One day when I was 12, my mother gave me an order: I was to walk to the public library, and borrow at least one book for the summer. This was one more weapon for her to _______ my strange problem —_______ to read.
In the library, I found my way into the “Children’s Room.” I sat down on the floor and pulled a few books off the _______ at random. The _______ of a book caught my eye. It _______ a picture of a beagle. I had recently had a beagle, the first and only animal companion I ever had as a child. He was my secret _______ of happiness and sorrows, but one morning, he was gone, _______ to someone who had the space and the money to care for him. I never _______ my beagle.
To my astonishment, there on the book’s cover was a beagle which looked _______ to my dog. I ran my fingers over the picture of the dog on the cover. My eyes ran across the title, Amos, the Beagle with a Plan. ________, I had read the title. Without opening the book, I borrowed it from the library for the summer.
Under the shade of a bush, I started to read about Amos. I read very, very slowly with difficulty. Though ________ were turned slowly, I got the main idea of the story about a dog who, like mine, had been ________ his family and who finally found his way back home. That dog was my dog, and I was the little boy in the ________. At the end of the story, my mind continued the final scene of ________, on and on, until my own ________ dog and I were, in my mind, running together.
My mother’s call ________ me to the real world. I suddenly realized something: I had read a book, and I had loved reading that book. Everyone knew I could not read. But I had read it. Books could be incredibly ________ and I was going to read them.
I never told my mother about my amazing experience that summer, but she saw a slow but remarkable ________ in my classroom performance during the next year. And years later, she was proud that her son had read thousands of books, was awarded a PhD in literature, and ________ his own books, articles, poetry and fiction. The power of the words has ________.
1.A.defeat B.explain C.sense D.figure
2.A.confusion B.absence C.inability D.eagerness
3.A.list B.shelf C.gallery D.locker
4.A.back B.surface C.content D.cover
5.A.obtained B.developed C.described D.presented
6.A.sharer B.teller C.follower D.reader
7.A.left behind B.turned back C.sent out D.given away
8.A.missed B.forgot C.sensed D.walked
9.A.similar B.equal C.distant D.belonging
10.A.Unusually B.Unluckily C.Unknowingly D.Undoubtedly
11.A.heads B.ideas C.pages D.books
12.A.separated from B.concerned about C.set free from D.called back by
13.A.room B.picture C.book D.sky
14.A.struggle B.waiting C.racing D.reunion
15.A.dead B.lost C.honored D.imagined
16.A.hurried B.returned C.stopped D.followed
17.A.wonderful B.simple C.challenging D.long
18.A.topic B.excellence C.improvement D.cost
19.A.sold B.authored C.spotted D.read
20.A.turned B.demanded C.meant D.held
A person’s nose is important for breathing and smelling, while the ears have the basic functions of listening. They are both used in many popular expressions.
1. But the following passage is not to discuss facial features, but to explain how they are used in many popular expressions.
Some people are able to lead other people by the nose. For example, if a wife leads her husband by the nose, she makes him do whatever she wants him to do.
Some people are said to be hard-nosed. 2. If someone is hard-nosed, chances are he will never pay through the nose, or pay too much money, for an object or service.
It is always helpful when people keep their nose out of other people’s business. They do not interfere (干涉). The opposite of this is someone who noses around all the time. This kind of person is interested in other people’s private matters. 3.
Someone who keeps his nose to the grindstone (磨刀石) works very hard. This can help a worker keep his nose clean or stay out of trouble.
One unusual expression is that it is no skin off my nose. This means that a situation does not affect or concern me. 4. That is, he makes a situation worse for himself by doing something foolish because he is angry.
What about ears? Well, I hope you are all ears or very interested in hearing more expressions. We might even put a bug in your ear or give you an idea about something. 5. This means to be interested in what is happening around you and what people are thinking.
If you are a good person, you will lend an ear to your friends. You will listen to them when they have a problem they need to talk about. Sometimes we are supposed to play it by ear, which means to decide what to do at the last minute instead of making detailed plans.
A.He is considered nosey.
B.Our last expression is to play it by ear.
C.I think we have explained the nose expressions.
D.We also advise you to keep your ear to the ground.
E.Nose and ears are among the most important sense organs.
F.They will not change their opinions or positions on anything.
G.We also say that sometimes a person cuts off his nose to spite his face.
“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” An old tale tells a seemingly unbelievable story of a magic mirror, but now the magic is no longer unachievable.
