[填空题]

The funny thing about how a bank works is that it functions because of our trust. We give a bank our money to keep it safe for us, and then the bank turns around and gives it to someone else in order to make money for itself. Banks can legally extend considerably more credit than they have cash. Still, most of us have total trust in the bank’s ability to protect our money and give it to us when we ask for it.
Why do we feel better about having our money in a bank than we do having it under a mattress(床垫) Is it just the fact that they pay interest on some of our accounts.’ Is it because we know that if we have the cash in our pockets we’ll spend it Or, is it simply the convenience of being able to write checks and use debit cards(借记卡) rather than carrying cash Any and all of these may be the answer, particularly with the conveniences of electronic banking today. Now, we don’t even have to manually write that check -- we can just swipe(刷卡) a

[单项选择]A funny thing happened on the way to the communications revolution: we stopped talking to one another.
I was walking in the park with a friend recently, and his cell phone rang, interrupting our conversation. There we were, walking and talking on a beautiful sunny day and—poof—I became invisible, absent from the conversation.
The park was filled with people talking on their cell phones. They were passing other people without looking at them, saying hello, noticing their babies or stopping to pet their puppies. Evidently, the untethered electronic voice is preferable to human contact.
The telephone used to connect you to the absent. Now it makes people sitting next to you feel absent. Recently I was in a car with three friends. The driver shushed the rest of us because he could not hear the person on the other end of his cell phone. There we were, four friends zooming down the highway, unable to talk to one another because of a gadget designed to make communication
A. telling the truth
B. expressing his opinion
C. being sarcastic
D. explaining a phenomenon

[填空题]The author thinks sleep is a funny thing as it is necessary for human life.

[单项选择]Sleep is a funny thing. We’ re taught that we should get seven or eight hours a night, but a lot of us get by just fine on less, and some of us actually sleep too much. A study out of the University of Buffalo last month reported that people who routinely sleep more than eight hours a day and are still tired are nearly three times as likely to die of stroke--probably as a result of an underlying disorder that keeps them from snoozing soundly.
Doctors have their own special sleep problems. Residents are famously sleep deprived. When I was training to become a doctor, it was not unusual to work 40 hours in a row without rest. Most of us took it in stride, confident we could still deliver the highest quality of medical care.
Maybe we shouldn’ t have been so sure of ourselves. An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association points out that in the morning after 24 hours of sleeplessness, a person’ s motor performance is
A. patients are alone when they are in hospital.
B. patients will try their luck on their doctors’ health.
C. patients will have some problems related to them, rather than other people.
D. patients will make their decisions for themselves.