As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. “The woods” was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend’s house and found him not at home, his mother might say, “Oh, he’s out in the woods, ” with a tone(语气) of airy acceptance. It’s similar to the tone people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I’m looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even “away from his desk.” For us ten-year-olds, “being out in the woods” was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.
We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring(探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though, seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Italian burial mound.
Often we got “lost” and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical: the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly----tall beeches, easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.
It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence（青春期）. In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that were really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.
1.The author and his fiends were often out in the woods to _______.
A. spend their free time
B. play gold and other sports
C. avoid doing their schoolwork
D. keep away from their parents
2.What can we infer from Paragraph 2?
A. The activities in the woods were well planned.
B. Human history is not the result of exploration.
C. Exploration should be a systematic activity.
D. The author explored in the woods aimlessly.
3.The underlined word “skeptical” in Paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to ______.
A. calm
B. doubtful
C. serious
D. optimistic
4.How does the author feel about his childhood?
A. Happy but short.
B. Lonely but memorable.
C. Boring and meaningless.
D. Long and unforgettable.
We can achieve knowledge either actively or passively（被动地）. We achieve it actively by direct experience, by testing and proving an idea, or by reasoning.
We achieve knowledge passively by being told by someone else. Most of the learning that takes place in the classroom and the kind that happens when we watch TV or read newspapers or magazines is passive. Conditioned as we are to passive learning, it’s not surprising that we depend on it in our everyday communication with friends and co-workers.
Unfortunately, passive learning has a serious problem. It makes us tend to accept what we are told even when it is little more than hearsay and rumor(谣言).
Did you ever play the game Rumor? It begins when one person writes down a message but doesn’t show it to anyone. Then the person whispers it, word for word, to another person. That person, in turn, whispers it to still another, and so on, through all the people playing the game. The last person writes down the message word for word as he or she hears it. Then the two written statements are compared. Typically, the original message has changed.
That’s what happens in daily life. The simple fact that people repeat a story in their own words changes the story. Then, too, most people listen imperfectly. And many enjoy adding their own creative touch to a story, trying to improve on it, stamping（打上标记）it with their own personal style. Yet those who hear it think they know.
This process is also found among scholars and authors: A statement of opinion by one writer may be re-stated as fact by another, who may in turn be quoted by yet another; and this process may continue, unless it occurs to someone to question the facts on which the original writer based his opinion or to challenge the interpretation he placed upon those facts.
1.According to the passage, passive learning may occur in _______.
A. doing a medical experiment
B. solving a math problem
C. visiting an exhibition
D. doing scientific reasoning
2.The underlined word “it” in Paragraph 2 refers to _____.
A. active learning
B. knowledge
C. communication
D. passive learning
3.The author mentions the game Rumor to show that _____.
A. a message may be changed when being passed on
B. a message should be delivered in different ways
C. people may have problems with their sense of hearing
D. people tend not to believe in what they know as rumor
4.What can we infer from the passage?
A. Active learning is less important.
B. Passive learning may not be reliable.
C. Active learning occurs more frequently.
D. Passive learning is not found among scholars.
Michael Fish may soon be replaced as a weather forecaster by something truly fishier---the shark(鲨鱼).
Research by a British biology student suggests that sharks could be used to predict storms.
Lauren Smith, 24, is close to completing her study on shark’s ability to sense pressure.
If her studies prove the theory, scientists may be able to monitor the behaviour of sharks to predict bad weather.
Miss Smith had previously studied the behaviour of lemon sharks in the Bahamas.
She then used their close relatives, lesser spotted dogfish, for further research at Aberdeen University.
Her work---thought to be the first of its kind to test the pressure theory ---- resulted from the observation that juvenile blacktip sharks off Florida moved into deeper water ahead of a violent storm in 2001.
Miss Smith said: “I’ve always been crazy about traveling and diving and this led me to an interest in sharks.”
“I was delighted to have been able to research in the area for my degree. I know there’s so much more we need to understand ---- but it certainly opens the way to more research.”
