Scientists believe that conditions on Mars around 3.8 billion years ago were very similar to those of the early earth, when primitive organisms were spreading through our oceans. At that time, Mars would have been much warmer and wetter than it is today, with an atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide, just like that of the earth at the time. Under these conditions, it is highly probable that life may have arisen on Mars as well.
But, even if life did not arise naturally on Mars, it does not mean that it could not have existed there. According to Professor Paul Davies of the University of Adelaide, Australia, life forms could have been transferred between the earth and Mars in wreckage (broke pieces) created by the impact of comet(彗星) and small planets on the surface of the two planets.
Even today, about 500 tons of material from Mars lands on earth every year. It is mainly in the form of the dust but occasionally a larger chunk(厚片，大块) strikes the earth. In 1911, a piece of Martian rock crashed in Egypt, killing a dog. According to Professor Davies, it is in these chunks of rock, which were much larger and more frequent in the past that life forms could have been transported from planet to planet.
“But how could these life forms have survived their journey through space?” says Paul Davies, “The difficulty in believing this theory is that a bacterium on its own in space has to struggle itself not only against cold but also against deadly cosmic (宇宙的) radiation. But wrapped in a rock the situation is different. A rock ten meters across would shield life inside it from a lot of radiation and the temperature might only be minus 10 or 20 degrees, the sort of thing we have on earth.”
1. Where do some scientists suppose life probably come from? (2’) (No more than 6 words)
2.What does Professor Paul Davies believe? (2’) (No more than 6 words)
3. Why could life survive when transferred from one planet to another? (3’) (No more than 12 words)
4. List at least two differences about Mars between the past and now. (3’) (No more than 16 words)
随着新课堂改革的进一步深入，关于“课堂中到底是以教师为中心还是以学生为中心”仍然是讨论的一个热点，请你以自己的实际情况为依据，按照下列提示写一篇文章。
提示：1. 表明观点：你更喜欢哪种课堂模式；
2. 说明理由；
3. 总结全文。
参考词汇：以教师为中心 teacher-centered
以学生为中心 student-centered
注意：1. 词数不少于120；
2. 开头已写好，不计入总词数。
Although in the past, the majority of classes were teacher-centered…
From bankers to factory staff, employees in the west face the bleak prospect of losing their jobs as a global recession starts to bite. For colleagues in the East the pain is more likely to come through a pay cut.
Human resource experts say cultural differences explain why Asian firms try harder to keep jobs in difficult times, which will stop unemployment and may help keep Asian economies afloat at a time of slowing exports.
The East Asian attitude may also make it easier for firms to recover quickly from the economic downturn since they will not need to rehire or train new staff, leaving some experts predicting Western shift to Eastern flexibility.
“In the Confucian attitude, the right thing to do is to share the burden. There is the sense of collective responsibility whereas in the west, it’s more about the individual survival,” said Michael Benotlel, associate professor of organizational behavior at Singapore Management University.
Steven Pang, Asian Regional director for Aquent, a headhunting firm, said in many East Asian companies there was an responsibility “ to take care of the members of the family and go through the pain together” even if that meant causing losses.
Us firms from General Motors to Goldman Sachs plan to lay off workers by the thousands. But at the Asian units of Western multinationals, jobs cuts will probably be less severe.
Japan’s jobless rate was 4 percent in September, up from 3.8 percent in January, while Hong Kong’s was flat at 3.4 percent. But US unemployment is expected to have jumped to 6.3 percent last month from below 5 percent in January.
Experts say that while there are noticeable differences in labor practices in East
and West, the gap will narrow as more firms become more multinational and competition forces firms to adopt the best practices of rivals from abroad.
1.According to the passage, what does “to share the burden” mean?
( less than 6 words)
____________________________________________________________________
2. Why would firms in the west lay off workers when facing a bleak prospect?
( no more than 5 words)
____________________________________________________________________
3.Why is it easier for the East Asian firms to recover quickly from the economic downturn? (no more than 12 words)
____________________________________________________________________
4.What’s the passage talking about? (no more than 15 words)
____________________________________________________________________
As the US wakes up to China’s rising status (地位) as an economic and strategic competitor, US parents are urging their children to learn Chinese, reports Julian Borger.
The US is being swept by a rush to learn Mandarin (普通话) -- from wealthy New York mothers hiring Chinese nannies (保姆) for their small children to a defence department education project in Oregon.
The forces driving Mandarin’s momentum (势头) are parental ambition for children facing a future in which China is almost certain to be a major player, and the government is worried about that America may get left behind in that new world.
The bottleneck is the supply of teachers. Mandarin instructors are difficult to import and difficult to train. There are visa problems in bringing over teachers from China but the biggest barrier is cultural. Teaching in Asia is generally done by rote and the change to western, interactive styles of instruction can be a large leap（跳越）.
On the other hand, it requires enormous firmness for westerners to learn a language like Chinese, with its thousands of written characters. According to the Asia Society in New York, all of America’s teacher-training institutions turn out only a couple of dozen homegrown Mandarin teachers.
