A sugar glider is a small, grey, furry mammal with big eyes. You'd be lucky to see one, 21 , because they are small, timid, an nocturnal. If you do get a 22 of a sugar glider, you might notice that when it is 23 through the tree tops, its skin stretches out between its arms and legs, almost in the shape of a square. Sugar gliders are a type of possum native 24 Australia. They get their name from their 25 for sweet foods like flower nectar, acacia gum, and the sap from eucalyptus trees.

 Passage 1 （31~35 題） 

Infectious disease is all around us. Disease-causing agents, such as viruses, usually have specific targets. Some viruses only affect humans. Other viruses live in or affect only animals. Problems start when animal viruses are able to infect people as well, a process known as zoonosis. When an animal virus passes to a human, the result can usually be deadly. 

In the last three decades, more than 30 zoonotic diseases have emerged around the globe. HIV is an example; it evolved from a virus originally carried by African monkeys, and later chimps. Today, conservative estimates suggest that HIV has infected about 40 million people. For instance, SARS, a type of flu which jumped from chickens to humans, is another type of zoonotic disease. But how do these viruses pass from animals to humans? Contact is crucial.

Paul Cézanne is one of the greatest artists of all time. One could say that good art speaks in a language we know: we get the message and then move on. Great art seems to speak in a foreign language we imagine we’ll get with long enough immersion. However, there’s Cézanne, who is like the sound of water dripping or the clank of a train. It’s just there to be known, full of meaning and pleasure, somehow, but without a hope of translation. 

With most of Cézanne’s rivals, however superb, there are certain banalities we utter that also happen to be true: Michelangelo is about cosmic drama and heroic bodies; Monet is about light and brushwork and modern French life. With Cézanne, we don’t have the backup of truisms. Or rather, the ones that do get trotted out are all simply wrong. “Cézanne reduces the world to a few geometric solids”—ludicrous to anyone who really looks at his stew of shapes. “Cézanne simply stared harder at the world than other artists”—absurd to anyone who recognizes how little looking at a Cézanne apple is like looking at a real one. “Cézanne is only about composition and color”—impossible, given how much he labors over getting his card players right as humans. 

There are other great artists who will puzzle us forever—James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Arnold Schoenberg—but that puzzlement seems to come from their willful complexity. Whereas it seems as though Cézanne wants to keep things simple but then can’t. Tapping his head, he once said, “Painting . . . it’s inside here.” The glory of his art is that, no matter how hard we try, we can never quite see it.

Hospitals and surgery can be especially frightening for children, and to help lessen young patients’ anxiety, one drug company has been experimenting with sedative “lollipops.” Recently the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved further testing of sweet-tasting fentanyl suckers on children, despite protests from a consumer health group that the lollipop form will give kids the idea that drugs are candy. Fentanyl, a widely used narcotic anesthetic agent, is 200 times more potent than morphine. Fentanyl lollipops can ease kids’ separation from their parents and make the administration of anesthesia go more smoothly, according to a member of the team that tested them. But the Public Citizen Health Research Group, alarmed by what it believes is a danger to children and a new opportunity for drug abuse, urged the FDA to call a halt to the experiments.

 Fentanyl is so addictive, according to the Group’s director, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, that its widespread availability could cause drug-abuse problems. He suggests that hospitals develop other ways to calm young patients, such as making greater use of play therapy and allowing parents to accompany children into the operating room. 

Dr. Gary Henderson, a pharmacologist and an authority on fentanyl abuse, doubts that carefully controlled use of the drug in a hospital setting would pose a danger or suggest to kids that drugs are like candy. “Children will associate few things in the hospital with a pleasant experience,” he says.

People once thought that a solar eclipse meant that a terrible disaster would happen. Now we know that is not true, but millions of people do suffer from true natural disasters ranging from deadly typhoons from the sea to tornadoes on land. Fossils show that natural disasters have been affecting life on earth since long before human existed. These disasters still affect us all. 

Our oceans and straits may be affected by typhoons. In the mountains and gorges of Taiwan and elsewhere, the rains brought by these storms often lead to mudslides. In other parts of the world, there is sometimes not enough rain, resulting in a drought. Because of the drought, crops wither and people starve. Earthquakes are also a constant danger. Even a small tremor is able to destroy a poorly constructed building or the span of a bridge. Larger earthquakes sometimes cause huge waves, called tsunamis, which destroy villages and kill thousands of people. The eruption of volcanoes can also be a major hazard and the vapors that spill from them can be as dangerous as the mud and ash that come from them. 

Governments around the world spend large amounts of money on efforts to protect their people from the effects of natural disasters and the famines that often follow. After a disaster strikes, governments and individual donors from around the world rush to help those nations that have been affected, rebuilding farms and canals. Many governments work through the United Nations to develop systems to warn people of tempests and tsunamis approaching the coast. Despite our great advances in science and technology, we still suffer from natural disasters the same way that our ancestors did thousands of years ago.