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If you are like most international students, you are probably pretty comfortable reading and writing in English, but not as comfortable with listening and speaking in the language. 1.
Make friends with American students. Many international students end up making friends with a lot of — or only — other international students. 2. Hanging out with natives not only naturally pushes you to improve your spoken English, but also helps you pick up cultural and social information.
Learn from American friends. Tell your American friends that you are trying to improve your listening and speaking skills, and would like them to help you. If you pronounce a word incorrectly, or misuse an idiom, you want them to tell you. 3.
Increase your knowledge. 4. If you have known about the topics that are likely to be discussed in conversation, you have a much better chance of understanding people when they talk, and of being able to express yourself well.
5. If you have to explain something to someone, you have a strong desire to pronounce everything as well as you can, and find other ways to explain yourself. Finally, this becomes a good habit. Many people have asked me how I learned to speak English fluently, and I think it is because of my being a math teacher in college for years.
A. I don’t think this is a good idea.
B. You will learn much faster this way.
C. If possible, become a teacher at your school.
D. It’s a win-win opportunity for international students.
E. Read books, keep up with news and watch popular shows and movies.
F. It’s a good way to make some extra cash while improving your English.
G. Below are some tips to help you to improve your conversational skills.
In the Internet age, speed reading is a necessary and important skill. We skim over articles and e-mails to try to get key words and the main idea of the text. With so much information through our electronic devices (电子设备), it would be impossible to get through everything if we read word by word, line by line. However, a new trend calls on people to enjoy reading slowly.
A recent story from The Wall Street Journal reported on a book club in Wellington, New Zealand, where members meet in a café and turn off their smartphones. They sit back in comfortable chairs and read in silence for an hour.
Unlike typical book clubs, the point of the slow reading club isn’t to exchange ideas about certain books, but to get away from electronic devices and read in a quiet, relaxed environment. According to the story, the Wellington book club is just one example of a movement started by book lovers who miss the traditional way of reading.
Traditional readers, like Maura Kelly, say a regular reading habit sharpens the mind, improves concentration, reduces stress levels and deepens the ability to understand others. Some of these benefits have been backed up by science. For example, a study of 300 elderly people published by the journal Neurology last year showed that adults who take part in activities that use their brain, such as reading, suffer less memory loss as they get older. Another study published last year in Science showed that reading novels helps people understand others’ mental states and beliefs — a key skill in building relationships.
Yet technology has made us less careful readers. Computer and phone screens have changed our reading patterns from the top-to-bottom, left-to-right reading order we traditionally used, to a wild skimming pattern as we hunt for important words and information. Reading text online that has many links to other web pages also leads to weaker comprehension than reading plain text. The Internet may have made us stupider, says British journalist Patrick Kingsley, only half joking. Because of the Internet, he says we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual tidbits (花边新闻), but we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, think and connect all these facts with each other.
1.Speed reading is a necessary and important skill in the Internet age because people ______.
A. no longer read word by word, line by line
B. have to get the meaning faster
C. have much more information to read
D. must use their smartphones more frequently
2.Members of the Wellington book club are expected to ______.
A. make coffee for the other members
B. read peacefully for an hour
C. regularly exchange ideas about books
D. turn off their smartphones for sleeping
3.According to the Neurology study, who is most likely to suffer memory loss?
A. A 79-year-old woman who reads regularly.
B. A 17-year-old middle school student who seldom reads.
C. A healthy 24-year-old university graduate who often plays games.
D. A 65-year-old man who rarely reads.
4.The last paragraph is written to ______.
A. explain the secrets of others’ minds
B. describe the problems caused by electronic reading
C. call on people to read more about science
D. encourage people to read as slowly as possible
Great white sharks! Just hearing that name makes many people’s hair stand on end. In reality, these big fish have more to fear from us than we do from them. For many years, people killed countless great white sharks in the waters around the United States.
But thanks to conservation (保护) efforts, great whites are making a comeback in the U.S. Two recent studies show that the population of these sharks is rising along the east and west coast.
Why is the growing population of a killer fish something to celebrate? “When you fish too many of them, you start to lose balance in the environment,” says shark researcher Tobey Curtis. As the biggest killer, sharks help keep the populations of fish, seals, and other creatures they eat from growing too large.
In spite of their importance, great white sharks had long been hunted for their meat and their fins (鳍). Then, in 1997, the U.S. government passed a law that didn’t allow the hunting of great whites. Afterwards, the numbers of these sharks in the U.S. waters started to increase.
The law wasn’t the only thing that has helped great whites. Conservationists have also played a part in the sharks’ comeback. The research group OCEARCH is using a method called tagging (加标签) to help change people’s attitudes about great white. They let the public follow each shark as it travels the world’s oceans. OCEARCH also gives each tagged shark a name to help people form a closer connection with the big fish.
