My neighbor Mrs. Gargan first told me about it. “Have you seen the tree?” She asked as I was sitting in the backyard enjoying the autumn twilight （暮色）. “The one down at the corner,” she explained. “It’s a beautiful tree—all kinds of colors. All the passers-by stop to have a look. You ought to see it.” I told her I would, but I soon forgot about the tree. Three days later, I was jogging down the street when a splash of bright orange caught my eyes. For an instant, I thought someone’s house had caught fire. Then I remembered the tree.
I approached the tree to look at it closely. There was nothing remarkable about the shape of the tree. It was a medium-sized maple. But Mrs. Gargan had been right about its colors. Like the mess of an artist’s palette（调色板）, the tree blazed a bright crimson（深红色）on its lower branches and burned with vivid yellows and oranges in its center, and deep red at its top. Through these colors were light green leaves as yet untouched by autumn.
Walking closer I noticed several bare branches near the top, their small black branches scratching the air like claws. The fallen leaves lay like a red carpet around the trunk.
As I was amazed at this beauty, I thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s comments about the stars. “If the constellations（星座）appeared only once in a thousand years, imagine what an exciting event it would be. But because they’re up there every night, we barely give them a look,” he made a remark in Nature.
I felt the same way about the tree. Because its beauty will last only a week, it should be especially precious to us. And I had almost missed it.
Once in the 19th century when a man noticed a brilliant display of northern lights（北极光）in the sky over Massachusetts, he rang a church bell to alert the whole town’s people. That’s what I felt like doing about the tree. I wanted to awake the countryside to its wonder.
I didn’t have a church bell, but as I walked home, I did ask each neighbor I passed the same simple but important question Mrs. Gargan had asked me: “Have you seen the tree?”.
1.What did the author’s neighbor remind him?
A. To appreciate the beauty of the sunset.
B. To find what happened at the street corner.
C. To draw a picture of a tree.
D. To enjoy the beautiful tree in all colors.
2. From the passage we know _________.
A. the author felt it precious to see the beauty of the tree
B. the author thought of the stars as beautiful as the tree
C. the remarkable scene of the tree only appeared in a thousand years
D. People never had a close look at the tree
3. How did the author call on people to enjoy the wonder?
A. He rang the church bell.
B. He passed on the same question.
C. He awakened all neighbors up.
D. He required people to the corner.
4.The best title of the passage can be ________.
A. Have You Seen the Tree?
B. The Most Beautiful Tree
C. One of the Wonders in Nature
D. The Precious Moment in Life
In August 2015, President Obama announced that North America’s highest mountain, Mount McKinley, would be renamed. Its new moniker（名字）, Denali, was actually its original Aleut name, meaning “the high one”. The previous name, on the other hand, only dates back to 1896—the year when it was named in honour of William McKinley（1843—1901）, who was shortly to become President of the United States. Denali is of course not the only mountain with an interesting linguistic history, so let’s travel to Asia, and across Europe, to explore the naming of those continents’ most famous peaks and mountain ranges.
The Nepalese name Himalaya comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “Abode of Snow”, from hima for “snow” and ālaya for “abode”. In Buddhist sources, Himalaya is known by various names such as Himavā and Himavanta.
In 1856, Mount Everest was named after Sir George Everest （1790—1866）, who was the superintendent （负责人）of the Trigonometrical Survey of India. Everest himself was initially displeased by the naming, since he feared that local inhabitants might not be able to pronounce it.
K2 stands for Karakoram 2, because it was the second peak to be surveyed in the Trigonometrical Survey in the Karakoram system. It was also formerly known as Mount Godwin Austen after Col. H. H. Godwin Austen, who first surveyed it. Another alternative name for the mountain is Chhogori.
Annapurna is a household Goddess for Hindus, who guarantees to her worshippers （崇拜者）that food will not fail. The name derives（源出）from a Sanskrit word meaning “one who gives nourishment”.
The Matterhorn’s name derives from the name of the nearby town of Zermatt, the second element of which is apparently Matte “meadow”, and Horn, “horn”. Horn is not an unusual element in German names of mountains with jutting（突出的）peaks. The mountain is called Mont Cervin in French and Monte Cervino in Italian, from the Italian adjective cervino “deer-like”, which conjures up （使想起）a deer’s antlers.
Ben Nevis is the Anglicized form of the Scottish Gaelic name Beinn Nibheis, which means“Mountain by the（River）Nevis”. The name of the river apparently derives from a Celtic root for “water”.
