The president spoke at the business meeting for nearly an hour without______his notes.
A. bringing up
B. referring to
C. looking for
D. trying on
Text 4According to studies cited by the National Eating Disorders Association, 42 percent of girls in first through third grade want to be thinner, 81 percent of 10-year-olds are a {raid of being fat, and 51 percent of 9- and 10-year-old girls feel better about themselves if they are on a diet.In many ways, this fixation on weight at ever earlier ages comes at an inopportune time physiologically. At a recent Hadassah meeting at the Woodlands Community Temple in White Plains, Dr. Marcie Schneider, the director of adolescent medicine at Greenwich Hospital, and Erica Leon, a registered dietitian, spoke about early adolescence as a time when a little hit of pudginess is necessary for proper growth, and youngsters wrestle constantly with their body image."I can’t tell you how many kids I’ve seen who’ve been on the Atkins diet, or on the South Beach diet," Ms. Leon said, adding that overweight children who try diets can be at risk of developing eating disorders.After the presentation, three mothers from Hartsdale who wanted to help their children avoid such issues spoke about how their young daughters are already beginning to become weight-conscious.Anorexia is a mental illness in which the victim eats barely enough to survive, because her distorted thinking makes her think she is fat. Bulimia, a mental illness in which someone binges on large amounts of food, then purges it through vomiting or the abuse of laxatives, is on the rise, and is surfacing in younger and younger patients, mostly girls, said Judy Scheel, the director of the Center for Eating Disorder Recovery in Mount Kisco.About 90 percent of victims of eating disorders are female, and often the male victims are on teams like wrestling and crew, where they must keep their weight low for competitive reasons. Dr. Scheel believes that where girls claim the eating disorder enables them to be thin, boys typically state their goal is to achieve or maintain a muscular but thin physique. The average onset for bulimia used to be 17, but to see teenagers age 14 and 15 with bulimia is common these days, Dr. Scheel said.Other people believe the disorders have genetic Or chemical components, and many people with eating disorders respond well to anti-depressants, for example.A certain amount of education is necessary to help young people avoid becoming obsessed with their body image. "Teachers need to stay outside of talking about diets," Dr. Scheel said. "It’s like a parent, always talking about their next diet. You have to help a child understand that if you eat healthily and exercise, your body is going to take care of itself."And in relatively homogenous populations, like in some Westchester schools, competition runs high. "So the young people don’t really see how beautiful diversity is," she said, "and they tend to all be competing for kind of the same goals." From the fifth paragraph we may infer that Anorexia and Bulimia are()
A. two similar mental illnesses.
B. two different common mental illnesses.
C. both bad eating habits.
D. both illnesses of eating disorders.
Text 3When I was a child in Sunday school, I would ask searching questions like "Angels can fly up in heaven, but how do clouds hold up pianos" and get the same puzzling response about how that was not important, what was important was that Jesus died for our sins and if we accepted him as our savior, when we died, we would go to heaven, where we’d get everything we wanted. Some children in my class wondered why anyone would hang on a cross with nails stuck through his hands to help anyone else; I wondered how Santa Claus knew what I wanted for Christmas, even though I never wrote him a letter. Maybe he had a tape recorder hidden in every chimney in the world.This literal-mindedness has stuck with me; one result of it is that I am unable to believe in God. Most of the other atheists I know seem to feel freed or proud of their unbelief, as if they’ve cleverly refused to be sold snake oil. My husband, who was reared in a devout Catholic family and served as an altar boy, is also firmly grounded on this earth. He doesn’t even have the desire to believe. So other than baptizing our son to reassure our families, we’ve skated over the issue of faith.Some people believe faith is a gift; for others, it’s a choice, a matter of spiritual discipline. I have a friend who was reared to believe, and he does. But his faith has wavered. He has struggled to hang onto it and to pass it along to his children. Another friend of mine never goes to church because she’s a single mother who doesn’t have the gas money. But she once told me about a day when she was washing oranges as the sun streamed onto them. As she peeled one, the smell rose to her face, and she felt she received the Holy Spirit. "He sank into my bones," she recounted. "I lifted my palms upward, feeling filled with love."Being no theologian, and not even a believer, I am not in a position to offer up theories, but mine is this: people who receive faith directly, as a spontaneous combustion of the soul, have fewer questions. They have been sparked with a faith that is more unshakable than that of those who have been taught. From the first paragraph of the passage we know that()
A. the author was a Sunday school boy.
B. the author used to be puzzled at many things.
C. the school didn't teach the children enough knowledge.
D. tape recorders were popular in daily life.