California’s attack on second-hand smoke reached its historic high this New Year, when even indoor areas in bars and casinos became smoke-free by force of law. The rules on smoke exposure have taken a 180-degree turn in less than a generation. In the United States of my youth, every citizen was hostage(人质)to other people’s cigarettes in airplanes, in offices and in almost every other public place. Now the indoor areas of public life are all nonsmoking zones — an inconvenience for the 25% of adults who smoke, but a benefit of large proportions to the breathing system of the 75% who do not.
In the cold and flu, the greatest risk of appearing in public is not tobacco smoke, but rather contagious(接触传染的)disease. And strangers who would not dream of blowing smoke in your face seem happy enough about coughing and sneezing whenever they see you coming.
Isn’t there a double standard here, when the same folks prohibited from smoking in my office building can sneeze me home for a week of hell with the ruling bacterium of the season? Why don’t the contagious among us stay home or wear those cut little paper nose and mouth covers or at least feel bad about putting the rest of us at risk of sharing their misery?
Could it be that the similarity passing a law that requires germ-free public spaces. But two smaller lessons do come from the contrasting treatment of germs and cigarettes. The first lesson is that what we accept in public is much more a matter of particular social expectation than scientific studies. The French read scientific journals just as diligently as do Americans, yet the average French cafe contains more smoke than a forest fire. You are more likely to encounter a face full of tobacco smoke if you go to Japan this year than you would in Los Aneles. But you will also notice hundreds of people on the subway in Japan who wear paper mask to avoid spreading contagious disease that they carry. Which culture is more considerate depends on the particular subject of the inquiry. The standard for what is polite in public varies tremendously from one social setting to another.
1.The first paragraph tells us ________.
A.the rules on smoke exposure have become less strict
B.in the past people exposed to other people’s cigarettes complained a lot
C.in California, smoke-free zones in public places have existed for a long time
D.most people can benefit from banning indoor smoking in public places
2.What can be inferred from the passage?
A.People think coughing and sneezing are less harmful than smoking in public.
B.Sick people should live alone and stay home wearing paper masks all winter.
C.Strangers will feel bad when they cough and sneeze in front of other people.
D.Those with contagious diseases feel bad sharing their misery with others.
3.The tone of the passage is best described as ______.
A.encouraging B.worrying
C.carefree D.suspicious
4.What does the author want to express in this passage?
A.Learn from Japan. B.Don’t smoke indoors.
C.Pay attention to environmental germs. D.Stay home all winter.
The Docklands Light Railway(DLR) took just three years to build at a cost of £77 million. It is London’s first Light Rail System, but its route follows that of a number of older lines, which carried the nineteenth century railways through the crowded districts of the East End.
The section of the line from the Tower Gateway Station to Poplar follows the line of one of London’s earliest railways, the London & Blackwell(1840), a cable-drawn railway(later converted to steam) which carried passengers to steam ships at Blackwell Pier, and provided transport for the messengers and clerks who went backwards and forwards between the docks and the city every day.
From Poplar to Island Gardens, a new line crosses high above the dock waters, and then joins the old track of the Millwall Extension Railway, built to service the Millwall Docks(1868) and to provide transport for workers in the local factories. This line was horse-drawn for part of its route, until the 1880s.
The Poplar to Stratford section of the DLR route was first developed by the North London Railway, built in the 1850s to link the West and East India Docks with the manufacturing districts of the Midlands and North of England. There were major railway works and sidings(岔线) at Bow until recently.
The trains are automatically controlled from a central computer, which deals with all signaling and other safety factors, as well as adjusting speeds to keep within the timetable; on board each vehicle, Train Captains, who are also fully qualified drivers, are equipped with two-way radios to maintain contact with central control. There are passenger lifts, and self-service ticket machines, at every station.
1.The history of the railway tells us that the DLR ______.
A.was begun in the nineteen century
B.follows some of the original line
C.will be finished in three years’ time
D.took three years longer than expected to complete
2.It appears that the Poplar to Stratford section of the DLR route was originally developed to ____.
A.make the transport of goods easier B.encourage trade abroad
C.promote the transport in England D.create employment at home
3.The trains on the DLR are controlled by ______.
A.drivers on the trains themselves B.two-way radios operated by the drivers
C.a computer on board the train D.a computer based elsewhere
假设你是红星中学高三学生李华。请根据以下四幅图的先后顺序,为校刊“英语园地” 写一篇短文,讲述上周你校高三年级举行趣味运动会的过程。
注意:词数不少于60。
提示词:趣味运动会fun sports meeting 二人三足 three-legged race
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假设你是红星中学高三学生李华。你的英国好友Jim在你的视频博客(Vlog)上看到你做中餐的视频,很感兴趣并表示也想学做中国美食,发来邮件询问。请你给他回复邮件,内容包括:
1. 推荐一道中国菜或饭;
2. 推荐理由。
注意:1 .词数不少于50;
2.开头和结尾已给出,不计入总词数。
Dear Jim,
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yours,
Li Hua
The Buy Nothing Movement
Social media, magazines and shop windows bombard(猛轰)people daily with things to buy, and British consumers are buying more clothes than ever before. The average person spends more than £ 1,000 on new clothes a year, which might not sound like much. 1. A lot of consumer spending is by means of credit cards. British people currently owe about £670 per adult to credit card companies. Also, people are spending money they haven't earned to buy things they don't need. Britain throws away 300,000 tons of clothing a year, most of which goes into landfill(垃圾填 埋地)sites.
