Ryan Hickman was born in an American family. When he was three years old, Ryan Hickman visited a _________ center in California and found what he wanted to do most. Amazingly, the next day as he greeted his dad, Damion, he made a(n) _________, “I’m going to pick up all the bottles and cans from everyone in the neighborhood. I’ll start a new _________ myself!”
It’s never too _________ to start a business, though there were no other staff but himself when the company was started. Today, Ryan, aged seven, the worlds _________ garbage man, is the CEO, manager and _________ of Ryan’s Recycling Company. Though Ryan says he doesn’t remember what made it all start, he remains _________ about what he is doing. When questioned why he did so, he said, “It’s _________ bottles get to the ocean, and then animals get sick and die.” Ryan’s neighbors have been _________ to the little boy’s knocking for their recycled goods. More and more __________ ones call to ask for a pickup or even lay down bags of bottles and cans at Hickman’s door. At school, Ryan’s favorite activity is helping the dustmen __________ the trash and taking away the recyclable. “My wife and I support him and we told him that whenever he wants to __________, he can,” Damion said. “I want to see him with friends, but the recycling just makes him delighted. He has actually __________ five of his friends to join him.”
According to Damion, Ryan has __________ over $11,000 through recycling bottles and cans. Ryan says he wants to buy a large trash truck to be __________ with enough garbage and become a true garbage man.
1.A.financial B.recycling C.delivering D.industrial
2.A.bet B.announcement C.speech D.explanation
3.A.investigation B.study C.business D.campaign
4.A.old B.early C.weak D.late
5.A.cleverest B.busiest C.wealthiest D.youngest
6.A.customer B.employer C.trainee D.employee
7.A.enthusiastic B.energetic C.unbearable D.comfortable
8.A.why B.how C.because D.when
9.A.opposed B.supposed C.accustomed D.devoted
10.A.supportive B.instructive C.aggressive D.persuasive
11.A.desert B.separate C.circulate D.weed
12.A.start B.continue C.quit D.back
13.A.persuaded B.urged C.forced D.instructed
14.A.raised B.saved C.wasted D.spent
15.A.surrounded B.entertained C.equipped D.loaded
Why we still need to read Dickens
Walk into any bookstore, and you can hardly avoid “bumping into” Charles Dickens. Many of Dickens’ works still sell well today.1.
As someone who teaches Dickens, the question of why we still read him is often on my mind. 2. One day nearly 10 years ago, however, when I was giving a lecture, I was telling the students that for Victorian readers, Dickens’s writing was a “tune-in-next-week” type of thing that generated crazes. 3. “But why should we still read this stuff?” the student asked. The answer I gave was only acceptable, “Because he teacher you how to think,” I said.
The question annoyed me for years, for years, and for years I told myself answers, but never with complete satisfaction. We read Dickens because he is not just a man of his own times, but also a man for our times. We read Dickens because we can learn from experiences of his characters almost as easily as we can learn from our own experiences.
4. But these are not exactly the reason why I read Dickens. My search for an answer continued until one day a text message came from a student of mine. “We still read Dickens’s novels,” she wrote, “because they tell us why we are what we are.” Simple as it was, that’s the explanation I had sought for years.
Dickens shines a light on who we are during the best of times and wrote of times. 5. If you have time, go to pick up one of his many novels, read it and enjoy what it has to tell you about yourself.
A.Then a hand shot up.
B.I know that wasn’t really the reason.
C.And they are placed on outstanding shelves.
D.That question was never more troubling.
E.That’s why we still need to read him today.
F.I already know who it is I’ll meet in those novels.
G.These are all wonderful reasons to read Dickens.
Some 30,000years ago, artists who lived in caves in Europe painted pictures of the animals around them: panthers, hyenas, rhinos, cave lions, mammoths and other creatures which have been extinct for a long time. The paintings were highly realistic. Some even showed movement.
The artwork, more than a thousand drawings, is considered the oldest group of human cave drawings which have ever been discovered. They were preserved because the cave was sealed--closed off--for more or less 23,000 years.
