Something roared like thunder. The earth shook a little and we heard the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. ‘‘Father!” Hassan cried. We sprung to our feet and raced out of the living room.
“Father! What’s that sound?” Hassan screamed, his hands outstretched toward Ali. Ali wrapped his arms around us. A white light flashed and lit the sky in silver. It flashed again and was followed by rapid sharp sounds of gunfire.
“They’re hunting ducks, ” Ali said in a hoarse voice. “They hunt ducks at night, you know. Don't be afraid.”
A siren(汽笛）went off in the distance. Somewhere glass broke and someone shouted. I heard people on the street, woken up from sleep. Hassan was crying. Ali pulled him close and held him with tenderness.
We stayed huddled (蜷缩）that way until the early hours of the morning. The shootings and explosions had lasted less than an hour, but they had frightened us badly, because none of us had ever heard gunshots in the streets. They were foreign sounds to us then. The generations of Afghan children whose ears would know nothing but the sounds of the bombs and gunfire were not yet born. Huddled together in the dining room and waiting for the sun to rise, none of us had any idea that a way of life had ended. The end came when Russian tanks were rolling into the very same streets where Hassan and I played, bringing the death of the Afghanistan I knew and marking the start of a still ongoing era of bloodletting.
Just before the sunrise, Baba’s car pulled into the driveway. His door slammed shut and his running footsteps pounded the stairs. Then he appeared in the doorway and I saw something on his face. Something I didn’t recognize right away because I’d never seen it before: fear. “Amir! Hassan!” He cried as he ran to us, opening his arms wide. “They blocked all the roads and the telephone didn’t work. I was so worried!”
We let him wrap us in his arms and, for a brief moment, I was glad about whatever had happened that night.
1.Who is the author of this passage?
A. Amir. B. Ali. C. Baba. D. Hassan.
2.By saying “They’re hunting ducks”, Ali _______.
A. told the children the truth B. played a joke on the children
C. tried to calm the children D. cheered the children up
3.We can infer from the passage that _______.
A. there were thunderstorms that night
B. Afghan children were used to the war
C. people on the street shouted and broke the windows
D. that night was the end of people's peaceful life
4.From the last sentence of the passage, we know _______.
A. Baba's arms gave the author temporary comfort and joy
B. there was a chance that a world in peace was to come
C. what happened that night seemed nothing to the author
D. the author was glad to see his father come home safe
Men and women are still treated unequally in the workplace. Women continue to earn less, on average, for the same performance. Research has shown that both conscious(有意识的) and subconscious biases (偏见) contribute to this problem. But we’ve discovered another source of inequality: Women often don’t get what they want and deserve because they don’t ask for it. In three separate studies, we found that men are more likely than women to negotiate for what they want.
The first study found that the starting salaries of male MBAs who had recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon were 7.6%, or almost $4,000, higher on average than those of female MBAs from the same program. That’s because most of the women had simply accepted the employer’s salary offer; in fact, only 7% had attempted to negotiate. But 57% of their male counterparts--or eight times as many men as women—had asked for more.
Another study tested this gender difference in the lab. Subjects were told that they would be observed playing a word game and that they would be paid between $3 and $10 for playing. After each subject completed the task, an experimenter thanked the participant and said, “Here’s $3. Is $3 OK?” For the men, it was not OK, and they said so. Their requests for more money are nine times as many as the women’s.
The largest of the three studies surveyed several hundred people over the Internet, asking them about the most recent negotiations they’d attempted or started and when they expected to negotiate next. The study showed that men place themselves in negotiation situations much more often than women do.
There are several reasons accounting for the phenomenon. First, women often are taught from an early age not to promote their own interests and to focus instead on the needs of others. The messages girls receive—from parents, teachers, other children, the media, and society in general—can be so powerful that when they grow up they may not realize that they’ve made this behavior part of them, or they may realize it but not understand how it affects their willingness to negotiate. Women tend to think that they will be recognized and rewarded for working hard and doing a good job. Unlike men, they haven’t been taught that they can ask for more.
1.According to this passage, what causes the inequality in the workplace?
A. social bias
B. women’s poorer working ability
C. women’s worse academic background
D. women’s less negotiating
2.Which can be the result of the following survey, according to Para 4?
When do you expect to negotiate next?
3.Which of the following statements is NOT true?
A. Women are more likely to accept the employer’s salary offer.
B. Men tend to ask for more money than woman.
C. Women care more about other’s interest instead of themselves’.
D. Men believe that the better they work, the better they’re paid.
4.What will be discussed in the following paragraph?
