【文章內(nèi)容簡介】 ams in another city. It’s everything you’d hoped for, but there’s only one problem — housing costs in the area are so high that you’re forced to live in a parking lot. While this sounds like an impossible situation, this predicament is a reality for one man. Brandon, 25, is a software engineer for Google at its San Francisco, California campus.“I realized I was paying too large an amount of money for the apartment I was staying in, and I was almost never home,” he told Business Insider. “It’s really hard to justify throwing that money away. You’re not putting money into anything and you are not building it up for a future.”Since scoring his job in May 2015 following a successful internship, he’s been living in a truck on a parking lot a short distance from his workplace.The tech worker makes up for the lack of facilities by eating, using the bathroom and showering at work, also charging his phone and puter there. San Francisco is home to the most expensive rental market in the US, with the average rental for a onebedroom apartment ing to ＄3,590 (24,900 yuan) a month, according to property site Zumper.And while some may not be able to handle giving up life’s luxuries just to put aside some cash, Brandon estimates that he’s saved almost ＄28,000 since he moved in just over 18 months ago. “Not only do I get to invest all of that redirected rent money, but I get to invest all the money I’m not spending on furniture, facilities and buying food,” Brandon wrote on his blog.29. Which of the following can replace the underlined word “predicament” in Paragraph2? A. possibility B. dilemma C. disappointment D. mess30. Why does Brandon prefer to live in a truck on a parking lot? A. Because he has no time to go back to an apartment. B. Because his workplace provides him with what he needs C. Because the rent is too high and he thinks it isn’t worthwhile. D. Because he wants to save money for an apartment of his own.31. What does Brandon think of his choice? A. Wise B. Embarrassing C. Painful D. DifficultDPigeons may only have a brain the size of a thimble (頂針), but it appears that pigeons can categorize and name objects in the same way human children learn new words.A new study from the University of Iowa has shown that the birds are capable of learning to categorize 128 different photographs into 16 basic categories.Scientists taught three pigeons to sort out different kinds of dogs or types of shoes, for example by using a particular symbol in exchange for a reward. When they were shown black and white pictures of previously unseen dogs or shoes, the birds were able to correctly match these with the corresponding symbols.The scientists behind the project say this is a similar approach taken by young children when they are first learning words for objects. However, the researchers said it took their birds around 40 days to perfect the task of learning just 16 categories.Professor Edward Wasserman, who led the work, said: “Our birds’ rate of learning appears to have been quite slow. Would children learn faster than pigeons? Almost certainly. However, our pigeons came to the experiment with no background knowledge at all. Thus, the more relevant parison group may be newborn babies, who indeed take 6–9 months to learn their first words.”Writing in the journal Cognition, the researchers said their experiment was a very simple mirror of the way children are taught words — by their parents pointing to pictures and asking them to name the object.Pigeons are known to be smarter than many birds. Professor Bob McMurray, who also took part in the study, said the results showed that human learning is not as unique as was previously believed.He said: “Children are facing a huge task of learning thousands of words without a lot of background knowledge to go on. For a long time, people thought that such learning is special to humans. What this research shows is that the ways in which children solve this huge problem may be shared with many species.32. What’s the main idea of this passage?A. Pigeons and young children take a similar approa