I am the youngest of three children and have two older brothers. My family was always fortunate and we had a very _______ life in Shanghai. My _______ were focused on our education, but also on giving us more control over our own life so that we could move ahead _______. To use a car analogy (类比), I was the _______, but they were _______ in the passenger seat in case I needed support. So they didn’t _______ my homework but, whenever I had a question, I could _______ to them. I remember _______ my mom telling neighbors, “My daughter is very smart. She knows how to play _______.” The fact that my mother thought I was smart because I could play a sport, and not just because I was good at school work, was a huge ________. I grew up feeling ________ and had a “can do” attitude.
Shanghai is different from the rest of China as it has a more westernized environment. So, in the late 70s, when my family moved to San Francisco to ________ my grandparents, from a lifestyle point of view it was not much different. What was really ________ was my English. I love to ________ with people but I could ________ say in English, “How do you do?” “Thank you.” and “Don’t mention it.” When we arrived, my grandfather said, “Oh, Weili, living here is going to be wonderful ________ you don’t speak much of the language, because Americans are very friendly.” My parents taught us to be ________and when I went to school or the supermarket, I would say, “Thank you.” ________ the expected reply, “Don’t mention it,” ________ said, “You’re welcome.” So one day, I told my grandfather, “You were ________— people here always say I am welcome here.”
1.A.difficult B.comfortable C.busy D.sad
2.A.grandparents B.neighbors C.brothers D.parents
3.A.lightly B.slowly C.confidently D.cautiously
4.A.passenger B.owner C.conductor D.driver
5.A.sitting B.sleeping C.waiting D.resting
6.A.hand in B.help with C.learn from D.ask for
7.A.turn B.respond C.explain D.lie
8.A.stopping B.imagining C.hearing D.minding
9.A.basketball B.tricks C.roles D.music
10.A.achievement B.encouragement C.movement D.argument
11.A.burdened B.frightened C.valued D.excited
12.A.invite B.leave C.love D.join
13.A.confusing B.challenging C.tiring D.inspiring
14.A.quarrel B.live C.communicate D.compete
15.A.hardly B.firmly C.slowly D.only
16.A.even though B.in that C.in case D.ever since
17.A.careful B.patient C.polite D.modest
18.A.Instead of B.By means of C.In spite of D.due to
19.A.nobody B.somebody C.anybody D.everybody
20.A.wrong B.right C.nice D.funny
Do you think you got enough sleep this past week? Can you recall the last time you woke up without an alarm clock feeling refreshed, not needing caffeine ? 1.. Two-thirds of adults throughout all developed nations fail to obtain the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep.
2.. Routinely, sleeping less than six or seven hours a night destroys your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’ s disease. Inadequate sleep, even moderate reductions for just one week, disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic.
Perhaps you have also noticed a desire to eat more when you’re tired? 3.. Too little sleep increases- concentrations of a hormone that makes you feel hungry while stopping a companion hormone that otherwise signals food satisfaction. Despite being full, you still want to eat more. It's a proven recipe for weight gain in sleep-deficient adults and children alike. Worse, 4., it is in vain, since most of the weight you lose will come from lean body mass(丢脂体重), not fat.
Add the above health consequences up, and a proven link becomes easier to accept: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life will be. The old maxim “I’ll sleep when I m dead” is therefore unfortunate. Adopt this mindset, and you will be dead sooner and the quality of that (shorter) life will be worse. 5..
A.This is no coincidence
B.It is a tragedy to cost you your family
C.If the answers are“no, you are not alone
D.when you push yourself too hard before you go to sleep
E.The rubber band of sleep loss can stretch only so far before it breaks
F.should you attempt to diet but don't get enough sleep while doing so
G.I doubt you are surprised by this fact, but you may be surprised by the consequences
The second little pig was unlucky. He built his house from sticks. It was blown away by a huffing, puffing wolf, which quickly ate him up. His brother, by contrast, built a wolf-proof house from bricks. The fairy tale could have been written by someone hired by the building industry, which strongly favours brick, concrete and steel. However, in the real world it would help reduce pollution and slow global warming if more builders copied the wood-loving second pig.