A. The suggestions given to women.
B. The warnings to men.
C. Another reason for women’s not asking.
D. Another reason for men’s asking.
Below is a web page from http://www.parents.com/.
Kid of the Year Photo Competition
Enter your kid’s photo today and win! We’re giving away 52 weekly $250 prizes from Readers’ Choice votes. PLUS our editors will select one entry to win our grand prize of $7,000.
Official Competition Rules
No purchase necessary to enter or win.
The Kid of the Year Photo Competition entry period begins at 12:00 a.m. January 23, 2011, and ends January 21, 2012 (“Entry Period”). Entries must arrive by 9:00 p.m. on January 21, 2012 (“Entry Deadline”). Entries will not be acknowledged or returned.
SPONSOR(赞助商): Meredith Corporation, 1716 Locust Street, Des Moines, Iowa.
ENTRY: There will be two methods of entry.
Share My Entry:
Visit http://www.parents.com/photos/photo-contests-1/kid-of-the-year/ and click the button to enter.
Visit http://Facebook.com/ParentsMagazine and click the Kid of 2011 tab.
Then complete the registration form and follow the instructions to upload one album of up to six photos of your child aged three months to eight years. You may provide one description and one album title that will be applied to all photos. Photos, without any brand names or trademarks, must be taken by participants, non-professional, unpublished and may not have won any prize or award. Photos must be .jpeg or .bmp image formats (格式) and cannot be over 3 MB.
This promotion is in no way sponsored, supported or run by, or associated with Facebook. You are providing your information to Parents Magazine and not to Facebook. The information you provide will only be used to run the promotion and register for Parents.com.
LIMIT: One entry per family, per child, per week. One weekly prize per child. For entries of more than one child in a family, the entry process must be completed separately for each child. No group entries.
1.We can learn from the passage that ___________.
A. you should buy something first before you enter the contest
B. your entry will not be returned even if you don’t win the contest
C. you should send your entry before 9:00 p.m. on January 21, 2011
D. the editors of the contest will decide who will win the 20,000 dollars in prizes
2.Linda, a mother with seven-year-old twins, wants to enter the competition. She must ___________.
A. provide a description and an album title for the kid’s photos
B. go to Meredith Corporation to fill out the registration forms
C. complete the entry process separately for each of her kids
D. provide the information to Facebook if she chooses Facebook Entry
3.To enter the competition, photos must ___________.
A. be taken by non-professional participants
B. have won some prize or award
C. contain brand names or trademarks
D. contain parents’ personal information
4.The purpose of the passage is ___________.
A. to advertise the website Facebook. com
B. to attract photographers’ interest in a photo contest
C. to introduce two methods of entering a photo contest
D. to encourage parents with children to enter a photo contest
I lost my sight when I was four by falling off a box car in a freight（货物）yard in Atlantic City. Now I am thirty two. I can slightly remember what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a disaster can do strange things to people. I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn’t been blind. I don’t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.
Life, I believe, asks constant adjustments to reality. The adjustment is never easy. I was totally confused and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me—a potential to live, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself, I mean: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the intricate（错综复杂的） pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.
It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was making fun of me and I was hurt. “I can’t use this.” I said. “Take it with you,” he urged me, “and roll it around.” The words stuck in my head. “Roll it around!” By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a new kind of baseball. We called it ground ball.
All my life I have set a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good trying for something that I knew at the start was out of reach. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.
1.We can learn from the beginning of the passage that _______
A. the author lost his sight because of a car crash.
B. the author wouldn’t love life if the disaster didn’t happen.
C. the disaster made the author appreciate what he had.
D. the disaster strengthened the author’s desire to see.
2.What’s the most difficult thing for the author?
A. How to adjust himself to reality.
B. Building up assurance that he can find his place in life.
C. Learning to manage his life alone.
D. How to invent a new kind of baseball.
3.According to the context, “a chair rocker on the front porch” in paragraph 3 means that the author _________.
A. would sit in a rocking chair and enjoy his life.
B. would be unable to move and stay in a rocking chair.
C. would lose his will to struggle against difficulties.
D. would sit in a chair and stay at home.
4.What is the best title for the passage?
A. A Miserable Life B. Struggle Against Difficulties
C. A Disaster Makes a Strong Person D. An Unforgettable Experience
When Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, it was a revolution in communication. For the first time, people could talk to each other over great distances almost as clearly as if they were in the same room. Nowadays, though, we increasingly use Bell’s invention for taking photographs, accessing the internet, or watching video clips, rather than talking. Over the last two decades a new means of spoken communication has appeared: the mobile phone.
