The first foreign language I studied was French, and I learnt it at a secondary school between the ages of 11 and 18. It was a compulsory subject for the first three years and I 1. (choose) to continue studying it afterwards because I enjoyed it, found it 2. (interest) and was quite good at it. Outside class I practiced 3. (listen) to the French language radio and reading French books.
Before going to university, I spent three months working on 4. farm in southern France. This helped me become pretty fluent5. French and acquire a rich farming-related vocabulary.
My French has also been 6. (help) on holiday on Morocco and Portugal. French 7. (use) as a second language in Morocco and in other countries quite a few people speak French in places 8. a lot of tourists visit.
In September 2009 I joined a couple of French conversation 9. (group) in Bangor and I have been going to them ever since. It has resulted in my 10. (improve) in my spoken French.
Now I can still speak French fluently and can also read it well, but my written French is not so good.
When I was young at school, I loved to talk, a characteristic not always appreciated by Miss Jordan, my tenth-grade English teacher.
She was a teacher no one wanted because she was so ______. She stood about five-foot-five, was very thin and wore her hair pulled back in a way that gave her a horsy ______. She wore those half-circular reading glasses. Whenever she got upset, she would lower her head and look at you over the top of her glasses.
One day in her class I was busy talking. I didn’t ______ she had stopped teaching and was ______ straight at me. “Young lady, I would like to see you after school.”
Later Miss Jordan ______ in a low, but very firm voice that showed she expected me to listen when she was talking. For ______ she told me to write a thousand-word essay on education and its effect on the economy. She wanted it in by the following Wednesday.
Well, I met my deadline. I was ______. It was a good paper. And I expected a sign of ______ from her. The next day in class,______, she was looking at me over her glasses. She called me forward and ______ my paper. “Go back and rewrite,” she said. “Remember, each paragraph is supposed to begin with a topic sentence.” When she gave my paper back a second time, she ______ the grammar. The third time, the spelling. The fourth time, it was punctuation. The fifth, it wasn’t neat enough. I was ______!
The sixth time, I rewrote the whole paper ______, in ink, leaving generous space. When she saw it, she removed her glasses and smiled She finally ______ the paper. After that, I put the whole thing out of my ______.
Two or three months passed. One day Miss Jordan came into the class and said to us: Class, do you still ______ an essay contest held citywide? They’ve announced the ______. I am happy to inform you that Mary has won third prize in the essay contest ‘On the Impact of Education on the Economy’.”
I was amazed and ______. It was the first time I had ever won a prize. Years later, I told a reporter that story, and my comments — including my unfriendly ______ of Miss Jordan’s appearance. Miss Jordan wrote me, and said that her appearance wasn’t what was important. What was important was the ______ I had learnt. When I wrote and rewrote that paper for her, I began to learn how to discipline myself.
1.A. open-minded B. strict C. careful D. cold-hearted
2.A. look B. shape C. style D. character
3.A. guess B. believe C. imagine D. realize
4.A. waving B. laughing C. staring D. running
5.A. complained B. whispered C. explained D. apologized
6.A. objection B. motivation C. punishment D. encouragement
7.A. confident B. concerned C. nervous D. helpful
8.A. suggestion B. praise C. comment D. respect
9.A. otherwise B. moreover C. however D. therefore
10.A. changed B. tore C. opened D. returned
11.A. mastered B. corrected C. taught D. identified
12.A. relieved B. grateful C. relaxed D. sick
13.A. carelessly B. eagerly C. quickly D. slowly
14.A. published B. accepted C. finished D. studied
15.A. mind B. list C. question D. sight
16.A. remember B. enter C. expect D. organize
17.A. plans B. winners C. participants D. names
18.A. curious B. anxious C. thrilled D. enthusiastic
19.A. conclusion B. reaction C. recommendation D. description
20.A. lesson B. meaning C. skill D. result
Confidence is a skill that many folks want to master, but have a hard time acquiring. Have you ever wondered why? Possibly you were born confident. You were talked to negatively as a child or maybe you were rejected many times. Whatever the case is, 1. But how to boost your confidence?
Begin to act as if you are confident. Act as the person you would want to be like.2. Surround yourself with people who you think are confident and have high value. You will learn so much from observing other confident folks.
3. One of the most areas that you need to pay attention to is your self-talk. Your thoughts about your capabilities and self-worth need to be positive and encouraging. Whenever you notice you think negatively, pause and take a moment, and shift your focus to something that can help you feel better about yourself.
Go after your goals. If you are really serious about building self-confidence, you need to identify your goals and go after them. The more you add to your accomplishments, the more confident you will feel about your abilities and skills.4..
By using these steps to boost your confidence,5..
A. Always stay positive.
B. Improve your self-talk.
C. Begin to think and behave like them.
D. This requires you to know what a confident person looks like.
E. you will be on the path to improving your self-esteem (自尊) and self-worth.
F. You’ll begin to trust your inner self more and appreciate yourself more.
G. you should know you can improve your self-esteem and build confidence.
For thousands of years, we have looked for ways to measure time. Early humans found that the regular movements of the sun, the earth> the moon, and the stars made good ways to measure time. The rising and setting of the sun were used to distinguish (辨别) day from night.
But, eventually, people needed to tell time more accurately, or exactly. So, by using the sun’s position in the sky, they divided the day into dawn, morning, midday and evening.
Then it was noted that the sun cast a changing shadow as it moved across the sky. Time could be told more accurately by setting up a stick and marking the positions of the sun’s shadow. It was the ancient Greeks who divided each position of this “sundial (日晷)” into hours.
