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You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—Guardian

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You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianDo the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1 In boxes on your answer sheet, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information FALSE if the statement contradicts the information NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this Games can simplify the questions in the real world.
答案： NOT GIVEN
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover MagazineLook at the following statements and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct people, A-E. Write the correct letter, A-E, in boxes on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once. List of People A William Curry B Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze C Pieter Brueghel the Elder D Terrence Joyce E Bob Dickson The little Ice Age may come again and if it is true, it will take hundreds of years to recover.
答案： D
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceReading Passage 3 has nine paragraphs, A-G. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the correct number, Ⅰ-Ⅺ, in boxes on your answer sheet. List of Headings Ⅰ The difference between crowding and density Ⅱ The effects of crowding in different situations on human beings Ⅲ The terrible results of the crowding study Ⅳ The effective solutions to the crowding problem Ⅴ The reasons of increasing crowding Ⅵ The best strategy to cope with the crowding problem—social withdrawal Ⅶ Different definitions of crowding and their effects on human beings Ⅷ The only reason why people feel bad Ⅸ The reasons why crowding affects people’s feelings Ⅹ Three most important trends that people may face today Ⅺ What is crowding Paragraph
答案： Ⅴ
判断题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianFate of the world is the first product referred to social issues.
答案： 错误
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover MagazineThat the ice-choked scene in Philadelphia will not happen again can be ensured.
答案： A
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceParagraph B
答案： Ⅰ
判断题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianLearning knowledge from books is as effective as from games.
答案： 错误
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover MagazineThe ice-choked scenes in the work made European landscape looked like cold Lapland.
答案： C
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceParagraph C
答案： Ⅲ
判断题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianPlaying games is an excellent way of solving complex problems because it can last for a long period of time.
答案： 正确
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover MagazineAmerican soldiers in the work attacked English and Hessian troops in an ice-choked way.
答案： B
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceParagraph D
答案： Ⅶ
判断题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianThere are other organisations other than Red Redemption develop the environment-protecting programmes.
答案： 正确
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover MagazineAs the world becomes warmer, the weather or the North Atlantic will be 10 times colder.
答案： D
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceParagraph E
答案： Ⅸ
判断题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianIt is possible for games to help people solve the pressing problems in the real world.
答案： 正确
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover MagazinePeople are reminded of the biggest decrease in salinity and temperature in the records.
答案： E
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceParagraph F
答案： Ⅱ
问答题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianLook at the following statements and the list of people below. Match each statement with the correct people, A-D. Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once. List of People A Gobion Rowlands B Myles Allen C Tom Chatfield D Mike Childs People can apply the experience they got from games to their daily life.
答案： D
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover MagazineComplete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 2 for each answer. Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet. When the Gulf Stream water flows northward, it releases some 20 , which makes the cooler water become 21 and dip into the North Atlantic in the process of 22 As the cold water sinks, a deep water current formed and it is named 23 Then the freshwater on the top of North Atlantic becomes a new one, which is just like a 24 , and makes the Gulf Stream water move 25 or turn 26 .
答案： heat
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceParagraph G
答案： Ⅳ
问答题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianFate of the World was coined in a friends’ conversation.
答案： A
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceComplete the sentences below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from Reading Passage 3 for each answer. Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet. Calhoun’s study about rats shows that they may become aggressive despite no ______.
答案： resource limitations
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover Magazine
答案： denser
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceWhen the definition of crowding concerns with ______, or interaction, it may affects people both psychologically and physically.
答案： social density
问答题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianLeaning knowledge from games is better than learning from books.
答案： C
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover Magazine
答案： thermohaline circulation
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceCrowding makes people feel insufficient ______, because people cannot do what they want.
答案： privacy
问答题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianThe aim of Fate of the World is to create an opportunity for people to learn climate change in an ideal environment.
答案： B
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover Magazine
答案： Great Ocean Conveyor
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceThat males are more aggressive in small rooms and females are more aggressive in large rooms shows the different ______ of genders.
答案： personal space requirements
问答题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianPlaying computer games can make people become smarter.
答案： A
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover Magazine
答案： big thermal blanket
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceHigh density may reduce helping behaviour due to the ______.
答案： diffusion of responsibility
单项选择题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—GuardianChoose TWO letters, A-E. Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet. Which TWO problems have been solved in computer games A gang crimes in New York B climate change C family violence D cutting carbon emissions E foreigners’ invasions
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover Magazine
答案： slowly
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of SciencePeople feel less crowding if they can ______ more over the situation.
