英语阅读精选(部分).doc

1、红色能增强反应的速度和力度What links speed, power, and the color red? Hint: its not a sports car. Its your muscles.A new study, published in the latest issue of the journal Emotion, finds that when humans see red, their reactions become both faster and more forceful. And people are unaware of the colors intensifying effect. The findings may have applications for sporting and other activities in which a brief burst of strength and speed is needed, such as weightlifting. But the authors caution that the color energy boost is likely short-lived.Red enhances our physical reactions because it is seen as a danger cue, explains coauthor Andrew Elliot, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester and a lead researcher in the field of color psychology. Humans flush when they are angry or preparing for attack, he explains. People are acutely aware of such reddening in others and its implications.But threat is a double-edged sword, argue Elliot and coauthor Henk Aarts, professor of psychology at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. Along with mobilizing extra energy, threat also evokes worry, task distraction, and self-preoccupation, all of which have been shown to tax mental resources, they write in the paper. In earlier color research, exposure to red has proven counterproductive for skilled motor and mental tasks: athletes competing against an opponent wearing red are more likely to lose and students exposed to red before a test perform worse.Color affects us in many ways depending on the context, explains Elliot, whose research also has documented how men and women are unconsciously attracted to the opposite sex when they wear red. Those color effects fly under our awareness radar, he says.The study measured the reactions of students in two experiments. In the first, 30 fourth-through-10th graders pinched and held open a metal clasp. Right before doing so, they read aloud their participant number written in either red or gray crayon. In the second experiment, 46 undergraduates squeezed a handgrip with their dominant hand as hard as possible when they read the word squeeze on a computer monitor. The word appeared on a red, blue, or gray background.In both scenarios, red significantly increased the force exerted, with participants in the red condition squeezing with greater maximum force than those in the gray or blue conditions. In the handgrip experiment, not only the amount of force, but also the immediacy of the reaction increased when red was present.The colors in the study were precisely equated in hue, brightness, and chroma (intensity) to insure that reactions were not attributable to these other qualities of color. Many color psychology studies in the past have failed to account for these independent variables, so the results have been ambiguous, explains Elliot.The study focused exclusively on isometric or non-directional physical responses, allowing the researcher to measure the energy response of participants, though not their behavior, which can vary among individuals and situations. The familiar flight or fight responses, for example, show differing reactions to threat. (497 words)2、三十年，人类战胜艾滋病吗？ ON JUNE 5th 1981 Americas Centres for Disease Control and Prevention reported the outbreak of an unusual form of pneumonia in Los Angeles. When, a few weeks later, its scientists noticed a similar cluster of a rare cancer called Kaposis sarcoma in San Francisco, they suspected that something strange and serious was afoot. That something was AIDS.Since then, 25m people have died from AIDS and another 34m are infected. The 30th anniversary of the diseases discovery has been taken by many as an occasion for hand-wringing. Yet the war on AIDS is going far better than anyone dared hope.Even more hopeful is a recent study which suggests that the drugs used to treat AIDS may also stop its transmission. If that proves true, the drugs could achieve much of what a vaccine would. The question for the world will no longer be whether it can wipe out the plague, but whether it is prepared to pay the price.If AIDS is defeated, it will be thanks to an alliance of science, activism and altruism. The science has come from the worlds pharmaceutical companies. In 1996 a batch of similar drugs, all of them inhibiting the activity of one of the AIDS viruss crucial enzymes, appeared almost simultaneously. The effect was miraculous, if you (or your government) could afford the $15,000 a year that those drugs cost when they first came on the market.Much of the activism came from rich-world gays. Having badgered drug companies into creating the new medicines, the activists bullied them into dropping the price.The altruism was aroused as it became clear by the mid-1990s that AIDS was not just a rich-world disease. Three-quarters of those affected wereand still arein Africa. Unlike most infections, which strike children and the elderly, AIDS hits the most productive members of society: businessmen, civil servants, engineers, teachers, doctors, nurses. Thanks to an enormous effort by Western philanthropists and some politicians (this is one area where even the left should give credit to George Bush junior), a series of programmes has brought drugs to those infected.The result is patchy. Not enough peoplesome 6.6m of the 16m who would most quickly benefitare getting the drugs. And the pills are not a cure. Stop taking them, and the virus bounces back. But it is a huge step forward from ten years ago.What can science offer now? A few peoples immune systems control the disease naturally and antibodies have been discovered that neutralise the virus. But a cure still seems a long way off. Prevention is, for the moment, the better bet.In the early days scientists were often attacked by activists for being more concerned with trying to prevent the epidemic spreading than treating the affected. Now it seems that treatment and prevention will come in the same pill. If you can stop the virus reproducing in someones body, you not only save his life, you also reduce the number of viruses for him to pass on. Get enough people on drugs and it would be like vaccinating them: the chain of transmission would be broken.Such a programme would take years and also cost a lot of money. About $16 billion a year is spent on AIDS in poor and middle-income countries. Half is generated locally and half is foreign aid. Moreover, most of the extra spending would be offset by savings on the treatment of those who would have been infected, but were notsome 12m people, if the boffins have done their sums right. At $500 