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Part II Reading Comprehension (Skimming and Scanning) (15 minutes)

Directions: In this part, you will have 15 minutes to go over the passage quickly and answer the questions on Answer Sheet 1. For questions 1-7, choose the best answer from the four choices marked ［A］, ［B］, ［C］ and ［D］. For questions 8-10, complete the sentences with the information given in the passage.

What’s the Single Best Exercise?

Let’s consider the butterfly（蝶泳）. One of the most calorie-consuming movements in sports, the butterfly requires greater energy than bicycling at 14 miles per hour, running a 10-minute mile, playing competitive basketball or carrying furniture upstairs. It burns more calories, demands larger doses of oxygen and elicits more fatigue than those other activities, meaning that over time it should increase a swimmer’s endurance and contribute to weight control.

So is the butterfly the best single exercise that there is? Well, no. The butterfly “would probably get my vote for the worst” exercise, said Greg Whyte, a professor of sport and exercise science at Liverpool John Moores University in England. The butterfly, he said, is “miserable, isolating, and painful.” It requires a coach, a pool and ideally supplemental weight and flexibility training to reduce the high risk of injury.

Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned body exercises: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

And sticking with an exercise is the key, even if you don’t spend a lot of time working out. The health benefits of activity follow a breathtakingly steep curve. “The majority of the mortality-related benefits” from exercising are due to the first 30 minutes of exercise, said Timothy Church, M.D., who holds the John S. Mchenny endowed chair in health wisdom at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.

A recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality showed that, in general, a person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause is reduced sharply by nearly 20 percent if he or she began brisk walking (or the equivalent) for 30 minutes five times a week. If he or she tripled that amount, for instance, to 90 minutes of exercise four or five times a week, his or her risk of premature death dropped by only another 4 percent. So the one indisputable aspect of the single best exercise is that it be sustainable. From there, though coach3折包包, the debate grows heated.

“I personally think that brisk walking is far and away the single best exercise,” said Michael Joyner, M.D., a professor of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

As proof, he points to the work of Hiroshi Nose, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of sports medical sciences at Shinshu University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan, who has enrolled thousands of older Japanese citizens in an innovative, five-month-long program of brisk, interval-style walking (three minutes of fast walking, followed by three minutes of slower walking, repeated 10 times). The results have been astonishing. “Physical fitness — maximal aerobic power and muscle strength — increased by about 20 percent,” Dr. Nose wrote in an e-mail coach2013女王新款目錄, “which is sure to make you feel about 10 years younger than before training.” The walkers’ “symptoms of lifestyle-related diseases decreased by about 20 percent,” he added, while their depression scores dropped by half.

Walking has also been shown by other researchers to aid materially in weight control. A 15-year study found that middle-aged women who walked for at least an hour a day maintained their weight over the decades. Those who didn’t gained weight. In addition, a recent fascinating study found that when older people started a regular program of brisk walking, the volume of their hippocampus, a portion of the brain involved in memory, increased significantly coach官方網2012.

But let’s face it, walking holds little appeal — or physiological benefit — for anyone who already exercises. “I nominate the squat（深蹲）,” said Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University. The squat “activates the body’s biggest muscles, those in the buttocks, back and legs.” It’s simple. “Just fold your arms across your chest,” he said, “bend your knees and lower your trunk until your thighs are about parallel with the floor. Do that 25 times. It’s a very effective exercise.” Use a barbell once the body-weight squats grow easy.

The squat, and weight training in general, are particularly good at combating sarcopenia, he said, or the inevitable and debilitating loss of muscle mass that accompanies advancing age. “Each of us is experiencing sarcopenia right this minute,” he said. “We just don’t realize it.&rdquo 美國coach官方網; Endurance exercise, he added, unlike resistance training, does little to slow the condition.