答案： control
单项选择题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Climate Change Challenge for Computer Gamers
Fate of the World: The video game in which players save the world from catastrophic climate change.
They’ve previously tackled alien invasions, gang violence in New York and how to raise a happy family, but this week computer games wrestle with an even more pressing issue: climate change.
Arriving on PCs on Tuesday and Macs shortly after, the British-made Fate of the World puts players at the helm of a future World Trade Organisation-style environmental body with a task of saving the world by cutting carbon emissions or damning it by letting soaring temperatures wreak havoc through floods, droughts and fires.
The strategy game is already being hailed by gaming experts as a potential breakthrough for such social change titles, and welcomed by climate campaigners as a way of reaching new audiences. While traditional mainstream games have focused on action, sports and increasingly casual genres, Fate of the World features data from real-world climate models, anecdotes from the polar explorer Pen Hadow and input from a team of scientists and economists in the U.S. and UK. It has been developed by Oxford-based games designers Red Redemption, whose previous browser-based climate game for the BBC has been played more than a million times since it was launched in 2006.
Gobion Rowlands, chairman at Red Redemption and a board member of social gaming organisation Games for Change, said the game was inspired by his desire to make the subject more accessible and a drunken boast to Dr. Myles Allen, head of climate dynamics at Oxford University and a contributor to the last report by the UN’s climate science panel.
’My wife was working on Allen’s Climateprediction.net project (a project to use the power of home PCs to process climate model data). When he took me out for dinner, we got quite drunk, and I bragged that we could make a computer game about anything. He challenged us to make one about climate change.’
Allen has provided the prediction models used in the game. ’For far too long, climate policy has been developed by unelected technocrats in smoke-free conference centres or through talkshow soundbites,’ said Allen. ’What I like about this game is that it allows people to experience, in an idealised world, of course, the kinds of decisions we are likely to confront, and makes it clear there are no easy answers: should we start mining methane clathrates (gas trapped in arctic ice), for example’
Tom Chatfield, gaming expert and the author of Fun Inc." Why Games Are the 21st Century’s Most Serious Business, said: ’This could be the beginning of a flowering of issue-led gaming. But it will be judged on whether it’s a good game, not on whether it’s worthy or not.’
He said that, although some mainstream titles—such as the Civilisation franchise, which has sold more than 6m copies—had touched on issues of sustainability and pollution before, most games with an overt social message often had a lower budget and gave a less polished experience. ’It will be interesting to see if this game can resolve that tension—I can’t list many games that are both campaigning and staggeringly good.’
But, he added, issue-driven titles on everything from health to human rights, such as the browser-based Darfur is Dying, —a game based on life as a refugee in Sudan played by more than 800,000 people were improving in quality and popularity. Just over half of all gamers play games in which they think about moral and ethical issues, according to a 2008 study by the Pew Research Centre of 1,102 12-to 17-year-olds.
Both Rowlands and Chatfield agree that games as a medium are uniquely placed to tackle the complexity of climate change. ’Two of the problems with environmental issues are time and geography—getting people to care about people on the other side of the planet and problems far in the future,’ said Chatfield. ’But if people can feel and see the evolution of variables in a system—such as a changing climate—it can be a better way of learning than reading lots of scientific prose.’
’Games handle complexity well,’ said Rowlands. ’Partly because you learn by doing, but also because of the length of interaction—you could be playing for up to 50 hours, during which you learn a huge amount about how a game works. In an age when we’re accused of dumbing down, computer games can reverse that trend and help us to smarten up.’
Green campaigners have welcomed gaming joining other cultural efforts—from Ian McEwan’s recent novel Solar to the BBC’s drama Burn Up featuring Neve Campbell—to take on the subject. Mike Childs, Friends of the Earth’s head of climate change, said: ’We’ve had books, films, TV debates, movies—so it was only a matter of time before the fight against global warming inspired computer games too. We hope that, by wrestling with the challenges of tackling climate change in the virtual world, gamers will be inspired to take action in the real one—especially with crucial international climate talks coming up in Cancun later this month.’
—Guardian
问答题

A New Ice Age: The Day After Tomorrow
A William Curry is a serious, sober climate scientist, not an art critic. But he has spent a lot of time perusing Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous painting George Washington Crossing the Delaware, which depicts a boatload of colonial American soldiers making their way to attack English and Hessian troops the day after Christmas in 1776. ’Most people think these other guys in the boat are rowing, but they are actually pushing the ice away,’ says Curry tapping his finger on a reproduction of the painting. Sure enough, the lead oarsman is bashing the frozen river with his boot. ’I grew up in Philadelphia. The place in this painting is 30 minutes away by car. I can tell you, this kind of thing just doesn’t happen anymore.’
