Q: Tattoos and body piercings have moved up on the trend list in recent years. Around Western schools lots of teens are sporting new holes and "flesh ink" . As with all other subjects, the Chinese will surely have to deal with this situation with respect to their children. To get a better view of what has happened in the West, 1et's sit down and hear what they say. Tiara from Indiana: I personally think body piercing is sickening. If there were supposed to be holes in your body,you would have been born with them. I do,however,think that ear piercing is not wrong. There is a difference between ear piercing and belly button piercing. Ear piercing is not nearly as dangerous. I would be sick if someone stuck a needle in my belly button. Lee from Illinois: Hi! I live in Illinois. I am 23. I have 12 tattoos and three piercings. I love my tattoos and consider myself an art collector. You would be surprised at who has given me the thumbs up on my art work. People on the street stop me to look at the tattoo on my leg. Most of them don't know what it is. They just think the work itself is great. Subotai from California: I'm not forbidden of self-expression,but when I see high school students getting these piercings, I really wonder. In some cases, the drive is deeper and darker than mere fashion. A friend of mine tried piercing her own tongue with a safety pin. It got infected and she had a tongue the size of a cow's. Jackson from Ohio: I don't think it is wrong, but when people do it all over the place like their face and everything--I think that's ridiculous. People who get the big "dragons that cover the whole body--I don't think that's necessary." When I see naked chicks on guys, I think, "You have no respect for women." Who doesn't think tattoos and piercings except ear piercing are beautiful? A) Jackson B) Lee C) Tiara D) Subotai
A: C


Q: Jack Andraka from Maryland won the grand prize at the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. It is the largest high school science competition in the world. The Maryland teenager is the youngest winner of the $75,000 prize. He was chosen from among 1,500 students in 70 countries. Jack Andraka invented a test for pancreatic cancer  . He started to learn it after losing a close family friend to the disease. "I went on the Internet and I found that 85%of all pancreatic cancers are found late, when someone has less than 2% chance of survival , " he says, "and I was thinking,' That's not right. We should be able to do something.'" He found that early discovery is important to increasing the chances of surviving the disease. The Maryland teenager asked to work in a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and was allowed. There he developed a simple paper test, which can recognize the disease in a single drop of blood. His test has proved correct 90% of the time. It also is 100 times more sensitive than other tests. "It costs 3 cents per test, and then it takes only 5 minutes to run," he said. Jack's success wouldn't have been possible without Anirban Maitra, a professor at Johns Hopkins. He was the only person among the 200 researchers Jack wrote to who showed interest in his project. "I was very surprised that this was a 15-year-old who was writing this. I wanted to meet this clever young man and see what he wanted to talk about and so I called him over for an interview . " Jack worked in Professor Maitra's laboratory, completing his project in 7 months. The government has given the Maryland teenager patent rights to the pancreatic cancer test. He is now talking with companies about developing the test into a simple product. Whatever happens, the professor believes Jack Andraka's name is one we will be hearing again over the next 10 to 20 years. We can infer from the text that Jack Andraka   _  . A) left a deep impression on Professor Maitra B) was thought highly of by companies C) got support from others easily D) wasn't afraid of failure
A: A


Q: In the kitchen of my mother's houses there has always been a wooden stand   with a small notepad   and a hole for a pencil. I'm looking for paper on which to note down the name of a book I am recommending to my mother. Over forty years since my earliest memories of the kitchen pad and pencil, five houses later, the current paper and pencil look the same as they always did. Surely it can't be the same pencil? The pad is more modern, but the wooden stand is definitely  the original one. "I'm just amazed you still have the same stand for holding the pad and pencil after all these years." I say to her, walking back into the living-room with a sheet of paper and the pencil. "You still use a pencil. Can't you afford a pen?" My mother replies a little sharply. "It works perfectly  well. I've  always kept the stand in the kitchen. I never knew when I might want to note down an idea, and I was always in the kitchen in those days." Immediately I can picture her, hair wild, blue housecoat covered in flour, a wooden spoon in one hand, the pencil in the other, her mouth moving silently. My mother smiles and says, "One day I was cooking and watching baby Pauline, and I had a brilliant thought, but the stand was empty. One of the children must have taken the paper. So I just picked up the breadboard and wrote it all down on the back. It turned out to be a real breakthrough for solving the mathematical problem I was working on." This story--which happened before I was born--reminds me how extraordinary my mother was, and is, as a gifted mathematician. I feel embarrassed that I complain about not having enough child-free time to work. Later, when my mother is in the bathroom, I go into her kitchen and turn over the breadboards. Sure enough, on the back of the smallest one, are some penciled marks I recognize as mathematics. Those symbols have travelled unaffected through fifty years, rooted in the soil of a cheap wooden breadboard, invisible   exhibits at every meal. Why has the author's mother always kept the notepad and pencil in the kitchen? A) To leave messages. B) To list her everyday tasks. C) To note down maths problems. D) To write down a flash of inspiration.

A: D