But the sun doesn’t always shine. So, for the past 6,000 years, many other ways of keeping time have been tried. Slow-burning candles were divided into hours, and the hourglass was invented. When all the sand in the top of an hourglass has shifted to the bottom, an hour has passed.
Later, the pendulum (摆钟), with its regular back-and-forth movement of weights, was used to move the hands on a clock. Pendulums are still used in grandfather clocks.
Today, even more accurate clocks are in use, such as battery-operated quartz clocks (石英钟), digital clocks, and clocks run by electrical tuning forks and tiny atoms. These atomic clocks are the most accurate clocks ever invented. The exact time can be kept to within 1 second a century.
1.Humans in the old days used to tell day from night.
A. the rising and setting of the sun
B. battery-operated quartz clocks
C. atomic clocks
D. digital clocks
2.A sundial works by .
A. tracking the movement of the stars around the sun
B. marking a shadow cast by the moving sun
C. burning candles in the sunlight
D. watching the stars
3.Which of the following was NOT used in the past to measure time?
A. An hourglass. B. A sundial.
C. Digital clocks. D. A pendulum.
4.Which of the following ways of measuring time is ordered from the least accurate to the most accurate?
A. Sundial, pendulum, sun.
B. Atomic clock, quartz clock, sundial.
C. Sun, pendulum, atomic clock.
D. Digital clock, hourglass, slow-burning candles.
Good health is the most valuable thing a person can have, but one cannot take good health for granted. It is important to remember that the body needs proper care in order to be healthy. There are three things that a person can do to help stay in good: eat right food, get enough sleep, and exercise regularly.
Proper nutrition is important for good health. Your body cannot work well unless it receives the proper kind of “fuel”. Don’t eat too much food with lots of sugar and fat. Eat plenty of foods high in protein, like meat, fish, eggs and nuts. Vegetables and fruits are very important because they provide necessary vitamins and minerals. However, don’t overeat. It is not helpful to be overweight.
Getting the proper amount of sleep is also important. If you don’t get enough sleep, you feel tired and easily get angry. You have no energy. Over along period of time a little amount of sleep may even result in a change of personality. Be sure to allow yourself from seven to nine hours of sleep each night. If you do, your body will feel strong and refreshed, and your mind will be sharp.
Finally, get plenty of exercise. Exercise firms the body, strengthens the muscles, and prevents you from gaining weight. It also improves your heart and lungs. If you follow a regular exercise program, you will probably increase your life-span Any kind of exercise is good. Most sports are excellent for keeping the body in good shape: basketball, swimming, bicycling, running and so on are good examples. Sports are not only good for your body, but they are enjoyable and interesting, too.
If everybody were to eat the right foods, get plenty of sleep and exercise regularly, the world would be a happier and healthier place. We would all live to be much older and wiser.
1.In order to keep good health, .
A. we should eat a lot of sweets
B. one needs a large amount of fat
C. people should eat according to the nutrition of the food
D. we must try to sleep now and then
2.Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?
A. Eating too much sugar and fat is not good for our health.
B. We have no energy if we don’t have enough sleep.
C. If we sleep five hours each night, we will feel strong.
D. Exercise is good for our body.
3.The title of the article should be .
A. Eating and Exercising
B. How Vitamins Work in Man’s Body
C. Staying Healthy
D. Sleeping Well
A Japanese telecom company has designed a robot that it says has emotions (情绪). But rather than run in fear from it, we’ve welcomed it into our homes: Pepper, the “emotional robots” sold out within a minute of going on sale.
Created by Aldebaran Robotics and Japanese mobile giant SoftBaok, Pepper went on sale to the general public in Japan on June 20. It is “the first humanoid (类人的) robot designed to live with humans,” Aldebaran says on its website. Pepper costs about $ 1,600. And like all good mobile products, there’s a $ 120 per month data fee, as well as an $80 per month damage insurance fee. According to a news report, Pepper can pick up on human emotions and create his own using a “multi-layer neural (神经的) network.” Pepper’s touch sensors and cameras are said to influence its mood, which is displayed on the tablet-sized screen on its chest.
Pepper will sigh when unhappy, and can go around your house recording your family’s daily activity. Aldebaran says Pepper can feel “joy, surprise, anger, doubt and sadness,” but it doesn’t say how strongly it can feel these emotions. What happens when Pepper is having a bad day? Will it, like many humans, become uncooperative? Will it ask for some time alone? What happens if it knows that its purpose in life is just to take part in small talk? Thankfully, Pepper is only about four feet tall, with roller balls instead of legs, so if it is angry with and even turns on its owners, you’ll be safe if you can make it upstairs.
Aldebaran says in reality, they’re probably quite a few years away from artificial intelligence that could create real emotions. Aldebaran wasn’t immediately able to tell when Pepper will be available out of Japan, but additional sales are scheduled for July after the first 1,000 units sell out. SoftBank currently uses the robots in its stores as greeters, and it plans to offer Pepper to other stores in the future. Hopefully “boredom” is not an emotion Pepper can feel.
1.According to the author, Pepper .
A. is very popular among customers
B. can not only run but also show fear
C. is going to be sold all over the world
D. can deal with many kinds of housework
2.How much do you need to pay for Pepper’s data and damage insurance fee each year?
A. 80 dollars. B. 120 dollars.
C. 1,440 dollars. D. 2,400 dollars.
3.Pepper s height and roller balls are mentioned to .
A. introduce its appearance B. tell Pepper won’t get angry
C. show that safety isn’t a big problem D. explain robots have strong emotions
4.What can we infer from the last paragraph?
A. Pepper cannot produce real emotions.
B. Pepper can feel joy, surprise and boredom.
C. Pepper will be sold in other countries next year.
D. Pepper is being used as waiters in some restaurants.