B But it may again soon. And ice-choked scenes, similar to those immortalised by the sixteenth century Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder, may also return to Europe. His works, including the 1565 masterpiece Hunters in the Snow make the now-temperate European landscapes look more like Lapland. Such frigid settings were commonplace during a period dating roughly from 1300 to 1850 because much of North America and Europe was in the throes of a little ice age. And now there is mounting evidence that the chill could return. A growing number of scientists believe conditions are ripe for another prolonged cool down, or small ice age. While no one is predicting a brutal ice sheet like the one that covered the Northern Hemisphere with glaciers about 12,000 years ago the next cooling trend could drop average temperatures 5 degrees Fahrenheit over much of the United States and 10 degrees in the Northeast, northern Europe, and northern Asia.
C ’It could happen in 10 years,’ says Terrence Joyce, who chairs the Woods Hole Physical Oceanography Department. ’Once it does, it can take hundreds of years to reverse.’ And he is alarmed that Americans have yet to take the threat seriously.
D A drop of 5 to 10 degrees entails much more than simply bumping up the thermostat and carrying on. Both economically and ecologically, such quick, persistent chilling could have devastating consequences. A 2002 report titled Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises produced by the National Academy of Sciences, pegged the cost from agricultural losses alone at $100 billion to $250 billion while also predicting that damage to ecologies could be vast and incalculable. A grim sampler: disappearing forests, increased housing expenses, dwindling freshwater, lower crop yields, and accelerated species extinctions.
E Political changes since the last ice age could make survival far more difficult for the world’s poor. During previous cooling periods, whole tribes simply picked up and moved south, but that option doesn’t work in the modern, tense world of closed borders. ’To the extent that abrupt climate change may cause rapid and extensive changes of fortune for those who live off the land, the inability to migrate may remove one of the major safety nets for distressed people,’ says the report.
F Isn’t the earth actually warming Indeed it is, says Joyce. In his cluttered office, full of soft light from the foggy Cape Cod morning, he explains how such warming could actually be the surprising culprit of the next mini-ice age. The paradox is a result of the appearance over the past 30 years in the North Atlantic of huge rivers of freshwater—the equivalent of a 10-foot-thick layer—mixed into the salty sea. No one is certain where the fresh torrents are coming from, but a prime suspect is melting Arctic ice, caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that traps solar energy.
G The freshwater trend is major news in ocean-science circles. Bob Dickson, a British oceanographer who sounded an alarm at a February conference in Honolulu, has termed the drop in salinity and temperature in the Labrador Sea—a body of water between northeastern Canada and Greenland that adjoins the Atlantic—’arguably the largest full-depth changes observed in the modern instrumental oceanographic record’.
H The trend could cause a little ice age by subverting the northern penetration of Gulf Stream waters. Normally, the Gulf Stream, laden with heat soaked up in the tropics, meanders up the east coasts of the United States and Canada. As it flows northward, the stream surrenders heat to the air. Because the prevailing North Atlantic winds blow eastward, a lot of the heat wafts to Europe. That’s why many scientists believe winter temperatures on the Continent are as much as 36 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in North America at the same latitude. Frigid Boston, for example, lies at almost precisely the same latitude as balmy Rome. And some scientists say the heat also warms Americans and Canadians. ’It’s a real mistake to think of this solely as a European phenomenon,’ says Joyce.
I Having given up its heat to the air, the now-cooler water becomes denser and sinks into the North Atlantic by a mile or more in a process oceanographers call thermohaline circulation. This massive column of cascading cold is the main engine powering a deep water current called the Great Ocean Conveyor that snakes through all the world’s oceans. But as the North Atlantic fills with freshwater, it grows less dense, making the waters carried northward by the Gulf Stream less able to sink. The new mass of relatively freshwater sits on top of the ocean like a big thermal blanket, threatening the thermohaline circulation. That in turn could make the Gulf Stream slow or veer southward. At some point, the whole system could simply shut down, and so quickly. ’There is increasing evidence that we are getting closer to a transition point, from which we can jump to a new state. Small changes, such as a couple of years of heavy precipitation or melting ice at high latitudes, could yield a big response,’ says Joyce.