In 2015 world leaders meeting in Paris agreed to move towards zero net greenhouse-gas emissions in the second half of this century. That is a tall order, and the building industry makes it even taller. Cement- making(水泥制造) alone produces 6% of the world 's carbon emissions. Steel, half of which goes into buildings, accounts for another 8%. If you factor in all of the energy that goes into lighting, heating and cooling homes and offices, the world's buildings start to look like a giant environmental problem.
However, buildings can become greener. They can use more recycled steel and can be made in sections that can be put together later in off-site factories, greatly reducing lorry journeys. But no other building material has environmental credentials (证书) as exciting and overlooked as wood.
The energy required to produce a wooden beam is one-sixth of that required for a steel one of comparable strength. As trees take carbon out of the atmosphere when growing,wooden buildings contribute to negative emissions by storing the stuff. When a mature tree is cut down, a new one can be planted to replace it, capturing more carbon. After buildings are torn down, old beams and panels are easy to recycle into new structures. And for improving older buildings to be more energy efficient, wood is a good insulator(隔热材料). A softwood window frame provides nearly 400 times as much insulation as a plain steel one of the same thickness and over a thousand times as much as an aluminium equivalent.
Wood alone will not bring the environmental cost of the world's buildings into line. But using wood can do much more than is appreciated. The second little pig was not wrong, just before his time.
1.Why is the second little pig with his brother mentioned in Paragraph 1?
A.To attract readers. B.To share a story.
C.To support the main idea. D.To introduce the topic.
2.Which of the following is TRUE according to the passage?
A.The world’s buildings are the biggest environmental problem.
B.The goal set by world leaders in Paris in 2015 is difficult to achieve.
C.The wooden house is not only exciting but also overlooked for a long time.
D.The building industry produces 14% of the world's carbon emissions totally.
3.How can buildings become eco-friendly?
A.Restoring them.
B.Planting more trees in them.
C.Recycling old wooden structure.
D.Substituting steel windows for wood ones.
4.What is the best title for the text?
A.The benefit from wood
B.The building industry
C.The lesson from fairy tales
D.The house made of wood
The world of work is changing. Are people ready for the new job outlook? A survey of 15- year-olds across 41 countries by the OECD(经合组织) has found that teenagers may have unrealistic expectations about the kind of work that will be available.
Four of the five most popular choices are traditional professional roles: doctors, teachers, business managers and lawyers. Teenagers cluster around the most popular jobs, with the top ten being chosen by 47% of boys and 53% of girls.
This selection is partly due to wishful thinking on the part of those surveyed. Furthermore, teenagers can hardly be expected to have an in-depth knowledge of labour-market trends. They encounter doctors and teachers in their daily lives. Other popular professions, such as lawyers and police officers, are familiar from films and social media.
Some parts of the OECD survey are disturbing. More boys than girls expect to work in science or engineering. The problem continues in higher education; with the exception of biological and biomedical sciences, degrees in STEM Subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths ) are male-dominated. In America women earn just 35. 5% of undergraduate STEM degrees and 33. 7% of PhDs. Things are even worse in technology. In Britain only one in five computer-science university students is a woman. Women are underrepresented in some important fields of technology; they have only 12% of jobs in cloud computing, for example.
Women play a much bigger role in the health- and social-care sectors. The problem is that some of these jobs are not very well paid. Home-health and personal-care aides had median annual salaries in 2018 of just over 24,000. Some jobs in health care are extremely profitable, of course. But another gender imbalance emerges here: women make up only one-third of American health-care executives. In contrast, they tend to dominate the poorly paid social care workforce.
The biggest problem in the labour market, then, may not be that teenagers are focusing on a few well-known jobs. It could be a mismatch: not enough talented women move into technology and not enough men take jobs in social care. Any economist will recognise this as an inefficient use of resources. Wherever the root of the problem lies---be it the education system, government policy or corporate recruiting practices---it needs to be identified and fixed.
1.Many teenagers would like to choose some traditional jobs because_______.
A.they are ready for these jobs
B.these jobs are better known to them
C.these jobs live up to their expectations
D.they think these jobs are available to them
2.Where do most women work?
A.In engineering
B.In technology.
C.In health care.
D.In business.
3.What would-the author most probably agree with?
A.The mismatch of resources requires improving.
B.Not enough men and women take jobs in society.
C.Teenagers have unrealistic expectations about jobs.
D.It's the education system that causes the problem in the labour market.
