Time was running out, and Mark Dickinson wasn't sure whether he'd get to see his dying 2－year－old grandson one last time. A long line at Los Angeles International Airport's security checkpoint had kept him from getting to his gate on time.
His grandson Caden would be taken off life support in a matter of hours in Denver, Colorado, with or without his grandfather's presence, according to CNN affiliate KABC.
“I was kind of panicking because I was running late, and I really thought I wasn't going to make the flight，” Dickinson told KABC.
That's when a pilot from Southwest Airlines stepped up and held the flight at the gate until Dickinson arrived. The pilot was standing by the air bridge waiting for him when Dickinson arrived in socks, so rushed that he just grabbed his shoes at security and ran through the terminal.
“I told him, ‘Thank you so much. I can't tell you how much I appreciated that.’ And he said, ‘No problem. They can't leave without me anyway，’”Dickinson told KABC.
Authorities say Dickinson's grandson, Caden Rodgers, suffered a head injury after his mother's boyfriend threw him across the room. The boyfriend reportedly told police he was drunk and high on marijuana(大麻) at the time. The child later died and the boyfriend has been charged with first－degree murder, according to the Aurora Sentinel.
Thanks to the pilot, Dickinson made it to Colorado in time to say goodbye to his grandson. Most airlines would punish any staff member who holds up a flight, according to consumer advocate Christopher Elliott, who broke the story of the sympathetic pilot on his blog. However, a Southwest spokeswoman said the pilot's actions were praiseworthy.
“You can't hold a plane for every late customer, but I think we would all agree that these were extenuating(可以原諒的) circumstances and the pilot absolutely made the right decision，” Southwest spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said. “I don't think you could ask for a better example of great service for our customers.”
【小題1】According to the passage, which is the correct order of the following events?
a. The pilot held the plane for Dickinson.
b. People read the story of the pilot on the Internet.
c. Caden suffered a head injury.
d. Dickinson was waiting in line at the security checking point.
d. Marilee McInnis praised the pilot's actions.

閱讀下面短文，根據小題的具體要求，簡要回答問題。
UFO is short for Unidentified Flying Object. It’s also called Flying Saucer. It is one of the most popular topics in the 20^th century. With films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and ET in the 1970s came a rapid increase in reports of flying saucers and men from Mars. More than 20 countries said their people once saw the UFO and there were over 1,200 reports about the UFO. Some even said they saw aliens.
In July, 1916, Gaynor was a nine-year-old girl and lived in North Wales. One day, on her way home from school, she saw a silver object in a field not far from her home. The object looked like a saucer. Gaynor was very scared. She stayed in the tall grass and watched the door of the strange object open. She saw two aliens wearing silver suits get ou. Then they use something to examine the ground. They were short and had pink eyes. After about half an hour, the two aliens went back into the object. Then it took off. When Gaynor got home, she told her mother about her unusual experience, but her family decided to keep quiet about it. They didn’t want others to laugh at their daughter. However, 18 months later, Gaynor told her story to UFO scientists. They found out that Gaynor told the truth.
【小題1】What does UFO stand for? (No more than 3 words)
【小題2】How did Gaynor feel when she saw the silver object like a saucer? (No more than 4 words)
【小題3】Why did Gaynor’s parents keep quiet about her experience ? (No more than 10 words)

Scientists at Harvard University and Bates College find female chimpanzees (黑猩猩) appear to treat sticks as dolls, carrying them around until they have children of their own. Young males engage in such behavior much less frequently.
The new work by Sonya M. Kahlenberg and Richard W. Wrangham, described this week in the journal Current Biology, provides the first evidence of a wild non­human species playing with dolls, as well as the first known sex difference in a wild animal’s choice of playthings.
The two researchers say their work adds to a growing body of evidence that human children are probably born with their own ideas of how they want to behave, rather than simply mirroring other girls who play with dolls and boys who play with trucks. Doll play among humans could have its origins in object—carrying by earlier apes (猿類), they say, suggesting that toy selection is probably not due entirely to socialization.
“In humans, there are obvious sex differences in children’s toy play, and these are remarkably similar across cultures,” says Kahlenberg. “While socialization by elders and peers has been the primary explanation, our work suggests that biology may also have an important role to play in activity preferences.”
In 14 years of data on chimpanzee behavior at the Kibale National Park in Uganda, Kahlenberg and Wrangham counted more than 100 examples of stick­carrying. Some young chimpanzees carried sticks into the nest to sleep with them and on one occasion built a separate nest for the stick. “We have seen juveniles occasionally carrying sticks for many years, and because they sometimes treated them rather like dolls, we wanted to know if in general this behavior tended to represent something like playing with dolls,” says Wrangham, a Professor at Harvard. “If the doll hypothesis (假設) was right, we thought that females should carry sticks more than males do, and that the chimpanzees should stop carrying sticks when they had their first child. We have now watched enough young chimpanzees to prove both points.”
【小題1】What does a female chimpanzee do with sticks?

