IELTS(雅思)题库_留学英语题库

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New ScientistReading Passage 2 has seven paragraphs, A-G. Which paragraph contains the following information Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once. the only creature who has its breath under good control while laughing

答案： G

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You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistLook at the following people and the list of statements below. Match each person with the correct opinion, A-L. Write the correct letter, A-L, in boxes on your answer sheet. List of Statements A suggests that creative people are more likely to be aesthetic. B finds the correlation between mood and creativity is circular. C says that communication makes people creative. D identify that changing mental state from negative side may stimulate creativity. E creates the way to test creativity. F uses brain waves to study creative brains. G draws on the knowledge from novels. H finds a process to explain the relationship between mood and creativity. I says that creative people are always socially popular. J points out that creative people are more likely to have mental illnesses. K finds that latent inhibition is the reason why people become creative. L finds that creative brain activity becomes more when they deal with harder and more complex work. Paul Torrance

答案： E

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Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science DailyClassify the following features as characterising A Americans B British C both Americans and British D neither Americans nor British Write the correct letter A, B, C or D in boxes on your answer sheet. NB You may use any letter more than once. People’s lifestyle affects their health.

答案： C

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientistan important setting to identify the origin of laughter

答案： C

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistMark Runco

答案： A

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science DailyPeople receive more education.

答案： A

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientistthe hypotheses of the origin of laughter

答案： F

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science DailyPeople carry more fat around their waist.

答案： A

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistJamison

答案： D

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientistlaughing should involve more than one person

答案： B

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science DailyPeople have less money to spend on their medical treatment.

答案： B

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistJordan Peterson

答案： H

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientistthe impossibility of identifying the origin of laughter

答案： G

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science DailyComplete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from Reading Passage 3 for each answer. Write your answers in boxes on your answer sheet. According to the studies of diabetes risk among American and English people, 31 and conventional risk factors are both needed to be considered. And researchers believed that fat around 32 is the main reason why Americans are more likely to suffer from diabetes than Englishmen, although they have almost the same 33 That is because studies show that 34 leads to a large percentage of higher diabetes rate instead of conventional risk factors in the aspects of 35 and 36 Therefore, Americans should do some changes, like the amount of 37 , 38 and reducing some social and environmental factors like 39 in order to have as large as 40 as their English peers.

答案： waist size

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science Daily

答案： middle sections

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientistexamples of creatures other than human beings laugh

答案： A

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistColin Martindale

答案： F

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New ScientistComplete 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. Although human beings and chimps have the same 20 , their laughter are not really 21 when removing the 22 When people laugh, they tend to shorten their 23 Through 24 , investigation has revealed that human infant and chimp laughter may have closely resembled 25 based on the 26 of their sounds.

答案： ticklish spots

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science Daily

答案： standard of living

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistPaul Howard-Jones

答案： L

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science Daily

答案： waist circumference

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientist

答案： parallel

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science Daily

答案： health

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistTeresa Amabile

答案： B

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientist

答案： context

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science Daily

答案： lifestyles。

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science Daily

答案： physical activities

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistVera John-Steiner

答案： I

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientist

答案： (single)exhalation

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science Daily

答案： diet

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientist

答案： sound spectrographs

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science Daily

答案： stress

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientist

答案： pattern

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistDo 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 Creativity can be seen as a kind of intelligence.

答案： 0

填空题

What Are You Laughing at
A We like to think that laughing is the height of human sophistication. Our big brains let us see the humour in a strategically positioned pun, an unexpected plot twist or a clever piece of word play. But while joking and wit are uniquely human inventions, laughter certainly is not. Other creatures, including chimpanzees, gorillas and even rats, chuckle. Obviously, they don’t crack up at Homer Simpson or titter at the boss’s dreadful jokes, but the fact that they laugh in the first place suggests that sniggers and chortles have been around for a lot longer than we have. It points the way to the origins of laughter, suggesting a much more practical purpose than you might think.
B There is no doubt that laughing typical involves groups of people. ’Laughter evolved as a signal to others—it almost disappears when we are alone,’ says Robert Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland. Provine found that most laughter comes as a polite reaction to everyday remarks such as ’see you later’, rather than anything particularly funny. And the way we laugh depends on the company we’re keeping. Men tend to laugh longer and harder when they are with other men, perhaps as a way of bonding. Women tend to laugh more and at a higher pitch when men are present, possibly indicating flirtation or even submission.
C To find the origins of laughter, Provine believes we need to look at play. He points out that the masters of laughing are children, and nowhere is their talent more obvious than in the boisterous antics, and the original context is play. Well-known primate watchers, including Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, have long argued that chimps laugh while at play. The sound they produce is known as a pant laugh. It seems obvious when you watch their behaviour—they even have the same ticklish spots as we do. But remove the context, and the parallel between human laughter and a chimp’s characteristic pant laugh is not so clear. When Provine played a tape of the pant laughs to 119 of his students, for example, only two guessed correctly what it was.
D These findings underline how chimp and human laughter vary. When we laugh, the sound is usually produced by chopping up a single exhalation into a series of shorter with one sound produced on each inward and outward breath. The question is: does this pant laughter have the same source as our own laughter New research lends weight to the idea that it does. The findings come from Elke Zimmerman, head of the Institute for Zoology in Germany, who compared the sounds made by babies and chimpanzees in response to tickling during the first year of their life. Using sound spectrographs to reveal the pitch and intensity of vocalisations, she discovered that chimp and human baby laughter follow broadly the same pattern. Zimmerman laughter was around long before humans arrived on the scene. What started simply as a modification of breathing associated with enjoyable and playful interactions has acquired a symbolic meaning as an indicator of pleasure.
E Pinpointing when laughter developed is another matter. Humans and chimps share a common ancestor that lived perhaps eight million years ago but animals might have been laughing long before that. More distantly related primates, including gorillas, laugh, and anecdotal evidence suggests that other social mammals may do too. Scientists are currently testing such stories with a comparative analysis of just how common laughter is among animals. So far, though, the most compelling evidence for laughter beyond primates comes from research done by JaakPanksepp from Bowling Green State University, Ohio, into the ultrasonic chirps produced by rats during play and in response to tickling.
F All this still doesn’t answer the question of why we laugh at all. One idea is that laughter and tickling originated as a way of sealing the relationship between mother and child. Another is that the reflex response to tickling is protective, alerting us to the presence of crawling creatures that might harm us or compelling us to defend the parts of our bodies that are most vulnerable in hand-to-hand combat. But the idea that has gained most popularity in recent years is that laughter in response to tickling is a way for two individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the individuals to signal and test their trust in one another. This hypothesis starts from the observation that although a little tickle can be enjoyable, if it goes on too long it can be torture. By engaging in a bout of tickling, we put ourselves at the mercy of another individual, and laughing is a signal of trust according to Tom Flamson, a laughter researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. ’Even in rats, laughter, tickle, play and trust are linked. Rats chirp a lot when they play,’ says Flamson. ’These chirps can be aroused by tickling. And they get bonded to us as a result, which certainly seems like a show of trust.’
G We’ll never know which animal laughed the first laugh, or why. But we can be sure it wasn’t in response to a prehistoric joke. The funny thing is that while the origins of laughter are probably quiet serious, we woe human laughter and our language-based humour to the same unique skill. While other animals pant, we alone can control our breath well enough to produce the sound of laughter. Without that control there would also be no speech—and no jokes to endure.
—New Scientist

