Jimmy is an automotive mechanic (汽修工), but he lost his job a few months ago. He has good heart, but always feared applying for a new job.
One day, he gathered up all his strength and decided to attend a job interview. His appointment was at 10 am and it was already 8:30. While waiting for a bus to the office where he was supposed to be interviewed, he saw an elderly man wildly kicking the tyre of his car. Obviously there was something wrong with the car. Jimmy immediately went up to lend him a hand. When Jimmy finished working on the car, the old man asked him how much he should pay for the service. Jimmy said there was no need to pay him; he just helped someone in need, and he had to rush for an interview. Then the old man said,“Well, I could take you to the office for your interview. It’s the least I could do. Please. I insist.”Jimmy agreed.
Upon arrival, Jimmy found a long line of applications waiting to be interviewed. Jimmy still had some grease (润滑油) on him after the car repair, but he did not have much time to wash it off or have a change of shirt. One by one, the applicants left the interviewer’s office with disappointed look on their faces. Finally his name was called. The interviewer was sitting on a large chair facing the office window. Rocking the chair back and forth, he asked, “Do you really need to be interviewed?”Jimmy’s heart sank.“With the way I look now, how could I possibly pass this interview?”he thought to himself.
Then the interviewer turned the chair and to Jimmy’s surprise, it was the old man he helped earlier in the morning. It turned out he was the General Manager of the company.
“Sorry I had to keep you waiting, but I was pretty sure I made the right decision to have you as part of our workforce before you even stepped into the office. I just know you’d be a trustworthy worker. Congratulations!”Jimmy sat down and they shared a cup of well-deserved coffee as he landed himself a new job.
1.What did Jimmy see on the way to the interview?
A. A friend’s car had a flat tyre. B. A wild man was pushing a car.
C. A terrible car accident happened. D. An old man’s car broke down.
2.Why did the old man offer Jimmy a ride?
A. He was also to be interviewed. B. He needed a traveling companion.
C. He always helped people in need. D. He was thankful to Jimmy.
3.How did Jimmy feel on hearing the interviewer’s question?
A. He was sorry for the other applicants.
B. There was no hope for him to get the job.
C. He regretted helping the old man.
D. The interviewer was very rude.
4.What can we learn from Jimmy’s experience？
A. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. B. A friend in need is a friend indeed.
C. Good is rewarded with good. D. Two heads are better than one.
Joey was born in 1990 in Connecticut and now lives in North Carolina in the United States. When Joey was six, he started racing small cars in competitions. He began to win many races, but they weren’t big races. His parents decided to move to Atlanta, Georgia, so Joey could compete in bigger and better competitions. When he was 12, he set a record by winning 14 races in a row at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. He continued to win many races, and finally began racing with regular-sized (正常大小的) race cars.
When Joey was 15 years old, he met the race car driver Mark Martin. Martin is a famous NASCAR driver. NASCAR is the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, and it is the biggest and most popular car-racing organization in the United States. Martin was interested in Joey and thought he was “the real deal.” He said, “I am sure that he can be one of the greatest that ever raced in NASCAR. There’s no doubt in my mind.”
Martin was right. Joey started as a NASCAR driver in 2007. NASCAR has many races, and at first, Joey was only able to compete in smaller races because of his age. In his first NASCAR season, he won a championship (冠军). In 2008, he was able to compete in bigger NASCAR competitions. He competed in one of the top NASCAR racing series called the Nationwide Series, and at 18, he became the youngest winner in Nationwide Series history.
In 2009, he became the youngest winner in another top NASCAR racing series called the Sprint Cup Series, and he also won the Nationwide Series for the fifth time. To be one of the best drivers in the history of racing, Joey has to win many more races. But at 19, he’s off to a good start.
1.Why did Joey’s parents decide to move to Atlanta?
A. To make more money for Joey.
B. To allow Joey to watch more car races.
C. To provide Joey with a better education.
D. To let him compete in bigger and better races.
2.What does the underlined sentence in Paragraph 3 mean?
A. Joey had a bright future.
B. Joey was a true lover of race cars.
C. Martin won a nationwide competition.
D. Martin became the youngest NASCAR winner.
3.What happened when Joey was 19 years old?
A. He won the Sprint Cup Series.
B. He had his first NASCAR season.
C. He won the Nationwide Series for the first time.
D. He broke many records for NASCAR racing series.
4.What is the best title for the text?
A. A good start. B. NASCAR races.
C. Racing to success. D. Best drivers in history.
The Nobel Prize Winners in Literature
Rabindranath Tagore(1913)
Prize motivation: because of his deep sensitive, fresh and beautiful poetry, with perfect skills, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words，part of the literature of the West.