In August 2018, news went widely-spread that the police had caught criminal suspects who attended Chinese singer Jacky Cheung’s concerts. How did the police pick out the suspects among thousands of screaming fans? The helping hand is AI facial recognition technology. The low-key yet powerful tool is no longer far-fetched, but entering the world of China’s top investors and companies.
Facial recognition is a technology able to identify a person from a digital image or a frame from a video source. Tang Wenbin, CTO of Face ++, an AI computer vision (视觉) technology company in China, vividly explained the workflow. According to him, facial recognition is the identification of our appearance, including knowing the sex, age and identity of a person. You may think it is like a brain or a neural network. You use data to train it, and then, it learns the pattern.
Facial recognition technology has been traditionally allied with the security work but today there is active expansion into other industries including mobile phones, marketing and finance. Chinese start-ups have seen the potential of Al facial recognition for simplifying and speeding up tasks in multiple industries. And the market is now crowded and competitive.
China is starting the AI revolution and has made breakthroughs in facial recognition. "If applying AI to different industries is a marathon, the companies there probably have just got off the blocks, "said Tian Feng, director of Alibaba Cloud Research Center. He also thinks that in the future, everybody will be able to use AI as it will soon become a basic tool for work and life.
1.Why is the news mentioned in paragraph 2?
A.To introduce a new tool for companies.
B.To show the magic has become a reality.
C.To prove old tales are based on true stories.
D.To describe the background of facial recognition.
2.Which of the following best explains “allied with” underlined in paragraph 4?
A.Dependent on. B.Compared with.
C.Different from. D.Related to.
3.What do Tian Feng’s words imply?
A.Many companies in China are researching AI.
B.Al plays a key role in companies' development.
C.Al technology applied now is far from mature.
D.Al technology will be used in marathons one day.
4.What can be a suitable title for the text?
A.The eye of AI in China
B.Effects of AI technology
C.Breakthroughs of Chinese technology
D.Facial recognition in security
The world’s most popular animals are in more danger than we realize, according to a new study. A survey of the Public’s Knowledge suggests many people are unaware that the animals they consider “inviting” are under threat in the wild. These include lions, elephants, tigers and other animals which frequently appear in branding and advertising.
The idea of “inviting” species has come up recently in Conservation Biology, explains Dr. Franck Courchamp, the study’s lead author. “There is a regular claim that the most ‘inviting’ species are attracting most of the time and resources. I started wondering whether this was true and followed by better results in conservation,” he told BBC News.
Using an online survey available in four languages, researchers asked the public to name the wild species they considered most attracting. They also looked at how frequently animals were represented on zoo websites, and on the covers of Disney and Pixar films. Additionally, the team had volunteers in France catalogue their meeting with virtual (虚拟的) populations of the 10 most “inviting” animals over the period of a week. They saw an average of 4.4 lions in cartoons, magazines and other sources each day, suggesting that people are likely to see two to three times as many “virtual” lions in a year as there are lions in West Africa. “Mostly I think because people see giraffes and lions every day of their life, they unconsciously think they are in abundance,” Dr. Courchamp said.
Despite their abundant media representation, nine of the animals on the list are classed as vulnerable, endangered or critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. When researchers asked survey participants whether they thought these animals were endangered, almost half of the participants thought that critically endangered gorillas (大猩猩) were not under threat.
As for this, Dr. Courchamp proposes a solution. Companies would donate money to Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in return for using the animals in their branding or advertising. “I think it’s not so unrealistic,” says Dr. Courchamp. “There are already some companies that do that. Jaguar is in partnership with Panthera, an organization protecting wild cat species. Lacoste also made a campaign recently where they replaced their logo with images of endangered species.”
1.What is the text mainly about?
A.The ten most attracting animals.
B.The importance of saving wild animals.
C.Animals’ images needing more attention.
D.Animals’ attraction harming their conservation.
2.According to Dr. Courchamp, survey participants’ views are unconsciously affected by _____.
A.the media B.their preferences
C.the IUCN Red List D.other participants’ opinions
3.How might the researchers feel about survey participants’ answers?
A.Relieved. B.Surprised.
C.Frightened. D.Excited.
4.What is Dr. Courchamp’s solution?
A.Raising people’s environmental awareness.
B.Asking big companies to organize campaigns.
C.Funding conservation by trading animals’ images.
D.Appealing for cooperation in NGOs for animal protection.
When he was a little boy his uncle called him “Sparky”, after a cartoon horse named Spark Plug. School was all but impossible for Sparky. He failed every subject in the eighth grade. And his record in sports wasn’t any better. Though he did manage to make the school’s golf team, he lost the only important match of the season in no time.
