A European Union program is letting blind people experience famous paintings for the first time. It uses three dimensional(3-D) printing to re-create famous paintings so they can be touched.
One painting printed with the new technology is Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.” It is a popular attraction at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, Austria. The painting shows a man and a woman standing in a field filled with flowers. They are wearing gold robes and have their arms around each other. The man leans down to kiss the woman.
Klimt finished the painting in 1908. Until now, people who had trouble seeing could not appreciate the artwork. But thanks to the reproduction they can touch the piece and feel the ridges and depressions. Andreas Reichinger started making 3-D versions of artwork in 2010. He said this reproduction was his most difficult project because the couple’s robes are so detailed.
Dominika Raditsch is a blind museum visitor. She touched the reproduction. As she moved her hands around it she said, “Exactly, can you see these? There are so many details.” Raditsch said she can imagine what the original painting looks like when she touches the reproduction. “It’s somehow round. You can feel it. You can feel it. It comes with it. And in many places it’s so smooth. And then I think to myself: it probably shines too!” Raditsch said.
The Belvedere is not the only museum to have 3-D versions of its artwork. Some of the pieces at the Prado, in Madrid, Spain, have reproductions that can be touched. But the piece in Vienna has one special part: It is made with widely available 3-D printing technology. That means one day, blind art fans anywhere in the world could download the source files and print the reproductions themselves.
1.What is “The kiss”?
A. A European Union project. B. A popular painting.
C. A 3-D technology. D. A famous museum.
2.Why did Reichinger say this reproduction was difficult to finish?
A. The painting was reproduced detailed.
B. The original artwork was made in 1908.
C. Blind art fans can’t download the source.
D. The 3-D technology is not available.
3.How did Raditsch feel when she first touched the reproduction?
A. Awkward. B. Puzzled.
C. Excited. D. Nervous.
4.What is the best title for the text?
A. A European Union Program for Museum Visitors
B. 3-D Printing Lets Blind Experience Famous Painting
C. How to Reproduce the World-famous Paintings
D. A Special Museum for Art Fans in Vienna, Austria
Imagine that you’re looking at your company-issued smartphone and you notice an e-mail from Linkedln:“These companies are looking for candidate like you!” You aren’t necessarily searching for a job, but you’re always open to opportunities, so out of curiosity, you click on the link. A few minutes later your boss appears at your desk. “We’ve noticed that you’re spending more time on Linkedln lately, so I wanted to talk with you about your career and whether you’re happy here,” she says Uh-oh.
It’s an awkward scene. Attrition(损耗) has always been expensive for companies, but in many industries the cost of losing good workers is rising, owing to tight labor markets. Thus companies are making greater efforts to predict which workers are at high risk of leaving so that managers can try to stop them. Methods range from electronic monitor to sophisticated analyses of employees’ social media lives.
Some of this work may be a reason to let employees to quit. In general, people leave their jobs because they don’t like their boss, don’t see opportunities for promotion or growth, or are offered a higher pay; these reasons have held steady for years.
New research conducted by CEB, a Washington-based technology company, looks not just at why workers quit but also at when. “We’ve learned that what really affects people is their sense of how they’re doing compared with other people in their peer group, or with where they thought they would be at a certain point in life, says Brian Kropp, who heads CEB’s HR practice. “We’ve learned to focus on moments that allow people to make these comparisons.”
Technology also provides clues about which star employees might be eyeing the exit. Companies can tell whether employees using work computers or phones are spending time on (or even just opening e-mails from) career websites, and research shows that more firms are paying attention to these things. Large companies have also begun tracking badge swipes(浏览痕迹)—employees’ use of an ID to enter and exit the building or the parking garage—to identify patterns that suggest a worker may be interviewing for a job.
1.From the first paragraph, we can infer Linkedln is ________.
A. an e-mail
B. a job from the Internet
C. a professional social network
D. a world-famous company
2.What’s the main idea of the second paragraph?
A. The cost of losing good workers is rising.
B. Companies are stricter with workers than before.
C. Measures have been taken to find the potential workers who want to quit.
D. Finding new jobs has been a trend for most workers.
3.According to the research by CEB, which of the following might be the most probable reason for workers to quit their jobs?
A. They don’t like their bosses.
B. Workers are always doing comparisons.
C. Not seeing opportunities for promotion.
D. To find a higher-paid job.
Bill Gates recently has predicted that online learning will make place-based colleges less significant, and five years from now, students will be able to find the best lectures in the world online. I applaud Mr. Gates. But what’s taking us so long?
As early as 1997, MIT(麻省理工) decided to post videos of all university lectures online, for free, for all people. But today, how many students have you met who mastered advanced mathematics or nuclear physics from an MIT online video? Unfortunately, the answer is not many. The problem is the poor quality of online education websites and the experience they provide to students. Those who go to the MIT website and watch courses online are surely very smart people, but it’s not like playing a video game such as World of Warcraft. Only the most ardent students, those who are highly motivated, will devote themselves to studying these boring online videos.