It has been discovered that a shark senses pressure using hair cells in its balance system.
At the Bimini Shark Lab in the Bahamas, Miss Smith fixed hi-tech sensors to sharks to record pressure and temperature, while also tracking them using GPS (Global Positioning System) technology.
In Aberdeen, she was able to study the effects of tidal(潮汐的) and temperature changes on dogfish----none of which were harmed. She also used a special lab which can mimic(模拟) oceanic pressure changes caused by weather fronts.
She is due to complete her study and graduate later this year. She says she will be looking for a job which will give her the chance to enrich her experience of shark research.
1.The passage is most probably taken from _____.
A. a short-story collection
B. a popular science magazine
C. a research paper
D. a personal diary
2.What do we learn from the first four paragraph of the passage?
A. Sharks may be used to predict bad weather.
B. Sharks’ behaviour can be controlled.
C. Michael Fish is not qualified for his job.
D. Lauren Smith will become a weather forecaster.
3.Lauren Smith conducted her research by _______.
A. removing hair cells from a shark’s balance system
B. measuring the air pressure of weather fronts
C. recording sharks’ body temperature
D. monitoring sharks’ reaction to weather changes
4.What is the passage mainly about?
A. A popular way of forecasting weather.
B. A new research effort in predicting storms.
C. Biologists’ interest in the secrets of sharks.
D. Lauren Smith’s devotion to scientific research.
I love charity(慈善) shops and so do lots of other people in Britain because you find quite a few of them on every high street. The charity shop is a British institution, selling everything from clothes to electric goods, all at very good prices. You can get things you won’t find in the shops anymore. The thing I like best about them is that your money is going to a good cause and not into the pockets of profit-driven companies, and you are not damaging the planet, but finding a new home for unwanted goods.
The first charity shop was opened in 1947 by Oxfam. The famous charity’s appeal to aid postwar Greece had been so successful it had been flooded with donations(捐赠物). They decided to set up a shop to sell some of these donations to raise money for that appeal. Now there are over 7,000 charity shops in the UK. My favourite charity shop in my hometown is the Red Cross shop, where I always find children’s books, all 10 or 20 pence each.
Most of the people working in the charity shops are volunteers, although there is often a manager who gets paid. Over 90% of the goods in the charity shops are donated by the public. Every morning you see bags of unwanted items outside the front of shops, although they don’t encourage this, rather ask people to bring things in when the shop is open.
The shops have very low running costs: all profits go to charity work. Charity shops raise more than ￡110 million a year, funding（资助）medical research, overseas aid, supporting sick and poor children, homeless and disabled people, and much more. What better place to spend your money? You get something special for a very good price and a good moral sense. You provide funds to a good cause and tread lightly on the environment.
1.The author loves the charity shop mainly because of _______.
A. its convenient location
B. its great variety of goods
C. its spirit of goodwill
D. its nice shopping environment
2.The first charity shop in the UK was set up to ____.
A. sell cheap products
B. deal with unwanted things
C. raise money for patients
D. help a foreign country
3.Which of the following is TRUE about charity shops?
A. The operating costs are very low.
B. The staff are usually well paid.
C. 90% of the donations are second-hand.
D. They are open twenty-four hours a day.
4.Which of the following may be the best title for the passage?
A. What to Buy a Charity Shops.
B. Charity Shop: Its Origin & Development.
C. Charity Shop: Where You Buy to Donate.
D. The Public’s Concern about Charity Shops.
Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954 to a Mexican American family. As the only girl in a family of seven children, she often felt like she had “seven fathers,” because her six brothers, as well as her father, tried to control her. Feeling shy and unimportant, she retreated(躲避) into books. Despite her love of reading, she did not do well in elementary school because she was too shy to participate.
In high school, with the encouragement of one particular teacher, Cisneros improved her grades and worked for the school literary magazine. Her father encouraged her to go to college because her thought it would be a good way for her to find a husband. Cisneros did attend college, but instead of searching for a husband, she found a teacher who helped her join the famous graduate writing program at the University of Iowa. At the university’s Writers’ Workshop, however, she felt lonely----a Mexican American from a poor neighborhood among students from wealthy families. The feeling of being so different helped Cisneros find her “Creative voice.”