Fast forward to December 18, 1994, a group of French cave scientists were exploring caves in southern France. Jean-Marie Chauvet, who led the group then, describes the process of discovering the cave paintings.”At that time I was in the front, Eliette just walked behind me, Christian behind. Eliette said she saw two marks made with red ochre and she said, ‘They came here.’And at this very moment everything began. The drawings and everything linked to the parietal art (壁画). That is where it started.”
Cave art expert Jean Clottes reviewed the paintings. “I was amazed at the number of paintings there were and paintings of their quality and particularly in front of the panel of the horses.”
Scientific analysis confirmed the prehistoric date of the artwork. Studies showed the drawings were created tens of thousands of years ago, before human history was written. The United Nations’cultural agency UNESCO lists the cave as a World Heritage Site. They say that the drawings form a remarkable expression of early human artistic creation of grand excellence and variety.
The Chauvet Cave has been named after the explorer who first entered it. However, its environment and drawings are too fragile to be visited by human beings. So the cave is closed, and only people there for scientific purposes can go inside and see the artwork.
However, French authorities asked experts to create an exact copy of the cave, called Pont d’Arc Cavern. The copy, which we also call replica, cost more than 59million dollars to build. It opened at the end of April in France.
Pascal Terrasse is the president of the cavern. He says everyone will be able to experience the thrill of looking at drawings made by the first humans in Europe. He says the place is magic because it is done so well. Authorities say they think as many as 400,000people will be allowed to visit Pont d’Arc Cavern every year.
1.According to the passage, the first scientist to enter the cave was ________.
A.Christian B.Eliette
C.Clottes D.Chauvet
2.According to Jean Clottes’ words in Paragraph 4, the paintings in the cave were ________.
A.abstract B.superior
C.creative D.inspiring
3.Which of the following statements is TRUE about the Chauvet Cave?
A.It was closed off for more than 30, 000years.
B.It is thought to be the origin of modern parietal art.
C.The environment and artwork there are very easy to damage.
D.The majority of drawings there are about the extinct animals.
4.The purpose of creating Pont d’Arc Cavern is to ________.
A.show admiration for the earliest artists in Europe
B.arouse visitors’awareness of protecting ancient art
C.offer visitors chances to view the wonderful artwork
D.collect money for the perseverance of the Chauvet Cave.
Tyler Skiuzacek’s father, Patrick, could not sleep through the night. It was 2007, and Patrick had just returned from a year in Iraq, where he served in the U. S. Army. Patrick Skluzacek was energetic and happy when he left for Iraq, Tyler says. But when he returned, he was unhappy and drinking alcohol too much. It turned out Patrick was suffering from sleep panic attacks. Patrick would wake up every night. His heart would beat too fast. He would sweat. The nighttime panic attacks prevented Patrick from feeling good the next day, because he was so tired.
Almost 10 years later, Tyler was in a position to help his father. He thought he could make a computer program that might help his father. So he entered a competition in Washington, D. C, trying to solve the problem Tyler’s father and other U. S. war veterans (老兵), were having. People called them”night terrors. ”The students had 36 hours to come up with a program. They called it myBivy—That name comes from bivouac, a military term for a safe place to sleep.
The application uses a smart watch and a smart phone together. The watch tracks the wearer’s heartbeat. It sends the data to the program on the smart phone. Research shows that a person’s heart rate will increase right before a night terror. So if the wearer’s heartbeat started to rise, myBivy would respond. The smart watch would vibrate and gently wake up the sleeping person. That was enough to prevent a night terror from happening.
Patrick wore the watch for two weeks to get used to it. Then, Tyler turned on the application. On the first night, the vibrations from the watch prevented 10 nightmares. Patrick said he had not slept that well in many years. Tyler and his team won the contest in Washington, D. C. The prize was $1,500. Then the group tried to raise more money from investors, and they were surprised when they took in over$25,000. By the spring of 2016, Tyler and his team were testing the app with volunteers, and hoped to make it available to the public soon.
1.What might be the cause of Patrick’s problem?
A.His experience in the war. B.His drinking habit.
C.His family troubles. D.His sleeping disorder.
2.We can learn from the second paragraph that ________.
A.the US government tries to help war veterans
B.people look down upon the night terrors
C.many other veterans suffer similar problems
D.myBivy was named after a great soldier
3.What is the main idea of the third paragraph?
