Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made. In my early 20s, I hardly went to bed before midnight, and I would always get up late the next morning.
But after a while I couldn’t ignore the high relationship between success and rising early. On those rare occasions where I did get up early, I noticed that my productivity was always higher. So I set out to become a habitual early riser. But whenever my alarm went off, my first thought was always to stop that noise and go back to sleep. Eventually some sleep research showed that my strategy was wrong. The most common wrong strategy is this: supposing you’re going to get up earlier, you’d better go to bed earlier. It sounds very reasonable, but will usually fail.
There are two main schools of thought on sleep patterns. One is that you should go to bed and get up at the same time every day. The second school says you should go to bed when you’re tired and get up when you naturally wake up. However, I have found both are wrong if you care about productivity. If you sleep at fixed hours, you’ll sometimes go to bed when you aren’t sleepy enough. You’re wasting time lying in bed awake.
My solution is to combine both methods. I go to bed when I’m sleepy and get up with an alarm clock at a fixed time. So I always get up at the same time (in my case 5 a.m.), but I go to bed at different times every night.
However, going to bed only when I’m sleepy, and getting up at a fixed time every morning are my ways. If you want to become an early riser, you can try your own.
1.Why did the author want to become a habitual early riser?
A. Because he / she found that the productivity was higher.
B. Because he / she wanted to do morning exercise.
C. Because he / she wanted to test which school is better.
D. Because he / she wanted to have more sleep time.
2.The author experienced all the following EXCEPT ________.
A. going to bed after midnight
B. asking scholars for advice on sleeping habits
C. getting up early occasionally
D. pressing off the alarm to go on sleeping
3.According to the passage, the underlined phrase refers to ___________.
A. People who stays up late until the next morning
B. People who feel sleepy in the morning
C. People who get up early in the morning
D. People whose productivity is the highest in the morning
4.The passage is mainly about ________.
A. main schools of thought on sleep patterns
B. how to have a good sleep
C. wrong strategies for getting up early
D. how to become an early riser
书面表达
请阅读下面短文，并按照要求用英语写一篇150词左右的文章。
Wishing Away
Have you ever noticed how people always want to be something they’re not?
Tall want to be short, young long to age, single dream of marriage, and no matter what body shape, everyone wants to lose at least another five pounds.
It’s almost like a natural preoccupation (天性), this wishing away of our lives.
Think about it. When was the last time you heard someone say, “I am totally satisfied with myself and my life. I couldn’t ask for anything more.”
It just doesn’t happen. So, I have this idea to create a virtual reality machine that would allow people to actually experience the life of their dreams. For instance, for all the women who live with the unanswered hope that their husband will one day wait at the back door with a dozen roses and a cool bottle of Dom Perignon... the opportunity to live with Prince Charming.
Or, for sports fans, how about the chance to score the winning goal, kick the overtime fieldgoal, drive the victory lap, or hit that “must-win” two pointer at the buzzer? Music fans might choose to jump onstage and perform with their favorite rock band or conduct a full orchestral symphony.
The possibilities are endless.
But I wonder about the down side to such an invention. Would experiencing the dreams of a lifetime really make us better people? I'm not sure of that answer, or of the true possibility of such an invention.
But what I am sure of is that perfection is often over-evaluated.
[写作内容]
1．用约30个单词写出上文概要；
2．用约120个单词发表你的观点，内容包括：
(1) 陈述你对上文的观点；
(2) 用2～3个理由或论据支撑你的观点。
[写作要求]
1. 发表观点时必须提供理由或论据；
2. 阐述观点或提供论据或叙述经历时,不能直接引用原文语句；
3. 作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称；
4. 不必写标题。
[评分标准]
内容完整，语言规范，语篇连贯，词数适当。
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任务型阅读
请认真阅读下列短文，并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。
注意：每个空格只填1个单词。请将答案写在答题卡上相应题号的横线上。
Child sponsorship moves beyond the basics
One of the most popular forms of charitable giving in use today is child sponsorship as witnessed by the fact that just one of the leading child sponsorship charities currently has over 1 million individual child sponsors worldwide. Despite this huge level of support, it is not generally understood exactly what child sponsorship actually involves.