I credit my typing skill to so many hours of chatting online. Unfortunately, as my typing speed increased on the Internet, all grammatical rules went out of the window. You see instant messages have their own shorthand language and grammar isn’t important, of which even a newbie (新手) is aware. They can leave out articles, subjects (主語), pronouns, etc. They can misspell or “respell” almost any word. They often ask “A/S/L” when they first chat. Abbreviations (縮寫) and capitalizations (大寫) are particularly important. English-speaking instant messengers also refuse to burden themselves with punctuation and capitalization.
After I came back China, I discovered not one but two instant messaging crazes. The first, which brought back memories of my previous addiction to the computer, was QQ. I can see evidence that the Chinese have the same kind of separate instant messaging language, even when they chat in English. My first word in this language, for example, was “ft”. This abbreviation for “faint” is used whenever there is a need to express surprise. I also discovered that Chinese use the same kind of abbreviation for a laugh. And there is an extraordinary number of smileys (表情符) to the “vomit” and “army soldier” smileys. There is even a SARA smiley.
After QQ, there is another, perhaps more widespread messaging trend. You guessed it --- cell phone text messaging. I now understand how useful text messaging is and why it is so common. I admit that I have been guilty of sending text messages while walking outside or sitting on the subway. Who hasn’t ? No matter where I go, I see people on their cell phones, messaging. In fact, it’s rare to see someone actually talking on their phone!
So it looks as if there is no escape from the instant messaging crazes, no matter where in the world I go. And that’s plainly not going to change. In the end, though, I can’t complain: instant messaging is quick, it’s cheap, it’s easy and it’s extremely fun too. And after all, everyone’s doing it.
【小題1】The underlined phrase “went out of the window” in Paragraph 1 probably means        .

Memory is the ability to keep track of things that have happened in the past. Memory really is learning. One needs memory to ride a bicycle. A dog needs to remember if it is to come when called.
Memory is said to be stored in the brain as a “memory trace（記憶痕）.” What makes up this trace is not known. Some scientists believe that certain chemical substances may carry certain memories. For example, one substance, when given to rats, causes them to fear the dark.
Other research into memory has to do with how the brain works. Psychologists use three means to find out how a person remembers. For example, give a person a grocery list. Let the person memorize the list, then put it away. The most natural way to find out how much a person remembers of the grocery list is to ask what he or she remembers. This is called the method of recall. Another method is called recognition. Give the person another grocery list. Ask him or her to choose items on the first list from the items that are on only the second list. Often a person will be able to recognize things that he or she cannot recall. A third method of finding how much a person remembers is called relearning. Here the person is asked to read over the first list. The person will probably learn the list the second time faster than he did the first time. The difference in the time it takes to relearn the list is thought of as a measure of how much a person has remembered.
One way of remembering something is to repeat it many times. Interest is very important. Boring lists of facts are much more difficult to remember than something that we understand and are interested in. Motivation, or wanting to do something, is also important. Motivation is linked with reward. For example, a hungry animal quickly learns how to do something if that action gets the animal food. In humans, wanting to learn is often motivation. The praise of a teacher or the knowledge that an answer is correct is rewarding.
【小題1】We can learn from the 2nd paragraph that ___________       .

The African elephant, the largest land animal remaining on the earth, is of great importance to African ecosystem(生態(tài)系統(tǒng)). Unlike other animals, the African elephant is to a great extent the builder of its environment. As a big plant-eater, it largely shapes the forest-and-savanna(大草原) surroundings in which it lives, therefore setting the terms of existence for millions of other animals that live in its habitat.
It is the elephant’s great desire for food that makes it a disturber of the environment and an important builder of its habitat. In its continuous search for the 300 pounds of plants it must have every day, it kills small trees and underbushes, and pulls branches off big trees. This results in numerous open spaces in both deep tropical forests and in the woodlands that cover part of the African savannas(熱帶草原). In these open spaces are numerous plants in various stages of growth that attract a variety of other plant-eaters.
Take the rain forests for example. In their natural state, the spreading branches overhead shut out sunlight and prevent the growth of plants on the forest floor. By pulling down trees and eating plants, elephants make open spaces, allowing new plants to grow on the forest floor. In such situations, the forests become suitable for large hoofed plant-eaters to move around and for small plant-eaters to get their food as well.
What worries scientists now is that the African elephant has become an endangered species. If the elephant disappears, scientists say, many other animals will also disappear from vast areas of forest and savanna, greatly changing and worsening the whole ecosystem.
【小題1】What is the passage mainly about?

Most of the flowers in nature are red, orange and yellow. If we have seen a black flower, it’s a chance in million. People have made a census ( 普查 ) to colors of more than four thousand kinds of flowers and discovered that only eight of them are black. As we know, sunlight is formed by seven different colored lights. The wave length of each light is different, so the quantity of heat in each light is also different. Flowers, especially their petals ( 花瓣 ) , are easy to be harmed by high temperature. Black flowers can take in all the light waves which cause the flowers to dry up in a high temperature. So black flowers can rarely survive sunlight. But red flowers, orange flowers and yellow flowers can protect themselves from sunlight by reflecting the red light, orange light and yellow light, each of which has a large quantity of heat.
【小題1】It is _________ to see a black flower.

