I must have been about fourteen then, and I put away the incident from my mind with the easy carelessness of youth. But the words, Carl Walter spoke that day, came back to me years later, and ever since have been of great value to me.
Carl Walter was my piano teacher. During one of my lessons he asked how much practicing I was doing. I said three or four hours a day.
“Do you practice in long stretches, an hour at a time?”
“I try to.”
“Well, don't.” he exclaimed. “When you grow up, time won't come in long stretches. Practice in minutes, whenever you can find them five or ten before school, after lunch, between household tasks. Spread the practice through the day, and piano-playing will become a part of your life.”
When I was teaching at Columbia, I wanted to write, but class periods, theme-reading, and committee meetings filled my days and evenings. For two years I got practically nothing down on paper, and my excuse was that I had no time. Then I remembered what Carl Walter had said. During the next week I conducted an experiment. Whenever I had five minutes unoccupied, I sat down and wrote a hundred words or so. To my astonishment, at the end of the week I had a rather large manuscript ready for revision, later on I wrote novels by the same piecemeal method. Though my teaching schedule had become heavier than ever, in every day there were idle moments which could be caught and put to use. I even took up piano-playing again, finding that the small intervals of the day provided sufficient time for both writing and piano practice.
There is an important trick in this time-using formula: you must get into your work quickly. If you have but five minutes for writing, you can't afford to waste four chewing your pencil. You must make your mental preparations beforehand, and concentrate on your task almost instantly when the time comes. Fortunately, rapid concentration is easier than most of us realize.
I admit I have never learnt how to let go easily at the end of the five or ten minutes. But life can be counted on to supply interruptions. Carl Walter has had a tremendous influence on my life. To him I owe the discovery that even very short periods of time add up to all useful hours I need, if I plunge in without delay.
1.What is the best title of this passage?
A.Concentrate on Your Work B.Good Advice
C.How I Became a Writer D.A Little at a Time
2.Which of the following statements is true?
A.The writer owes great thanks to his teacher for teaching him to work in long stretches.
B.The writer didn't take the teacher's words to heart at first.
C.Carl Walter has had a great influence on the writer’s life since he became a student.
D.Rapid concentration is actually more difficult than most people imagine.
3.The underlined part “counted on” can be replaced by __________.
A.expected B.concentrated
C.valued D.enriched
4.We can infer that the writer ____________.
A.can find sufficient time for mental preparations beforehand, so he’s devoted to work instantly
B.is always tired of interruptions in life because his teaching schedule is always heavy
C.has formed a bad habit of chewing a pencil while writing his novels
D.has new books published each year however busy his teaching is
Directions: Translate the following sentences into English, using the words given in the brackets.
1.不可否认的是他用这个靠谱的方法扭转了局势。(apply) 3’
2.大家都想当然认为英雄都是流血不流泪的，其实不然。(granted) 4’
3.他的父母达成共识，要提醒他适度使用电子产品，不要沉迷于网络游戏。(obsess) 4’
4.我们不仅在被他人质疑时要坚持自己的原则，在遭受他人歧视时也不要觉得低人一等。(Not only) 4’
5.虽然专家建议保持社交距离，美国政府却始终把重点放在复苏经济和刺激就业上，因此未能有效防止病毒的传播。(despite, failure) 5’
Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main points of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.
Imagine living on the edge of a vast desert, which is moving quietly closer to your village every day and covering your fields. The desert is on the move. This is called desertification.
Desertification occurs in regions close to an already existing desert. It generally arises from two related causes. The first is over-use of water in the area. There is not enough water in any case, and if it is not carefully used, disaster can follow. As time goes on, water shortages make farming more and more difficult. In some places, locals can remember local lakes and marshes which were once the homes for all kinds of fish and birds. They have been completely buried by the sand now. Farmers leave the land, and fields are replaced by deserts.
The second cause is misuse or over-use of the land. This means that the wrong crops are planted and need more water than is available. Ploughing large fields and removing bushes and trees means that the wind will blow away the soil. Once the soil is lost, it is hard to replace, and if there is rain, it has nowhere to go, and brings no benefit.
It is not only the farmers and villagers who suffer. Every spring, the skies over some of eastern cities, thousands of kilometers away from the deserts, can be darkened by sandstorms. Dust from deserts can have a great effect on weather systems. While desertification is perhaps being partly caused by global warming, these sandstorms can make global warming worse by adding to what is known as the greenhouse effect.
