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The Grass Cutting Days

Every time we headed out to cut grass, Dad was there to watch. I used to______why he came with us. He stood watching us in the sticky Florida heat when he could have been inside_______with air conditioning and an icy drink.

One day we were cutting our next-door neighbor's yard. She always waited until the grass was knee-high to call us over. To make matters worse, we had an old lawn mower that kept breaking down as we tried to cut ______ her backyard jungle. This particular afternoon, I was finishing up and was tired and sweaty. I ______ the tall glass of cold juice I would drink in a minute to cool down.

I was just about to turn off the lawn mower ______ I saw Dad pointing to one single blade of grass (一片草). I thought about the small amount of money I was getting ______ for cutting grass so high that it almost broke the mower. I ignored him and kept walking. Dad called me out and yelled, “You missed a blade.”

I frowned (皱眉)，hoping he would let me go home. He kept pointing. Though ______ and discouraged, I still went back to cut that blade of grass. I thought to myself, “That one blade isn't ______ anyone. Why won't he just let it go?”

But when I reached adulthood, I understood his ______ : When you're running a business, the work you do says a great deal about you. If you want to be seen as an honest businessman, you must deliver a quality product. That single blade of grass ______ the job was not done.

Other neighbors took ______ of the good work we did and we soon gained more ______. We started out with one customer, but by the end of the summer we had five, which was all we cared to handle because we wanted time to enjoy our summer break from school.

The lesson my dad taught me stayed with me: Be ______ , If you say you are going to perform a job at a certain time, ______ your word. Give your customers the kind of ______ you would like to receive. It shows how sincere you are and how much pride you take in your work.

1.A. wonder    B. understand    C. know    D. expect

2.A. hiding    B. relaxing    C. playing    D. talking

3.A. in    B. back    C. up    D. through

4.A. pictured    B. decided    C. required    D. invented

5.A. until    B. before    C. when    D. while

6.A. involved    B. caught    C. changed    D. paid

7.A. tired    B. ashamed    C. touched    D. shocked

8.A. surprising    B. frightening    C. hurting    D. embarrassing

9.A. punishment    B. message    C. cruelty    D. expression

10.A. seemed    B. realized    C. meant    D. found

11.A. care    B. notice    C. place    D. control

12.A. business    B. workers    C. experience    D. prizes

13.A. patient    B. powerful    C. prepared    D. professional

14.A. break    B. give    C. save    D. keep

15.A. advice    B. service    C. attention    D. warmth

请阅读下面图画和短文，并按要求用英语写一篇150词左右的文章.

（写作内容）

1. 用约 30个单词概述上述信息的主要内容；

2. 结合上述信息,简要分析目前人们回家过春节的意愿变化的原因; (不少于两点)

3. 结合自己的例子，谈谈人们是否应该回家过春节？说明原因。

（写作要求）

（1）写作过程中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）文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称；

（4）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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请认真阅读下列短文，并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。

注意：每个空格只填1个单词。请将答案写在答题卡上相应题号的横线上。

Why We Struggle to Say ‘I Love You’

For many Asian-Americans, the phrase belongs to the wonderful world of white people we see in the movies and on television.

So many of our Asian parents have struggled, and suffered in ways that are completely beyond the imaginations of their children born or raised in North American comfort. This struggle and sacrifice was how Asian parents say “I love you” without having to say it. And so many of us children are not expected to say it either, but instead are expected to express love through gratitude, which means obeying our parents and following their wishes for how we should live our lives.

Our parents, for the most part, told us to get a good education, get a good job and not speak up, things they had to do to survive. They have encouraged, or forced, many of us to become doctors, lawyers and engineers, and to feel ashamed if we do not. What these parents did not do was tell us we could become artists, actors or storytellers, people engaged in seemingly trivial, unsafe and unstable professions.

I have met so few who have proudly told me that their children are English majors or have become writers or artists. But I became a writer despite, and perhaps because of, their resistance to the idea, my inarticulate(难以言喻的) desires pushing against their inarticulate sacrifice, all of it taking place before a backdrop of refugee（难民）life and racial reality.

I grew up in the relatively diverse city of San Jose, Calif., in the 1980s. My neighbors were older white working-class people, Mexican immigrants and Vietnamese refugees. Then I went to a mostly white high school, with only a handful of students of Asian descent. We knew we were different, but we found our difference a little difficult to put into words. We called ourselves “the Asian invasion.”