The group’s most well-known shark is named Katharine. She was tagged last year near Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Since then, thousands of people have tracked Katharine’s movements on Twitter and the OCEARCH website.
This helps people see sharks in a new way. Chris Fischer, the founder of OCEARCH believes learning to appreciate great whites will encourage people to do more to protect them.
1.The underlined part “makes many people’s hair stand on end” in Paragraph 1 can best be replaced by______.
A. worries many people B. bores many people
C. frightens many people D. interests many people
2.The law passed in 1997 ______.
A. seemed very helpful
B. let scientists down
C. needed to be changed
D. made people like great whites
3.Katharine’s example is used to show that ______.
A. great whites are in fact lovely animals
B. the OCEARCH website has a lot of visitors
C. the number of great whites is growing quickly
D. OCEARCH help people get closer to great whites
4.The main purpose of the passage is to ______.
A. introduce an experiment result
B. make an advertisement for OCEARCH
C. remind us that big killers are dying out
D. inform us that great whites are making a comeback
The worst days of any summer are the rainy ones. We spend all year looking forward to nice weather and long, hot days. In winter, with its cloudy days and bitter cold, we dream of those days at the beach, lying on the sand and enjoying the bright and burning sun. And then, summer comes, and it rains.
As a child, I would wake up to rainy summer days and come close to crying. It wasn’t fair. We suffered through months of school and experienced bad weather for those short ten weeks of freedom.
On those rainy summer days, I had nothing fun to do and could only sit inside, staring out at the rain like a bird in a cage. I was an only child, so there was no one else to play with. My father worked from home, so I was not truly alone, but he could not actively play with me since he was at work. It was those days that I would watch whatever was on television or read any books that I could find lying around. I’d pray each night that the rain would not be there the next day.
As an adult, though, my opinion of summer rain has changed. When you have to work every day, summer is not as exciting. Everything seems uninteresting. Such a mindset makes you cheer for anything new or different. I spend the winter dreaming of summer and the summer dreaming of winter. When summer comes, I hate how hot it is. And then I look forward to the rain, because the rain brings with it a cold front, which makes me comfortable. Rainy days are still the worst days of the summer, but summer rain today means positively beautiful — and quite cooler — weather tomorrow.
1.When the author was a child, he ______.
A. liked staying indoors B. hated rainy days
C. dreamed on summer days D. preferred cooler weather
2.We can learn from the passage that the author ______.
A. could enjoy the brilliant sun in winter
B. preferred reading to playing outside
C. had no brothers or sisters
D. was often left alone at home
3.As an adult, the author views summer rain differently because ______.
A. rain makes the weather cooler
B. his summer holiday is very short
C. he knows it won’t last long
D. he can better deal with his spare time
My wife and I have always been friendly with the clerks at the local store. I don’t think many people appreciate what a difficult job these clerks have. They work for a little money and I often wonder how they make ends meet.
One of the clerks, Charlie, was always wearing his glasses but he didn’t one day. I asked him about it and he said they’d been out of order and that he couldn’t afford a new pair. His family needed money. It was clear that he was having a difficult time.
We wanted to help him, so we turned to our own eye doctor for help with a plan. We had his secretary contact him, asking him to come in for an eye exam for free. We told the doctor to let him order whatever glasses he wanted and that we would pay for them. Although Charlie questioned what was going on, the doctor just told him that someone had offered the money for his new glasses. When we went in to pay the bill, the doctor told us he was touched by our idea so that he waived the exam fee and only charged us for half the price of the glasses!
It was so wonderful to see Charlie in his new glasses and he enjoyed telling all the regular customers how the gift came about. I’m sure that upon hearing his story, ideas of kindness may have come in the minds of many people.
1.Why didn’t the clerk Charlie wear glasses one day?
A. It was very warm and fine.
B. His glasses were missing.
C. His old glasses were broken.
D. He forgot to wear his glasses.
2.From the passage, we can infer that ______.
A. Charlie was a young man with skills
B. Charlie knew who paid the money for the new glasses
C. Charlie completely accepted the money for the new glasses
D. Charlie couldn’t support his family with enough money
3.The underlined word “waived” in the third paragraph can be replaced by ______.
A. took up B. gave up
C. cut down D. put off
4.Which of the following could be the best title for the passage?
A. Customers’ Gift to an Employee
B. A Friendly Clerk — Charlie
C. The Wonderful Feeling of Helping others
D. An Expensive Pair of Glasses
The number of people present at the meeting ______ about one thousand, a large number of whom ______ experts from abroad.
A. was; was B. was; were
C. were; were D. were; was
