【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 ing a speakerphone. As Kunar and Horowitz report, those who were making the equivalent of a handsfree call had an average reaction time 212 milliseconds slower than those who were not. That, they calculate, would add metres to the braking distance of a car travelling at 100kph. They also found that the group using the handsfree kit made 83% more errors in their tasks than those who were not talking. To try to understand more about why this was, they tried two further tests. In one, members of a group were asked simply to repeat words spoken by the caller. In the other, they had to think of a word that began with the last letter of the word they had just heard. Those only repeating words performed the same as those with no distraction, but those with the more plicated task showed even worse reaction times—an average of 480 milliseconds extra delay. This shows that when people have to consider the information they hear carefully, it can impair their driving ability significantly. Punishing people for using handheld gadgets while driving is difficult enough, even though they can be seen from outside the car. Persuading people to switch their phones off altogether when they get behind the wheel might be the only answer. Who knows, they might even e to enjoy not having to take ：考試大 47. Carrying on a mobile phone conversation while one is driving is considered dangerous because it seriously distracts _______________________. 48. In the experiments, the two groups of volunteers were asked to handle a series of moving tasks which were considered _______________________. 49. Results of the experiments show that those who were making the equivalent of a handsfree call took _______________________ to react than those who were not. 50. Further experiments reveal that participants tend to respond with extra delay if they are required to do _______________________. 51. The author believes persuasion, rather than _______________________, might be the only way to stop people from using mobile phones while driving. Section B Passage One Questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage. There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the overeducated, ecoconscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly（自鳴得意的） green village of Berkeley, Calif., as being among the worst in the country. The city’s public high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratory’s worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium and nickel each day. This in a city that requires school cafeterias to serve anic meals. Great, I thought, anic lunch, toxic campus. Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists（活躍分子） and various parentteacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steelcasting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe? Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropp ed off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it pare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safe—whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean. “There’s no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also means you aren’t going to know if they do.” A 20xx report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: Well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the dangers parents can’t—and may never—quantify that occur all of sudden. That’s why I’ve rid my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancercausing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line(地質(zhì)斷層 ) for more than 12 years, I still haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall. 52. What does a recent investigation by USA Today reveal? A) Heavy metals in lab tests threaten children’s health in Berkeley. B) Berkeley residents are quite contented with their surroundings. C) The air quality around Berkeley’s school campuses is poor. D) Parents in Berkeley are oversensitive to cancer risks their kids face. 53. What response did USA Today’s report draw? A) A heated debate. B) Popular support. C) Widespread panic. D) Strong criticism. 54. How did parents feel in the face of the experts’ s