4.In which section of a magazine may this text appear ?
A.Entertainment. B.Education.
C.Science. D.Career.
My brother had, for years, a delightfully tame and lively blue-fronted Amazon parrot named Papagallo, which had an extraordinary talent for speech. Living with us in Altenberg, Papagallo flew just as freely around as most of my other birds. A talking parrot that flies from tree to tree and at the same time says human words, gives a much more comical effect than one that sits in a cage and does the same thing. When Papagallo, with loud cries of “Where’s the Doc?” flew about the district, sometimes in a real search for his master, it was funny.
Still funnier, but also remarkable from a scientific point of view, was the following performance of the bird. Papagallo feared nothing and nobody, with the exception of the chimney sweep. Birds are likely to fear things which are up above. And this tendency is associated with the natural fear of the bird of prey diving down from the heights. So everything that appears against the sky, has for them something of the meaning of “bird of prey”. As the chimney sweep in black stood up on the chimney and became outlined against the sky, Papagallo fell into a panic of fear and flew, loudly screaming, so far away that we feared he might not come back. Months later, when the chimney sweep came again, Papagallo was sitting on the weathercock, quarrelling with other birds who wanted to sit there too. All at once, I saw him stretch his neck and peer down anxiously into the village street; then he flew up and away, crying out in tough tones, “ The chimney sweep is- coming!” “The chimney sweep is coming! The next moment, the man in black walked through the doorway of the yard !
Unfortunately, I was unable to find out how often Papagallo had seen the chimney sweep before and how often he had heard the excited cry of our cook, which meant his approach. It was, without a doubt, the voice and intonation of this lady that the bird copied. But he had certainly not heard it more than three times at the most and, each time, only once and at an interval of months.
1.It can be inferred that the author_______.
A.might be a bird expert
B.must set a lot of parrots free
C.could talk with Papagallo
D.did have Papagallo look for his brother
2.What does the underlined words “bird of prey” in Paragraph 2 mean?
A.Bird flying up high.
B.Bird hunting animals.
C.Bird having black feathers.
D.Bird diving down from the sky.
3.What confused the author?
A.Why Papagallo feared the chimney sweep.
B.What the chimney sweep did to Papagallo.
C.How Papagallo had learnt to say the exact sentence.
D.How often Papagallo was seen by the chimney sweep.
4.Which of the following best describes Papagallo?
A.Gifted B.Caring.
C.Shy. D.Talkative.
There are plenty of things to do while at home, from watching heartwarming TV to indoor fitness, but if you want to do something with the whole family, a board game is the perfect activity.
Telestrations
It is like a combination of the whisper game Telephone and Pictionary. Players draw a word and pass their sketch to the player next to them, who writes down the word they think the first player draws. The next player draws the word the previous player writes down, and the game continues in this way until the final drawing or description comes out wildly different from the original one. It is most popular among kids.
Catan
A slightly more involved game than Risk or Monopoly, Catan, previouly known as Settlers of Catan or Settlers, has become popular in the past decade or so beyond board game enthusiasts. In the game, which has many expansions available if you get bored with the original, players become “settlers”, each trying to build up individual settlements while trading resources. The bigger your settlement, the more points, and the first to a set number wins.
Ticket to Ride
It is an easy-to-understand game that is about something as simple as trains. Players use colored train cars that they are able to obtain by collecting cards of the same color to create train routes across a map of the U. S. Expansion packs have many other maps to choose from. Bigger train routes give you more points, as do building the routes shown on the secret ticket cards you draw at the beginning of the game.
Lords of Waterdeep
This board game from the makers of Dungeons Dragons is definitely more complex but is one of the most enjoyable games once you understand all the rules. Beautifully designed in fantasy style, Waterdeep is a “worker placement game”, in which players use agents to gather resources to complete quests, which generate victory points. Whoever has the most at the end of the game wins.
1.In which of the following board games is drawing needed?
A.Telestrations.
B.Catan.
C.Ticket to Ride.
D.Lords of Waterdeep.
2.Who will be the winner in Catan?
A.The one becoming the first settler.
B.The one getting needed points first.
C.The one gathering the most resources.
D.The one creating the most train routes.
3.What do the four board games have in common?
A.They have many expansions.
B.They ask players to get points.
C.They involve more than one player.
D.They are easy to understand and play.
