考研英语阅读短文练习.docx

1、考研英语阅读短文练习National Geographic Society Inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888National Geographic Daily News Valentines Day: Why Do We Celebrate It? (Hint: Naked Romans)Ancient Roman priests are depicted striking women in a Lupercalia fertility rite.Illustration by Labrouste Del., Mary E

2、vans Picture Library/AlamyJohn Roachfor National Geographic NewsUpdated February 13, 2012Where did Valentines Day come from? (Think naked Romans, paganism, and whips.) What does it cost? And why do we fall for it, year after year?Valentines Day History: Roman RootsMore than a Hallmark holiday, Valen

3、tines Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying. (See Halloween Facts: Costumes, History, Urban Legends, More.)The lovers holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing thei

4、r fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.at least 150 years after Constantine made Christianity the officia

5、l religion of the Roman Empire.Lupercalia was clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the ancient Christians are trying to close it down, Lenski said. So theres reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, OK, well just call this a Christian festival.The church peg

6、ged the festival to the legend of St. Valentine.According to the story, in the third century A.D., Roman Emperor Claudius II, seeking to bolster his army, forbade young men to marry. Valentine, it is said, flouted the ban, performing marriages in secret.For his defiance, Valentine was executed in A.

7、D. 270on February 14, the story goes.While its not known whether the legend is true, Lenski said, it may be a convenient explanation for a Christian version of what happened at Lupercalia.Valentines Day 2012: A Strengthening Economy?Todays relatively tame Valentines Day celebration is big businessth

8、e 2012 holiday is expected to generate $17.6 billion in retail sales in the United States. Thats up from last years $15.7 billion, according to an annual survey by the U.S. National Retail Federation (NRF).The level of discretionary spending exhibited by survey results is a strong indication our eco

9、nomy continues to move in the right direction, federation president Matthew Shay said in a statement.That is, from the retailers perspective, the fact that Americans are going shopping for candy, flowers, and jewels is a good sign for the economy.But behavioral economics professor Dan Ariely said th

10、at suggesting that an uptick in Valentines day spending is a sign of widespread recovery, is premature, I think.Theres a question of whether people are compensating, said Ariely of Duke University. You could say that Valentines Day is perfectly correlated with other expenditures in life, or you coul

11、d say that Valentines Day is compensating for other things.Ariely, whose books include the bestseller Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions, said theres good reason to splurge on Valentines Day, even in a tough economy.If you treat yourself to something on next Thursday,

12、 just a random day of the year, theres an issue of whether it becomes a routine, he explained. But if you splurge only at Valentines Day, now your spending is more confined.And spend Valentines Day celebrants will, according to the retail federation survey. The average U.S. consumer is expected to s

13、hell out $126.03 on Valentines Day gifts, meals, and entertainmentabout $10 more per person than in 2011.Spouses and significant others plan to invest $74.12 on Valentines Day gifts for their significant otherup from last years $68.98 average. Pets, however, are getting a little less retail love thi

14、s year, with average planned spending on animal gifts down 52 cents to $4.52.Why we go shopping at all on Valentines Day, Dukes Ariely said, has a lot to do with herd mentality.Herds give us a sense of what is normative behaviornot normative in terms of rational but normative in terms of this is how

15、 people behave, he said.On Valentines Day, the normative behavior is to go out and spend money on things such as chocolate and flowers as an expression of love. So, when we ask ourselves what to do, the answer is very simple, Ariely said.Valentines Day CardsGreeting cards, as usual, will be the most

16、 common Valentines Day gifts. Fifty-two percent of U.S. consumers plan to send at least one, according to the National Retail Federation survey.The Greeting Card Association, an industry trade group, says about 190 million Valentines Day cards are sent each year. And that figure does not include the

17、 hundreds of millions of cards schoolchildren exchange.Giving your sweetheart or someone else a Valentines Day card is a deep-seated cultural tradition in the United States, said association spokesperson Barbara Miller. We dont see that changing.The first Valentines Day card was sent in 1415 from Fr

