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All mothers deserve our support--those who care for children at home and those who have joined the work force. But many working mothers continue to believe that they are shortchanging (少找钱)their children. They shouldn't. Research tells us that kids do just fine when mothers work.<br>Suzanne Bianchi a scientist of the University of Maryland, has found that mothers today spend as much if not more time with their children than they did in 1965, even though the percentage of mothers who work rose from 35 percent to 71 percent. Then there are the obvious financial benefits. For many children, these earnings are the difference between living in poverty—or out of it.<br>The kids are all right. Studies conducted by the University of Michigan have consistently demonstrated that a child's social or academic competence does not depend on whether a mother is employed. In my research four out of five children (nine out of ten in single parent families) told me that having a working mother was their preferred arrangement. My study found that children with working mothers are no more likely to drop out, take drugs, break the law, or experiment with sex prematurely than children with non-employed mothers. Children have taken their mothers' example to heart. Ninety percent of the young women I interviewed said they hoped to combine work with motherhood, while two-thirds of the men said they wanted to share parenting and work.<br>Sadly, children support working mothers more than we do as a society. Parental leave and child-care benefits in the United States remain inadequate, particularly when compared to what's offered in other countries. Children thrive when their mothers have satisfying, well-paid jobs when they can count on other caretakers to share the load. The challenge facing us is thus not whether good workers can also be good mothers, but whether we can create the conditions that enable working mothers and fathers to be good parents.<br>From the first paragraph, we can see that ______.

A. now more American mothers are working than any time in American history and anywhere else in the world
B. more than half Americans think that before going to school, children need their mothers' whole-hearted care
C. a majority of Americans believe that once working outside home mothers think of their own work more than their children
D. more American mothers work than ever before, but this problem of working mothers has not been solved satisfactorily

不定项选择题

We sometimes think humans are uniquely vulnerable to anxiety, but stress seems to affect the immune defenses of lower animals too. In one experiment, for example, behavioral immunologist (免疫学家) Mark Laudenslager, at the University of Denver, gave mild electric shocks to 24 rats. Half the animals could switch off the current by turning a wheel in their enclosure, while the other half could not. The rats in the two groups were paired so that each time one rat turned the wheel it protected both itself and its helpless partner from the shock. Laudenslager found that the immune response was depressed below normal in the helpless rats but not in those that could turn off the electricity. What he has demonstrated, he believes, is that lack of control over an event, not the experience itself, is what wakens the immune system.<br>Other researchers agree. Jay Weiss, a psychologist at Duke University School of Medicine, has shown that animals who are allowed to control unpleasant stimuli don't develop sleep disturbances or changes in brain chemistry typical of stressed rats. But if the animals are conditioned to confront with situations they have no control over, they later behave passively even when faced with experiences they can control. Such findings reinforce psychologists' suspicions that the experience or perception of helplessness is one of the most harmful factors in depression.<br>One of the most startling examples of how the mind can alter the immune response was discovered by chance. In 1975 psychologist Robert Ader at the University of Rochester School of Medicine conditioned (使形成条件反射) mice to avoid saccharin (糖精) by simultaneously feeding them the sweetener and injecting them with a drug that while suppressing their immune systems caused stomach upsets. Associating the saccharin with the stomach pains, the mice quickly learned to avoid the sweetener. In order to extinguish this dislike for the sweetener, Ader reexposed the animals to saccharin, this time without the drug, and was astonished to find that those mice that had received the highest amounts of sweetener during their earlier conditioning died. He could only speculate that he had so successfully conditioned the rats that saccharin alone now served to weaken their immune systems enough to kill them.<br>The word "vulnerable"(in Para. 1) means______.

A. fragile
B. ambiguous
C. sober
D. dedicated

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