1. How many continents’ mountains are mentioned in the passage?
A. 2 B. 3 C. 4 D. 5
2.Himalaya is a mountain also named ________.
A. Nepalese B. Abode of Snow
C. Alaya D. Himavā
3. Which of the following is FALSE according to the passage?
A. Everest was unhappy about the name of Mount Everest at first.
B. K2 was once called Col. H. H. Godwin.
C. Annapurna means “one who offers food”.
D. Matterhorn comes from the name of the nearby town of Zermatt.
4.The above mountains’ names come from sources other than _________.
A. color B. a Sanskrit word
C. a person’s name D. geographic name
How to avoid common life mistakes?
1. Don’t do things you don’t like
Whenever you do things you don’t like, you will start to hate yourself a bit more. You will hate yourself for not being consistent. For doing things you know that you don’t want to do, another stress is right there.
2. Do less
This is one of the hardest things, especially for me. I’m doing too many things at the same time. In itself, doing many different things to figure out what works and what doesn’t isn’t that had. It’s actually quite good. But at some point you need to let go of the things that don’t work and focus on the things that work. And that’s the hardest part, at least for me. I always try to make everything work. And if you always try to make everything work, you’ll usually end up with nothing working at all.
3. Get rid of complicated things
There are many complicated things in life. Complicated relationships, complicated jobs, complicated whatever. What all of these things do is that they steal our focus.
They add an additional stress layer to our lives and take over some of our brain’s bandwidth（带宽；频宽）. We desperately need to navigate（驾驶）bandwidth in this crazy and complex world.
4. Read books, not blogs
Blogs consist of too much information for our brains to process. Blogs usually leave out the story our brains need. Our brains need a story to remember things.
Don’t believe me? Try it. What parts of this blog post do you remember? Probably none. All that blogs do is that they clutter（拥塞）our brains with useless information we forget immediately after we read them. A waste of time.
There are a number of personal traits which all of us should develop in our earlier life.
1.Young people will hate themselves when ________.
A. they avoid doing things they dislike
B. their stress level is high
C. they know what they dislike doing
D. their actions conflict with their ideas
2.What is the writer’s viewpoint on complicated things?
A. They cause little stress to young people’s lives.
B. Young people can’t focus on their business without them.
C. They have a great influence on young people’s lives.
D. Young people needn’t do what they want to do.
3.The writer thinks reading blogs ________.
A. is not a waste of time
B. prevents us from getting stories we need
C. is a great way to access useful information
D. does not fill our brain in a messy way
情景作文
假设你是红星中学高三学生李华，请根据以下四幅图先后顺序，介绍在“国画之旅”活动中，向国画艺术家学习国画的过程，并以“A Day with an Artist of Traditional Chinese Painting”为题，给校刊“英语角”写一篇英文稿件。
注意：词数不少于60
提示词： 国画traditional Chinese painting
荷花lotus
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应用作文
假设你是李华,上周末你们班新来的美籍学生Jack邀请你去了他家做客，请你给他写一封邮件。内容包括：
1. 感谢他和家人对你的热情款待；
2. 你们在一起玩得很开心的具体情况；
3. 邀请他下周日到你家做客。
注意：1.词数不少于50。
2.开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数。
提示词：邀请做客invite someone to have dinner
Dear Jack,
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根据短文内容，从短文后的选项中选出能填入空白处的最佳选项。选项中有两项为多余选项。
You go to a store to buy food for a party. But when you get to the cash register, there are no plastic bags for the things you buy. If you live in San Francisco, this situation might not surprise you. 1. Many cities and towns around the United States may ban plastic bags. 2. Instead, they’d like people to use their own cloth bags when they shop. 3. They say they wouldn’t buy as much if they couldn’t get a free bag. Store owners don’t want to lose business. So they want to keep offering plastic bags.
Stores should be banned from using plastic bags. Here’s why:
All those plastic bags fill up garbage dumps (垃圾站). That hurts the environment.
People can use cloth bags instead. 4.
Stores should not be banned from using plastic bags. Here’s why:
People might buy less if stores don’t offer plastic shopping bags. Some stores might go out of business.
Some people reuse plastic shopping bags for things like garbage. If they don’t get them for free, they’ll have to buy some.
5. That could get expensive.
A. These bags don’t get thrown away until they’ve been used many times.
B. There should always be a choice.
C. If shoppers forgot a cloth bag, they would have to buy one.
D. But many people don’t want to buy their own cloth bags.
E. Many people throw them away after using them.
F. That city has banned most plastic shopping bags from stores.
G. They hope that shoppers won’t use paper bags either.
