The Iron Lady

    Margaret Thatcher, known as the Iron Lady, was one of the toughest political women in the world.

    As the daughter of a businessman and mayor of Grantham, Margaret was educated at a very famous grammar school. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Upon graduation, she worked for four years as a research chemist. She then became a lawyer, doing an excellent job in taxation law, in 1954. Miss Margaret stood twice in elections for the Conservative Party before being elected to the House of Commons(下议院) in 1959. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} After that she quickly became a spokesman for her party, and member of the Shadow Cabinet(影子内阁).

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Thatcher spent quite a lot of time visiting schools and universities, who encouraged people to be creative. After the Conservatives lost power in 1974, she was appointed to the Shadow Cabinet. She was elected leader of the Conservative Party in the following year. In May 1979, she became Britain's first female prime minister, after the Conservatives regained power from Labor.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} She fought against labor organizations. According to a figure reported by her government, traditional industries were reduced to around 15,000 in total and she also made social housing and public transport private.

    She left office on November 28, 1990 after she failed to carry out a fixed rate local tax, which led to huge popular protest from within her party. In 1992, she was appointed to the House of Lords(上议院), as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven. In the last few years of her life, she has been busy with writing and public speech. This caused her increasingly poor health. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. She got a degree in chemistry at Oxford University.

B. Also she built strong association with US President Reagan.

C. In June 1970, she became secretary of state for education and science.

D. In power, she was best known for her reducing Britain's traditional industries.

E. Therefore, she had to give up many chances of attending public activities.

F. Thatcher was appointed as a Minister in 1961.

G. Thatcher was well-known as a female leader.

Distance runners often worry about “hitting the wall” during training or races—that terrible moment when negative thoughts become so overpowering that they make it difficult to continue.

Hitting the wall typically happens around 20 miles in a marathon, when the body's supplies become exhausted. At this point, many runners feel exhausted and discouraged, slow their pace, have trouble focusing and want to quit or walk.

“Generalized tiredness, unintentionally slowing their pace, the desire to walk, and shifting focus to just surviving the marathon appear to be particularly common characteristics of it,” said Dr. Alistair McCormick, an exercise psychologist in England who co-authored a new study. “A marathon becomes a real mental battle when runners ‘hit the wall.'”

    Psychological blocks are an extremely common experience for recreational endurance (耐力) athletes, according to the study. To learn how they affect people, sports psychologists asked 30 recreational runners and cyclers about the psychological demands of training, preparing for and participating in competitions.

     “Recreational runners and cyclists found it stressful trying to find the time to train, McCormick said. “What was also interesting was the number of potential banana skins they met with before and during competition-disasters that could cause the athletes to lose their focus and their motivation to keep persevering.”

    These roadblocks included difficult environmental conditions and equipment failure, problems with nutrition or making a mistake, the study reported. The athletes in the study said they fell these obstacles (障碍) affected their motivation and concentration, negatively affecting their overall performance.

According to the study, 43 percent of marathoners are likely to hit the wall during a race. Finding ways to move past those kinds of experiences, then, could have major benefits for an athlete's performance and well-being.

    Feelings often run high where insects are concerned, with many people even sick when seeing them, let alone touch or swallow them. And yet insects present a huge nutritional opportunity as an increasing global population seeks more sources of food and feed.

    Insects have generally high levels of animal protein and key micronutrients with lower environmental footprints than traditional alternatives, and they can be raised on leftovers. But cultural, social and economic problems remain, reports an article published today in Nutrition Bulletin.

    “Insects present a nutritional opportunity, but it is unclear how their nutritional quality is influenced by what they are fed,” says Darja Dobermann, a researcher at the University of Nottingham. “In ideal conditions, insects have a smaller environmental impact than most traditional western forms of animal protein; less known is how to raise insect production while maintaining these environmental benefits.”

    “Studies overall show that insects could make valuable economic and nutritional contributions to the food or fed systems, but there are no clear regulations in place to bring insects into such supply systems without them turning into a more expensive version of poultry（家禽）for food,” says Dobermann.

    The article highlights how insects have been a source of food for hundreds of years in more than 100 countries with over 2,000 species that can be eaten; in central Africa, up to 50% of dietary protein has come from insects, with their market value higher than many alternative sources of animal protein.

    Insects need to be large enough to make the effort of catching them worthwhile and easy to locate, preferably in predictably large quantities. They are consumed at various life stages, as raw, fried, boiled, roasted or ground food.