The real question is why we aren’t spending more to develop better online education platforms. Where is the Avatar of education? Think about this. The market for Hollywood films per year is worth around 30 billion USD. Education in the world is a trillion-dollar-a-year market, hundreds of times bigger than Hollywood movies. Yet the most expensive digital learning system ever built cost well under 100 million dollars.
Bill Gates’ prediction is going to happen. There is no doubt about it. But it will only happen when we create high level educational content and experiences that engage and excite more than has ever been possible in the real world.
1.What has Bill Gates forecast about online learning?
A. It will concentrate on physics lectures
B. It will completely replace real universities
C. It will help to make universities more successful
D. It will play an increasingly important role in education
2.What does the underlined word “ardent” in Paragraph 3 mean?
A. Creative B. Enthusiastic
C. Well-behaved D. Experienced
3.According to the author, what is holding back the popularity of online learning?
A. The lack of lectures available online
B. The high cost of access to the websites
C. The low standard of educational websites
D. The competition with online computer games
4.Why does the author mention Hollywood?
A. To show that Hollywood produces many successful movies
B. To prove that education is more profitable than entertainment
C. To argue that movie directors should produce educational content
D. To urge that more money be spent developing educational websites
Chen Yifan, the student from a local senior high school, hit a BMW car parking along the street when he was passing by on a bicycle on February 4, leaving the rearview mirror broken and several scratches over the body of the car.
Chen left a letter of apology to the car owner, together with an envelope of 311 yuan he had earned from part-time jobs during the winter holiday. He put them at the inside of a door handle.
The car owner surnamed Xue found the letter and cash the next day and got so touched by Chen’s honesty. With the help of local police Xue located the student on February 10 in the hope of returning the money. He told the police that he also wants to fund Chen’s education if the family cannot afford it.
On February 11, Chen’s mother, after knowing what her son had done, voluntarily contacted Xue trying to compensate for the repair of 13,000 yuan. But Xue turned her down firmly.
The next day, Xue’s daughter visited Chen’s family with a grant of 10,000 yuan for his education.
【写作内容】
1. 用约30个单词写出上文概要；
2. 用约120个单词发表你的观点，内容包括：
（1）如果你是那位中学生，你会怎么做？你又如何看待这位车主的行为？
（2）如何理解“穷有信、富而仁”这句话？
【写作要求】
1. 写作过程中不能直接引用原文语句；
2. 作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称；
3. 不必写标题。
【评分标准】
内容完整，语言规范，语篇连贯，词数适当。
____________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________
Nowhere is the place you never want to go. It’s not on any departure board, and though some people like to travel so far off the motherland that it looks like Nowhere, most wanderers ultimately long to get somewhere. Yet every now and then—if there’s nowhere else you can be and all other options have gone—going nowhere can prove the best adventure around.
Nowhere is entirely uncharted; you’ve never read a guidebook entry on it or followed others’ suggestions on a train ride through its suburbs. Few YouTube videos exist of it. Moreover, it’s free from the most dangerous kind of luggage, expectation. Knowing nothing of a place in advance opens us up to a high energy we seldom encounter while walking around Paris or Kyoto with a list of the 10 things we want—or, in embarrassing truth, feel we need—to see.
I’ll never forget a bright January morning when I landed in San Francisco from Santa Barbara, just in time to see my connecting flight to Osaka take off. I hurried to the nearest airline counter to ask for help, and was told that I would have to wait 24 hours, at my own expense, for the next day’s flight. An unanticipated delay is exactly what nobody wants on his schedule. The airline didn’t answer for fog-related delays, a gate agent declared, and no alternative flights were available.
Millbrae, California, the drive-through town that encircles San Francisco’s airport, was a mystery to me. With one of the world’s most beautiful cities only 40 minutes to the north, and the unofficial center of the world, Silicon Valley, 27 miles to the south, Millbrae is known mostly as a place to fly away from, at high speed.
It was a cloudless, warm afternoon as a shuttle bus deposited me in Millbrae. Locals were taking their dogs for walks along the bay while couples wandered hand in hand beside an expanse of blue that, in San Francisco, would have been crowded with people and official “attractions.” I checked in to my hotel and registered.
Suddenly I was enjoying a luxury I never allow myself, even on vacation: a whole day free. And as I made my way back to my hotel, lights began to come on in the hills of Millbrae, and I realized I had never seen a sight half so lovely in glamorous, industrial Osaka. Its neighbor Kyoto is attractive, but it attracts 50 million visitors a year.
Who knows if I’ll ever visit Millbrae again? But I’m confident that Nowhere will slip into my schedule many times more. No place, after all, is uninteresting to the interested eye. Nowhere is so far off the map that its smallest beauties are a discovery.