per person per year, the benefits would far outweigh the costs in purely economic terms; though donors will need to compare the gain from spending more on knocking out AIDS against other worthy causes, such as eliminating malaria.For the moment, the struggle is to stop some rich countries giving less. It is still a long haul. But AIDS can be beaten. A plague that 30 years ago was blamed on mans iniquity has ended up showing him in a better, more inventive and generous light. (679 words)3、流动劳动力的未来American cyber-security experts failed to provide sufficient evidence when accusing Chinese cyber spies of trying to break into computers belonging to China specialists and defense contractors in the United States, a Chinese cyber expert told Xinhua on Thursday.WHEN a Bangladeshi man goes to work on a construction site in the Middle East, his wife typically moves in with her husbands family. Not all wives enjoy this. They sweat in a strange kitchen, take care of a bossy mother-in-law and see their husbands only for a few weeks each year. And although their husbands send home plenty of money, they often send it to their parents, not their wives. Migration creates losers as well as winners.But the gains vastly outweigh the losses, as Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan make plain in their new book, “Exceptional People”. If rich countries were to admit enough migrants from poor countries to expand their own labour forces by a mere 3%, the world would be richer, according to one estimate, by $356 billion a year. Completely opening borders would add an astonishing $39 trillion over 25 years to the global economy. That is more than 500 times the amount the rich world spends on foreign aid each year. Migration is the most effective tool yet devised for reducing global poverty. The same worker can earn 15 times as much if he or she moves from say, Yemen to the United States. The wage gap between rich and poor countries is far wider than it was a century ago, during the great age of migration from Europe to America. And the emotional costs of leaving home, though still hefty, are much lighter than they were. A 19th-century Russian emigrant might never see or speak to his family again. A 21st-century migrant can Skype them in the taxi from the airport. Small wonder that the number of international migrants has doubled in the past quarter-century, to more than 200m. Increasing mobility combined with cheaper communications means that in the future, “the global community is becoming connected in a manner not experienced since our small-world evolutionary origins in Africa.” This is a fascinating point, which the authors could have pursued further than they do. Overall, however, this is a book of bold ambitions ably fulfilled. Mr Goldin and his co-authors offer a history of migration, from mans earliest wanderings in Africa to the present day. Thanks to modern techniques for decoding genetic evidence, far more is known today about the great movements of prehistory than was suspected even a decade ago. Genetic tests are now so cheap that Mr Goldin can draw us a map of how his own ancestors moved from east Africa 31,000 years ago, across Arabia and through Central Asia before swinging back into northern Europe. After filling in the historical background, the authors give a rigorous but readable guide to the costs and benefits of modern migration. Poor countries may suffer when they lose their best brains to the West: 43% of Liberian doctors, for example, now work in North America. But the prospect of migrating spurs people in poor countries to acquire marketable skills. Some then decide not to migrate after all. Others spend several years abroad but then return home with new skills, new contacts and a pot of savings to invest. Overall, the brain drain actually helps poor countries. And of course, it benefits the migrants themselves. If it did not, they would not leave home. Immigration is unpopular in rich countries because people overestimate its costs and underestimate its benefits. An influx of unskilled migrants may drag down the wages of unskilled natives, but this effect is “very small at most, and may be irrelevant”, according to a number of different studies. Migrants often create employment for natives. Indian entrepreneurs in San Francisco create new technology firms. Mexican nannies hold babies while American mothers go out to work. Migrants come when their services are wanted and stay away when they are not. Through the migrant grapevine, they know that jobs are drying up several months before government statisticians notice. More generally, the authors predict a future of labour shortages in rich countries which only migration can solve. As Europe and America age, they will need more young and energetic nurses, care assistants, housekeepers and cleaners. Robots cannot do everything, even in Japan. The demand for highly skilled workers will grow too, and countries will start to compete more fiercely for mobile talent. Migration will “define our future”, the authors say. They are probably right. (720 words)4、新的方法能使被偷的密码失效No password is 100% secure. There are always ways and means for those with malicious intent to hack, crack or socially engineer access to a password. Indeed, there are more and more websites and databases compromised on a seemingly daily basis. A new approach to verifying passwords that also takes into account the speed with which a user types in their login and the gaps between characters would render a stolen password useless.Writing in the International Journal of Internet Technology and Secured Transactions computer scientists from Beirut explain the shortcomings of previous attempts at key-pattern analysis. KPA is an attempt to scrutinize the speed with which a user taps the keys as well as measuring the gaps between keystrokes, the beat of their typing. KPA has also been tested with modified keyboards that measure the force with which keys are pressed. The result can be a biometric profile of the way an individual user types in their password. If the biometric does not match the user then the password fails even if it is correct.Ravel Jabbour, Wes Masri and Ali El-Hajj of the American University of Beirut, in Lebanon, point out how inconvenient a modified keyboard would be to an organization or individual. They explain how previous attempts at KPA fail if the pressing of two keys overlaps. Early efforts also focus on inter timing, the time lag between pressing one key and the next, which is not adequate to ensure a password is usable only by the legitimate user. Th