As a little child, I was always plump（胖的）. In college I started blowing up. It got out of control when l went to law school.

    I'd made a decision a thousand times: I'm going to lose weight now. But what motivated（激发） me to get serious about it was turning 30.1 weighed 414 pounds.1 was always tired. Some of my family members have suffered from heart disease, and l was frightened. I also wanted to look better.

    So after my birthday, I walked into the office of a weight loss doctor.

    She was very understanding. Her focus was on balanced meals and she wanted me to exercise.

    Walking was all I could do at first. I started by walking a few blocks and gradually increased the distance, until one weekend, I heard myself saying, "Wow, this seems pretty easy." So I started to run.

    I was losing nine or ten pounds a month, and I had more energy. I started to think about the New York City Marathon. For years, I watched the runners and thought, "This looks like fun, but I could never do that." But now I realized that maybe I could. I joined the New York Road Runners. I ran a 10km, then a half marathon.I still wasn't confident I could run a full 26 miles. But I told myself I was going to do it, no matter what.

    By my 33rd birthday, I was down to 180 pounds. I started formally training for the marathon.

    And on the morning of November l, I stood on the Verrazano Bridge in Staten Island with more than 40,000 0ther runners, waiting for the event to start.

    It was unbelievable to have the audience cheering me on, handing me cups of water. And I crossed the finish line. My friends sprayed（向……喷射）me with beer, as if I'd won the Super Bowl.

    And at that moment, I knew: If I set my mind to something, nothing is impossible.

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    It's always important to use the right tools for any job. Success in school is no different. If you need to vary your time management tool box, consider these less traditional tools. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} .

    Daily Task List

    A daily task list is nothing more than a notepad that you use to list your daily goals. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} . Cross them off as you finish them. At the end of each day, simply carry over any job that you didn't finish to the next day's list. It works wonders!

    Big Well Calendar

    Simply place the big wall calendar in a prominent place near your regular study space. Then come up with a color code for your classes(like green for math and yellow for history). When you have a big due date or a test date, place the appropriate colored sticker on that date. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} , so it works as a constant reminder. This trick is simple, cheap, and so effective!

    Sticky Note Flags

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} , whether you're putting together a big research project or you're simply reading a book. Whenever you need to remember to take a certain object or assignment to school, place a sticky flag on the door knob, bathroom mirror, or the cereal box the night before. It works like an alarm!

    Bedside Notepad

    You can keep a notepad beside your bed to write down any items or tasks you have to remember for the next day. As you settle in for the night, take a few moments to think about the things you need to do tomorrow. Then write them down and tear off the sheet in the morning. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} !

A. Remember to pack it in your schoolbag.

B. Keep your homework and your life in order

C. Two heads are better than one when it comes to projecting due dates

D. You could also use the calendar feature to alert you when projects are due

E. These little paper banners are lifesavers when it comes to getting organized

F. Carry a small pad around and write down every task you need to complete

G. The sticker will be something you can see every time you enter the room.

    We know cats like to hide in boxes and knock things over. But if you make a square on your floor, what will your cat do? Turns out a lot of cats will get inside it. Amazed cat owners repeated the experiment, often with tape(带子), but others with squares made out of ribbon, sheets of paper and even shoes.

    Cat experts weigh in

    So what makes cats so interested in a square on the floor?

    “We know that cats like safe spaces. It's possible that the mark on the floor creates some illusion(幻觉) on the floor that doesn't actually exist,” says cat behavior expert Mikel Delgado. “It might have enough similarity to a low-sided box that a lot of cats are attracted to it for safety.”

    Another cat behavior expert Ingrid Johnson agrees. “I would imagine they probably feel as if they are 'in' something. Though shallow, still comforting, offers the idea of sides,” she says. Johnson points out that cats have poor close-up sight, so they may have the idea that the tape is actually the sides of a square area. “Their sight is built for distance and speed, watching a mouse run across the field,” she says. “Close up, they're blind 8 to 12 inches off their noses.”

    Kitty curiosity(好奇心)

    Another reason cats are attracted by the square? Pure curiosity.

    Because cats are very sensitive to their environment, the tape square might be attracting them just because it's new and different, she says. The same thing would likely happen if you put a piece of cardboard or a paper bag on the floor. A lot of cats would check it out.

    Did you know that the color of uniforms（制服）can influence the performance of an athlete？ It may sound strange, but a study suggests this might be true.

    Two British scientists studied the results of four spots in the 2004 Athens Olympic Games where the athletes had been given either a red or a blue uniform. They discovered that when there was a big difference in the score, color had no influence on the result . But if it was a close match, the athlete in a red uniform was more likely to win. Then they looked at the uniforms of the soccer teams at the Euro 2004 tournament. Again, teams wearing red won more games.

    The two scientists got their idea from earlier studies of wild animals. It had been discovered that when a male（雄性）shows red on its body, it sends a signal（信号）of its power and strength. For example, in many kinds of monkey, the more the male shows off its red scars（伤疤），the more females it can attract.

