NBA commissioner David Stern was in Orlando on Thursday night, getting ready for Sunday's All-Star Game. Of course, all he could talk about was the only player anyone wants to talk about these days: New York Knicks guard Jeremy Lin. Hours before Lin took the court against the Heat, a few hundred miles South down I-95 in Miami, Stern told reporters that Lin's instant popularity hasn't ever been matched in sports history, not even by Sunday's biggest names, LeBron James or Kobe Bryant. The Associated Press had the details. "I haven't done a calculation, but it's fair to say that no player has created the interest and the craze in this short period of time, in any sport, that I'm aware of like Jeremy Lin has," Stern said Thursday. Lin, an undrafted guard from Harvard, has become the NBA's biggest story since coming off the Knicks' bench earlier this month to lead them to nine wins in 11 games heading into their matchup with Miami on Thursday night. With Lin's popularity in Asia as the league's first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent, and with the religious community because of his strong Christian faith, Stern says he's "never quite seen anything like" the attention on Lin. "It's fascinating," Stern said after the All-Star Jam Session opening ceremonies. The top five videos on NBA.com since Feb. 4, when Lin joined the circulation, are all Lin or Knicks related. Lin went from 190,000 followers on Sina, China's version of Twitter, on Feb. 2 to more than 1 million as of Feb. 16. Indeed, Lin's popularity is so _ that the NBA made a late list switch to ensure his participation in the Rising Stars Challenge on All-Star Saturday, a game that includes the NBA's best rookies and sophomores. Lin is in such high demand that all of the game's other participants will meet with the media following a team practice on Friday while Lin will have his own, separate press conference later in the night. This is Jeremy's world, folks. We're all just living in it. Even David Stern and the rest of the league's... What can we learn from the above passage about Jeremy Lin's instant popularity? A) Knowledge starts with practice. B) Failure is the mother of success. C) Every dog has its day. D) No pains, no gains.
C


(Question)
In Jane Austin's time, unmarried girls were always closely guarded, and hardly allowed to be alone with a young man; and during the Victorian period (just the period after Jane Austin) exposure  of the body in particular was thought to be most immoral, Victorian ladies wore dresses reaching down to their feet, long in the sleeve and high at the neck. Since then, ways of dressing as well as times have changed. Girls were no longer guarded, and they can do more or less what they like. And yet among all these astonishing changes, one thing has remained much the same for most people, and that is the same of becoming a mother before being married. If this does happen, there often comes a quick marriage with the responsible man. If this is impossible, the affair may bring considerable shame to the girl's parents as well as to herself.    It is now quite normal for a girl, once past the age of about fifteen, to go out with a boyfriend, and although her parents will probably insist that she come home at a certain time, beyond this they depend on her or look after herself. Kisses between young men and women are now considered to be perfectly normal, but although times have changed so much, most people still believe that a woman should not become a mother before being married. From the article, we learn that   _  . A) an unmarried girl must come back home for the night. B) it is good for a girl of 15 to have a boyfriend. C) the unmarried girl who has a baby needn't get married at once. D) a girl of 15 has the right to be alone with her boyfriend.
(Answer)
D


Ques: A new study suggests that early exposure to germs  strengthens the immune system. That means letting children get a little dirty might be good for their health later in life.  The study involved laboratory mice. It found that adult mice raised in a germ-free environment were more likely to develop allergies, asthma  and other autoimmune disorders. There are more than eighty disorders where cells that normally defend the body instead attack tissues and organs.  Richard Blumberg,who led the study,is a professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston,Massachusetts. He says,in 1989,medical researchers who sought to explain these diseases, first discovered that the increasing use of antibacterial soaps and other products, especially early in life, could weaken immune systems.  Now, Dr. Blumberg and his team have what is the first biological evidence to link early exposure to germs to stronger adult immune systems. They say this exposure could prevent the development of some autoimmune diseases.  In the adult germ-free mice, they found that inflammation in the lungs and colon  was caused by so-called killer T cells. These normally fight infection. But they became overactive and targeted healthy tissue--an autoimmune condition seen in asthma and a disease called ulcerative colitis .  Dr. Blumberg says the mice raised in a normal environment did not have the same reaction. He says their immune systems had been "educated" by early exposure to germs.  Rates of autoimmune disorders are rising worldwide, but mostly in wealthier, industrialized countries. According to Dr. Blumberg, it might be high time that people were warned to be more careful with the early use of antibiotics  and the prescription from their doctors.  Rob Dunn is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He says the new study does not mean people should stop washing. "Wash your hands , but don't do it with antibacterial soap. Let your kids play in a reasonable amount of dirt and get outside and get... Where does this text most probably come from? A) A teacher's handbook. B) A story book. C) A science magazine. D) A travel journal.
Ans: C


Ques:Can you believe your eyes? A recent experiment suggests that the answer to that question may depend on your age. Martin Doherty, a psychologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland, led the team of scientists. In this experiment, Doherty and his team tested the perception  of some people, using pictures of some orange circles. The researchers showed the same pictures to two groups of people. The first group included 151 children aged 4 to 10, and the second group included 24 adults aged 18 to 25. The first group of pictures showed two circles alone on a white background. One of the circles was larger than the other, and these people were asked to identify the larger one. Four-year-olds identified the correct circle 79 percent of the time. Adults identified the correct circle 95 percent of the time. Next, both groups were shown a picture where the orange circles, again of different sizes, were surrounded by gray circles. Here's where the trick lies in. In some of the pictures, the smaller orange circle was surrounded by even smaller gray circles -- making the orange circle appear larger than the other orange circle, which was the real larger one. And the larger orange circle was surrounded by even bigger gray circles -- so it appeared to be smaller than the real smaller orange circle. When young children aged 4 to 6 looked at these tricky pictures, they weren't fooled -- they were still able to find the bigger circle with roughly the same accuracy as before. Older children and adults, on the other hand, did not do as well. Older children often identified the smaller circle as the larger one, and adults got it wrong most of the time. As children get older, Doherty said, their brains may develop the ability to identify visual context. In other words, they will begin to process the whole picture at once: the tricky gray circles, as well as the orange circle in the middle. As a result, they're more likely to fall for this kind of visual trick. According to the passage, we can know that  _  . A) a smaller orange circle appears bigger on a white background B) an orange circle appears bigger than a gray one of the same size C) a circle surrounded by other circles looks bigger than its real size D) a circle surrounded by bigger ones looks smaller than its real size

Ans:
D