Most people tend to assume that one’s chosen charity arranges for sponsors to be matched up with an underprivileged child in one of the poorer underdeveloped countries. The idea is that you essentially take a child under your wing and act almost like a fairy godmother or father until he or she attains adulthood and can stand on his or her own two feet.
To a large extent, this is a pretty accurate impression. New sponsors are matched with individual children and can typically choose which country, which sex and which age group they would prefer. They then exchange photos and letters on a regular basis. This obviously helps the sponsors to see at first-hand how their donations are benefiting the children.
The sponsorship itself costs approximately £15 per month and many donators choose to sponsor more than one child at once. One common wrong impression about these regular donations is that they go direct to the child’s parents or guardian in order to pay for essentials such as food or education. In reality, some of the longest established child sponsorship charities have found that this is largely ineffective and can cause anger among other children in the community who might not be so fortunate.
Instead, some of the largest charities prefer to pool total donations and carry out larger schemes to assist the whole community. Nor are all the funds diverted (分配使用) towards obvious short term relief like providing food, water and basic healthcare. There is a strong emphasis on self-help and personal development so that future generations will be self-sustaining and not so reliant on outside assistance.
To this end, sponsors will often find their donations finding their way into things like training courses to teach teenagers how to farm, small grants (补助金) for business start-ups and introducing the concept of village-based savings and loan organizations.
There is no doubt that the top sponsorship charities have been active for so long in many countries that they are now taking a leading role in aiding the overall welfare of children and ensuring that they are not exposed to discrimination and abuse.
Child sponsorship moves beyond the basics | |
Passage outline | Supporting details |
Current 1. of child sponsorship | ◇Child sponsorship has enjoyed great popularity and huge support. ◇What it actually involves is not quite 2. to the general public. |
A usual practice of child sponsorship | ◇Donators help them until they grow up and can 3. themselves. ◇The charity4. the underprivileged children with sponsors according to their preference. ◇Sponsors keep in5. with the children to know what’s going on with the donation. ◇Donations go to the children’s parents or guardians to pay for essentials, which proves 6. . |
A new practice of child sponsorship | ◇Charities 7. larger schemes covering the whole community by gathering the individual donations. ◇The schemes include training teenagers, 8. their business start-ups and developing their financial awareness. ◇It9. personal development and independence for future generations by focusing on larger schemes. |
Conclusion | ◇Thanks to the 10. efforts of child sponsorship, the overall welfare and the rights of children are guaranteed. |
I’m sitting here in this coffee shop. You know the one there by Allen street. The town is filled with thousands of middle class college kids living off their parent’s money.
The coffee shop is where the ones come to play the part of sophisticated bohemians (放荡不羁的文化人). The pretensions (自命不凡) glow from their line-less faces as they sip cappuccinos and chew strawberry cookies. The boys to my right are discussing Nabokov with a serious air, a copy of Sartre’s Cuba lies on the table.
The young woman on my left is declaring that she can never allow her creativity to be killed by entering the work force. The man with her scratches his goatee (胡子) in agreement, occasionally suggesting they go back to his place to hear his new Washington Squares CD. Matt has just designed a new international symbol for peace. He moves from table to table trying to sell hand painted T-shirts that bear the design. Tomorrow he’s leaving for the 25th anniversary Woodstock concert where he hopes to strike it rich with his creation.
Gopha the skinny Indian boy feels like singing me a verse of ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ when I ask him if he’s a friend of Monica’s. Jason is trying to talk Gopha into a dollar bet on a game of chess. Between times Jason will chew your ear off with his plans to conquer the music industry while studying entertainment law, but when it comes to his never ending dollar chess matches he’s quiet as a church mouse.