The first real mobile telephone call was made in 1973 by Dr Martin Cooper, the scientist who invented the modem mobile handset（手机）. Within a decade, mobile phones became available to the public. The streets of modem cities began to feature sharp-suited characters shouting into giant plastic bricks. In Britain the mobile phone quickly became the same with the “yuppie”, the new type of young urban professionals who carried the expensive handsets as status symbols. Around this time many of us said that we would never own a mobile phone.
But in the mid-90s, something happened. Cheaper handsets and cheaper calling rates meant that, almost overnight, it seemed that everyone had a mobile phone. And the giant plastic bricks of the 80s had changed into smooth little objects that fitted nicely into pockets and bags.
Moreover, people’s timekeeping changed. Younger readers will be amazed to know that, not long ago, people made spoken arrangements to meet at a certain place at a certain time. But later Meeting time became approximate under the new order of communication: the Short Message Service （SMS） or text message. Going to be late? Send a text message! It takes much less effort than arriving on time, and it’s much less awkward than explaining your lateness face to face and the text message has changed the way we write in English. Traditional rules of grammar and spelling are much less important when you’re sitting on the bus, hurriedly typing “Will B 15mm late - C U @ the bar. Sorry! -).”
Alexander Graham Bell would be amazed if he could see how far the science of telephony has progressed in less than 150 years. If he were around today, he might say “That’s gr8! But I’m v busy rite now. Will call U 2nite.”
1.What does the underlined part in Para.2 refer to?
A. Houses of modern cities. B. Sharp-suited characters.
C. New type of professionals. D. Mobile phones.
2.According to Paragraph 4, why did Meeting time become approximate?
A. People were more likely to be late for their meeting.
B. SMS made it easier to inform each other.
C. Young people don’t like unchanging things.
D. Traditional customs were dying out.
3.If you want to meet your friend at the school gate this evening, which of the following message can you send him?
A. Call U@ SKUg8 2nite. B. IM2BZ2CU 2nite.
C. CU@ the bar g8 2nite. D. W84U@ SKUg8 2nite.
4.What does the passage mainly tell us about?
A. Alexander Graham’s invention.
B. SMS as a new way of communication.
C. New functions of the mobile telephone.
D. The development of the mobile phone.
The Healing
Jim and his wife, Connie, were shocked by the loss of their four-month-old son—Joshua, whose life was taken by SIDS—sudden infant death syndrome.
Thirty hours ago, Jim drove to the baby-sitter’s home to Joshua. It was a trip, like the one he made five days every week. He arrived, and little Joshua could not be from his nap. The next few hours were a time of life and death: the racing ambulance, swift-moving doctors and nurse. But 12 hours later, at Children’s Hospital, the doctors had exhausted（用尽） all , little Joshua was gone. Yes, they wanted of Joshua’s usable organs to be donated. That was not a decision for Jim and Connie, a loving and couple.
The next morning dawned and many things had to be arranged. Telephone calls and funeral plans. one point Jim realized he needed a .When Jim settled into the chair the barber’s, he began to the past hours, trying to some sense of it all. had Joshua, their first-born, the child they had waited so long for, been taken so soon….He had begun his life. The question kept coming, and the pain in Jim’s heart just him.
While talking with the barber, Jim mentioned the organ donations, looking at his watch, “They are transplanting one of his heart valves（瓣膜）right now.”
The stopped and stood motionless. Finally she spoke, but it was only a whisper. “You’re not going to believe this. But about an hour ago the customer sitting in this chair wanted me to hurry she could get to Children’s Hospital. She here so full of joy. Her prayers had been answered. Today her baby granddaughter is receiving a needed transplant—a heart valve.”
Jim’s healing began.
1.A. pick out B. pick up C. set out D. set up
2.A. routine B. annual C. average D. difficult
3.A. called B. disturbed C. awakened D. survived
4.A. though B. since C. because D. as
5.A. medicine B. strength C. attempts D. spirits
6.A. part B. few C. some D. wise
7.A. giving B. tiring C. boring D. thinking
8.A. Of B. In C. On D. At
9.A. haircut B. break C. donation D. decision
10.A. with B. at C. by D. near
11.A. decide on B. reflect on C. keep on D. focus on
12.A. get B. take C. hold D. make
13.A. How B. Why C. Whether D. If
14.A. barely B. nearly C. seldom D. almost
15.A. covered B. drew C. enveloped D. choked
16.A. hairdresser B. customer C. father D. parent
17.A. since B. as C. so D. and
18.A. arrived B. left C. stayed D. sat
19.A. desperately B. deadly C. clearly D. obviously
