We may not be aware of it, but ordinary family homes in the U.S. and the rest of the world are not energy-efficient.

    Most of their energy goes to heating and cooling, and a lot of it is wasted, as warm air and cool air escape through fireplace chimneys and thin or poorly fitting windows and doors. A passive house loses almost none."Imagine a thermos(保温瓶),"said housing developer Brendan O'Neill."You have insulation(隔绝) everywhere, and it's basically completely sealed. And so the idea is to build a house like a thermos. So the windows are sealed. There's insulation completely surrounding the building. We make it as sealed as possible."

    A 147-square-meter passive house, presented by O'Neill Development Corp. as a demonstration unit just outside Washington, was brought to the site in two boxes. "Once it's set and put together, it takes about four weeks to complete the outside construction, to put down carpets," O'Neill said. "If everything is set in place, you put a house like this together in about four months.”The total cost of building it was $325,000, or about 17 percent more than constructing an ordinary house. But its utility(公用事业) bill is only around $20 monthly, or one-tenth the amount for the average house of the same size.

    While passive houses have been around for a long time, the idea has never taken root in the U.S. There was no driving force to push it.

    However, David Peabody, an architect who designs passive houses said, "I think climate change is now becoming a larger issue. And I think building standards are catching on to that. So people are becoming more aware of energy."Peabody said the cost of building passive houses could come down."What really makes sense for truly affordable housing," he said, "is to build multi-storey buildings."

    An old lady in a plane had a blanket（毯子）over her head and she did not want to take it off. The air hostess spoke to her, but the old lady said, “I have never been in a plane before, and I am frightened. I am going to keep this blanket over my head until we are back on the ground again!”

    Then the captain came. He said, “Madam, I am the captain of this plane. The weather is fine, there are no clouds in the sky, and everything is going very well. ”But she continued to hide.

    So the captain turned and started to go back. Then the old lady looked out from under the blanket with one eye and said, “I am sorry, young man, but I don't like planes and I am never going to fly again. But I'll say one thing, ”She continued kindly, “You and your wife keep your plane very clean!”

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。

    In her new book, “The Smartest Kids in the World,” Amanda Ripley, an investigative journalist, tells the story of Tom, a high-school student from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who decides to spend his senior year in Warsaw, Poland. Poland is a surprising educational success story: in the past decade, the country raised students' test scores from significantly below average to well above it. Polish kids have now outscored(超过……分数) American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Warsaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind.

    That American high schools waste more time and money on sports than on math is an old complaint. This is not a matter of how any given student who plays sports does in school, but of the culture and its priorities. This December, when the latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results are announced, it's safe to predict that American high-school students will once again display their limited skills in math and reading, outscored not just by students in Poland but also by students in places like South Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Singapore, and Japan. Meanwhile, they will have played some very exciting football games, which will have been breathlessly written up in their hometown papers.

    Why does this situation continue? Well, for one thing, kids like it. And for another, according to Ripley, parents seem to like the arrangement, too. She describes a tour she took of a school in Washington D.C., which costs thirty thousand dollars a year. The tour leader—a mother with three children in the school—was asked about the school's flaws(瑕疵). When she said that the math program was weak, none of the parents taking the tour reacted. When she said that the football program was weak, the parents suddenly became concerned. “Really?” one of them asked worriedly, “What do you mean?”

    One of the ironies(讽刺) of the situation is that sports reveal what is possible. American kids' performance on the field shows just how well they can do when expectations are high. It's too bad that their test scores show the same thing.

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。

    A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

    “It's extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just a bunch of individual components (零件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. “The added difficulty with such a project is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to make them all on our own,” he said.

    They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, and then has to be matched well to everything it's connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.

    Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect- scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications (应用). “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day to day basis.”

    There are many weird sports that are present from around the world. From each region of the world, along with the very popular common sports, there are also those really popular but very weird kinds of sports.

    The Ultimate Test between Man and Horse:

    This indeed a very strange kind of sport that tests your stamina. You will learn how to be agiler while competing against a horse. This game originated in Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells. This sport really has to do with strength. You will require great agility and strength in order to take part in this. Marathon human contestants are put to test against those mounted on horses. This is how the marathon testing takes place.

    Love Locked Race

    This is a sports event that was first introduced in Finland. This is all about a male competitor racing with a female in a certain way. There would be many obstructions and blocks on the way which would definitely bring you challenges. The person to win would have to finish the race without losing his female partner in the course of overcoming the obstacles even for once. This race takes place really fast and the obstacles are set that way.

    Toe sport

    This is yet another weird sport that welcomes you to use your toes. This is quite the same kind of sport that you used to play as a child which involved toe wrestling. This has now been turned into a major sport that even has a World Toe Wrestling Competition. It first originated in a pub of Derbyshire.

    The locals took this sport with great enjoyment and then made this so popular that it soon had its own championship. The individuals who participate have only got to use their feet in locks but then this is tougher than it may sound.

    The Mud Pit Belly Flop

    This is a kind of game where even the spectators get splashed in mud but in fact that is quite the fun. The very annual Summer Redneck Games in East Dublin brings about this game and brings about some of the greatest hubcap discus throws with it. This is also a great sport to show the strength and dexterity of your feet.

    If you find yourself checking your phone first thing in the morning, if you find you're text-messaging while driving, checking your phone instead of working on an important assignment—you are addicted.

    Don't worry. The new NoPhone might be just the thing you need. It looks and feels exactly like a smartphone, but it does nothing. It's just a piece of plastic that you can carry around in your hand to fool yourself.

    NoPhone is currently a prototype(手机模型) that will cost only $12 once it hits the market. Its makers are trying to raise $30,000 in order to cover the production and marketing costs.

    Dutch designer Ingmar Larsen, who helped create the NoPhone, said that he had the idea as a joke along with his friends Van Gould and Ben Langveld. To their great surprise, the idea received a lot of attention online and people from all over the world started placing requests for NoPhone of their own, so that's when the three friends decided to raise money for mass production.

    David H said," I used to sleep with my phone in my hand, but my night terrors would cause me to throw it across the room in an unconscious panic. With the NoPhone, I can still enjoy the comfort of holding a phone in my sleep, without waking up to a broken screen, thanks, NoPhone."

    If you're interested in NoPhone, but concerned about not being able to take selfies anymore, don't worry. The makers do have an update at no extra charge—the mirror sticker. That way, they say, you can enjoy "real-time" selfies with your friends when they're standing right behind you.