Epic Fails: The Wright Brothers Nose-diving into History
By Erik Slader and Ben Thompson. Ages 6 to 12.
The first book in the Epic Fails series deals with one of the most ambitious goals humans have pursued to fly. Authors Slader and Thompson focus on life-or-death scenes, such as when the Wright brothers crashed their sailplane over and over on the sandy coast of North Carolina: it took them two more years to get it right.
Epic Fails: The Race to Space: Countdown to Liftoff
By Erik Slader and Ben Thompson. Ages 6 to 12.
Today, everyone is familiar with Neil Armstrong’s famous words as he first set foot on the moon, "That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. "He made it look easy, but America’s Journey to the moon was anything but simple. Our first attempt was a failure. Still we didn't give up. We tried again. And again. And each time we failed, we failed a little bit better.
Fantastic failures:True Stories of People Who Changed the World by Falling Down First
By Luke Reynolds.Ages 6 to 12
Teacher Luke Reynolds opens each chapter with a quick, impossibly perfect version of one person's life and then says how that person actually had to face huge challenges to accomplish goals. In this book, Reynolds writes about various common men, women and children.
Cyrus Field’s Big Dream: The Daring Effert to Lay the First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable
By Mary Morton Cowan. Ages 6 to 12
In 1853, it took at least a week to relay a message between the United States and Europe because people had to be transported on ships over the Atlantic Ocean. Cyrus Field tried to reduce that transmission ((传送) time to just minutes by laying a long undersea cable. In this book, Cowan describes many failures. Field suffered before he achieved this major breakthrough.
1.What do we know about Fantastic Failures?
A.It was written by a famous actor. B.It tells stories of ordinary people.
C.It is about science fiction stories. D.It is about some celebrities’ success.
2.Cyrus Field made a major breakthrough in the area of .
A.communication B.entertainment
C.transportation D.sailing
3.What lesson can we learn from the four books?
A.All roads lead to Rome. B.An early bird catches worms.
C.Failure is the mother of success. D.Actions speak louder than words.
Directions: Write an English composition in 120-150 words according to the instructions given below in Chinese.
毕业在即，你班将举行最后一次班会。请你为本次班会设计方案，方案中必须包含以下内容:
1. 确立班会的主题；
2. 描述你所设计的活动；
3. 谈谈活动设计的理由。
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Directions: Translate the following sentences into English, using the word or phrase given in the brackets.
1.被撞倒后，似乎过了好几个小时这位司机才苏醒过来。 (knock)
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2.四分之一受访的学生承认过马路时被手机分心。 (survey, distract)
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3.按照先前安排，我开车去接她，并送她到办公室。 (As, drop)
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4.如果没有我以前的老师,我就不会成为一名记者,因为是她激励了我们去为未来努力。(But)
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Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in NO MORE THAN 60 WORDS. Use your own words as far as possible. Write your answer on the answer sheet.
To understand the changing role of women in China, consider the runaway success of a novel titled Du Lala’s Rise. Decades after Mao Zedong declared that women hold up half the sky,” the success of Du Lala and her peers reflects a curious fact about women in China: they appear to be far more ambitious than their counterparts (对应者)in the United States.
Rjpa Rashid, a senior vice president at the Center for Work-Life Policy, says the rapid growth “creates this excitement”， and builds on a cultural and historical legacy (遗产)in which Chinese women are not just encouraged to participate in the workforce, they are expected to.
One result has been a generation of women and girls who believe they belong among China’s power elite ( 精 英 ). In the US, that shift followed decades of battles over equality and women’s rights. In China, there are fewer institutional barriers for women trying to succeed professionally.
That’s true, too, in the executive suite. Grant Thornton International, the tax consultancy, found that roughly eight out of 10 companies in China had women in senior management roles, compared with approximately half in the European Union and two thirds in the US. Similarly, in China, 31 percent of top executives are female, compared with 20 percent in America.
Thirdly, child care is easily accessible in China, enabling them to pursue their careers after giving birth to their children. Fourthly, ambition has become a matter of necessity in fast-paced China, and both the husband and wife have to work in order to keep up with the skyrocketing housing prices.
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Directions: Read the following passage. Fill in each blank with a proper sentence given in the box. Each sentence can be used only once. Note that there are two more sentences than you need.
In 1974, I graduated from Skyline High School in Oakland, California, an underachieving student with poor SAT scores. I couldn't afford tuition for college anyway.
1.
