I was 18 years old, fit, strong and ambitious. One day, I fell down for no_______reason. I saw many different specialists and was finally diagnosed with limb girdle muscular dystrophy(MD).
It was a very difficult time. I had no idea what life was going to_______at me and I was scared. By my late 30s it was_______and I had transitioned(转变）from a walking stick to a wheelchair. I wanted to be master of my own _______, so I had to recognize my_______ and play to my weaknesses. What I wanted to make _______was a trip to the north pole.
People with MD feel the cold. So why did I want to go to one of the most extreme, cold and_______places on Earth?I'd read about Chris Cope, who wanted to go to the north pole to raise money for MD, and it had _______ my adventurous spirit: I wanted to raise awareness about the _______, but I also wanted to find out what I was capable of. I'm very________
In the two years it had taken to organize the expedition, my muscles had worsened but we ________regardless. The unpleasant life coaching and cold training helped me to ________ how my body would behave in extreme cold, which made me aware of what to________.
I had an amazing team around me,________ the four different flights we took to get to the inner Arctic ice shelf were nevertheless discouraging. While we were on the ice the runway________and we had to wait for it to refreeze.________ we reached the north pole, I was bitterly cold, exhausted and a complete ________.I was on the ice for the best part of three long days,then ________the final 350m.The expedition raised50,000 for ________MD is slowly destroying my life but I have chosen to fill it with ________ and I live life to the full.
1.A.adequate B.apparent C.sound D.major
2.A.yell B.target C.throw D.direct
3.A.advanced B.initial C.modest D.minor
4.A.disease B.fortune C.fate D.business
5.A.achievements B.strengths C.privileges D.commitments
6.A.differ B.happen C.count D.work
7.A.autonomous B.mysterious C.fantastic D.inaccessible
8.A.referred to B.appealed to C.belonged to D.applied to
9.A.significance B.conservation C.ambition D.condition
10.A.trustworthy B.delicate C.competitive D.ridiculous
11.A.pulled out B.took off C.pressed on D.hung about
12.A.illustrate B.assess C.stress D.clarify
13.A.value B.forgive C.require D.expect
14.A.though B.but C.so D.as
15.A.floated B.disappeared C.twisted D.split
16.A.Because B.Once C.Before D.Unless
17.A.envy B.failure C.pride D.mess
18.A.ran B.climbed C.rolled D.walked
19.A.treatment B.charity C.training D.ecology
20.A.imaginations B.experiences C.recreations D.responsibilities
Many healthcare workers know that washing hands is important to prevent the spread of infectious disease. 1. During a study conducted by Nicas and Best at Berkley University, they counted the number of times people touched their face with their hands. 2.Whether we are aware of our actions or not, most of us can agree that we touch our face with our hands frequently enough.
Imagine that you are able to record a full day of your actions. Better yet, reflect on what you did when you woke up yesterday morning. Let me give you an idea of my previous morning. I was woken by the alarm clock at 6 am. 3.Then I checked my phone for messages, turned on the TV for my morning news, started making my coffee and finally hit the shower. It wasn’t even 5 minutes from the time I awoke and I already touched different objects. The point of this is to be aware that even in our homes we are exposed to germs in places we don’t realize.
Luckily, the human body has amazing defense against harmful germs. 4.Our white blood cells are like soldiers coming to the rescue. Unfortunately, there are a lot of areas on our face that do not have the protection of skin such as the eyes and mouth. There’s a reason to every wise proverb and our parents annoying us to wash our hands before dinner is not for nothing.
5.If you have children, it is even more important to set the example because children are known to learn from adults. Let’s start a good habit of washing hands. As for your friends, don’t be shy about checking to make sure their hands are clean. Asking someone if they have washed their hands is caring. Checking to see if someone has washed their hands will benefit not only that person, but you and your family.
A.Our skin is the first line of defense.
B.Several minutes later, I turned off the alarm clock.
C.It is easy for us to admit that we wash our hands regularly.
D.They are more self-aware that hand washing should be practiced as needed.
E.Most importantly, it is our duty to set the right example for friends and family.
F.They found that the subjects touched their face 15.7 times per hour on average.
G.Do the rest of your family members, especially children, wash their hands regularly?
Perhaps the first novel to best express the modern idea of the self was Jane Eyre, written in 1847 by Charlotte Bronte.
Those who remember Jane Eyre solely as required reading in high-school English class likely recall most vividly a childhood banishment(流放) to a death-haunted room, a mysterious presence in the attic, and a cold mansion going up in flames. It’s more seemingly the stuff of Lifetime television, not revolutions. But as unbelievable as many of the events of the novel are, even today, Bronte’s biggest accomplishment wasn’t in plot devices. It was the narrative voice of Jane — who so openly expressed her desire for identity, definition and meaning — that rang powerfully true to its 19th-century audience. In fact, many early readers mistakenly believed Jane Eyre was a true account (in a clever marketing scheme, the novel was subtitled, “An Autobiography”)，perhaps a validation of her character’s authenticity.