NASA’s Mars detector (探測器), Opportunity, succeeded in finding signs that water once existed on the planet. Opportunity landed on Mars in January. Scientists now believe that the planet could once have supported life.
This discovery was chosen by Science, one of the world’s leading magazines, as the most important scientific achievement of 2004 last Friday.
“This little, wheeled, one-armed box went around another planet and has done something no human has ever managed,” according to Science. “It has discovered another place in the universe where life could once have existed.”
“Although we still can’t say that life could have existed in this environment, it is now certain that there was water on Mars,” said Steve Squyres, one of the scientists working on the Mars mission. The evidence comes from pictures and chemical readings taken by Opportunity. It includes marks on rocks like those caused by flowing water on Earth and salty chemicals like those found in dried-out sea-beds. Scientists said the new evidence proved beyond doubt that water has existed on Mars. But it is still unknown whether the water on Mars was like an ocean or just ice.
While Opportunity has not found any signs of life, the presence of water means life is possible. “In everything we know about life on Earth, there is no example without liquid water,” Squyres said. “So water is important for the search for life on Mars.”
Researchers agree that a future mission (任務) should bring back physical samples (樣品). But some scientists worry about the risk that this could introduce dangerous foreign creatures to Earth. “The problem here is how to get the samples back,” Squyres replied. “I think it is our responsibility to limit any risk.”
【小題1】________ prove that water existed on Mars.

It is always hard for a small fish to live in a big pond. Pluto's recent departure from the classical planet family clearly proves that size really matters.
Astronomers voted on August 24 to create the first scientific definition of the word planet, and Pluto obviously didn't make the cut. It turned out to be only a "dwarf planet" (矮行星). After weeks of heated debate, over 2,500 astronomers from 73 countries voted on the definition of a "planet" at a conference of the international Astronomical Union (IAU). According to the definition, a planet must have a clear neighborhood around its orbit. Pluto has widely been considered a planet since its discovery in 1930. Unfortunately, it has a special orbit which overlaps with Neptune's. It is all because, compared with Neptune, Pluto is very small. It is attracted by Neptune's gravity when the two planets get closer.
According to IAU, a "dwarf planet" should have an orbit around the Sun. It will not have a clear neighborhood around its orbit, and must not be a satellite. The new classification means that the science textbooks will have to be updated. The solar system is now made up of the eight "classical planets," together with a number of dwarf planets. The classical planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The debate over Pluto's status started in 1992. After an advanced telescope was sent into space, astronomers started find a belt of objects, which lies beyond Neptune. The belt contains nearly 1,000 objects, including Pluto. As they continued the exploration, scientists recently discovered at least 41 dwarf planets at the edges of the solar system. There are at least two objects of a similar size to Pluto.
It seems that even if the IAU had kept Pluto's status as a planet, the classical theory of nine planets in the solar system would have had to be changed, but the other way around. More dwarf, planets of a similar size to Pluto would join the family of planets. Scientists will probably find many more dwarf planets.
【小題1】According to the passage, Pluto is          .

A new argument has been put forward as to whether penguins are disturbed by the presence of tourists in Antarctica.
Previous research by scientists from Keil University in Germany monitored Adelie penguins and noted that the birds’ heart rates increased dramatically at the sight of a human as far as 30 meters away. But new research using an artificial egg, which is equipped to measure heart rates, disputes this. Scientists from the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge say that a slow moving human who does not approach the nest too closely, is not viewed as a threat by penguins.
The earlier findings have been used to partly explain the 20 per cent drop in populations of certain types of penguins near tourist sites. However, tour operators have continued to insist that their activities do not adversely affect wildlife in Antarctica, saying they encourage non-disruptive behavior in tourists, and that the decline in penguin numbers is caused by other factors.
Amanda Nimon of the Scott Polar Research Institute spent three southern hemisphere summers at Cuverville Island in Antarctica studying penguin behavior towards humans. “A nesting penguin will react very differently to a person rapidly and closely approaching the nest,” says Nimon. “First they exhibit large and prolonged heart rate changes and then they often flee the nest leaving it open for predators (掠奪者) to fly in and remove eggs or chicks.” The artificial egg, specially for the project, monitored both the parent who had been ‘disturbed’ when the egg was placed in the nest and the other parent as they both took it in turns to guard the nest.
However, Boris Culik, who monitored the Adelie penguins, believes that Nimon’s findings do not invalidate his own research. He points out that species behave differently ---- and Nimon’s work was with Gentoo penguins. Nimon and her colleagues believe that Culik’s research was methodologically flawed because the monitoring of penguins’ responses needed capturing and restraining the birds and fitting them with beart-rate transmitters. Therefore, argues Nimon, it would not be surprising if they became stressed on seeing a human subsequently.
【小題1】According to the passage, what overall message is presented?