18、ances Duke of Orlans to his wife when he was a prisoner in the Tower of London following the Battle of Agincourt, according to the association.During the Revolutionary War, Valentines Day cardsmostly handwritten notesgained popularity in the U.S. Mass production started in the early 1900s.Hallmark g

19、ot in the game in 1913, according to spokesperson Sarah Kolell. Since thenperhaps not coincidentallythe market for Valentines Day cards has blossomed beyond lovers to include parents, children, siblings, and friends.Valentines Day Candy: Cash CowAn estimated 50.5 percent of U.S. consumers will excha

20、nge Valentines Day candy in 2012, according to the retail federation surveyadding up to about a sweet billion dollars in sales, the National Confectioners Association says.About 75 percent of that billion is from sales of chocolate, which has been associated with romance at least since Mexicos 15th-

21、 and 16th-century Aztec Empire, according to Susan Fussell, a spokesperson with the association.Fifteenth-century Aztec emperor Moctezuma I believed eating chocolate on a regular basis made him more virile and better able to serve his harem, she said.(Related: secrets of ancient candy.)But theres no

22、thing chocolaty about Valentines Days most iconic candy: those demanding, chalky little hearts emblazoned BE MINE, KISS ME, CALL ME.About eight billion candy hearts were made in 2009, the association saysenough to stretch from Rome, Italy, to Valentine (map), Arizona, and back again 20 times.What Is

23、 Love? Evolution and InfatuationValentines Day is all about love. But what, exactly, is that?Helen Fisher is an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of several books on love, including Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.Fisher breaks love into three disti

24、nct brain systems that enable mating and reproduction:Sex driveRomantic love (obsession, passion, infatuation)Attachment (calmness and security with a long-term partner).These are brain systems, Fisher said, and all three play a role in love. They can operate independently, but people crave all thre

25、e for an ideal relationship.I think the sex drive evolved to get you out there looking for a range of partners, she said.I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, and attachment evolved to tolerate that person at least long enough to raise a child

26、 together as a team.Valentines Day, Fisher added, used to encompass only two of these three brain systems: sex drive and romantic love.But once you start giving the dog a valentine, you are talking about a real expression of attachment as well as romantic love.Special Series: 7 BillionPopulation 7 B

27、illionThere will soon be seven billion people on the planet. By 2045 global population is projected to reach nine billion. Can the planet take the strain?By Robert KunzigPhotograph by Randy OlsonOne day in Delft in the fall of 1677, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant who is said to have been t

28、he long-haired model for two paintings by Johannes Vermeer“The Astronomer” and “The Geographer”abruptly stopped what he was doing with his wife and rushed to his worktable. Cloth was Leeuwenhoeks business but microscopy his passion. Hed had five children already by his first wife (though four had di

29、ed in infancy), and fatherhood was not on his mind. “Before six beats of the pulse had intervened,” as he later wrote to the Royal Society of London, Leeuwenhoek was examining his perishable sample through a tiny magnifying glass. Its lens, no bigger than a small raindrop, magnified objects hundreds

30、 of times. Leeuwenhoek had made it himself; nobody else had one so powerful. The learned men in London were still trying to verify Leeuwenhoeks earlier claims that unseen “animalcules” lived by the millions in a single drop of lake water and even in French wine. Now he had something more delicate to

31、 report: Human semen contained animalcules too. “Sometimes more than a thousand,” he wrote, “in an amount of material the size of a grain of sand.” Pressing the glass to his eye like a jeweler, Leeuwenhoek watched his own animalcules swim about, lashing their long tails. One imagines sunlight fallin

32、g through leaded windows on a face lost in contemplation , as in the Vermeers. One feels for his wife. Leeuwenhoek became a bit obsessed after that. Though his tiny peephole gave him privileged access to a never-before-seen microscopic universe, he spent an enormous amount of time looking at spermatozoa, as theyre now called. Oddly enough, it was the milt he squeezed from a cod one day that inspired him to estimate, almost casually, just how many