“It was not until this moment when I considered myself truly different that my writing acquired a voice. I knew I was a Mexican woman, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, but it had everything to do with it! That’s when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about.”
Cisneros published her first work, The House on Mango Street, when she was twenty-nine. The book tells about a young Mexican American girl growing up in a Spanish-speaking area in Chicago, much like the neighborhoods in which Cisneros lived as a child. The book won an award in 1985 and has been used in classes from high school through graduate school level. Since then, Cisneros has published several books of poetry, a children’s book, and a short-story collection.
1.Which of the following is TRUE about Cisneros in her childhood?
A. She had seven brothers.
B. She felt herself a nobody.
C. She was too shy to go to school.
D. She did not have any good teachers.
2.The graduate program gave Cisneros a chance to _____.
A. work for a school magazine
B. run away from her family
C. make a lot of friends
D. develop her writing style
3.According to Cisneros, what played the decisive role in her success?
A. Her early years in college.
B. Her training in the Workshop.
C. Her feeling of being different.
D. Her childhood experience.
4.What do we learn about The House on Mango Street?
A. It is quite popular among students.
B. It is the only book ever written by Cisneros.
C. It wasn’t success as it was written in Spanish.
D. It won an award when Cisneros was twenty-nine.
阅读下面短文，掌握其大意，然后从各题所给的A、B、C、D四个
选项中，选出最佳选项。
Jenna, a popular girl from Westwood Middle School, had graduated first in her class and was ready for new 1in high school.
2, high school was different. In the first week, Jenna went to tryouts(选拔赛)for cheerleaders(拉拉队队员). She was competing against very talented girls, and she knew it would be 3for her to be selected. Two hours later, the 4read a list of the girls for a second tryout. Her heart 5as the list ended without her name. Feeling 6, she walked home carrying her schoolbag full of homework.
Arriving home, she started with math. She had always been a good math student, but now she was 7. She moved on to English and history, and was 8to find that she didn’t have any trouble with those subjects. Feeling better, she decided not to 9math for the time being.
The nest day Jenna went to see Mrs. Biden about being on the school 10. Mrs. Biden wasn’t as 11as Jenna. “I’m sorry, but we have enough 12for the newspaper already. Come back next year and we’ll talk then.” Jenna smiled 13and left. “Why is high school so 14?” she sighed.
Later in 15class, Jenna devoted herself to figuring out the problems that had given her so much 16. By the end of class, she understood how to get them right. As she gathered her books, Jenna decided she’d continue to try to 17at her new school. She wasn’t sure if she’d succeed, but she knew she had to 18. High school was just as her mom had said: “You will feel like a small fish in a big pond 19a big fish in a small pond. The challenge is to become the 20fish you can be.”
1.A. processes B. decision C. challenges D. exercises
2.A. Therefore B. However C. Otherwise D. Besides
3.A. difficult B. easy C. boring D. interesting
4.A. editor B. boss C. candidate D. judge
5.A. jumped B. sank C. stopped D. raced
6.A. strange B. happy C. awful D. lonely
7.A. struggling B. improving C. working D. complaining
8.A. ashamed B. disappointed C. shocked D. relieved
9.A. put up B. prepare for C. worry about D. give up
10.A. committee B. newspaper C. radio D. team
11.A. enthusiastic B. artistic C. sympathetic D. realistic
12.A. speakers B. readers C. cheerleaders D. writers
13.A. widely B. weakly C. excitedly D. brightly
14.A. similar B. ordinary C. different D. familiar
15.A. physics B. history C. English D. math
16.A. pleasure B. hope C. trouble D. sorrow
17.A. fit in B. look out C. stay up D. get around
18.A. swim B. try C. ask D. escape
19.A. in return for B. in case of C. in terms of D. instead of
20.A. slimmest B. smallest C. best D. gentlest