One way to ease the shortage is to find native Mandarin speakers and use fast-track methods to train them. However, the majority of Chinese-Americans grew up speaking Cantonese, the dialect（方言）spoken in Hong Kong, where their parents came from. Many are themselves signing on as Mandarin students at the private language schools springing up on the west coast.
Title : in the USA
You are watching a film in which two men are having a fight. They hit one another hard. At the start they only fight with their fists. But soon they begin hitting one another over the heads with chairs. And so it goes on until one of the men crashes(撞击） through a window and falls thirty feet to the ground below. He is dead！Of course he isn't really dead. With any luck he isn't even hurt. Why? Because the men who fall out of high windows or jump from fast moving trains, who crash cars and run out of them even when they catch fire, are professionals. They do this for a living. These men are called stuntmen. That is to say, they perform tricks. There are two sides to their work. They actually do most of the things you see on the screen. For example, they fall from a high building. However, they do not fall on to hard ground but on to empty cardboard boxes covered with a mattress（床垫）. Again, when they hit one another with chairs, the chairs are made of soft wood and when they crash through windows, the glass is made of sugar! But although their work depends on trick of this sort, it also requires a high degree of skill and training. Often a stuntman’s success depends on careful timing. For example, when he is "blown up" in a battle scene, he has to jump out of the way of the explosion just at the right moment.
Naturally stuntmen are well paid for their work, but they lead dangerous lives. They often get seriously injured, and sometimes killed. A Norwegian stuntman, for example, skied over the edge of a cliff（悬崖）a thousand feet high. His parachute（降落伞）failed to open, and he was killed. In spite of all the risks, this is no longer a profession for men only. Men no longer dress up as women when actresses have to perform some dangerous action. For nowadays there are stuntgirls too.
1. Stuntmen are those who ______.
A. often dress up as actors
B. prefer to lead dangerous lives
C. often perform seemingly dangerous actions
D. often fight each other for their lives
2.Stuntmen earn their living by ______.
A. playing their dirty tricks B. selling their special skills
C. jumping out of high windows D. jumping from fast moving trains
3. When a stuntman falls from a high building, ______.
A. he needs little protection B. he will be covered with a mattress
C. his life is endangered D. his safety is generally all right
4.Which of the following is the main factor of a successful performance?
A. Strength. B. Exactness. C. Speed. D. Carefulness
5.What can be inferred from the author’s example of the Norwegian stuntman?
A. Sometimes an accident can occur to a stuntman.
B. The percentage of serious accidents is high.
C. Parachutes must be of good quality.
D. The cliff is too high.
This is a dangerous world we live in. The number of murders goes up every year, people are dying of cancer, more people contract HIV, more teens are using drugs, ect. You know this because you’ve heard all the statistics on the news and in the paper. But do you really have an accurate idea what they mean? The numbers are going up, but how do they compare to the growth in population? Are more cases of these diseases being reported because of better testing techniques, or are the diseases more common? The fact is that without knowing the background statistics mean very little.
This growing trend of reporting only part of the information is becoming dangerous. For example, several years ago a high school student reported the dangers of the chemical known as dihydrogen monoxide. This chemical, found in most cancerous tumors, is often found in the blood of people drunk on alcohol, and causes complete physical and mental dependence for those who take the chemical even once. After reading his report, more than 75% of his Advanced Placement Chemistry class voted to forbid this dangerous chemical! Every one of the above statement is true, yet this chemical is necessary to all life on earth. The students made a mistake because they voted knowing only a few statements and statistics, rather than the chemical’s full background.
The point of this article is that one should be aware of what is and is not being said. When one finds a new fact or number, one should try to consider other important information before forming an opinion with only half-truths. Always remember that the author is trying to convince you of his or her own view, and will leave our information that is different from his view. For example, look again at the statistics that suggest skiing is safe. Only 32 people die each year when skiing, while 897 die from lightening strikes, but which is really more dangerous? If you think more about it, you will realize far fewer people go skiing each year than the number of people in danger of a lightning strike. When you think about it again, skiing is more dangerous than you might at first think when looking at the statistics. If we teenagers are to be left in this world, we had better be able to think critically, and form our own views, rather than be easily persuaded by another’s. To be warned is just to be prepared.
1.What’s the author’s attitude towards the growing trend of reporting only part of the
information?
Disapproving B. Positive C. Indifferent D. Dangerous
2.In the first paragraph, what does the writer suggest?
A. We are now living in a dangerous world.
B. We get a lot of false statistics from the media.
C. There are around us more and more murders diseases, ect.
D. Statistics alone without full background don’t give us an accurate picture of things.
3.What’s the purpose of the writer’s using the two examples in the second paragraph?
A. To argue that high school students are easily persuaded.
B. To prove what is necessary to us might be dangerous.
C. To show the danger of reporting only part of the information.
D. To warn us of the harmful substance around us.
4.Relative information is often left out because ___________________.
A. it is not important
B. the author is trying to show what he or she says is true
C. readers will consider other important information
D. readers are able to form an opinion with half-truths
5.What can we learn from the passage?
A. Some measures must be taken to protect our dangerous world.
B. The growing trend of reporting only half-truths is getting out of control.
C. Teenagers ought to improve their ability of telling right from wrong.
D. We should learn to think critically and look at problems from all sides.