I sit among them. To all surface appearances one and the same. If they could only see I would rather reach into their flesh and tear out their shallow little hearts than listen to another second of their prattle (闲扯).
With no job, no gigs, and my girlfriend’s so far gone she might as well be on another planet, I’ve been leading the writer’s quiet cafe life, spending my free time outdoors drinking iced teas and cheap wines. I chat warmly with whoever decides to squander away their hours in my surrounding area.
But behind my eyes is an unspoken challenge to any and every one of these social elites (精英) to just once say one thing that would inspire me. Just one little idea which is new and meaningful. Unfortunately original thoughts are zero here.
In my secret mind I wish to run like a madman banging gongs and speaking in tongues. Or maybe jump on a table and sing the Star Spangled Banner in the forgotten language of the Hottentots. I know these thoughts only reveal me as a fool because the spark I search for cannot be found in acts of shocking performance art. Where it truly comes from is one of the mysteries which will always hang around me.
1.The college students in the coffee shop can be described as ______.
A. shallow and aimless B. determined and independent
C. vain and ambitious D. honest and hardworking
2.Which of the following statements is true according to the passage?
A. Matt’s T-shirts will be a hit at the concert and bring him wealth.
B. Jason seems to show more enthusiasm in the dollar chess matches.
C. The young woman agrees to listen to a new Washington Squares CD.
D. The hero envies the lifestyle of the college students in the coffee shop.
3.Why is the hero in the coffee shop?
A. To recall the pleasant memories.
B. To relieve his sorrows and worries.
C. To know what is in fashion nowadays.
D. To find something new to inspire himself.
4.What does the passage imply?
A. The hero is sure that he can find the original thoughts in a crazy way.
B. The hero is disappointed at the college students failing his expectation.
C. The hero is quite content with his quiet café life as a writer.
D. The hero is lost in the physical world and hopeless about his future.
THE idea came to Ralph Liedert while he was sweating in the Californian sunshine, having been standing with his daughter for over an hour in a queue for a ride at Disneyland. What, he thought, if his T-shirt had a cooling system he could turn on, at the tap of a smart phone app, when he needed it. Luckily, Mr Liedert does have the means to make the dream reality, for he works at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, as one of a team there studying the rapidly growing field of microfluidics (微流控技术).
Cooling vests already exist (used by racing drivers, motorcyclists and people who work in hot conditions). But the tubes through which the cooling water is being pumped, and the vests’ need to be connected to outside units that cool this water, make them huge and clumsy. Mr Liedert thought VTT’s microfluidics department could do things better.
As its name suggests, microfluidics is the art of building devices that handle tiny amounts of liquid. Inkjet-printer cartridges (喷墨打印机墨盒) are a familiar example. Less familiar, but also important, are “labs-on-a-chip” (芯片实验室). These are tiny analytical devices that transport fluids such as blood through channels half a millimetre or less in diameter (直径), in order to carry them into what holds analytical reagents (试剂). Sensors, then detect the resulting reactions and provide an instant analysis of a sample (样本). Designing labs-on-a-chip is the VTT microfluidics department’s day job. One of its chips, for example, can tell whether water is affected by the bacteria that cause Legionnaires’ disease.
The department’s biggest contribution to the field, though, is to have developed a way of printing microfluidic channels onto large rolls of thin, flexible plastic. It works by passing the plastic between two heated rollers, one of which contains raised outlines of the required channels. As the rollers squeeze the plastic they create a pattern of channels into one surface. A second plastic film is then melted over the top as a cover. This process might, thought Mr Liedert, be suitable for printing a microfluidic cloth that was thin enough and pleasant enough to wear as a cooling vest.
The group’s first model showed that such a material could indeed be made and used to circulate cooled water. They are also looking at ways the water being circulated through the microchannels might be cooled. They have identified two. One uses a small heat-exchanger, the details of which they are keeping secret at this stage. The other employs evaporation (蒸发). It thus works in the same way that heat from circulating blood is removed by the evaporation of sweat.