A.How effective the app is. B.How to download the app.
C.How to design the app. D.How the app works.
4.What does the author probably think of the future of myBivy?
A.Valueless. B.Promising.
C.Tough. D.Controversial.
The minute you start talking about what you’re going to do if you lose, you have lost.
Some people have a great fear of losing. In fact, fear is not the best description of what they have. It is more like a crazy phobia(恐惧症) that they cannot keep away from. Day after day, these people allow their fear of losing to control everything in their lives. They are so afraid of losing that they try to keep away from losing without considering the cost of doing so.
When things start to get out of control, fear begins to come in. As the fear of losing or getting hurt overwhelms(充溢) them, they quickly look for excuses, rather than fight back or find a way to deal with their fear. They never realize that losing is just as common as eating and breathing.
If one is given a choice, who wouldn’t prefer winning over losing? After all, winning is exciting and winning is what living is all about. Although we might try hard all the time, we’re not going to win every time. In fact, most of us are going to lose a lot more often than we win and, believe it or not, it’s not all bad.
In order to make the most of our abilities ，we have to take risks every now and then. When we take risks, we might get knocked down, or even knocked flat, but with each failure and each loss, we have an opportunity to get better and get closer to the life we expect.
1.Which of the following might be the best title for the passage?
A.The Bad Effects of Losing
B.Make the Most of Every Success
C.We Win Some and We Lose Some
D.Winning Is the Main Purpose in Life
2.By saying the underlined sentence “They are so afraid. . .” in paragraph 2, the author means .
A.one should avoid losing by using any kind of means
B.one is too afraid to deal with losing properly by himself
C.one is so afraid of losing that he can’t step forward at all
D.one should make efforts to deal with losing rather than avoid it
3.We can know from the passage that .
A.fear works most when one is eager to win
B.losing is a common part of our daily lives
C.one should avoid losing without considering the cost
D.the more losing one experiences, the stronger one will become
4.What can we infer from the last paragraph?
A.Losing is of great value to success.
B.The more we fear, the better we will perform.
C.Only when we improve our abilities can we win.
D.Only through experiencing losing can we get what we want.
Winter sports tend to be more dangerous than summer sports—they take place mostly outside at the mercy of ice or snow, involving metal edges, extreme speeds and crashes. Skeleton (俯式冰撬), however, stands apart as one of the most difficult and least accessible of all the winter sports. Adam Edelman, Israel’s first Olympic skeleton athlete, would like to change that.
Edelman was the 10th athlete named to the 2018 Israeli Olympic Team. Qualifying for the Olympics in any sport is impressive. But it’s more impressive if you qualify for the Olympics after only four years in the sport—and without a coach.
Edelman was first introduced to skeleton watching the game on television in late 2013. Sports have always been a part of his life. He grew up playing football and was a goalkeeper on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology football team. Ready for a new challenge, he set his sights on the Olympics.
Without a coach, Edelman learned to drive by watching endless hours of YouTube videos and taking more runs than anybody else on the track. “When everybody else would take three runs per day, I would take six to eight.” he recalled.
Succeeding in skeleton takes a large amount of athletic ability and technical skill, but there’s one more element (因素) required, one that can’t be taught. “These tracks but built in the middle of nowhere, and it’s gray and cold. You haven’t seen your family in seven months and you really just want to give up. To continue, it takes tenacity.” Edelman said.
Edelman is already looking beyond Pyeongchang. The 2022 Olympics could be in his future, but whether he continues to compete or not, he promises to stay in Israeli sports as long as possible-as instructor or as a coach.
1.What might impress people most?
A.Edelman’s gift in winter sports.
B.The challenges Edelman has met
C.Edelman entering for the Olympics.
D.Edelman’s successful story as a skeleton athlete
2.What does the underlined word “tenacity” in Paragraph 5 probably mean?
A.willpower B.Extra strength
C.Good luck D.Financial support
3.What might be Edelman’s plan for the future?
A.Setting up a team of his own.
B.Passing on his skills and experience.
C.Calling on more people to take up sports.
D.Ending his sports life after the Olympic Games.
4.Which of the following words can best describe Edelman?
A.intelligent B.confident
C.patient D.determined