    Based on this fact, the British scientists thought that the idea might work for humans, too. According to them, when an athlete sees a competitor in a red uniform, he gets a feeling that his competitor could be stronger than him. And that kind of feeling may have a bad influence on the player's performance in the actual game.

    Although the idea is interesting, most people don't accept that color signals in the animal world can really be useful to humans in sports. They think that it is unreasonable to develop an idea based on such a small number of examples. Much more research has to be done to prove the influence of uniform colors on the performance of athletes.

    If a diver surfaces too quickly, he may suffer the bends. Nitrogen(氮) dissolved(溶解) in his blood is suddenly liberated by the reduction of pressure. The consequence, if the bubbles (气泡)accumulate in a joint, is sharp pain and a bent body—thus the name. If the bubbles form in his lungs or his brain, the consequence can be death.

    Other air-breathing animals also suffer this decompression(减压) sickness if they surface too fast: whales, for example. And so, long ago, did ichthyosaurs. That these ancient sea animals got the bends can be seen from their bones. If bubbles of nitrogen form inside the bone they can cut off its blood supply. This kills the cells in the bone, and consequently weakens it, sometimes to the point of collapse. Fossil (化石)bones that have caved in on themselves are thus a sign that the animal once had the bends.

    Bruce Rothschild of the University of Kansas knew all this when he began a study of ichthyosaur bones to find out how widespread the problem was in the past. What he particularly wanted to investigate was how ichthyosaurs adapted to the problem of decompression over the 150 million years. To this end, he and his colleagues traveled the world's natural-history museums, looking at hundreds of ichthyosaurs from the Triassic period and from the later Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

    When he started, he assumed that signs of the bends would be rarer in younger fossils, reflecting their gradual evolution of measures to deal with decompression. Instead, he was astonished to discover the opposite. More than 15% of Jurassic and Cretaceous ichthyosaurs had suffered the bends before they died, but not a single Triassic specimen(标本) showed evidence of that sort of injury.

    If ichthyosaurs did evolve an anti-decompression means, they clearly did so quickly—and, most strangely, they lost it afterwards. But that is not what Dr Rothschild thinks happened. He suspects it was evolution in other animals that caused the change.

    Whales that suffer the bends often do so because they have surfaced to escape a predator (捕食动物) such as a large shark. One of the features of Jurassic oceans was an abundance of large sharks and crocodiles, both of which were fond of ichthyosaur lunches. Triassic oceans, by contrast, were mercifully shark- and crocodile-free. In the Triassic, then, ichthyosaurs were top of the food chain. In the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they were prey(猎物) as well as predator—and often had to make a speedy exit as a result.

    For all the pressures and rewards of regionalization (地区化) and globalization, local identities remain the most deeply impressed. Even if the end result of globalization is to make the world smaller, its scope seems to foster the need for more private local connections among many individuals. As Bernard Poignant, mayor of the town of Quimper in Brittany, told the Washington Post, "Man is a fragile animal and he needs his close attachments. The more open the world becomes, the more ties there will be to one's roots and one's land."

    In most communities, local languages such as Poignant's Breton serve a strong symbolic function as a clear mark of "authenticity (原真性)". The sum total of a community's shared historical experience, authenticity reflects a noticeable line from a culturally idealized past to the present, carried by the language and traditions associated with the community's origins. A concern for authenticity leads most secular (世俗的) Israelis to defend Hebrew among themselves while also acquiring English and even Arabic. The same obsession with authenticity drives Hasidic Jews in Israel or the Diaspora to champion Yiddish while also learning Hebrew and English. In each case, authenticity amounts to a central core of cultural beliefs and interpretations that are not only resistant to globalization but also are actually reinforced by the "threat" that globalization seems to present to these historical values. Scholars may argue that cultural identities change over time in response to specific reward systems. But locals often resist such explanation and defend authenticity and local mother tongues against the perceived threat of globalization with near religious eagerness.

    As a result, never before in history have there been as many standardized languages as there are today: roughly 1,200. Many smaller languages, even those with far fewer than one million speakers, have benefited from state-sponsored or voluntary preservation movements. On the most informal level, communities in Alaska and the American northwest have formed Internet discussion groups in an attempt to pass on Native American languages to younger generations. In the Basque, Catalan, and Galician regions of Spain, such movements are fiercely political and frequently involved loyal resistance to the Spanish government over political and linguistic rights. Projects have ranged from a campaign to print Spanish money in the four official languages of the state to the creation of language immersion nursery and primary schools. Zapatistas in Mexico are championing the revival of Mayan languages in an equally political campaign for local autonomy.

    In addition to causing the feeling of the subjective importance of local roots, supporters of local languages defend their continued use on practical grounds. Local tongues foster higher levels of school success, higher degrees of participation in local government, more informed citizenship, and better knowledge of one's own culture, history, and faith. Government and relief agencies can also use local languages to spread information about industrial and agricultural techniques as well as modern health care to diverse audiences. Development workers in West Africa, for example, have found that the best way to teach the vast number of farmers with little or no formal education how to sow and rotate crops for higher yields is in these local tongues. Nevertheless, both regionalization and globalization require that more and more speakers of local languages be multi-literate.