Today in our P. E. class, we all had to play basketball. There are only 7 girls in our P.E. class, so the class is mostly boys. And because we’re girls, they don't really like us. We hate basketball, and they hate us. So we asked them if we could sit on the chairs and not play. They agreed and so we talked and laughed happily on the chairs.
Well, today, Just while all the girls were talking happily, the P. E. teacher came in. Angrily, he looked at all the boys running around with the basketball. Seeing that not a girl was playing, he looked at us. Shaking his head, he blew his whistle( 哨子). Everyone looked up. We were all surprised.
“Why aren't you playing?” he asked us.
“Well，they said that we didn’t have to play，Mr. Backus!” We quickly blamed(归咎于) the boys, afraid to get into trouble.
“What? They didn't want to play!” the boys didn't want to get into trouble, either. Mr. Backus told us to get up and made all of us run around the playground for 5 minutes. Later, he made us sit down and listen to him. The boys complained, but he made them listen anyway.
“Am I ever unfair to you?” he asked. We all shook our heads. It was true. Mr. Backus was the nicest P. E. teacher ever! He never shouted and complained. He was just nice. “Well, then I hope you are fair to me. I don t care whose fault(错误) it was. One person’s fault, the whole class’s fault. Understand?”
We nodded and waited. It was the only thing he ever asked us to do: to be fair. It was not much; it was not anything. So we listened on.
“This time I catch you not doing anything, you run for 5 minutes. Next time. you run for 10 minutes. It’s your choice. You could play games or run. I don’t really care, but I think you care. Remember, one person's fault: the whole class's fault. Got it?”
As we nodded again, he left. We could see him smile as he closed the door. Mr. Backus was just too nice. That was why we all liked him and he certainly loved us.
1.Do the girls in the class like basketball?
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2.What did the girls do in their P. E. class?
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3.How long did Mr. Backus ask the students to run?
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4.What did the students think of Mr. Backus?
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5.What did Mr. Backus want his students to learn from his lesson?
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People can’t see you when you’re speaking on the phone, but they can hear you. So, the way you speak is especially important. In fact, researchers have found that 80% of communication over the phone is through your tone（语气）of voice; and only 20% is from the words you use. Here are our top tips on how to speak over the phone.
1.Facial Expressions
Your facial expressions can influence your voice. For example, if you smile, your voice will sound warm and friendly, just the opposite, if you have an angry look on your face, it can make you sound unpleasant.
2.Volume（音量）
If you speak too loudly, you could sound angry. And if you speak too softly, it’ll be difficult to hear you. So, speak loudly enough to be heard clearly, but not so loud that you’re shouting.
3.Pace
The pace of your voice is how quickly you speak. And this can show how you feel. For example, an angry person might speak faster than normal. Or a downhearted person might speak very slowly. Try speaking a little more slowly than normal. This will make you sound confident, and it’ll make it easier for the other person to understand you.
4.Gestures（手势）
Gesturing can influence the tone of your voice. When you gesture, you bring more air into the lungs, which can make your voice sound warmer. Gestures are also useful to help you stress the right words or even find the words you need. The best thing about gesturing during a phone call is that no one can see what you’re doing, so you can gesture as wildly as you like!
5.Movement
If you’re feeling nervous, stand up and move around. It will reduce the nervousness in your body and help your voice to sound more confident.
6. Pauses（停顿）
Using pauses every now and then can help you to slow down. This will make you sound more confident and in control. Also, if you pause after giving some new information, it’ll give the other person time to understand it. At the same time, listen to how the other person uses pauses. They could tell you something about the speaker’s feeling. For example, when a speaker is really angry, he might use pauses and say, “I... am... so... angry...”
1.Can your facial expressions influence your voice?
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2.What is the pace of voice?
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3.What is the best thing about gestures during phone call?
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4.What can people do to reduce their nervousness on the phone?
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5.What is the passage mainly about?
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Garbage（垃圾） Island
You can’t see it from the air. It’s almost impossible to see from a ship. But somewhere in the North Pacific is a huge island of garbage, just below the water surface.
What is the island made of?
The garbage island is not an island, but a collection of millions of plastic and other objects（物体）. The water movements of the Pacific Ocean bring the objects together and cause them to go around in a big circle.
Charles Moore found it in 1997 and named it “the Great Pacific Garbage Patch”.
Where does all the plastic come from?
Much of the garbage comes from everyday objects, such as shopping bags and water bottles. Some of these objects finally reach the ocean. Garbage from the western coast of North America takes about six years to reach it. Objects from East Asia take about a year. Other garbage comes from ships passing through the area.
Is the Garbage Patch dangerous?
The larger pieces of garbage are a problem for wildlife. For example, sea turtles（海龟） and seabirds often think the plastic is their food. They eat the plastic and die.
In addition, the plastic stops sunlight from reaching deeper water. Without sunlight, very small sea animals die. Then, there is less food for larger fish to eat.
What can we do to help stop it?
Cleaning up the island isn’t easy. But we can make people realize the problem. One environmentalist（环保主义者）， David de Rothschild, is sailing around the world on a boat made of plastic bottles to teach people about the problem of garbage in the sea.
Another idea is that we can recycle the plastic garbage. Environmental engineer Cesar Harada is building a robot that collects pieces of plastic. Harada hopes to use his robot in the Pacific. Harada also has a website for reporting environmental problems. He says, “I hope everybody can become an environmental activist.”
1.What is the garbage made of?
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2.How long does it take objects from East Asia to reach the island?
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3.Is the garbage island dangerous?
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4.Why is David de Rothschild sailing on a bottle boat?
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5.According to the writer, what can we do to help stop garbage island?