2.But charity shops can't sell all those unwanted clothes. A lot of clothes that charities can't sell are sent abroad, causing even more economic and environmental problems.
3.The idea originated in Canada in the early 1990s and then moved to the US. On Buy Nothing Day people organise various types of protests and cut up their credit cards. Throughout the year, Buy Nothing groups organise the exchange and repair of items they already own.
The trend has now reached influencers on social media who now encourage their viewers not to buy anything at all for periods as long as a year. Two friends in Canada spent a year working towards buying only food. For the first three months they learned how to live without buying electrical goods, clothes or things for the house. For the next stage, they gave up services, for example, haircuts, eating out or buying petrol for their cars. 4.
The changes they made meant two fewer cars on the roads, a reduction in plastic and paper packaging and a positive impact on the environment from all the energy saved. 5.But even if you can't manage a full year without going shopping, you can participate in the anti-consumerist movement by refusing to buy things you don't need.
A.In one year, they'd saved $55,000.
B.If everyone followed a similar plan, the results would be impressive.
C.Online shopping means it is easy for customers to buy without thinking.
D.Second-hand clothes are often of too poor quality to recycle in charity shops.
E.But that figure hides two far more worrying trends for society and for the environment
F.However, a different trend arises in opposition to consumerism—the ' buy nothing' trend.
G.People might not realise the problems because they donate their unwanted clothes to charities.
If there’s one cliche(陈词滥调)that really annoys Danah Boyd, a specialist researcher who has made a career from studying the way teenagers use the web, it’s that of the digital native. “Today the world has computer-mediated communications. Thus, in order to learn about their social world around them, teenagers are learning about those things too. And they’re using that to work out the stuff that kids have always worked out: peer(同龄人)sociality, status, etc.” she says.
It’s no surprise Boyd takes exception, really. As one of the first digital anthropologists to dig into the way teenagers use social networking sites, she gained insights into the social web by taking a closer look at what was going on.
Lately, her work has been about explaining new ways of interpreting the behavior we see online. She outlined some examples at a recent conference in San Francisco, including the case of a young man from one of the poorest districts of Los Angeles who was applying for a top American college. The applicant said he wanted to escape the influence of violence, but the admissions officer was shocked when he discovered that the boy's MySpace page was covered with precisely the violent language he claimed to hate. “Why was he lying about his motivations?” asked the university. “He wasn't, ” said Boyd. “In his world, showing the right images online was a key part of surviving daily life.”
Understanding what’s happening online is especially important, for today’s teenagers have a vastly different approach to privacy from their parents. She says, “Adults think of the home as a very private space. That’s often not the case for teenagers because they have little or no control over who has access to it, or under what conditions. As a result, the online world can feel more private because it feels like there's more control.”
The concept of control is central to Boyd's work, and it applies to pointing out the true facts about teenage behavior. Boyd suggests control remains in the same places as it always did.
“Technologists all go for the idea of techno・utopia (乌托邦), the web as great democratizer (民主 化)”,she says. “But we’re not actually democratizing the whole system; we’re just shifting the way in which we discriminate.”
It’s a call to arms that most academic researchers would tend to sidestep, but then Boyd admits to treading a fine line between academics and activists. “The questions I continue to want to ask are the things that are challenging to me;having to sit down and be forced to think about uncomfortable social stuff, and it’s really hard to get my head around it, which means it’s exactly what I should dive in and deal with, ” she says.
1.What does Danah Boyd think of “computer-mediated communications”?
A.They teach teenagers about social interaction.
B.They replace other sorts of social interaction for teenagers.
C.They are necessary for teenagers to have social interaction.
D.They are barriers to wider social interaction among teenagers.
2.Why does Danah Boyd cite the example of the Los Angeles college applicant?
A.To show how easy it is to investigate somebody's online activity.
B.To illustrate how easy it is to misinterpret an individual online activity.
C.To prove how important it is to check the content of someone's online activity.
D.To express how necessary it is to judge someone's sincerity from his online activity.
3.Danah Boyd argues in Paragraph 4 that _______.
A.teenagers feel more private in the online world than in the home
B.teenagers are less concerned about privacy than their parents
C.parents tend not to respect teenagers'
need for online privacy
D.parents value the idea of privacy less in a domestic environment
4.It can be inferred from the last paragraph that Danah Boyd _______.
A.is willing to take on research challenges others would avoid
B.regards herself as being more of an activist than a researcher
C.is aware that she is lacking in ability to deal with the challenges
D.feels like abandoning the research into uncomfortable social stuff