The Unexpected Joys of a Trip to Nowhere | |
Passage outline | Supporting details |
Introduction to Nowhere | ●Although many choose to travel beyond the 1., they actually hope to get somewhere. ●Getting nowhere can be the best adventure when we are2. out of options. |
3. of Nowhere | ●You don’t have to be 4. on a guidebook entry or others’ advice. ●With limited information of a place and little expectation, we will encounter a 5. high energy that doesn’t exist when visiting Paris or Kyoto. |
The author’s experience of getting nowhere | ●The airline wasn’t 6. for unexpected delays and there were no alternative flights available. ●He decided to visit the mysterious Millbrae,7. between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. ●He 8. to enjoy such a luxurious and free time in big cities before. |
Conclusion | ●Though 9. about whether to visit Millbrae again, Nowhere will be included in his schedule. ●Nowhere is entirely uncharted with its beauties to be 10.. |
The first time she saw Bryce Loski, she flipped. The first time he saw Juli Baker, he ran. For six years of living close by, they had played the same game of cat-and-mouse (Juli was the cat; Bryce was the unfortunate mouse).
For years Juli dreamed of one thing: her first kiss from the boy. Nothing else seemed to matter. But when Juli’s favorite sycamore tree is threatened by developers, things begin to change. She begins to see things and places and people in a different light. Things, for years, she thought to be important, become things she can live without; and people she thought to be the center of her universe, become nothing more than a star in a faraway galaxy.
Things begin changing with Bryce also. It all begins with the eggs…which then cause a domino effect of changes with his relationships with his best friend, his father, the Bakers and, ultimately, Juli.
I had seen this book on the shelf at bookstores for years, but never bothered to pick it up because it looked to be another book from Jerry Spinelli (not exactly my favorite author in the world) and so, continually, I would walk past it without giving it a second glance. If by chance I had picked it up, I most likely would not have read it, since the summary on the back didn’t seem too appealing. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I heard about Flipped the movie. I read an interview with Callan McAuliffe (the actor who portrays Bryce) and thought that Flipped was a romance right up my alley; cute, innocent and as far from Jane Austin as you could get. After reading the interview and a summary of the movie, I found the plot-line to be somewhat appealing and a definite breath of fresh air opposed to the dark material I have been recently reading and writing. I found the book a few days later in a Goodwill bookstore and finished it in three days.
The story isn’t what you would consider deep…it isn’t shallow and pointless either…I guess you could say it’s the perfect balance of life-lessons and innocence.
You read about Bryce and Juli (each from their own points of view) and how, throughout six years, their lives and views and opinions change and develop. Flipped is somewhat of a coming of age story about two kids learning to see life from the other’s point of view and learning that growing up isn’t about staying the same, but changing; changing likes and dislikes; changing friends and crushes and views on family.
Uniquely written, every other chapter showing the same scenes and events, only from the other’s point of view, you see how the saying, “Two sides to every story,” is true. You are able to see both Juli and Bryce’s reasons for doing what they do and saying what they say…not just what the other sees.
It will be interesting to see how this writing style comes into play in the movie. Overall I thought this story was incredibly cute and light-hearted, although it didn’t entirely meet my expectations. Especially the ending. I felt as though it ended quite abruptly and that there was more story that needed to be told.
But even with that, after having taken a step back and taken my mind off of Flipped, I find the story has stuck with me and stayed in the back of my mind, making me highly anticipate seeing this book turned to a film. I understand why it has been so popular for almost two decades and am looking forward to seeing Flipped on the big screen soon.
1.According to Paragraphs 1 and 2, what is the relationship between Juli Baker and Bryce Loski？
A. Lovers. B. Neighbors.
C. Daughter and father. D. Sister and brother.
2.What has happened to Juli after her favorite sycamore tree is endangered?
A. Bryce Loski has become an insignificant figure in her life.
B. Things and people around her have changed beyond recognition.
C. She has come to realize that she is the center of the universe.
D. The sycamore tree is nothing more than a star in faraway galaxy.
3.Which of the following sentences best expresses the essential information in the underlined sentence in Paragraph 4?
A. After reading the interview with Callan, the author confirmed his pervious attitude to Flipped.
B. After reading the interview with Callan, the author was deep impressed by his story of romance.
C. It was the interview with Callan that made the author realize that it was a book to his taste.
D. It was the performance of Callan that inspired the author to read the original work.
4.According to Paragraph 6, what is the theme of Flipped?
A. Generation gap. B. Growing pains.
C. Forever love. D. Changing lifestyles.
5.In the author’s opinion, Flipped doesn’t provide us readers with ________.
A. a happy ending for Juli and Bryce B. limited appeal for re-appreciation
C. much space for individual imagination D. a smooth ending to the whole story
6.The passage is mainly about ________.
A. a beautiful love story between Juli Baker and Bryce Loski
B. a cute and innocent love story that you shouldn’t miss
C. how an amazing movie was adapted from a love story
D. how a summary prevents readers from moving forward