For thousands of commuting students like me, Chabot was our Harvard, offering courses in physics, stenography, automechanics, certified public accounting, foreign languages, journalism and so on. Classmates included veterans ( 老 兵 )back from Vietnam, married women returning to school, middle-aged men wanting to improve their employment prospects and paychecks. We could get our general education requirements out of the way at Chabot — credits we could transfer to a university — which made those two years an invaluable head start.
Classes I took at Chabot have rippled (起涟漪)through my professional pond. I produced the HBO mini-series John Adams with an outline format I learned from a pipe-smoking historian, James Coovelis, whose lectures were interesting. Mary Lou Fitzgerald’s “Studies in Shakespeare” taught me how the five-act structures of Richard III, The Tempest, and Othello focused their themes.
In Herb Kennedy’s “Drama in Performance”， I read plays like The Hot L Baltimore and Desire Under the Elms, then saw their productions. I got to see the plays he taught, through student rush tickets at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.2.I got an A. Some hours I stayed in the huge library, where I first read the New York Times, frustrated by its lack of comics.
If Chabot’s library still has its collection of vinyl records (黑胶唱片), you will find my name repeatedly on the takeout slip of Jason Robards’s performance of the monologue of Eugene O’Neill.3.
Chabot College is still in Hayward, though Mr. Coovelis, Ms. Fitzgerald and Mr. Kennedy are no longer there. I drove past the campus a few years ago with one of my kids and summed up my two years there this way: “4.”
A.I listened to it 20 times at least.
B.That place made me what I am today.
C.Community colleges have improved a lot these years.
D.Those plays filled my head with expanded dreams.
E.Of course, I enjoyed the pleasure of eating French fries between classes.
F.So I sent my test results to Chabot, a community college in nearby Hayward, California, which accepted everyone and was free.
Now the Bush team is pushing hard an idea which is inherited from the Clinton administration and which, in some way, builds on the debt-relief initiative. For the very poorest countries, America strongly favors moving from loans to grants, though other industrial-country donors are still doubtful of the wisdom of this. Giving grants, they argue, will cut future aid flows because some of the funding for loans on generous terms comes from money which has been repaid to donors.
America takes the view that, since many developing—country loans will never be repaid, mainly because the recipients cannot afford to make large payments to their creditors, it makes more sense to treat them as grants in the first place. The Bush administration has threatened to hold up the provision of the funds used for this sort of aid. International Development Assistance (IDA), if it cannot persuade everyone else to come on board. All members talked about having made progress in this area, but it remains a stumbling block.
Work is also under way in the IMF and the G7 to reform the international financial system. This now has two objectives. One is to make it harder for terrorist organizations to obtain funding by cracking down on money—laundering and increasing financial transparency. The other is to reduce the occurrence and severity of financial crises in emerging—market countries. On this, American views seem to have prevailed. The G7 meeting on April 19th and 20th ended with an unexpected decision to proceed with an American plan to include collective action clauses in future loans taken out by emerging- market governments. The idea is that in the event of a delay of payment—such as that by Argentina last December--a government could negotiate with a “super-majority” of its creditors to restructure its debts, rather than, as now, have a small minority of creditors able to weaken such attempts.
This market--based approach is still controversial and implementing it could be difficult given the previous reluctance of governments to include such clauses in loan contracts (lest they appear to be signaling a readiness to default (拖欠)even as they borrow). Work on IMF plans for more far —reaching reforms of supreme debt, on which the Bush team recently appeared to pour cold water, is to proceed at the same time. The two approaches, said the G7, are “complementary”.
1.According to the passage, America favors moving from loans to grants on the purpose of____
A.making more money for the donors
B.relieving debt of the poorest countries
C.solving the problem of poverty completely
D.collecting more money for future aid to other countries
2.It can be seen that the undertaking of moving from loans to grants____
A.makes no progress at all
B.makes progress smoothly
C.still face some difficulties
D.will achieve its success in near future
3.The purpose of the reform of the international financial system includes____.
A.relieving the debt of poor countries
B.establishing a global financial market
C.distributing money more fairly in the world
D.preventing the possible financial crisis and terrorists to raise money through the system
4.It can be inferred from Para. 3 that at present .
A.a country can never expect to reconstruct its debts
B.a country can reconstruct its debt with the permission of IMF
C.a country in default cannot reconstruct its debts without the permission of all of its creditors
D.a country in default can reconstruct its debts by acquiring the permission of most of its creditors.