Surprisingly, weight training may even improve cardiovascular fitness, Phillips said, as measured by changes in a person’s VO2max, or the maximum amount of oxygen that the heart and lungs can deliver to the muscles. Most physiologists believe that only endurance-exercise training can raise someone’s VO2max. But in small experiments, he said, weight training, by itself, effectively increased cardiovascular fitness.

“I used to run marathons,” he said. Now he mostly weight-trains, “and I’m in better shape.”

But there’s something boring and unchallenging about a squats-only routine. And the science supporting weight training as an all-purpose exercise approach, while provocative, remains inconclusive. Is there a single activity that has proved to be, at once, more efficient than walking while building power like the squat?

“I think, actually, that you can make a strong case for H.I.T.,” Gibala said. High-intensity interval training, or H.I.T. as it’s familiarly known among physiologists, is essentially all-interval exercise. As studied in Gibala’s lab, it involves undertaking a series of short, bursting intervals on specialized stationary bicycles. In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise. After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had played leisurely for more than 10 hours. Other researchers also have found that H.I.T. reduces blood-sugar levels and heart disease risk, and Gibala anticipates that it will aid in weight control, although he hasn’t studied that topic fully yet.

The approach seems promising, since most of us have minimal time to exercise each week. Gibala last month published a new study of H.I.T., requiring only a stationary bicycle and some degree of motivation. In this modified version, you sprint for 60 seconds at a pace that feels unpleasant but sustainable, followed by 60 seconds easy and relaxing bicycling, then another 60-second sprint and recovery, 10 times in all. “There’s no particular reason why” H.I.T. shouldn’t be adaptable to almost any sport, Gibala said, as long as you adequately push yourself.

Of course, to be effective, H.I.T. must hurt. But a study published last month found that when a group of recreational runners practiced H.I.T. on the track, they enjoyed the workout more than a second group of runners who brisk walked continuously for 50 minutes. The H.I.T. runners, the study’s conductors suspect, were less bored.

The only obvious disadvantage of H.I.T. is that it builds muscular strength less effectively than, say, the squat. But even that can be partially remedied, Gibala said: “Sprinting up stairs is a power workout and interval session simultaneously.”Meaning that running up steps just might be the single best exercise of all. Great news for those of us who could never master the butterfly.

留神：此局部试题请在答题卡1上作答

1. In Greg Whyte’s viewpoint, butterfly____.

[A] requires little outside help or facility.

[B] burns out much more calories than most other exercises.

[C] is not an ideal way of shaping one’s body.

[D] can only be done by someone strong and flexible.

2. One reason burpee is NOT the single best exercise is that____

[A] It demands too much imagination.

[B] people are likely to lose interest in it after a short period of time.

[C] It has little mortality-related benefit.

[D] people tend to find it too challenging to carry out.

3. The essence of exercise lies in___

[A] the amount of time one puts in.

[B] what kind of sport one chooses.

[C] remembering to take deep breath during the activity

[D] keeping doing the exercise and not quit.

4. Recently, a research on exercise and mortality indicates that a good exercise should___

[A] benefit the majority of people.

[B] last 30 minutes five times a week.

[C] can be undertaken in a consistent manner.

[D] prevent people from premature death.

5. Regarding brisk walking, Michael Joyner___

[A] shares the idea of Hiroshi Nose.

[B] deems it as an undesirable way of exercise.

[C] finds the walking should be far and away.

[D]encourages the elder citizens to participate in.

6. Walking would sound less attractive to those who__

[A] are doing some kind of sport already.

[B] have lost their weight recently

[C] are unable to walk for a long time repeatedly.

[D] are aged and have difficulty in their brain functions.

7. According to the passage, what should we do to avoid the loss of muscle mass?

[A] To undertake endurance exercise.

[B] To stay away from sarcopenia.

[C] To slow down the process of aging.

[D] To turn to weight training.

8. Despite all its merits, science as an all-purpose exercise approach remains _________.

9. Gibala states that it is practical to______ H coach2013女王新款目錄.I.T. to most of the sports as long as you adequately push yourself.