William Faulkner (1949)
Prize motivation: for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.
Ernest Miller Hemingway(1954)
Prize motivation：for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea.
John Steinbeck (1962)
Prize motivation: for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining sympathetic humour and keen social perception.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill(1953)
Prize motivation：for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for his brilliant speech skills in defending noble human values.
Claude Simon (1985)
Prize motivation: he in his novel combines the poet’s and the painter’s creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the description of the human condition.
Mo Yan (2012)
Prize motivation：he, with dreamlike realism，combines folk tales，history and the contemporary.
Bob Dylan (2016)
Prize motivation：for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.
1.Which writer won Nobel Prize for his poetry?
A. Ernest Hemingway. B. Rabindranath Tagore.
C. William Faulkner. D. Winston Churchill.
2.Whose works will you turn to if you are interested in a song writing Nobel Prize winner?
A. Mo Yan’s. B. Bob Dylan’s.
C. Claude Simon’s. D. Rabindranath Tagore’s.
3.Who was famous for his speech?
A. John Steinbeck. B. Mo Yan.
C. Ernest Hemingway. D. Winston Churchill.
Robots will create double the number of jobs that they will destroy, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), but there will be significant shifts in the structure of America’s workforce that may impact everyone. The report says that 75 million jobs will be replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and automation. But it also suggests that 133 million new jobs may be created as organizations shift the balance between human workers and machines.
It is a widely held belief that routine, low-skilled jobs are most at risk for automation, but the report shows that many middle-class roles are also at risk. Financial analysts, accountants and lawyers could all see significant changes by 2022. But manual workers could be among the hardest hit.
Meanwhile, there could be a huge change in the structure of the workforce, with the executives surveyed by WEF expecting a shift away from full-time work to flexible employment with a focus on productivity.
All industries expect big skills gaps, stating that at least 50 percent of their workforce will require reskilling of some degree. The aviation, travel and tourism industry will have the largest demand for reskilling.
（写作内容）
1.用约30个单词概述短文的主要内容；
2.用约120个单词发表你的观点，内容包括:
(1) 这一现象产生的原因有哪些(不少于两点)；
(2) 面对即将到来的“智能时代”你所做的准备。
（写作要求）
1.阐述观点或提供论据时，不能直接引用原文语句；
2.作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称；
3.不必写标题。
（评分标准）内容完整，语言规范，语篇连贯，词数适当。
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Who’s Really Addicting You To Technology?
“Nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet”, wrote Tony Schwartz in The New York Times. It’s a common complaint these days. A steady stream of similar headlines accuses the Net and its offspring apps, social media sites and online games of addicting us to distraction.
There’s little doubt that nearly everyone who comes in contact with the Net has difficulty disconnecting. Then who’s at fault for its overuse? To find solutions, it’s important to understand what we’re dealing with. There are four parties cooperating to keep you connected: the tech, your boss, your friends and you.
The technologies themselves and their makers are the easiest suspects to blame for our distraction. Online services like Facebook, Google, twitter and the like rely on advertising revenue, so the more frequently you use them, the more money they make. No wonder these companies employ teams of people focused on improving their services to be as attractive as possible.
Good as these services are, there are simple steps we can take to keep them from coming too close. However, less than 15 percent of smartphone users are willing to adjust their notification settings meaning the remaining 85 percent of us default to (默认)the app makers’ every preset devices.
While companies like Facebook harvest attention to generate revenue from advertisers, other technologies have no such agenda. Take email, for example. We check email at all hours of the day we’re obsessed, because that’s what the boss wants. For almost all white-collar jobs, email is the primary tool of corporate communication. A slow response to a message could hurt not only your reputation but also your livelihood.
Your friends are also responsible for the addiction. Think about this familiar scene. People gathered around a table, enjoying food and each others’ company. Then, during an interval in the conversation, someone takes out their phone to check who knows what. Barely anyone notices and no one says a thing.
The reality is taking one’s phone out at the wrong time is more than an impolite behavior because, unlike other minor offense, checking tech is contagious (传染). Once one person looks at their phone, other people tend to do the same, starting a chain reaction.
Hie technology, your boss, and your friends, all influence how often you find yourself using (or overusing) these gadgets. But there’s still someone who deserves careful examination the person holding the phone.
When people are doing something difficult they’d rather not do, the phone is used to transport them elsewhere. They can easily escape discomfort temporarily, by answering email or browsing the web under the excuse of so-called “research”. The truth is that we are working unproductively out of our bad habits.
Personal technology is indeed more attractive than ever, which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt to control our use of technology, instead, we should come to terms with the fact that it’s more than the technology that’s responsible for our habits. Our workplace culture, social norms and individual behaviors all play a part.
