Some people make you feel comfortable when they are around. You spend an hour with them and feel as if you have known them half your life.1.
Here are several skills that good talkers have. If you follow the skills, they’ll help you put people at their ease, and make friends with them quickly.
First of all, good talkers ask questions.2.One well-known businesswoman says, “At business lunches, I always ask people what they did that morning. It’s a common question, but it will get things going.” From there you can move on to other matters—sometimes to really personal questions.3.
Second, once good talkers have asked questions, they listen to the answers. This point seems clear, but it isn’t. Your questions should have a point and help to tell what sort of person you are talking to. And to find out, you really have to listen carefully and attentively. 4. If someone sticks to one topic, you can take it as a fact that he’s really interested in it. Real listening also means not just listening to words, but to tones of voice. If the voice sounds dull, then, it’s time for you to change the subject.
Finally, good talkers know well how to deal with the occasion of parting. If you’re saying good-bye, you may give him a firm handshake and say, “I’ve really enjoyed meeting you.”5.Let people know what you feel, and they may walk away feeling as if they’ve known you half their life.
A.You can become a popular person.
B.It’s polite to listen to others with a smile.
C.These people have something in common.
D.Real listening at least means some things.
E.If you want to see that person again, don’t keep it a secret.
F.And how he answers will let you know how far you can go.
G.Almost anyone, no matter how shy he is, will answer a question.
Culture shock occurs when people have been suddenly thrown into a new culture. Newcomers may be anxious because they don’t speak the language. Neither do they know the customs or understand the people’s behavior in daily life.
Quite often the visitor find that “yes” may not always mean “yes”, that friendliness does not necessarily mean friendship, or that statements that appear to be serious are really intended as jokes. The foreigners may be unsure as when to shake hands, when to start conversations, or how to approach a stranger. The idea of culture shock helps explain feeling of puzzlement and confusion.
Language problems do not lead to all the setbacks that people feel. When one has lost everything that was once familiar, such as understanding a transportation system, knowing how to register(注册，登记) for university classes, or knowing how to make friends, difficulties in coping with the new society may arise.
When an individual enters a strange culture, he or she feels like a fish out of water. Newcomers feel at times that they do not belong to the culture and feel deserted by the native members of the culture. When this happens, visitors may want to refuse everything about the new environment and may glorify and sing their own praises of the positive aspects of their own culture. On the other side, more visitors may sneeze at their native country by rejecting its value and instead choosing to approve of the value of the new country. This may occur as an attempt to accept the new culture in order to be taken in by the people in it.
1.What do people feel when they are suddenly in a new culture?
A.Excited. B.Delighted. C.Upset. D.Hopeless.
2.We can infer from the second paragraph that _______.
A.it’s impossible to get used to a new culture
B.people feel confused due to culture shock
C.foreigners often don’t mean what they say
D.most foreigners are usually quite humorous
3.The underlined expression “he or she feels like a fish out of water” in the last paragraph suggests ______.
A.people away from their cultures can hardly survive in a new culture
B.a fish can not survive without water
C.people away from their culture experience mental loneliness.
D.people away from their culture have many difficulties in new environment
4.The biggest barrier(障碍) people often meet with in a new country is _____.
A.the language B.the transportation C.the environment D.the puzzlement
At this very moment you’re thirsty and hunting for something to drink. So you start walking towards the drinks machine at school. As you drink you hear your teacher say those frightening words: “Could I see you for a moment in the classroom, please?”
You can almost feel your blood pressure rise as you walk to your English class. She’s always picking on you. What can it be this time? You think of the test you did last Friday. Now your mind is racing, your heart is pounding, and your forehead is pouring with sweat. In situations like this you will often feel like running away but you may also feel like hitting someone on the nose.
Your teacher asks you to go into the class. “Here it comes,” you think. But what you hear is: “Well done. Your test was excellent.” You can hardly believe your ears.
Our fight or flight response is designed to protect us from tigers that would have once hidden in the woods around us, threatening(威胁) our survival. At times when our survival is threatened, there is no greater response to have on our side. When activated(刺激), the response causes stress hormones to pump through our body.
When we face very real dangers to our survival, it is invaluable. However, few of the “tigers” we face in our lives cause a serious physical threat to our existence. They cause us no end of stress, triggering(引发) the full activation of our fight or flight response. They tend to cause us to overreact to the situation in a counterproductive (事与愿违的) way. It is counterproductive to hit someone (the fight response) or run away (the flight response).
By recognizing the symptoms, we can begin to take steps to handle the stress overload. By learning to recognize the signals of fight or flight activation, we can avoid reacting excessively (过度地) to events and fears that are not life threatening. In doing so, we use this extra energy to help ourselves, borrowing the beneficial effects in order to change our emotional environment and deal productively with our fears, thoughts and potential dangers.
1.You feel nervous when walking to the classroom because ________.
A.you broke the school rules B.you failed the test last Friday
C.your teacher spoke to you loudly D.your teacher always blames you
2.What is Paragraph 4 mainly about?
A.The power of our fight or flight response.
B.How our fight or flight response works.
C.The benefits of our fight or flight response.
D.How we control our fight or flight response.
3.The underlined word “They” in Paragraph 5 probably refers to ________.
A.fierce tigers B.real dangers
C.dangers we face D.serious physical threats
4.A good understanding of our fight or flight response can help us ________.
A.get rid of unnecessary stress B.face real dangers bravely
C.find hidden dangers D.take threats seriously
The spread of Western eating habits around the world is bad for human health and the environment. These findings come from a new report in the journal Nature.