What can be done to slow down or stop the process of desertification? A great deal of work is already under way. Obviously first steps are to find new water sources. Tree planting can help, by providing barriers between desert and rich field. Some types of grass also hold the soil together, and stop the wind taking it. Without these efforts, it will be harder and harder to stop the world’s deserts in their tracks, and more and more farmers will give up and head for cities. The lesson to be learnt lies beneath the sand.
Directions: Read the following passage carefully. Fill in each blank with a proper sentence given in the box. Each sentence can be used only once. Note that there are two more sentences than you need.
Almost 90% of people are biased against women, according to a new index that highlights the ‘shocking’ extent of the global backlash towards gender equality.
Despite progress in closing the equality gap, 91% of men and 86% of women hold at least one bias against women in relation to politics, economics, education, violence or reproductive rights.
The first gender social norm index analyzed data from 75 countries that, collectively, are home to more than 80% of the global population. It found that almost half of the people surveyed felt men were superior political leaders and that more than 40% believed men made better business executives. 1..
The U.N. Development Program (U.N.D.P.), which published its findings on March 5, is calling on governments to introduce laws and policies that address deep-rooted prejudice.
‘We all know we live in a male-dominated world, but with this report, we are able to put some numbers behind these biases,’ said Pedro Conceição, director of the U.N.D.P.’s human development report office. ‘And I consider these numbers shocking. What our report shows is a pattern that repeats itself again and again. 2., but when we go deeper, we seem to be hitting a wall.’
3.. While in many countries, these biases were shrinking, in many others, the biases were actually increasing, he pointed out.
The figures are based on two sets of data collected from almost 100 countries through the World Values Survey, which examines changing attitudes in almost 100 countries and how they impact on social and political life. The figures cover periods from 2005-09 and 2010-14, the latest year for which data is available.
4.. But while more than 50% of people in Andorra, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden were free from gender prejudice, even in those places the pattern was not one of complete progress.
Sweden, for example, was one of several countries in which the percentage of people who held at least one bias increased over the nine years the data covered. More than half of the people in the U.K. and the U.S. held at least one bias.
A.Of the 75 countries studied, there were only six in which the majority of the people surveyed held no bias towards women.
B.Conceição said the data shows that opinions and expectations in society about the role of women were prejudiced against them.
C.Conceição pointed out that gender discrimination is increasingly destroy the social welfare in many aspects.
D.Perhaps more alarmingly, almost a third of men and women think it’s acceptable for a man to beat his wife.
E.The figures serve as a warning towards the social mechanism of developed countries.
F.Big progress has been made in more basic areas of participation and empowerment.
“I have slept on the Embankment (河堤),” wrote George Orwell in 1933, adding that, despite the noise and the wet and the cold, it was “much better than not sleeping at all.” Under the nearby Charing Cross bridge, Orwell reported that “50 men were waiting, mirrored in the shivering puddles.” Nine decades on and Charing Cross and the Embankment are once again full of rough sleepers, even during the coldest days of December. Across London their numbers have more than tripled since 2010.
It is a pattern found in much of the rich world. Almost every European country is seeing a rise in the number of homeless people. Homelessness across America is in decline, but it is soaring in its most prosperous cities. And roughly 5,000 people live on the streets of San Francisco, a 19% rise in just two years.
However, some rich, successful cities, including Tokyo and Munich, have few people living on the streets. These places offer lessons on how to reduce homelessness. One is that tough love can sometimes work. Conservatives argue that softer policing methods in the 1970s, including not being strict to public drunkenness, were in part responsible for the rise in homelessness. The world could learn something from Greece, where strong family networks ensure that those down on their luck find someone to take them in. Many experts argue that it is counterproductive to give money to someone begging on the street.
Yet stricter methods will ultimately do little if housing costs remain high, which is the underlying reason for rising homelessness. Few Americans lived on the streets in the early post-war period because housing was cheaper. Back then only one in four tenants spent more than 30% of their income on rent, compared with one in two today. The best evidence suggests that a 10% rise in housing costs in a pricy city causes an 8% jump in homelessness.
The state can do something to help. Cuts to rent subsidies for Britain’s poor are probably the biggest reason why Charing Cross has so many people sleeping on the streets once again. Making such subsidies more generous might actually save governments money in the medium term — after all, demands on health-care services and the police would decline. People would also be more likely to land a job.
Another option is for the state to build more housing itself. In Singapore, 80% of residents live in government-built flats which they buy at knock-down prices. While many countries have been privatizing their stock of public housing, Finland has been building more of it, giving the government the necessities to put homeless people in their own apartments rather than warehousing them in shelters. In Finland the homeless numbers are moving in the right direction.