The irony was that we had not invaded America. America had invaded us, or at the very least had occupied or fought in our countries of origin or heritage. We were here because America was there.

Looking back, what I only belatedly realized was that I needed — we all needed — more stories featuring us. More voices belonging to us. More advocates telling our stories in our way with our faces, our inflections, our concerns, our intuitions. We just needed to be at the center of a story, which would include all the aspects of human subjectivity, not just the good but the bad, the three-dimensional fullness that white people took for granted with the privilege of being individuals.

When it came to mass media’s representations of us — film and television, morning radio disc jockey jokes— we got only the bad. We were the servants, the enemies, the houseboys, the invaders.

As a result, so many of us who watched these distorted(扭曲的) images and heard the stupid jokes learned to be ashamed of ourselves. We learned to be ashamed of our parents. And the shame compounded the inability to say “I love you,” a phrase that belonged to the wonderful world of white people we saw in the movies and television.

We had to learn better, but the truth is that Asian parents have to learn better, too. You cannot be proud of your artist and storyteller children only when they win Golden Globes. We honor your sacrifice for us, but you have to encourage your children to speak up as well, to claim their voices, to risk failure, to tell their stories and your stories. At the very least, you cannot stand in their way.

We are still the Asian invasion in the eyes of many. We cannot accept this as our price of entry into American society. If we must assert ourselves and speak out against racism when it is directed against us, we must also do so when it benefits us. And we do that by challenging and changing the American story. We do it by taking the stage and by telling our own stories, which is really, in the end, our way of saying “I love you” to our parents, our families, our communities and our country.

Predictions about higher education’s future often result in two very different visions about what is next for colleges and universities. In one camp: those who paint a rosy picture of an economy that will continue to demand higher levels of education for an increasing share of the workforce. In the other: those who believe fewer people will enroll（入学）in college as tuition costs go out of control and alternatives to the traditional degree emerge.

“We are living in an age for learning, when there’s so much knowledge available, that one would think that this is good news for higher education,” Bryan Alexander told me recently. Alexander writes often about the future of higher education and is finishing a book on the subject for Johns Hopkins University Press. “Yet we’ve seen enrollment in higher education drop for six years.”

Alexander believes that for some colleges and universities to survive, they need to shift from their historical mission of serving one type of student (usually a teenager fresh out of high school) for a specific period of time. “We’re going to see many different ways through higher education in the future,” Alexander said, “from closer ties between secondary and postsecondary（中学后）schools to new options for adults. The question is, which institutions adopt new models and which try desperately to hang on to what they have.”

“The fact is that to maintain affordability, accessibility and excellence, something needs to change,” Rafael Bras, Georgia Tech’s provost (院长), told me when he unveiled the report at the Milken Institute Global Conference this past spring.

The commission’s report includes many impressive ideas, but three point to the possibility of a very different future for colleges and universities.

1) College for life, rather than just four years. The primary recommendation of the Georgia Tech report is that the university turns itself into a place for lifelong learning that allows students to “associate rather than enroll.”

“Students who we educate now are expected to have a dozen occupations,” Bras said. “So a system that receives students once in their lives and turns them out with the Good Housekeeping seal(印章) of approval to become alums (校友) and come back on occasion and give money is not the right model for the future.”

2) A network of advisers and coaches for a career. If education never ends, Georgia Tech predicts, neither should the critical advising function that colleges provide to students. The commission outlines a plan in which artificial intelligence and virtual tutors help advise students about selecting courses and finding the best career options. But even for a university focused on science and technology, Georgia Tech doesn’t suggest in its report that computers will replace humans for all advising.

3) A distributed presence around the world. Colleges and universities operate campuses and require students to come to them. In the past couple of decades, online education has grown greatly, but for the most part, higher education is still about face-to-face interactions.

Georgia Tech imagines a future in which the two worlds are blended in what it calls the “atrium” — a place that share space with entrepreneurs and become gathering places for students and alumni.

In some ways, as the report noted, the atrium idea is a nod to the past, when universities had agricultural and engineering experiment stations with services closer to where people in the state needed them.

Whether Georgia Tech’s ideas will become real is, of course, unclear. But as Alexander told me after reading it, “There is a strong emphasis on flexibility and transformation so they can meet emergent trends.” This is clear: colleges and universities are about to undergo a period of deep change — whether they want to or not — as the needs of students and the economy shift.

1.What can we learn from the two camps’ opinions about future colleges?