The way that novels paid attention to the particularities of human experience (rather than the universals of romances) made them the ideal vehicle to shape how readers understood the modern individual. The novel seemed perfectly designed to tell Bronte’s first-person narrative of a poor orphan girl searching for a secure identity—first among an unloving family, then a charity school, and finally with the wealthy but unattainable employer she loves. Unable to find her sense of self through others, Jane makes the surprising decision to turn inward.
The broader cultural implications of the story—its insistence on the value of conscience and will—were such that one critic worried some years after its publication that the “most alarming revolution of modern times has followed the invasion of Jane Eyre：' Before Rene Descartes's cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”)，when the sources of authority were external and objective, the aspects of the self so central to today’s understanding mattered little then.
To be sure, no earlier novelist had provided a voice so seemingly pure, so fully belonging to the character, as Bronte, She developed her art alongside her sisters, the novelists Anne and Emily, but it was Charlotte whose work best captured the sense of the modern individual. Anne Bronte's novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall contributed to the novers ability to offer social criticism, while the Romantic sensibilities of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights explored how the “other,” in the form of the dark, unpredictable Heathcliff，can threaten the integrity(完整) of the self.
One of the greatest testimonies(证明) to Bronte's accomplishment came from a modernist pioneer, Virginia Woolf, who declares, “Jane’s voice is the source of the power the book has to absorb the reader completely into her world.” Woolf explains how Bronte depicts: ...an overpowering personality, so that, as we say in real life, they have only to open the door to make themselves felt. There is in them some untamed ferocity perpetually at war with the accepted order of things which makes them desire to create instantly rather than to observe patiently.
It is exactly this willingness — desire, even — to be “at war with the accepted order of things” that characterizes the modern self. While we now take such a sense for granted, it was，as Bronte’s contemporaries rightly understood, radical (激进的) in her day.
“_______,’’ Jane says as she is dragged by her cruel aunt toward banishment in the bedroom where her late uncle died. This sentence, Joyce Carol Oates argues, serves as the theme of Jane’s whole story.
Charlotte Bronte created a new mold for the self—a person’s inner life can allow her to change from the inside out.
It is true Jane does right and exercises great moral strength.
1.Which of the following rang powerfully true to 19th-century audience?
A.The subtitle“An Autobiography". B.Jane' s real character.
C.The clever marketing scheme. D.Jane' s inner voice for herself
2.What can we infer from Paragraph 4?
A.The self started to be rooted in individuals 'hearts.
B.Jane Eyre gave rise to a cultural revolution comprehensively.
C.Jane Eyre changed people's viewpoints of their society.
D.The self failed to affect the course of an individual's life.
3.Why does the author mention Anna and Emily in Paragraph 5?
A.To argue how outstanding the sisters were.
B.To show how Charlotte was influenced by her sisters.
C.To prove how unique Charlotte's art of writing was.
D.To explain how the three sisters shaped English literature.
4.What does Virginia Woolf mean by"Jane' s voice is the source of the power the book has to absorb the reader completely into her world”？
A.Jane' s pursuit for individualism attracts readers.
B.Readers can express themselves through Jane.
C.Readers can find themselves in Jane' s voice.
D.Jane' s personality makes the book popular.
5.Which of the following can be put in the blank of the text?
A.I moved forward all the way B.I resisted all the way
C.I cried all the way D.I thought carefully all the way
6.What can we learn from the passage?
A.Readers recognized the modern individualism by nature of romance.
B.High-school students enjoy recalling what happens to Jane Eyre.
C.Jane Eyre is a reflection of its author Charlotte Bronte.
D.Jane Eyre' s publication changed the way people understood their internal world.
Humanity has begun wrestling with the dangers of global threats such as climate change.But few authorities are planning for catastrophic solar storms -huge eruptions of mass and energy from the sun that destroy Earth’s magnetic field. In a recent paper,two Harvard University scientists estimate the potential economic damage from such an event will increase in the future and could equal the current U.S.GDP-about＄20 trillion-150years from now.
This kind of storm has happened before.The so-called Carrington Event in 1859,the most intense magnetic storm ever recorded on Earth,caused auroras(极光）in the atmosphere and even delivered electric shocks to telegraph operators.But a Carrington-scale storm today would cause far more harm because society now depends so heavily on electrical power grids,communications satellites and GPS.
