of Medicine. She was one of the youngest students to complete her studies. Dr. Barry then went to work in a London hospital and studied surgery. A year later,she entered the army and became a hospital assistant. We will never know how she avoided the ar-my physical examination.
　　For the next 45 years, Dr. James Barry was a British officer and a successful surgeon. Every-one admired her. She began to do a lot of important work for the army. At that time, Eng-land had many colonies around the world. Dr. Barry spent a lot of time in foreign countries. She travelled to India, Corfu, Malta, and Jamaica. In 1856 she went to South Africa, and she was sooL known as the best doctor and surgeon in the colony. She saved the life of the governor' s daughter, and later she became the governor' s personal doctor. People admired Dr. Barry, but she also had a reputation as a troublemaker. If people talked about her high voice or tiny figure, she became very angry. She was an excellent swordsman, and she started fights often.

Reading Comprehension​

       Chokwe Selassie is on a mission to help drivers avoid potholes( 路面坑洼). The eighth-grader was inspired to kick off his mission on a recent morning, when his mother was driving him to school. Their car was damaged as it went over a huge pothole in the middle of the street in their hometown of Jackson, Mississippi. "I decided I was going to do something about the pothole prob-lem in my city," Chokwe says. His solution: an app(手机应用) that warns drivers when there is a pothole ahead.
　　Chokwe developed the app with his friends Rodriguez Ratliff and Emmanuel Brooks. "When the app detects a potheole, it is highlighted(突出显示) in red," Chokwe says. "And if you get close to the pothole, your phone will warn you. " Drivers can also use the app to report any pot-holes" they encounter, and to look for other routes they can take to avoid roads that have them.
　　The app relies on Current available information about the streets of Jackson. "It works by u-sing the city' s 311 call system, so it uses information already stored in a database," Chokwe says.
　　Through the call system, citizens dial 3-1-1 to report non-emergency problems--whiCh in-clude potholes. Chokwe and his friends determined that focusing on the 10 busiest streets in Jack-son would give them a large enough sample size to test the prototype(原型).
　　Although the app isn' t yet available for sale, Chokwe is already looking for ways to im-prove it. The prototype remains limited'to 10 streets in Jackson, but he hopes to add more, so that it includes every street in the city. And then he wants to go even farther. "I want to keep working on the app until it' s nationwide," Chokwe says.

Reading Comprehension

　　As the National Park Service celebrates its 100th anniversary(周年纪念), President Barack Obama has announced the establishment of one new national monument, and the expansion of another. In Maine, more than 87,500 acres of forest will become government-protected parkland for the first time. In Hawaii, a national monument created by President George W. Bush in 2006 will expand to about 582,578 square miles, four times its current size.
　　Obama has now created or enlarged 26 national monuments during his presidency. As a result,his administration says, Obama has protected more of the nation' s land than any other president has. But some residents and officials, in both Maine and Hawaii, object to the plans. They say their local economies depend on the use of these areas.
　　In establishing this monument, Obama took the side of conservationists ( 自然资源保护者)who want laws to protect wild lands. Creating a national park usually requires the approval of Con-gress. But a 1906 federal law allows the president to establish national monuments on his own.
　　The land' s new status as a monument means that mining and drilling operations are forbidden there. It may also severely limit activities such as logging, road-building, and hunting. Some of Maine' s politicians who want to protect the state' s logging industries say Obama should not have acted alone. They say Washington should not tell the states how to use their land, especially when people' s jobs are at stake. Maine politician Susan Collins said the president should have listened to Maine lawmakers and residents, as well as to the U. S. Congress before making his decision.
　　However, those who support the president' s decision say the establishment of the new monu-ment will lead to new jobs through tourism.

Reading Comprehension

     Over the years, college students have stood together for what they believe in, from civil rights to anti-war policies to the more recent protests against the unequal distribution of wealth. But nowhere in history have students banned bottled water. Until now.
     The bottled water ban, which Parted on just a few campuses, has now spread nationwide to more than 20 universities. The colleges have cither completely banned the use of plastic bottles altogether, or some have taken a more limited approach with partial bans.
     Many people believe that producing and bottled water wastes money and harms the environment. They say that bottled water is unnecessary because public water supplies in the U.S. arc among the best in the world. Water fountains and reusable bottles with easy access to filling stations are a better choice.
     An organization called Ban the Bottle raises awareness about the economic and environmental costs of using plastic bottles. The group claims that eight glasses of water a day costs each person 49 cents annually, while drinking from plastic containers costs $I,400 per year. Plastic bottles contain antimony—a chemical that in low doses causes depression, but in large doses can even lead to death.
     The controversy over bottled or tap is not limited to the students and college administrations. The makers of bottled water see the movement as a threat. They argue that plastic bottles make UP a small portion of the nation’s total waste. It's unfair to single out （单独挑出） their product when so many other items are packaged in plastic containers. Plus, water is a healthy choice compared to some sodas and juices that arc also sold at school.