答案： pitch and intensity

填空题

Large Waist Size Linked to Higher Diabetes Rates Among Americans
A higher rate of diabetes seen among adult Americans when compared to peers in England is explained primarily by a larger waist size rather than conventional risk factors such as obesity, according to a new study. Researchers say the findings offer more evidence that accumulating fat around the mid-section poses a health risk and suggests that studies of diabetes risk should emphasise waist size along with traditional risk factors.
’Americans carry more fat around their middle sections than the English do, and that was the single factor that explained most of the higher rate of diabetes seen in the United States, especially among American women,’ said James P. Smith, one of the study’s authors and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organisation. ’Waist size is the missing new risk factor we should be studying.’
Other authors of the study are James Banks of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and MeenaKumari and Paolo Zaninotto of the Department of Epidemiology at University College London. The findings were published online by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Researchers say that Americans middle-aged and older are significantly more likely to suffer from diabetes compared to their peers in England despite a similar standard of living. About 16 per cent of American men report having diabetes as compared to 11 per cent of English men. About 14 per cent of American women have diabetes, compared to 7 per cent among English women.
An earlier study co-authored by Banks and Smith demonstrated that middle-aged Americans are less healthy than their English counterparts, although medical spending in the United States is more than twice as high as it is in the United Kingdom.
Analysing studies about the health and lifestyles of large numbers of people from the United States and England, researchers found no association between higher diabetes rates in the United States and conventional risk factors such as age, smoking, socioeconomic status or body mass index, the commonly used ratio of height and weight that is used to measure obesity and overweight. The conventional risk factors for diabetes were similar among both the American and English populations. Americans had slightly higher scores on body mass index and were a little older. The English were less educated and more likely to have smoked.
However, American men had waists that averaged three centimetres larger than their English peers and the waists of American women were five centimetres bigger than English women. American women were significantly more likely to face higher risk because of their waist size when compared to English women (69 per cent to 56 per cent), while American men had only a slightly higher waist risk than their English peers did. The higher waist size of Americans posed more risk compared to their English peers across most body mass index categories. For example, among women with normal weight, 41 per cent of American women were categorised as having high waist risk compared to 9 per cent of English women. The study concludes that waist circumference explains a substantial proportion of the higher diabetes rate in America for men and virtually all the higher rate seen among women.
Researchers say there may be many reasons why Americans have larger waists than their English peers. It may be caused by different rates of physical activities through exercise or daily activities, diet differences or perhaps other social and environmental factors such as stress that occur in the United States.
Researchers say that future research needs to address the different mechanisms that may be responsible for this association. For example, there is evidence that fat in the midsection has a different metabolism than fat carried elsewhere on the torso.
Researchers say that past evidence has shown that waist circumference is a better marker for visceral fat than other measurements. Previous studies have shown that fat cells located in a person’s midsection have specific dysfunction that may be involved in the mechanisms that lead to diabetes.
The research was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Aging and was conducted through the RAND Labour and Population programme. The programme examines issues involving U.S. labour markets, the demographics of families and children, social welfare policy, the social and economic functioning of the elderly, and economic and social change in developing countries.
—Science Daily

答案： waist

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistPersonality plays a vital role in studying creativity because it is hard to do the actual experiments.

答案： 1

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistIt is widely accepted that creative people are more likely to have mental diseases.

答案： NOT GIVEN

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistAlpha waves are a kind of brain activity with which people can be creative.

答案： 1

填空题

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
Looking for Inspiration
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of human, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it What is going on in our brains when ideas form Does it feel the same for artists and scientists We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct the creative process—and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level, IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the ’creative personality’ tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. ’Creatives’ have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness. Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E But what of the creative act itself One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. ’It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,’ says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. ’Creativity requires different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.’ Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain region on the right- hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G And creativity always is a solitary, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
—New ScientistCreativity can be stimulated by positive mood states and work pressure.

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