David Tillman, a professor of ecology at the University of Minnesota, America, examined information from 100 countries to identify what people ate and how a diet affected health. He noted a movement beginning in the 1960s. He found that as nations industrialized (工业化), population increased and earnings rose, more people began to adopt what has been called the Western diet.
The Western diet is high in sugar, fat, oil and meat. By eating these foods, people began to get fatter and sicker. David Tillman says overweight people are at greater risk of noninfectious(不传染的) diseases like diabetes (糖尿病) and heart disease.
Unfortunately when people become industrialized, if they adopt this Western diet, they are going to have these health problems, especially in developing countries in Asia. China is an example where the number of diabetes cases has been jumping from less than one percent to 10 percent of the population as they began to industrialize over a 20year period. And that is happening all across the world, in Mexico, in Nigeria and so on.
And, a diet bad for human beings is also bad for the environment. As the world's population grows, more forests and tropical areas will become farmlands for crops or grasslands for cattle. We are likely to have more greenhouse gas in the future from agriculture than that coming out of all forms of transportation right now.
Mr. Tillman calls the link among the diet, the environment and human health “a trilemma” — a problem offering a difficult choice. He says one possible solution is leaving the Western diet behind.
1.According to the passage, more greenhouse gas might be given off in the future from ______.
A.transportation B.developing countries
C.agriculture D.developed countries
2.David Tillman believes that ______.
A.the diet, the environment and human health are closely connected
B.the Western diet is the only choice as the nation industrializes
C.people in tropical areas are more likely to have diabetes
D.traditional diets are more balanced than the Western diet
3.The main purpose of the passage is to ______.
A.call on us to protect the environment
B.warn us of the risk of the Western diet
C.remind us of the importance of health
D.advise us to have a balanced diet
After an absence of thirty years, I decided to visit my old school again. I had expected to find changes, but not a completely different building. As I walked up the school drive, I wondered for a moment if I had come to the right address. The dirty red brick houses had been swept away. In its place stood a bright, modern block. A huge expanse of glass extended (延展) across the face of the building, and in front, there was a well-kept lawn (草坪) where there used to be “an untidy gravel (沙石) yard”.
I was pleased to find that it was bread time and that the children were all in the playground. This would enable me to meet some members of staff. On entering the building, I was surprised to hear loud laughter coming from what appeared to be the masters’ common room. I could not help remembering the teachers in my time, all dressed in black gowns and high collars. And above all, I recalled Mr Garston whom we had nicknamed “Mr Ghastly”, the headmaster who had iron discipline on staff and pupils alike. I knocked at the common room door and was welcomed by a smiling young man who introduced himself to me as the headmaster. He was dressed casually in a sports jacket, and his cheerful manner, quickly dispelled (驱散) the image of Mr Ghastly. After I had explained who I was, the headmaster presented me to the teachers all of whom were a little younger than himself, and said he would take me round the school.
Here the biggest surprise of all was in store for me. Gone were the heavy desks of old with their deeply carved names; gone too, were the dark classrooms with their ink stained, dark brown walls, and their raised platforms for the teachers. The rooms now were painted in bright colors, and the children, far from sitting straight in their places, seemed almost free to do as they liked. I looked with envy as I remembered how, as a child, I had looked at the blackboard hardly daring to whisper to my neighbor.
1.The writer ______.
A.had no difficulty in recognizing his old school
B.found it difficult to recognize his old school
C.noticed that the building was still unfinished
D.was surprised to see an untidy gravel yard
2.Which of the following statements is NOT true?
A.He had expected that the school had completely changed.
B.In the writer’s time, all the teachers were dressed in black gowns and high collars.
C.There was a well-kept lawn in their school when he visited it.
D.An untidy gravel yard had disappeared.
3.“Mr. Ghastly” must be ______.
A.the writer’s teacher B.a serious old man
C.the strict headmaster D.a naughty boy
4.From what is said in the passage it seems clear the writer ______.
A.disapproved of all the changes that had taken place
B.felt sorry for the children in the school
C.was glad that the school was still the same
D.felt that conditions at the school had improved a lot
阅读下面短文，根据其内容写一篇 60 词左右的内容概要。
In today’s world where we have various translation apps that allow us to talk to almost anyone “in his own language”, why do we still need to make an effort to learn a foreign language ourselves? There are practical reasons, of course. For example, those who are bilingual (具备双语能力的) have a better chance in the job market. And science has proved that learning to speak more than one
language can train one’s brain to be stronger.
But there’s more to it than that. US author Rita Mae Brown once wrote: “Language is the road map of a culture.” By taking a look at the vocabulary and idioms of a language system, we get a glimpse (一瞥) at what’s held important in a certain culture. Take the Swedish word “lagom” for example. It means “just the right amount”, which doesn’t have a matching word either in English or in Chinese. From “lagom”, we can see how much the concepts of “moderation (适度)” and “balance” are valued in Swedish culture. By learning a foreign language, you also gain a better understanding of your own culture. Irish language expert Benny Lewis explained this idea in his blog with an interesting metaphor: “Trying to understand your own culture merely from within it is like trying to understand what a bus is like if you’ve only ever ridden inside it. If you want the bigger picture, you need to get off that bus and examine it from the outside.” And by opening our eyes to different
cultures, we’re able to understand better how people grow up to be different from one another. We also learn to be more tolerant and respectful to the diversity of the world.
As Trinity University professor Leonardo De Valoes wrote on the school’s website: “Foreign language study is simply part of a very basic liberal education: to ‘educate’ is to lead out, to lead out of narrowness and darkness.”
