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第四部分：阅读理解

短文后有5道题，每题后面有4个选项。请仔细阅读短文并根据短文回答其后面的问题，从4个选项中选择1个最佳答案涂在答题卡相应的位置上。

第一篇 Eye-tracker Lets You Drag and Drop Files with a Glance

Bored of using a mouse？ Soon you'll be able to change stuff on your computer screen – and then move it directly onto your smartphone or tablet（平板电脑） –with nothing more than a glance.

A system called Eye Drop uses a head-mounted eye tracker that simultaneously records your field of view so it knows where you are looking on the screen. Gazing at an object – a photo， say – and then pressing a key， selects that object. It can then be moved from the screen to a tablet or smartphone just by glancing at the second device， as long as the two are connected wirelessly.

“The beauty of using gaze to support this is that our eyes naturally focus on content that we want to acquire，” says Jayson Turner， who developed the system with colleagues at Lancaster University， UK.

Turner believes Eye Drop would be useful to transfer an interactive map or contact information from a public display to your smartphone or for sharing photos.

A button needs to be used to select the object you are looking at otherwise you end up with the “Midas touch”（点石成金） effect， whereby everything you look at gets selected by your gaze， says Turner. “Imagine if your mouse clicked on everything it pointed at，” he says.

Christian Holz， a researcher in human-computer interaction at Yahoo Labs in Sunnyvale， California， says the system is a nice take on getting round this fundamental problem of using gaze-tracking to interact. “Eye Drop solves this in a slick （灵巧的）way by combining it with input on the touch devices we carry with us most of the time anyway and using touch input as a clutching mechanism，” he says. “This now allows users to seamlessly（无缝地） interact across devices far and close in a very natural manner.”

While current eye-trackers are rather bulky， mainstream consumer devices are not too far away. Swedish firm Tobii is developing gaze-tracking technology that can be installed in laptops and tablets and is expected to be available to buy next year. And the Google Glass headset is expected to include eye-tracking in the future.

Turner says he has also looked at how content can be cut and pasted or drag-and-dropped using a mix of gaze and taps on a touchscreen. The system was presented at the Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia in Sweden， last week.

第三篇 The Northern Lights

The sun is stormy and has it own kind of weather. It is so hot and active that even the Sun‘s gravity cannot hold its atmosphere in check！ Energy flows away from the Sun toward the Earth in a stream of electrified particles that move at speeds around a million miles per hour. These particles are called plasma， and the stream of plasma coming from the Sun is called the solar wind. The more active the Sun， the stronger the solar wind.

The solar wind constantly streams toward the Earth， but don‘t worry because a protective magnetic fields surrounds our planet. The same magnetic field that makes your compass point north also steers the particles from the Sun to the north and south poles. The charged particles become trapped in magnetic belts around the Earth. When a large blast of solar wind crashes into the Earth’s magnetic field first gets squeezed and then the magnetic field lines break and reconnect.

The breaking and reconnecting of the magnetic field lines can cause atomic particles called electrons trapped in the belts to fall into the Earth‘s atmosphere at the poles. As the electrons fall into the Earth， they collide with gas molecules in the atmosphere， creating flashes of light in the sky.

Each atmospheric gas glows a different color. Oxygen and nitrogen glows red and green and nitrogen glows violet-purple. As these various colors glow and dance in the night sky， they create the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights.

Watching auroras（北极光） is fun and exciting， but normally you can only see them in places far north like Alaska and Canada. The movement of the aurora across the sky is usually slow enough to easily follow with your eyes but they can also pulsate（跳动）， flicker（闪烁）， or even move like waves. During solar maximum， 5 auroras are seen as far south as Florida， even Mexico！ Auroras often seem to be very close to the ground， but the lowest aurora is still about 100 kilometers above the ground， a distance much higher than clouds are formed or airplanes can fly. A typical aurora band can be thousands of kilometers long， a few hundred kilometers high， but only a few hundred meters thick.

We hope you are able to travel to far-north places like the Arctic Circle and see the Northern Lights at least once during your lifetime. We know you will never forget it！