    Are anger problems should also be recognized as an illness like depression and anxiety? Anger is largely viewed as a secondary emotion — one caused by other emotions. People are thought to be angry because they are sad, anxious or stressed. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Today, though, a growing number of mental health experts think that anger is a serious problem that needs its own treatment.

    To tell the difference between "normal" anger and "anger problem" is difficult. After all, everyone gets really mad from time to time. Experts point out a few ways.

    Disordered anger, as it is sometimes called, tends to be of greater intensity (强度). {#blank#}2{#/blank#} An example: While most people would get upset if a driver cut them off, someone with disordered anger might try to chase down the car and force it off the road.

    And in cases of disordered anger, the person gets angry more frequently and his/her anger lasts longer.{#blank#}3{#/blank#} But people with anger problems often stay angry for days, weeks or even years; their feelings of anger don't disappear over time.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Disordered anger often damages people's lives. "It interferes (干扰) with people's relationships and their jobs," says Raymond Chip Tafrate, a US psychologist. "Even their health is affected."

    Anger clearly increases the risk of certain health problems, as many studies have shown. When people are angry, their hearts beat faster and their blood pressure goes up. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    Experts suggest that people with an anger problem take anger-management programs. The programs teach people to control their responses to stressful situations through the use of relaxation techniques. The programs sometimes also include life-skills training to help bring down stress and remove angry feelings.

A. Anger takes away people's joy in life.

B. Consequences are also important to consider.

C. The anger buried inside him rises to the surface.

D. For most people, angry feelings disappear quickly.

E. Over time, these changes will have bad effects on the body.

F. In the past, many doctors didn't accept the idea that anger could be a problem all on its own.

G. It takes very little to set off a person with an anger problem, and their responses are very strong.

    Doctors say anger can be an extremely damaging emotion, unless you learn how to deal with it. They warn that anger can lead to heart disease, stomach problems, headaches, emotional problems and possibly cancer.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Some people express anger openly in a calm reasonable way. Others burst with anger, and scream and yell. But other people keep their anger inside. They can not or will not express it. This is called repressing anger.

    For years many doctors thought that repressing anger was more dangerous to a person's health than expressing it. They said that when a person is angry, the brain releases the same hormones (荷尔蒙). They speed the heart rate, raise blood pressure, or sugar into the blood, etc. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Some doctors say that both repressing and expressing anger can be dangerous. They believe that those who express anger violently may be more likely to develop heart disease, and they believe that those who keep anger inside may face a greater danger of high blood pressure.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} They say the first step is to admit that you are angry and to recognize the real cause of the anger, then decide if the cause is serious enough to get angry about. If it is, they say, "{#blank#}4{#/blank#} Wait until your anger has cooled down and you are able to express yourself calmly and reasonably."

    Doctors say that a good way to deal with anger is to find humor in the situation that has made you angry. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    Women may have good reason to drink coffee as much as they like. According to recent research, women who drank three or more cups of coffee a day were 30 percent less likely to have memory decline at age 65 than whose who drank one cup or less daily. And the benefit increased with age. Women over age 80 who drank three or more cups of coffee a day were about 70 percent less likely to have memory decline than those who drank one cup or less, the researchers said.

    Caffeinated tea had the same effect in the women, the study found, although more was needed to get the same caffeine boost. "Count roughly two cups of tea for a cup of coffee," said study leader Karen Ritchie of INSERM, the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research.

    But the researchers didn't find a similarly protective effect in men, although other studies have found a benefit to males.

    How might caffeine help ward off cognitive decline? "It is a cognitive stimulant." said Ritchie. "It also helps to reduce levels of the protein called beta amyloid in the brain" she said, "whose accumulation is responsible for Alzheimer's disease but which also occurs in normal aging."

    Ritchie said she wasn't sure why men in the study didn't benefit from caffeine. "Our hypothesis is that either women metabolize caffeine differently than men, or there may be an interaction of the caffeine with the sex hormones," she said.

    The French study confirms previous research, said William Scott, professor of medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, who has researched caffeine's beneficial effects against Parkinson's disease, also a neurodegenerative disorder.

    As for caffeine only protecting women, Scott noted that just 2,800 of the 7,000 study participants were men, and the results might have differed if more men were included.

    A study published in February in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at 676 healthy men and found that regular coffee drinkers had a lower rate of cognitive decline over a 10-year follow-up than those who didn't drink coffee. Those who drank three cups daily had the least signs of decline.

    Both Scott and Ritchie agreed that more study is needed. Ritchie's research will next look at the relationship between caffeine and Alzheimer's.