Whichever cooling system is applied, the electronics needed to power and control it would be shrunk into a small package contained on the back of the vest. This could be operated by hand or, as Mr Liedert originally envisaged in his Californian queue, by a wireless link to a smart phone. Moreover, what can cool down can also, if run in an opposite way, warm up. In Finland, where winter temperatures fall as far as -50°C, that might be the technology’s killer app.
1.Microfluidics has been used in ______.
A. racing cars B. printing industry
C. testing material D. clothing industry
2.We can learn from the passage that ______.
A. VTT is a company which mainly works on the research into microfluidics
B. the new cooling vest of VTT will be smaller and work more effectively
C. the technology of microfluidics may have a positive effect on medical science
D. heat-exchanger as well as the way of evaporation will be used to cool the wearer
3.______ plays the key role in making the new cooling vest.
A. The special cloth B. The cooling system
C. The tiny liquid D. The wireless link
4.The underlined word “envisaged” most likely means _____ .
A. imagined B. discovered C. viewed D. planned
There’s a case to be made, from things like Google search figures, that Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken – you know, the one about two paths diverging (分开) in a wood – is the most popular in modern history. Yet people still can’t agree what it means. On the surface, it’s a fridge-magnet cliché (陈词滥调) on the importance of taking risks and choosing the road less travelled. But many argue it slyly mocks (暗讽) that American belief in the individual’s power to determine his or her future. After all, the poet admits that both paths look roughly similarly well-travelled. And how could he be sure he took the right one? He’ll never know where the other leads. Looking back at our life histories, we tell ourselves we faced important dilemmas and chose wisely. But maybe only because it’s too awful to admit we’re stumbling (跌跌撞撞地走) mapless among the trees, or that our choices don’t make much difference.
Two psychologists, Karalyn Enz and Jennifer Talarico, throw light on these matters in a new study with a title that nods to Frost: Forks In The Road. They sought to clarify how people think about “turning points” versus “transitions” in life. A turning point, by their definition, is a moment that changes your future – deciding to leave a job or marriage, say – but often isn’t visible from the outside, at least at first. “Transitions” involve big external changes: going to university, marrying, emigrating (迁出). Sometimes the two go together, as when you move to a new place and realize it’s where you belong. (“New Yorkers are born all over the country,” Delia Ephron said, “and then they come to New York and it hits them: oh, that’s who I am.”) But it’s turning points we remember as most significant, Enz and Talarico conclude, whether or not they also involve transitions.
The distinction is useful: it underlines how the most outwardly obvious life changes aren’t always those with the biggest impact. Hence the famous “focusing illusion”, which describes how we exaggerate (夸大) the importance of a single factor on happiness: you switch jobs, or spouses, only to discover you brought the same troublesome old you to the new situation. Before it became a joke, “midlife crisis” referred to a turning point that happens because your circumstances don’t change, when your old life stops feeling meaningful. Turning points can be caused by mundane (世俗的) things – the offhand remark that makes you realize you’re in the wrong life – or by nothing at all.
1.Why do some people think the poem makes fun of the American belief?
A. Because the two roads are more or less similar in the poet’s view.
B. Because Americans believe they can decide their future themselves.
C. Because Americans can find their way easily in a forest just with a map.
D. Because Americans surely know which road to take without consideration.
2.Which of the following can be considered as a transition?
A. Your experience of midlife crisis.
B. Your choice of the road to take.
C. Your decision to travel abroad.
D. Your move into a new flat.
3.What can we infer from this passage?
A. Turning points involving transitions are often remembered as most significant.
B. The biggest impact is often characterized with obvious outside changes.
C. A fundamental change is often affected by more than one single factor.
D. We can rid ourselves of the unpleasant past with the change of a job.
4.What’s the best title of the passage?
A. Is our fate in our own hands?
B. Must people make changes in life?
C. Should we choose the road less travelled?
D. Are turning points connected with transitions?
