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  Babies living in bilingual homes get a perceptual boost by 8 months of age that may set the stage for more resilient thinking later in life, scientists reported on February 18 at the American Association of the Advancement of Science annual meeting. Infants raised bilingual from birth can distinguish not only between their two native tongues but between two languages they’ve never been exposed to, just by watching adults speak without hearing what they say, said psychologist Janet Werker of the University of British Columbia. Babies being raised to speak one language lack these visual discrimination skills, Werker and her colleagues have found. Given regular exposure to two languages, infants develop a general ability to track closely what they hear and see in decoding languages, Werker proposed. In the visual realm, such information may include lip movements, the rhythm of the jaw opening and closing, and the full ensemble of facial movements while talking. Her earlier studies found that newborn babies that had been exposed parentally to two languages prefer to listen to those languages over others and distinguish between sounds in the tongues that they regularly hear spoken. “Bilingual infants are able to keep their languages distinct from birth and may develop an increased sensitivity to voice and face cues for different languages,” Werker said. Early perceptual strides taken by infants in bilingual homes may represent the beginnings of an increased ability, relative to one-language speakers, to focus attention and think in complex ways later in life, suggested psychologist Ellen Bialystock of York University in Toronto. Bialystock’s group has found that among more than 400 older adults diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, those who speak two languages fluently are, on average, four to five years older than those who speak one language. “Bilingual adults are better able to cope with the disease’s effects on mental function,” Bialystock proposed. Werker’s team studied a total of 48 babies, all 8 months old, from families that spoke Spanish only, Catalan only or both Spanish and Catalan. Each infant sat on his or her mother’s lap and watched videos of three women, all bilingual in English and French, reading sentences in those languages without any sound. Once babies got bored with clips in one language and began to look away and fidget, they were shown different clips of a woman reciting sentences either in the same language as before, or in a different tongue. Babies from bilingual Spanish/Catalan homes homed in on faces speaking a different language and largely kept ignoring a language that they had just heard, even though both English and French were new languages to them. Babies from Spanish-only and Catalan-only families paid little attention to switches between French and English.

What is the main theme of the passage?

School Education and Self-taught Learning

   What Could Possibly Go Wrong: Genetically-Modified MosquitoesAs carriers for diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and yellow fever, mosquitoes are the deadliest creatures on the planet, responsible for millions of human deaths every year. And as the planet warms, the insects are broadly expanding their turf and bringing their diseases with them; thousands of cases of dengue, a tropical disease, have appeared in the U.S. in the past five years. DDT was long used to control the mosquito population, but it is now widely banned, and in any case, many scientists believe that mosquitoes quickly build up a resistance to the insecticide. That, in part, is why the battle against mosquitoes has gone genetic.Generally speaking, the goal of gene-based mosquito-control projects is either to kill the insects or make them benign. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, for example, are studying mosquitoes that were made malaria-resistant through the activation of a gene responsible for a protein that blocks the infection. And the British company Oxitec has engineered a strain of mosquito that cannot survive without regular doses of tetracycline; in the wild, these mosquitoes would survive just long enough to mate and pass on their tetracycline-junkie genes to their doomed offspring. In a trial in the Cayman Islands last year, Oxitec-modified mosquitoes were able to cut the overall population by 80 percent in just six months.

   But the problem is that we don’t fully understand how mosquitoes and the diseases they carry would adapt in response to such experiments. New strains of malaria and other diseases could emerge. Jo Lines, a malaria expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has described the process as “a series of arms races that the [malaria] parasite has consistently won.”

  Three percent of the offspring from Oxitec’s tetracycline-dependent mosquitoes survive-what happens if those bugs breed with wild mosquitoes?

   It’s even possible that the changes we induce in mosquitoes could move into other animals. Horizontal gene transfer could result in midges, gnats and black flies developing the same mutations, including the unfortunate characteristic of dying shortly after hatching-and a mass die-off of insects that provide sustenance to birds, bats, frogs and fish would be a food-chain disaster.

A very common operation in industry is that of pick and place. This would be typified by a packing operation, such as that shown in the figure, where items are taken from a conveyor and placed into a pallet.

The position of the item on the conveyor and the pallet position provide constraints on the endpoints of the trajectory of the item, but it does not matter from a functional point of view what path is taken by the robot. In practice, the path which gives the shortest time to perform the task will be the best. Note, however, that it will be desirable to constrain the robot to avoid collisions. Thus, once it has gripped the object it should move upwards from the conveyor, then move across to a position over the pallet, and then move downwards before releasing the object.

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41、他进大学时，接触到许多新思想。

42、午餐有两瓶葡萄酒就够了。

43、他的证词和第一个证人的不一致。

44、你应该考虑到飞机误点。

45、我们听说那位作家正在写一部新小说。

Children of whatever background have to ________ the tests as they arecompulsory.

contrast     to         scientific     absent        inform       with       even          between

    The purpose of scientific literature is to inform and persuade peers as to the validity of observations and conclusions and the forensic efficacy of methods. Popular science attempts to (33) and convince scientific outsiders (sometimes along with scientists in other fields) of the significance of data and conclusions and to celebrate the results through epideictic rhetoric. Statements in(34) literature are often qualified and tentative, emphasizing that new observations and results are consistent(35) and similar (36) established knowledge wherein qualified scientists are assumed to recognize the relevance. By(37), popular science emphasizes uniqueness and generality, taking a tone of factual authority(38) from the scientific literature. Comparisons (39) original scientific reports and derivative science journalism and popular science typically reveal at least some level of distortion and oversimplification which can often be quite dramatic, (40) with politically neutral scientific topics.

Recent pressure at work may ________ his behavior.

All the people ________ children’s education.

He is not very ________ country music.

The term “special needs” covers ________ problems.