In an effort to quantify that threat,astrophysicists Abraham Loeb and Manasvi Lingam of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics developed a mathematical model that assumes society's vulnerability(脆弱性）to solar storms will grow with technological advances.Under this model,during the next 50 years the potential for economic damage will depend primarily on the rising odds of a strong solar storm over time.Beyond 50 years our vulnerability will increase dramatically with technological progress until the latter levels off.
Some scientists question the model’s predictions. “Estimating the economic impact is challenging now, let alone in over a century,” says Edward Oughton, a research associate at the University of Cambridge's Center for Risk Studies.Yet he warns that uncertainty should not stop us from practical preparations, such as making power grids stronger and improving early-warning systems.
Loeb and Lingam think up a much wider strategy:$100-billion magnetic deflector shield(导流板）, positioned between Earth and the sun. This idea seems “pretty preposterous, ”however, given that solar particles arrive at Earth from all directions,says Daniel Baker,director of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder.
A better understanding of"space weather"-the changing condition in Earth's outer space environment, including solar radiation and particles-could help find the best strategies for confronting a dangerous solar storm,says Stacey Worman,a senior analyst at consulting firm Abt Associates."This is a challenging but important question,"Worman says,"that we need more eyes on."
1.According to Edward Oughton,which of the following about solar storms is right?
A.They will become much stronger in 150 years.
B.Technology makes their potential damage grow.
C.Space weather forecast can effectively help deal with them.
D.It's difficult to predict their possible economic damage.
2.The underlined word “preposterous” in Paragraph 5 means
A.innovative B.practical
C.unreasonable D.inflexible
3.The author writes the passage mainly to_
A.remind people to guard against solar storms
B.report the damage of solar storms
C.introduce the characteristics of solar storms
D.analyze the possible cause of solar storms
One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists have managed to turn an unassuming drone (无人机) into a remote controlled pollinator (授粉媒介) by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly.
Animal pollinators are needed for the reproduction of 90% of flowering plants and one third of human food crops. Chief among those are bees — but many bee populations in the United States have been in steep decline in recent decades. Thus, the decline of bees isn’t just worrisome because it could disrupt ecosystems, but also because it could disrupt agriculture and economy. People have been trying to come up with replacement techniques, but none of them are especially effective yet.
Scientists have thought about using drones, but they haven’t figured out how to make free-flying robot insects that can rely on their own power source without being attached to a wire. “It’s very tough work,” said senior author Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. His particular contribution to the field involves a gel, one he’d considered a mistake 10 years before and stuck in a storage cabinet. When it was rediscovered a decade later, it hadn’t dried up or degraded at all. “I was so surprised because it still had high viscosity,” Miyako said.
The chemist noticed that when dropped, the gel absorbed an impressive amount of dust from the floor. Miyako realized this material could be very useful for picking up pollen (花粉). He and his colleagues chose a drone and attached horsehairs to its smooth surface to mimic a bee’s fuzzy body. They coated those horsehairs in the gel, and then controlled the drones over lilies, where they would pick up the pollen from one flower and then deposit the pollen at another one, thus fertilizing it.
The scientists looked at the hairs under a scanning electron microscope and counted up the pollen grains attached to the surface and found that the drones whose horsehairs had been coated with the gel had about 10 times more pollen than those that had not been coated with the gel.
Miyako does not think such drones would replace bees altogether, but could simply help bees with their pollinating duties. There’s a lot of work to be done before that’s a reality, however. Small drones will need to become more controllable and energy efficient, as well as smarter, with better GPS and artificial intelligence.
1.What does the underlined word “viscosity” in Para.3 probably mean?
A.Hardness. B.Stickiness.
C.Flexibility. D.Purity.
2.We can learn from the passage that______.
A.bees disrupt both agriculture and economy
B.scientists have invented self-powered robot insects
C.bees in the United States are on the edge of extinction
D.Miyako found the special feature of the gel by chance
3.According to Eijiro Miyako, the drones______.
A.are not yet ready for practical use
B.may eventually replace bees in the future
C.are much more efficient than bee pollinators
D.can provide a solution to economic depression
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1.If you make a Purchase for$300 at Amazon.com with the Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card,how many points can you get?
A.9 B.30
C.600 D.900
2.Which of the following is Not the feature of the amazon.com Rewards visa card?
A.You needn't pay the annual fee.
B.You can get rewarded with this card even if you buy something on other websites.
C.$30 will be instantly loaded into your amazon.com account upon the approval of your credit card application.
D.Besides the redemption for instant savings at Amazon.com checkout,you can also redeem for cash back and gift cards.
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B.your points will be redeemed at Amazon.com checkout automatically towards any eligible purchase
C.the most attractive part of this card is the 2X rewards in gas and restaurant purchases
D.in some cases,you can get your cash back with the points in your card account