Throughout his youth, Sparky was awkward socially. It wasn’t that other students disliked him; it was just that no one really cared all that much. Sparky was a loser. He, his classmates ... everyone knew it. So he learned to live with it. He made up his mind early that if things were meant to work out, they would. Otherwise he would content himself with what appeared to be his mediocrity.
One thing was important to Sparky, however — drawing. In his senior year of high school, he sent some cartoons to the yearbook. The editors rejected his ideas. Despite that, Sparky was convinced of his ability. He decided to become an artist. So, after completing high school, Sparky wrote to Walt Disney Studios. They asked for samples (样本) of his artwork. Despite careful preparation, he was rejected.
But Sparky still didn’t give up. Instead, he decided to tell his own life’s story in cartoons. The main character would be a little boy who symbolized the continuous loser and chronic (长期的) underachiever. You know him well. Because Sparky’s cartoon character went on to become a cultural phenomenon of sorts. People readily identified with this “lovable loser”. He reminded people of the painful and embarrassing moments from their own past, of their pain and their shared humanity.
The character soon became famous worldwide — Charlie Brown. And Sparky, the boy whose many failures never kept him from trying, is the highly successful cartoonist Charles Schultz. His cartoon strip (连环漫画), “Peanuts”, continues to inspire books, T-shirts and Christmas specials, reminding us that life somehow finds a way for all of us, even the losers.
1.What does the underlined word “mediocrity” in paragraphs two mean?
A.annoying violence. B.strange behavior.
C.hopeless feeling. D.being ordinary.
2.Before Sparky started his Charlie Brown cartoon, _______.
A.his artwork was rejected time and again
B.he thought himself really bad at drawing
C.some editors encouraged him to keep trying
D.his artwork was accepted by Walt Disney Studios
3.Why did Sparky’s cartoon character Charlie Brown become popular?
A.Everyone had pity on it.
B.It belonged to youth culture.
C.Its lovely image rid people of their pain in life.
D.People shared some similarities with the character.
4.What can we learn from Charles Schultz’s story?
A.Everyone is equal in life. B.All is well that ends well.
C.There is always a way out. D.Things speak for themselves.
Not getting the sleep you need?
Is your pillow the problem?
How well did you sleep last night?
Did you toss and turn all night? Did you wake up with a sore neck or a headache? Do you feel like you need a nap even though you have slept for eight hours? Just like you. I would wake up in the morning with all of those problems and I couldn’t figure out why. Like many people who have trouble getting a good night’s sleep, my lack of sleep was affecting the quality of my life. I wanted to do something about my sleep problems, but nothing that I tried worked.
The pillow was the problem
I bought every pillow on the market that promised to give me a better night’s sleep. None of them worked. Finally, I decided to invent one myself. I asked everyone I knew what qualities they would like to see in their “perfect pillow” and got many responses: “I’d like a pillow that never goes flat,” “I’d like my pillow to stay cool” and “I’d like a pillow that adjusts to me regardless of my sleep position.” I spent the next two years of my life inventing MyPillow.
MyPillow to the rescue
Flash forward ten years and MyPillow, Mike Lindell’s revolutionary pillow design, has helped five million people improve the quality of their sleep. Lindell has been featured on numerous talk shows, including For Business News and Imus in the Morning. Lindell and MyPillow have also appeared in feature stories in The New York Times, MyPillow has been selected as the Official Pillow of the U.S. National Sleep Foundation.
“Until I was diagnosed with various sleep issues, I had no idea why my sleep was so interrupted throughout the night. I watched Imus each morning and heard endless ads about MyPillow. I ordered one and now, I wake up rested and ready to conquer (征服) the day ahead. Thank you for helping me remember what it's like to sleep like a baby!
—Jacqueline H
Get the sleep you’ve been dreaming about!
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1.What is the main purpose of this passage?
A.To introduce Mike Lindell. B.To encourage to buy MyPillow.
C.To tell the function of MyPillow. D.To deal with the problem of bad sleep.
2.The first two paragraphs were probably written by ______.
A.a fellow at the US National Sleep Foundation B.Jacqueline H
C.a staff writer for The New York Times D.Mike Lindell
3.Lindell decided to invent MyPillow after ______.
①he had trouble getting a good night’s sleep
②his wife often woke up with a sore neck or a headache
③none of the pillows that promised to improve sleep worked for him
④his friends shared their ideas of a “perfect pillow” with him
A.①② B.③④
C.①③ D.②④
