第3部分：概括大意与完成句子（第23-30题，每题1分，共8分)
下面的短文后有2项测试任务：（1)第23~26题要求从所给的6个选项中为指定段落每段选择1个最佳标题；（2)第27~30题要求从所给的6个选项中为每个句子确定一个最佳选项。
Organic Food: Why?
1. Europe is now the biggest market for organic food in the world, expanding by 25 percent a year over the past 10 years. So what is the attraction of organic food for some people? The really important thing is that organic sounds more “natural”. Eating organic is a way of defining oneself as natural, good, caring, different from the junk-food-eating masses.
2. Unlike conventional farming, the organic approach means farming with natural rather than man-made, fertilisers and pesticides. Techniques such as crop rotation improve soil quality and help organic farmers compensate for the absence of man-made chemicals. As a method of food production, organic is, however, inefficient in its use of labour and land; there are severe limits to how much food can be produced. Also, the environmental benefits of not using artificial fertiliser are tiny compared with the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by transporting food.
3. Organic farming is often 医学全.在线www.lindalemus.comclaimed to be safer than conventional farming. Yet studies into organic farming worldwide continue to reject this claim. An extensive review by the UK Food Standards Agency found that there was no statistically significant difference between organic and conventional crops. Even where results indicated there was evidence of a difference, the reviewers found no sign that these differences would have any noticeable effect on health
4. The simplistic claim that organic food is more nutritious than conventional food was always likely to be misleading. Food is a natural product, and the health value of different foods will vary for a number of reasons, including freshness, the way the food is cooked, the type of soil it is grown in, the amount of sunlight and rain crops have received, and so on. Likewise, the flavour of a carrot has less to do with whether it was fertilised with manure or something out of a plastic sack than with the variety of carrot and how long ago it was dug up.
5. The notion that organic food is safer than “normal” food is also contradicted by the fact that many of our most common foods are full of natural toxins. As one research expert says: “People think that the more natural something is, the better it is for them. That is simply not the case. In fact, it is the opposite that is true: the closer a plant is to its natural state, the more likely it is that it will poison you. Naturally many plants do not want to be eaten, so we have spent 10,000 years developing agriculture and breeding out harmful traits from crops.”
A. Main reason for the popularity of organic food
B. Description of organic farming
C. Factors that affect food health value
D. Testing the taste of organic food
E. Necessity to remove hidden dangers from food
F. Research into whether organic food is better
23. Paragraph 1         
24. Paragraph 2         
25. Paragraph 3         
26. Paragraph 4         
 
27. Techniques of organic farming help _________.
28. There is no convincing evidence to _________.
29. The weather conditions during the growth of crops_________.
30. The closer a plant is to its natural state, the less suitable it is to_________.
 
A. show that organic crops are safer than conventional ones
B. be specially trained
C. improve soil quality
D. poison you
E. be eaten
F. affect their nutritional content
 
第4部分：阅读理解（第31-45题，每题3分，共45分)
下面有3篇短文，每篇短文后有5道题。请根据短文内容，为每题确定1个最佳选项。
第一篇Why Don’t Babies Talk Like Adults?
Over the past half-century, scientists have settled on two reasonable theories related to baby talk. One states that a young child's brain needs time to master language, in the same way that it does to master other abilities such as physical movement. The second theory states that a child's vocabulary level is the key factor. According to this theory, some key steps have to occur in a logical sequence before sentence formation occurs. Children's mathematical knowledge develops in the same way.
In 2007, researchers at Harvard University, who were studying the two theories, found a clever way to test them. More than 20,000 internationally adopted children enter the U.S. each year. Many of them no longer hear their birth language after they arrive, and they must learn English more or less the same way infants do 一 that is, by listening and by trial and error. International adoptees don't take classes or use a dictionary when they are learning their new tongue and most of them don't have a well-developed first language. All of these factors make them an ideal population in which to test these competing hypotheses about how language is learned
Neuroscientists Jesse Snedeker, Joy Geren and Carissa Shafto studied the language development of 27 children adopted from China between the ages of two and five years. These children began learning English at an older age than US natives and had more mature brains with which to tackle the task. Even so, just as with American-born infants, their first English sentences consisted of single words and were largely bereft (缺乏的)of function words, word endings and verbs. The adoptees then went through the same stages as typical American-born children, though at a faster clip. The adoptees and native children started combining words in sentences when their vocabulary reached the same sizes, further www.med126.comsuggesting that what matters is not how old you are or how mature your brain is, but the number of words you know.
This finding 一 that having more mature brains did not help the adoptees avoid the toddle-talk stage 一 suggests that babies speak in baby talk not because they have baby brains, but because they have only just started learning and need time to gain enough vocabulary to be able to expand their conversations. Before long, the one-word stage will give way to the two-word stage and so on. Learning how to chat like an adult is a gradual process.
But this potential answer also raises an even older and more difficult question. Adult immigrants who learn a second language rarely achieve the same proficiency in a foreign language as the average child raised as a native speaker. Researchers have long suspected there is a "critical period" for language development, after which it cannot proceed with full success to fluency. Yet we still do not understand this critical period or know why it ends.
31. What is the writer's main purpose in Paragraph 2?
A.   To reject the view that adopted children need two languages.
B.   To argue that culture affects the way children learn a language.
C.   To give reasons why adopted children were used in the study.
D.   To justify a particular approach to language learning.
32.  Snedekert Geren and Shafto based their study on children who
A. were finding it difficult to learn English.
B. were learning English at a later age than US children.
C. had come from a number of language backgrounds.
D. had taken English lessons in China.
33.  What aspect of the adopted children's language development differed from that of US-born children?
A. The rate at which they acquired language.
B.   Their first words.
C.   The way they learn English.
D. The point at which they started producing sentences.
34.  What does the Harvard finding show?
A.   Not all toddlers use baby talk.
B.   Some children need more conversation than others.
C.   Language learning takes place in ordered steps.
D.   Not all brains work in the same way.
35.  When the writer says "critical period", he means a period when
A.   studies produce useful results.     
B.   adults need to be taught like children.
C. language learning takes place effectively.
D.   immigrants want to learn another language.

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