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Can you imagine a world without a writing system for your language? It may be hard to picture it now, but a man named Sequoyah lived in such a world. Sequoyah was a member of a native American tribe, the Cherokee. Cherokee people speak their own language, but for hundreds of years they did not have a system of writing. Without a writing system, the Cherokee had no newspapers or books before 1809.
Sequoyah was probably born around the year 1770 and lived with his mother in a small village in the mountains of Tennessee. When he grew up, he became a blacksmith. When he was doing business with those “English-speaking people”, he noticed that they used paper with marks to record their thoughts and ideas. Sequoyah called these pieces of paper with marks “talking leaves”. He began to wonder why people who spoke Cherokee did not have a way to write down their words.
In 1809, Sequoyah decided to give the Cherokee their own “talking leaves”. At first he tried to make a different symbol for every word in the Cherokee language. But in that case, there would be so many symbols and too hard for people to remember, so he decided to make a picture for each syllable (音节). After much hard work, Sequoyah invented 85 symbols. In order to see whether it would work, he helped his six-year-old daughter Ayoka learn each symbol and found she could learn to read and write very quickly. Sequoyah’s invention was a success!
Before long, Sequoyah’s writing system had spread far and wide. Cherokee people living in all different parts of the country learned to read and write. In 1825, Sequoyah’s system was made the official written language for Cherokee people. To this day, Cherokee speakers still use Sequoyah’s writing system. In some parts of the United States, you can see street signs and billboards written in both English and Cherokee. Sequoyah will always be remembered for his important contribution to Cherokee people.
1.Did the Cherokee have newspapers before 1809?
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2.What did Sequoyah call the pieces of paper with marks?
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3.How many symbols did Sequoyah invent in the Cherokee language?
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4.When was Sequoyah’s system made the official written language?
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5.Why will Sequoyah always be remembered?
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Albino Power
I was born an albino（白化病患者） in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1945. No one in my family had ever known what an albino was, what it meant to be an albino, what had to be done differently because I was an albino.
My parents and friends treated me just like they treated everybody else. They was just about the best thing they could have done. It gave me a leg up on trusting myself, so when troubles came along, I could deal with them.
Truly, my schoolbook photo always looked like a snowball with two pieces of coal for eyes. Like most albinos, I had terrible eyesight, but the fact that I could hardly see didn’t worry me all that much.
Kids laughed at me, calling me “Whitey”. People stared at me when I held reading material right at the tip of my nose so I could see it well enough to read. Even when I was eight or nine, movie theater workers started asking me to pay adult prices because I “looked older”.
The worst part for me was that because my eyesight was so bad that I couldn’t play sports very well. but I didn’t give up trying. I practiced playing basketball every day. And I studied harder.
Finally, I got better at school and loved it. By the time I got to college, I was double majoring（专业）, going to summer school and taking part in every kind of after-class activity I could find. I had learned to be proud of being an albino. I tried my best to make “albino” positive work. And I decided to make my living with my eyes—and in sports.
I couldn’t see well enough to play sports, but with a good and long-lasting education and the drive to do it, I could make a living involved in the area I loved. I’ve done it now for more than thirty years in print and in video, and now in cyberspace. People make jokes about how I’m the only “blind editor（编辑）” they know, but the jokes are friendly smiles now, and some of them are signs of respect. And I make jokes about being an albino. I have even developed an all-white routine, if you could call it that.
I was just a proud albino kid from the coal country of Pennsylvania. I now realize that being born an albino helped me to get over difficulties, become confident, and be proud of my personal achievements.
1.How did the writer’s parents and friends treat him?
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2.Why couldn’t the writer play sports very well?
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3.What was the writer doing by the time he got to college?
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4.What does the writer think of the “blind editor” jokes now?
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5.What does “Albino Power” mean to the writer?
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The Art of the Elephants
If your cat walked across something you were painting and left footprints behind, would you consider your cat an artist? What if your bird held a colored pencil in its beak（喙） and painted on a piece of paper? Most people may think of animal art as a joke, but some people have been taking it very seriously.
Elephants were used for hundreds of years in Thailand’s logging industry(伐木业). They moved wood from forests in areas where there were no roads. At the beginning of this century, when the forests of Thailand began to quickly disappear, the government put a stop to logging. All of a sudden, many elephants in Thailand no longer had a way to make a living.
Some elephants were treated badly. Others had to try to live on their own and couldn’t find enough food to eat. There were once tens of thousands of elephants in Thailand. Today, there are less than five thousand. When two Russian American artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, first heard about the troubled elephants in Thailand, they knew that something had to be done to forever change the way people treated Thai elephants. Then, they came up with an idea to help these elephants.
Komar and Melamid visited elephant camps in Thailand and began to show the elephant trainers how to teach the elephants to paint. At first, the trainers had to guide the elephants’ trunks. The elephants became more comfortable doing this with practice—and lots of sweet snacks—and finally started to paint on their own. The strange idea that Komar and Melamid had to save the elephants actually began to work. They even helped found several elephant art schools in Thailand and in other Asian countries. The elephants and their trainers go there to learn about painting and get supplies they need.
Today, people begin to buy elephant artworks from galleries(画廊) all around the world. Some are even willing to pay more than ＄2,000 for the works of the elephant artists! Some people compare the cheerful, brightly-colored artworks to the works of some great abstract(抽象地) painters. Some people are just happy to buy these special and original(原创地) artworks. Others think they are helping the troubled elephants in this way. The next time you see a piece of colorful abstract art, find out who the artist is. You just may be surprised at what you learn!
1.What may most people think of animal art?
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2.What did elephants do in Thailand’s logging industry?
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3.How many elephants are there in Thailand today?
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4.What was Komar and Melamid’s idea to help the elephants in Thailand?
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5.Please list one reason why people buy elephant artworks.
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