Luckily some friends living locally came to visit me regularly and I went home every weekend, or I________mad.
A.was going B.would have gone
C.would go D.had gone
—I'm going to spend my holiday abroad.Can you take care of my cat?
—________.
A.You have my word B.Go ahead
C.I just can't help it D.It was my pleasure
Have you thought about the problem from every________?You can never be too careful!
A.angle B.range
C.level D.individual
A survey________public last month shows that Japan moves behind other nations in teaching youngsters right from wrong.
A.was made B.was making
C.made D.being made
All of us, at some point, experience nights where we have difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep. The National Institute of Health estimates that one in three adults has bouts of infrequent sleeplessness or insomnia, while one in 10 sufferes from chronic insomnia. Being unable to get a good night's sleep can cause disruptions in our daytoday life. But persistent sleeplessness can lead to physical and emotional health problems.
The body needs sleep to rejuvenate itself and rebuild the cells necessary to keep the immune system strong and the brain functioning properly. Everyone's body requires a different amount of sleep to accomplish these goals. The average amount of sleep needed by an adult is around seven or eight hours a night. However, some people can function quite well with less than that, while others need more to be at peak performance.
Sleeplessness can be caused by many different things. Most people experience sleeplessness for a short period of time due to an outside stimulus such as stress, improper diet, a poor sleeping environment or an acute medical concern such as the flu. Once the stimulus passes, the ability to sleep will usually return. Chronic sleeplessness may be caused by ongoing health concerns such as the physical pain of arthritis or the emotional pain of anxiety and depression.
Prolonged sleeplessness can have a negative effect on the way the body performs daily tasks. Those that suffer from sleepless nights may find themselves feeling drowsy or fatigued during the day. The ability to concentrate or focus on a task diminishes and you are less mentally alert. Because the body needs sleep to support a healthy immune system, those that are sleepdeprived may be more susceptible to both acute and chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure and diabetes.
Sleeplessness not only takes a toll on your physical self but also your emotional wellbeing. Being unable to sleep well for a few nights may only produce minor irritability. However, if sleeplessness becomes chronic, the price could be much higher in the form of anxiety, depression and possibly substance abuse. Those with chronic sleeplessness may turn to controlled substances such as sleeping pills and alcohol to aid them in their quest for a good night's sleep.
There are numerous home remedies for mild sleeplessness. Prepare your body for sleep by avoiding caffeinated drinks such as tea or coffee before bed. Don't exercise strenuously before bedtime; instead do something relaxing such as meditate or take a warm bath. Go to bed only when you feel sleepy and not because of a selfappointed bedtime.Finally, create a favorable sleeping environment by removing stimulants from your bedroom such as extra lighting or a television. If you still cannot find relief, it may be time to visit your physician for help. A sleep study will be done that can help to determine the cause of the sleeplessness and possible solutions.
Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel.And he surely deserves additional praise:the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
I say clever because antislavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War.H.B.Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is only the most famous example.These early stories dealt directly with slavery.With minor exceptions,Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely.He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
Again and again,in the postwar years,Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race.Consider the most controversial,at least today,of Twain's novels,Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn,Twain's most widely read tale.Once upon a time,people hated the book because it struck them as rude.Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums(贫民窟).”More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim,the escaped slave,and many occurences of the word nigger.(The term Nigger Jim,for which the novel is often severely criticized,never appears in it.)
But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point.The novel is strongly antislavery.Jim's search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic.As J.Chadwick has pointed out,the character of Jim was a first in American fiction—a recognition that the slave had two personalities,“the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual:Jim,the father and the man.”
There is much more.Twain's mystery novel Pudd'nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day.Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior(低等的)to whites,especially in intelligence,Twain's tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth.A slave gave birth to her master's baby and,for fear that the child should be sold South,switched him for the master's baby by his wife.The slave's lightskinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slaveholding class.The master's wife's baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
The point was difficult to miss:nurture(养育),not nature,was the key to social status.The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice—manner of speech,for example—were,to Twain,indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
Twain's racial tone was not perfect.One is left uneasy,for example,by the lengthy passage in his autobiography(自传)about how much he loved what were called“nigger shows”in his youth—mostly with white men performing in blackface—and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them.Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality.His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
Was Twain a racist?Asking the question in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln.If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the“wisdom”of the considered moral judgments of the present,we will find nothing but error.Lincoln,who believed the black man the inferior of the white,fought and won a war to free him.And Twain,raised in a slave state,briefly a soldier,and inventor of Jim,may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.
1.How do Twain's novels on slavery differ from Stowe's?
A.Twain was more willng to deal with racism.
B.Twain's attack on racism was much less open.
C.Twain's themes seemed to agree with plots.
D.Twain was openly concerned with racism.
2.Recent criticism of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn arose partly from its________.
A.target readers at the bottom
B.antislavery attitude
C.rather impolite language
D.frequent use of “nigger”
3.What best proves Twain's antislavery stand according to the author?
A.Jim's search for his family was described in detail.
B.The slave's voice was first heard in American novels.
C.Jim grew up into a man and a father in the white culture.
D.Twain suspected that the slaves were less intelligent.
4.The story of two babies switched mainly indicates that________.
A.slaves were forced to give up their babies to their masters
B.slaves' babies could pick up slaveholders' way of speaking
C.blacks' social position was shaped by how they were brought up
D.blacks were born with certain features of prejudice
5.What does the underlined word “they” in Paragraph 7 refer to?
A.The attacks. B.Slavery and prejudice.
C.White men. D.The shows.
6.What does the author mainly argue for?
A.Twain had done more than his contemporary writers to attack racism.
B.Twain was an admirable figure comparable to Abraham Lincoln.
C.Twain's works had been banned on unreasonable grounds.
D.Twain's works should be read from a historical point of view.