A. Future workforce will have high levels of education.

B. The expensive traditional degree is losing its appeal.

C. Traditional higher education is not practical.

D. Declining enrollment in college results from easy learning.

2.What should traditional colleges do according to Alexander?

A. They should provide new options for adults to enter colleges.

B. The should strengthen the ties between secondary and postsecondary schools.

C. They should abandon what they have and change their historical mission.

D. They should offer more freedom to students throughout their life.

3.What can we infer from the commission’s report?

A. Students can return for further study or make donations freely after graduation.

B. Artificial intelligence and virtual tutors will perform better in career guidance.

C. It focuses on how to make people enjoy good education without stress.

D. There is no point in requiring students to be present at school.

4.The underlined words “two worlds” refer to _______.

A. Basic education and higher education

B. entrepreneurs and students

C. present education and future education

D. virtual education and real classes

5.What does the author think of atrium idea?

A. It corresponds to the past idea in some way.

B. It is hard to realize despite its flexibility.

C. It makes some industries more accessible.

D. It is a practical solution to the declining enrollment.

6.The passage mainly talks about _________.

A. a reflection on the drawbacks of current higher education

B. the key factors which determine higher education’s future

C. two camps’ opposite opinions about higher education's future

D. a comparison between traditional and future higher education

I’m 47 years old. Two days ago, you sent me an email, which I did not answer. I didn’t answer it, in part, because I am 47 years old.

I almost answered your email after bedtime, which is when I have often answered emails. My laptop was put on my bedside table. My husband sat on his side of the bed, and he leaned back and asked me if I’d given any thought to whether the chickens would need to be kept away from the apple trees after he sprayed them with something to keep the bugs away.

We moved on to the children’s math grades, then to the way they just take their socks off and leave them, inside out, no matter where they are. I looked at the clock and saw that it was not as early as I’d thought, not for a lot of things, and so we turned off the light, and I did not answer your email.

Your email sat among emails from bosses and editors and orthodontists all through the next workday. My children were at school, and I had not yet managed to write 300 words nine more times. I thought about answering your email in the afternoon, while my older daughter and I waited outside the school for her sister to finish a piano lesson. My daughter probably would not have minded. She is almost 13, and sometimes, when she sits in the house texting while I try to talk to her, I sprayed her with the bottle I keep on the counter to spray the cats when they start scratching the back of the sofa. I could have answered your email then. I admit it. We could have sat there, in peaceful silence, each staring at our phone. I had time to answer your email, and I did not.

I snuggled(依偎) my youngest son at bedtime that night, because he asked. I snuggled him even though your email was calling, and some part of me wanted to pull away from the tedium of bedtime and reply. Replying would have felt fresh and new, while bedtime felt old and stale. I would like to say I snuggled my son and did not give your email one single thought, but that would not be true, and it would also be rude, even though it is a state of mind to which many of us aspire. Instead, I hovered(悬停) somewhere between presence in the bedtime moment and awareness of your email and many others. I spend a lot of time in that gap, sometimes drafting mental responses to emails, which I am later surprised and sad to find I have not actually sent.

It is possible that I will answer your email later, in a few hours, or in a few years, maybe when I am 57, and I will be so happy to have your email. We will trade words, and those words will again seem so real to me, a whole world in my laptop, where I live, sometimes, because there is so much that is attractive in there, where time moves fast and yet never moves at all. I will take my laptop outside and I will sit among the trees, listening for the voices of children who are no longer home, and I will answer your email.

It is also possible that I will not — that I, in fact, will never answer your email. If that is the case, if the people and the places and the things around me still press upon me with more urgency than your email and so many others, I hope that you will forgive me. I have already forgiven myself.

1.Why does the author mention chickens and the children’s math grades?

A. Because daily routines took up most of her time.

B. Because she was troubled by many unimportant things.

C. Because she was more concerned about her family.

D. Because she often put off answering email till bedtime.

2.What can be learnt from the author’s description of her daughter?

A. The author used to answer emails while waiting for her daughter.

B. The author would rather play with her daughter than answer emails.

C. The author and daughters liked to use their phone alone.

D. The author regretted the time spent on the phone.

3.What tone does the author use in answering emails after snuggling her son?

A. humor    B. embarrassment

C. apology    D. happiness

4.What do the last two paragraphs mainly tell us?

A. Learn to forgive yourself for not answering emails in time.

B. The world outside is so attractive that we should enjoy it now.

C. I will surely answer emails without children around.

D. Answering emails is a thing of little urgency.