Who’s Really Addicting You To Technology? | ||
A common phenomenon | More and more people are getting addicted to some 1. to the Internet nowadays. Those who have difficulty disconnecting often lay 2. on the Net and its offspring apps. | |
Four suspects | The technologies | Some online services like Facebook are designed attractively for 3. reasons. Most people won’t 4.to make any adjustment to the preset devices. |
Your boss | Emails are widely used for communication in many companies. White-collar employees check emails hourly as a delayed response may 5.them reputation and livelihood. | |
Your friends | A check on the phone is often taken for 6. though it’s sometimes impolite with friends around. One tends to 7.suit when seeing; his friends surfing on the phone. | |
You (The users) | Technologies can be used as a good excuse to 8.ourselves from something boring or challenging. Some had habits as well as technologies give 9. to our distraction. | |
Conclusion | Technology 10. is not the root of the problem with our addition, as many other factors also play a part. |
When my vision-challenged daughter was 3, and I was pregnant with my second child, we got her glasses. It was a long process involving many different opticians (配镜师)over the course of a year, because of my daughter’s overwhelming desire to scream and fly into a temper any time we tried to have her eyes examined. The fourth optician was amazing while my daughter didn’t cooperate, she performed various miracles and managed what she called a “best guess” at her prescription.
“Start with this,” she said. “When she realizes she can see better, bring her back, and we can try for something more accurate.”
I didn’t want to pay $300 for glasses that might be replaced in a month’s time, so I decided to bring her straight to a Walmart optical. Things were going on well, until the optician needed to take an additional measurement, which would involve holding a ruler up to her eyes and measuring the distance between the outer corner of one eye and the inner corner of the other.
“Are you sure you need the measurement?” I asked. “She’s really not cooperative when it comes to the eye-testing stuff.”
“We definitely need to have it, we can’t fill her prescription without it.” the optician said.
But my daughter would not let the optician anywhere near her face with the small plastic ruler. She started yelling and crying, and we took her off to the side and promised we’d get ice cream afterward if she let the nice lady hold the ruler near her nose! The optician gave us the ruler, thinking we would have an easier time, but when my daughter knew we needed to hold the ruler near her face, which, in toddler logic, meant a life-or-death situation, she prevented us from getting anywhere near her.
Finally, my husband and I agreed that one of us would have to hold her down and the other would take the measurement. I sat on the floor trying to hold her head still while my husband tried to get an accurate reading on that stupid ruler. Despite her struggle and scream, we finally got it. My daughter stopped crying three seconds later and went back to play as if nothing had happened.
There is no version of this story where I feel comfortable us even if it was for her own good. I felt awful wondering, if magically know what to say to get her cooperation? The weeks spent with a special book about wearing glasses, telling her how great glasses were... I could feel tears welling up and I thought, “I can’t cry. I’m sitting on the floor of a Walmart optical centre. I can’t cry here.”
And there it was the final thing I could not bear. It w already reduced me to sitting on the floor of a Walmart optical p toddler down to press a ruler against her face and do it for the packed Saturday audience of all the Walmart checkout counters. I cried. Big, shoulder-shaking sobs. Sitting right there on the floor of a Walmart, behind the optical counter.
Five days later, the Walmart optical centre called. They said my daughter’s glasses were ready for pickup and I should schedule an appointment with the optician so that we can have them properly fitted. I said I’d be picking up the glasses alone and we would do the fitting another day. She insisted that the fitting was crucial, to which I replied, “I don’t know if you were working last Saturday, but my daughter is really not cooperating on this whole glasses thing. I’d prefer to just pick them up.” Silence. Then she said, “I was there last Saturday, I remember you. Absolutely, you can pick them up any time.”
1.Why did the daughter scream and yell when the measurement was taken for her glasses?
A. Because she didn’t like the opticians.
B. Because she was afraid that she would die.
C. Because her parents didn’t give her ice cream.
D. Because she had little knowledge of taking measurement for glasses.
2.In Para 1, the writer described the work of the fourth optician in a(n) _________tone.
A. ironic B. straightforward C. critical D. approving
3.Why did the writer cry in the Walmart?
A. Because she found it hard to educate her daughter.
B. Because she felt she could have done in a better way.
C. Because she strongly felt a sense of failure as a mother.
D. Because she felt it a shame to be watched by so many customers.
4.According to the last paragraph, the optician in the Walmart can be described as ________.
A. tolerant B. trustworthy C. considerate D. casual
5.Which of the following can best serve as the title of the passage?
A. A story of glasses
B. My big fat Walmart cry
C. A great lesson for parents
D. My struggle with my daughter
