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Read the following article and answer the question. Article: Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, made his first public appearance since going on medical leave six weeks ago, taking the stage at a San Francisco media event to introduce the iPad 2, the second generation of the company's tablet computer. Thin but energetic, Mr. Jobs showed off a thinner iPad. " We've been working on this product for a while and I just didn't want to miss this day," he said. His absence has concerned investors, especially since the group has given no details of his condition. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2004 and had a liver transplant during almost six moths of medical leave in 2009. People close to him said last month his health had been changing. Apple's stock rose more than 2 percent in the minutes after Mr. Jobs began speaking, then gave up some of its gain as he detailed the iPad 2. The iPad 2 will go on sale in black and white versions in the US on March 11 and in 26 other countries, including the UK and Germany, on March 25. The table is Apple's biggest product launch since the iPhone three years ago, and is comparable to the iPhone as the most expected in Apple's history. Most of the improvements in the latest version had been expected, including front and rear-facing video, which allows video conferencing between iPads, Mac computers and the most recent iPhones and iPods, a larger speaker, a faster processor and other upgrades. The iPad 2 is one-third thinner than the original tablet and slightly lighter, with a 9.7-inch touchscreen. It can run movies, books, games and a complete range of applications. In the US it will work with AT&T and Verizon, the top two mobile carriers. The pricing will be the same to the 2010 iPad at its introduction, ranging from $499 to $829 in six models. But Apple dropped prices on the older iPad on Wednesday by $100 across the board. Apple has made the most of its year-long head start in tablets, selling 15,000,000 units of the older iPad last year and taking about 85 percent of the market. Forrester predicted that the iPad 2 would clain 80... Question: How many tablet computers were sold in the market last year? Answer:
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A: about 17,000,000


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Read the following article and answer the question. Article: Laughter healing  benefits and healing with laughter have become synonymous with Norman Cousins, the man who laughed himself to wellness. Norman Cousins was the editor of SaturdayReviewfor over 30 years. His story began in 1964, when doctors found that the connective tissue in his spine was becoming worse, which is a condition known as Ankylosing Spondylitis . The doctors, one of whom was a close friend of Cousins, said that his chance of survival was approximately 1 in 500. He read about the theory that negative emotions do harm to the body, so he thought that if negative emotions were damaging to health, then positive emotions should improve health. Faced with the real possibility of his approaching death, Cousins thought long and hard and eventually did three things completely contrary to medical opinion. First he began his own research on all of the various drugs he was on. He discovered that his condition was removing Vitamin C from his body and, based on Cousins' personal research, doctors agreed to take him off several of the drugs he was on and inject  him with large doses of this supplement , as Cousins felt this may be his last hope. Secondly, Cousins made a decision to check out of the hospital and into a hotel room. The third thing Cousins did was get a movie projector  and a large supply of funny films. On his first night in the hotel Cousins found that he laughed so hard at the films that he was able to stimulate chemicals in his body that allowed him several hours of pain-free sleep. When the pain returned he would simply turn the projector back on and the laughter would help sleep, and he was able to measure the changes in his body by measuring his blood sedimentation rate , and found that this rate dropped by at least 5 points each time he watched one of these videos. The treatment proved to be so effective that in very little time Cousins was off all painkillers and sleeping pills. He found that the laughter relieved the pain and helped him sleep. He returned to work and wrote about his... Question: We can learn from the passage that Norman Cousins   _  . Answer:
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A: had a doctor friend


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Read the following article and answer the question. Article: Was the London Olympics a success? Many people hold different opinions. However one thing is certain, London could win a gold medal for hosting the "greenest" Games ever, BBC News reported. Previous Olympic hosts have been criticized for the environmental damage they have caused through construction, waste. and transport. But things had to be different in London because seven years ago it bid for the Olympics through the concept of "a One Planet Olympics". What is most impressive is that London used the construction of the Olympic Park as an opportunity to clean up polluted areas -- 2 million tons of contaminated   soil were removed and 200 old factory buildings, were torn down, according to sustainablebusiness.com. But that's not all --. 99 percent of the debris   were reused to build the Olympic Park. For example, part of the Olympic Stadium's roof is made from 2,500 tons of steel tubes recycled from old gas pipelines. As well as using recycled materials, all venues were built with green building techniques. The Olympic Stadium is the lightest one ever built, which _ the amount of steel and concrete needed. Also, the handball field has lighting pipes on the roof that reduce electricity use by 40 percent, according to sustainablebusiness.com. The effort that London made to deal with waste also deserves praise. Water used for drinking and watering plants was from collected rainwater or recycled wastewater. In this way. about 30-40 percent less water was used in total. Waste food packages were either recycled or processed and turned into renewable energy. As one of the best connected places in Europe, London tried to solve traffic jams by encouraging the use of public transport. For example, it had trains deliver half of the building materials, instead of cars, which greatly reduced carbon emissions. The clean anti-doping   result also added to the greenness of the Games. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) said that the devices used this time were the most accurate and advanced. Only one athlete tested... Question: To make the Olympic Park green, London   _  . Answer:
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A: applied green building techniques to the construction work


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Read the following article and answer the question. Article: It turns out that nodding off in class may not be such a bad idea after all, as a new study has shown that going to sleep shortly after learning new material is the best way to remember it. According to US lead author Jessica Payne, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, nodding off after learning something new is like "telling" the sleeping brain what to remember. Along with colleagues, she studied 207 students who habitually slept for at least six hours per night.Participants were casually selected to study declarative  , semantically   related or unrelated word pairs at 9am or 9pm, and returned for testing 30 minutes, 12 hours or 24 ours later. Declarative memory refers to the ability to remember facts and events with awareness, and can be broken down into episodic memory (memory for events) and semantic memory (memory for facts about the world).People routinely use both types of memory every day--recalling where we parked today or learning how a colleague prefers to be addressed. At the 12-hour retest, memory overall was better following a night of sleep compared to a day of wakefulness. At the 24-hour retest, with all subjects having received both a full night of sleep and a full day of wakefulness, subjects' memories were better when sleep occurred shortly after learning, rather than following a full day of wakefulness. "Our study confirms that sleeping directly after learning something new is beneficial for memory.What's new about this study is that we tried to shine light on sleep's influence on both types of declarative memory by studying semantically unrelated and related word pairs," Payne said. "Since we found that sleeping soon after learning benefited both types of memory, this means that it would be a good thing to practise any information you need to remember just before going to bed.In some sense, you may be 'telling' the sleeping brain what to remember." Question: The research led by Jessica Payre tries to   _  . Answer:
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A: