When US musician Bob Dylan was announced as the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for literature last month, many people took to social media to suggest that Leonard Cohen was the only other living songwriter who deserved(值得)the honor.

    Sadly, on Nov 7, the deep-voiced Canadian artist died at the age of 82.

    Many tributes(称赞)were written for Cohen, who had just released his 14th album, You Want It Darker, on Oct 21st. “Leonard Cohen is as important today as he was in the 1960s,” Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on in a statement. “ His ability to describe human emotion made him one of the most influential and lasting musicians ever.”

    Cohen's most famous song, Hallenlujah, in which he compared physical love to a need for spiritual connection, has been recorded hundreds of times by different musician since it was first released in 1984.

    And Cohen's song Bird on a Wire(1969) could be considered a perfect epitaph(墓志铭)that he wrote for himself. As the song's first line goes, “Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in midnight choir(合唱团), I have tired in my way to be free.”

    “Cohen writes words that explain what it means to be human. I've read poetry that has as much beauty as Cohen's work, but in the world of music, Cohen is a rarity,” US singer Jennifer Warnes told Austin American-Statesman newspaper. ‘He describes things that go on inside a heart and what it feels like to be here.”

    Along with his spirituality, Cohen's dry, deep voice also helped his popularity. In 2006 he spoke with the NPR radio station about how he got his interesting voice—apparently it was “500 tons of whiskey and a million cigarettes.”

    But he never forgot to work on the instruments that made up his songs, even though he was most famous for his lyrics (歌词)and voice.

    “There is no difference between a poem and a song,” Cohen said in 1969 interview with the New York Times newspaper. “Some were songs first and some were poems first and some were written at the same time. All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.”

    “When people talk about Cohen, they fail to mention the melodies(旋律), which to me, along with his lyrics, are his greatest genius,” Bob Dylan told the New York magazine.” They give a lift to every one of his songs. As far a I know, no one comes close to this in modern music.”

阅读短文，从每题所给的四个选项(A、B、C和D)中，选出最佳选项。

    Ben, at the age of 23 ,was the youngest man to ski solo to the North Pole. He dragged a 180-kilogramme sledge (雪橇) over 1,420 miles through the worst Arctic conditions. This year, Ben plans to ski solo from the Antarctic coast to the South Pole and back in the autumn, carrying all his supplies on his sledge.

    Ben Saunders was fired after persuading the firm to support his disorganized first adventure. “Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. We didn't get to the Pole, so we had no media interest. No one heard about it.”

    “People said it was impossible for me to get to the Pole. I said, “No, I can get there,” and I did. Self-belief, I see it as being a bit like a muscle — it's my belief that the more you stretch yourself the stronger it gets. If you never do anything that's uncomfortable or risky then your self-belief gets weaker. So that's one of the lessons I've figured out along the way.

    “My Antarctic adventure is just practicable and that's what is exciting to me. If I knew I could do it without too much bother, I wouldn't be interested." Why? “Personally I'm attracted by the human performance element to it. Not that long ago, running a marathon was seen as the top point of human attempt, and now I wouldn^'t be that surprised if my mum said she was going to run one."

    People^'s horizons are changing. “I'm not particularly gifted. I've just chosen this one goal to achieve and I've been working hard to realize it. And that^'s the thing that attracts me: with enough training and enough determination, enough focus and preparation, how far can we go? And I don ^， t think I've found out yet.”

    It's never easy to explain exactly when a specific language began, and in the case of English we can hardly regard it as a separate language before the Anglo-Saxons came to Britain. Germanic invaders (入侵者) came and settled in Britain from the north-western coastline of continental Europe in the fifth centuries. The invaders all spoke a language that was Germanic (related to Dutch, Frisian, German and the Scandinavian languages), but we'll probably never know how different their speech was from that of their continental neighbors.

    The reason that we know so little about the language in this period is because we do not have much in the way of written records from any of the Germanic languages until several centuries later. When Old English writings began to appear in the seventh and eighth centuries there was a good deal of regional variation (变化), but not more than that found in later periods.

    The Celts already lived in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, but there are few obvious signs of their language in English today. Some scholars have suggested that the Celtic tongue might have had some influence on the grammatical development of English, particularly in some parts of the country, but this is highly speculative (猜测). The number of borrowed words that have entered Old English from this language is very small. Those that survive in modern English include “comb” (a type of valley), alongside some place names.

    One day, I received a call from a colleague. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physical problem， while the student claimed a perfect score. I was elected as their arbiter. I read the examination problem: “Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer(气压计).” The student had answered: “Take the barometer to the top of the building，attach a long rope to it，lower it to the street， and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of it is the height of the building. ”

    The student had really answered the question completely, but the answer didn't confirm his competence in physics. I suggested the student try again. I gave him six minutes to answer the question, warning that the answer should show some knowledge of physics. Five minutes later, he said he had many answers and clashed off one, which read： “Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch. Then, use the physical formula (公式）to calculate the height of the building. ”

    At this point, my colleague had to accept it, and then the student made almost full marks. I couldn't help asking the student what the other answers were. He listed many others ，and then added “Probably the best is to take the barometer to the administrator and said to him，' Sir, here is a fine barometer. If you tell me the height of the building, I will give it to you.，”

    Then, I asked the student if he really did not know the conventional answer to this question. He admitted that he did, but said that he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him how to think.

    The name of the student was Bohr who later was famous all over the world. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922.

    Have you eaten too much over the holidays? You should try fidgeting for a while. Those around you might not like it, but scratching (moving your nails (指甲) against a part of your body) and twitching (moving suddenly and quickly when you don't want to) is an important way of burning up calories (卡路里).

    American researchers have found that some people's squirming (continuously turn your body when nervous) and wigging (move in small movements, especially from side to side) equals (等于) several miles of slow running each day.

    The scientists, based at the National Institute of Health's laboratory in Phenix, Arizona, are studying why some people get fat and other stay slim.

    In one study 177 people each spent 24 hours in a room in the institute where the amount (量) of energy is measured by their oxygen and carbon dioxide (二氧化碳) levels. By the end of the day, some people had burned up 800 calories in toe-tapping, (moving the front part of your foot up and down) finger-drumming (hitting your fingers continuously and lightly against something hard) and other nervous habits. However, others had burned up only 100 calories.

    The researchers found that slim（苗条的）women fidget more than fat women, but there was no significant difference in men. Heavy people burn up more energy when they fidget than do thin people.