【正文】 but due to global warming they are starting to get drier and hotter. Hot weather causes terrible jams on the roads as Britons rush to the coastal resorts. Winters are generally mild, with the most frequent snowfalls in the Scottish Highlands, where it is possible to go skiing. People enjoy discussing the snow, plaining about the cold and paring the weather conditions with previous winters. Contrary to the popular opinion, it does not rain all the time. There is certainly steady rainfall throughout most of the year, but the months from September to January are the wettest. Thanks to the rain, Britain has a richly fertile countryside which is famous for its deep green colour.Part DPassage 1People39。s understanding of health also bees deeper with the progress in scientific research. Recently the term health has e to have a wider meaning than it used to. It no longer means just the absence of illness. Today, health means the wellbeing of your body, your mind and your relationship with other people. This new concept of health is closely related to another termquality of life. Quality of life is the degree of overall satisfaction that a person gets from life.　　Why has the emphasis of health shifted from the absence of disease to a broader focus on the quality of a person39。s life? One reason for this has to do with the length and conditions of life that people can now expect. Medical advances have made it possible for people today to live longer, healthier lives. Imagine for a moment that you were born in the year 1900. You could have expected on average to live until about the age of 47. In contrast, if you were born in the year 1999, you could expect to live to the age of 75.Passage 2I often dreamed about what the world would be like one hundred years from now. I’m sure it will have changed a lot. For example, I think many people will be living in space. In fact, I imagine that all the advanced countries will have established space cities by then. On Earth, in my opinion, most people will be municating in English “online” by puters and videophones.As for my country, I think life will have also changed in many ways. First of all, the population will be decreasing. People will have fewer children and everyone will be living in smaller, hightech munities. In general, cities will have bee much smaller. I also think most of the environmental and transportation problems of today’s big cities will have been solved. In fact, I think life in my country will be a lot healthier. If I’m lucky, maybe I’ll still be living.Passage 3 Earthquakes are something that most people fear. In the world there are some places that have few or no earthquakes. However, most places in the world have earthquakes regularly. Some places, like Iran and Guatemala, have them frequently. Countries that have a lot of earthquakes are usually quite mountainous.The most talked about earthquake in the United Stated was the one that hit San Francisco in 1906. But the strongest one in North America was in 1964. It happened in Alaska. Strong earthquakes can kill a great many people. In 1755, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded happened in Portugal. Around 20, 000 people died. And in 1923, the great Kanto Earthquake in Japan claimed 142,000 lives. Earthquakes are not the only acts of nature which we fear. Floods, tidal waves and bad storms also cause us to be afraid, as they often claim many lives and do great damage to the environment. But they probably do not worry us as much as earthquakes, especially in modern times. The reason is that we often know they are ing. We have some warning. Someday we may be able to know when an earthquake is ing. However, so far no sure way is known to predict an earthquake. When one es, it is a surprise. People cannot prepare for it, so hundreds of lives may be lost in earthquakes such as those in China in 1976 and in 2008