The most effective reform, however, would be to make building more homes easier. In many countries NIMBYist (邻避主义者) planning rules vastly inflate the market price of shelter. Such rules should be abolished. Japan loosened planning rules, prompting residential construction to jump. Since then, the number of rough sleepers has fallen by 80% in 20 years in Tokyo. Until cities elsewhere let the buildings go up, more people will find themselves down and out.
1.The writer quotes the words of George Orwell in Paragraph 1 to __________.
A.describe the poor situation of the homeless in 1933.
B.emphasize the large number of the rough sleepers.
C.unveil the difficulty of solving the problem of the homeless.
D.introduce the current problem of homelessness in the rich world.
2.Which of the following is the main reason for rising number of the homeless?
A.prosperity of the rich world. B.generosity towards the homeless.
C.outrageous housing cost. D.privatization of the public housing.
3.Which of the following is Not True, according to this passage?
A.In Finland and Singapore, the number of the homeless was reduced by building more public housing and apartments.
B.Greece prioritized offering tough love over giving money directly to the beggars to comfort them.
C.NIMBYist supported the government to abolish the inappropriate housing rules and make building more houses easier.
D.British government’s cutting the rent subsidies for the poor contributes to the increasing number of the rough sleepers.
4.What is the main idea of the passage?
A.Reasons for the rising homeless in the rich world.
B.Ways to cut homelessness in the world’s priciest cities.
C.Different reaction of different countries towards the homeless.
D.Comparison of the housing cost in impoverished and rich countries.
Mental illness and disability were family problems for English people living between 1660 and 1800. Most women and men who suffered from mental illness were not institutionalized as this was the period before the extensive building of mental hospitals. Instead, they were housed at home, and cared for by other family members.
Now a new study by Cambridge historian Dr. Elizabeth Foyster will reveal the impact on families of caring for mentally ill and disabled relatives.
Much has been written about the insane themselves but few studies have considered mental illness from the perspective of the carers. The lifetime burden of caring for those individuals whose mental development did not progress beyond childhood, and who contemporaries labeled as ‘idiots’ or ‘fools’, has been little explored by historians. Foyster’s research, which has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, will carefully examine the emotional and economic consequences for families at a time when the Poor Law bound them to look after their mentally ill and disabled family members.
By asking key questions about the impact of ‘care in the community’ in the 18th century, Foyster hopes that her research will bridge social and medical history. Specifically, she aims to provide an historical perspective for contemporary debates such as how resources can be stretched to provide for children with learning difficulties and an aging population.
“The stresses and strains of family were worsened by high infant mortality and low life expectancy, and many individuals were pushed towards mental breakdown,” she explained. “Moreover, inherited conditions, senility(高龄) and what today would be described as ‘special needs’ could put great emotional demands on family members who had primary responsibility for their sick or disabled relatives.”
The research will shed light upon how caring for the mentally ill and disabled raised difficult issues for families about the limits of intergenerational responsibility, and whether family ties were weakened or strengthened by the experience. The questions of how far shame was attached to having insanity or idiocy within a family, and at what point families began to seek outside help, will also be addressed.
“The family must have seemed an inescapable feature of daily life between 1660 and 1800,” said Foyster. “Although there were those who were abandoned and rejected, for the majority, mental disability was accommodated within the family unit. I aim to get to the heart of what this really meant for people’s lives.”
1.Which is NOT the reason why those mentally ill and disabled were not institutionalized from 1660 to 1800?
A.Mental illness and disability were family problems then.
B.The extensive building of mental hospitals didn’t start yet.
C.They were abandoned by the government and the family.
D.The family would be found guilty if they didn’t care for them.
2.Why does Foyster want to carry out this study?
A.Because it can provide some food for thought for some current social issues.
B.Because the stresses and strains of family life have driven many people crazy.
C.Because she’s looking for ways to communicate with the sick or disabled people.
D.Because the limits of intergenerational responsibility in such families, interest her.
3.Which question will NOT be studied in the research?
A.How should resources today be stretched to provide for an aging population?
B.How did caring for the sick and disabled affect the family’s earning power?
C.How shameful did a family feel when their insane or disabled relatives were found out?
D.At what point did those families have to begin to look for outside help?
4.The passage is written in order to ________.
A.reveal the impact on families of caring for mentally ill and disabled relatives
B.provide an historical perspective to contemporary debates
C.shed light upon whether family ties were weakened or strengthened
D.introduce a new historical study carried out by a Cambridge historian