J ’You have all this freshwater sitting at high latitudes, and it can literally take hundreds of years to get rid of it,’ Joyce says. So while the globe as a whole gets warmer by tiny fractions of one degree Fahrenheit annually, the North Atlantic region could, in a decade, get up to 10 degrees colder. What worries researchers at Woods Hole is that history is on the side of rapid shutdown. They know it has happened before.
—Discover Magazine
答案： southward
问答题

The Biology and Psychology of Crowding in Man and Animals
A Of the great myriad of problems which man and world face today, there are three significant trends which stand above all others in importance: the unprecedented population growth throughout the world—a net increase of 1,400,000 people per week—and all of its associations and consequences; the increasing urbanisation of these people, so that more and more of them are rushing into cities and urban areas of the world; and the tremendous explosion of communication and social contact throughout the world, so that every part of the world is now aware of every other part. All of these trends are producing increased crowding and the perception of crowding.
B It is important to emphasise at the outset that crowding and density are not necessarily the same. Density is the number of individuals per unit area or unit space. It is a simple physical measurement. Crowding is a product of density, communication, contact, and activity. It implies a pressure, a force, and a psychological reaction. It may occur at widely different densities. The frontiersman may have felt crowded when someone built a homestead a mile away. The suburbanite may feel relatively uncrowded in a small house on a half-acre lot if it is surrounded by trees, bushes and a hedgerow, even though he lives under much higher physical density than did the frontiersman. Hence, crowding is very much a psychological and ecological phenomenon, and not just a physical condition.
C A classic crowding study was done by Calhoun (1962), who put rats into a physical environment designed to accommodate 50 rats and provided enough food, water, and nesting materials for the number of rats in the environment. The rat population peaked at 80, providing a look at cramped living conditions. Although the rats experienced no resource limitations other than space restriction, a number of negative conditions developed: the two most dominant males took harems of several female rats and occupied more than their share of space, leaving other rats even more crowded; many females stopped building nests and abandoned their infant rats; the pregnancy rate declined; infant and adult mortality rates increased; more aggressive and physical attacks occurred; sexual variation increased, including hyper-sexuality, inhibited sexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.
D Calhoun’s results have led to other research on crowding’s effects on human beings, and these research findings have suggested that high density is not the single cause of negative effects on humans. When crowding is defined only in terms of spatial density (the amount of space per person), the effects of crowding are variable. However, if crowding is defined in terms of social density, or the number of people who must interact, then crowding better predicts negative psychological and physical effects.
E There are several reasons why crowding makes us feel uncomfortable. One reason is related to stimulus overload—there are just too many stimuli competing for our attention. We cannot notice or respond to all of them. This feeling is typical of the hurried mother, who has several children competing for her attention, while she is on the phone and the doorbell is ringing. This leaves her feeling confused, fatigued and yearning to withdraw from the situation. There are strong feelings of a lack of privacy—being unable to pay attention to what you want without being repeatedly interrupted or observed by others.
F Field studies done in a variety of settings illustrate that social density is associated with negative effects on human beings. In prison studies, males generally became more aggressive with increases in density. In male prison, inmates living in conditions of higher densities were more likely to suffer from fight. Males rated themselves as more aggressive in small rooms (a situation of high spatial density), whilst the females rated themselves as more aggressive in large rooms (Stokols et al. 1973). These differences relate to the different personal space requirements of the genders. Besides, Baum and Greenberg found that high density leads to decreased attraction, both physical attraction and liking towards others and it appears to have gender differences in the impact that density has on attraction levels, with males experiencing a more extreme reaction. Also, the greater the density is, the less the helping behaviour. One reason why the level of helping behaviour may be reduced in crowded situations links to the concept of diffusion of responsibility. The more people that are present in a situation that requires help, the less often help is given. This may be due to the fact that people diffuse responsibility among themselves with no-one feeling that they ought to be the one to help.
G Facing all these problems, what are we going to do with them The more control a person has over the crowded environment the less negatively they experience it, thus the perceived crowding is less (Schmidt and Keating). The ability to cope with crowding is also influenced by the relationship the individual has with the other people in the situation. The high density will be interpreted less negatively if the individual experiences it with people he likes. One of the main coping strategies employed to limit the impact of high density is social withdrawal. This includes behaviours such as averting the gaze and using negative body language to attempt to block and potential intrusions.
—The Ohio Journal of ScienceThe most effective way to reduce the effect of high density on human beings is ______.
答案： social withdrawal
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