I was born in England, but I am an American. Americans like to travel on their yearly holiday. Today, more and more travelers in the United States are spending nights at small houses or inns (客栈) instead of hotels. They get a room for the night and the breakfast the next morning.
Rooms for the night in private homes with breakfast have been popular with travelers in Europe for many years. In the past five to ten years, these bedandbreakfast places have become popular in the United States. Many of these America’s bedandbreakfast inns are old historic buildings. Some bedandbreakfast inns have only a few rooms; others are much larger. Some inns do not provide telephones or televisions in the rooms; others do.
Staying at a bedandbreakfast inn is much different from staying at a hotel. Usually the cost is much less. Staying at an inn is almost like visiting someone’s home. The owners are glad to tell about the areas and the interesting places to visit. Many vacationers say they enjoy the chance to meet local families.
1.Americans take a holiday trip ________.
A. every year B. for years
C. all the year round D. every other year
2.According to the passage, which of the following is NOT true?
A. Some Americans like to stay at bedandbreakfast homes instead of hotels.
B. The bedandbreakfast inns are private homes opened to vacationers.
C. The bedandbreakfast inn owners provide a morning meal for their visitors and a room for the night.
D. The bedandbreakfast inns have been popular in America for a very long time.
3.Why do American travelers prefer staying at bedandbreakfast inns?
A. It is like visiting someone’s home.
B. The money they spend there is much less.
C. They can meet local families.
D. All of the above.
4.What’s the author’s nationality?
A. England B. American
C. European D. Chinese
One day a few years ago, a very funny thing happened to a neighbour of mine. He is a teacher at one of London's big medical schools. He had finished his teaching for the summer term and was at the airport on his way to Russia to give a lecture.
He had put a few clothes and his lecture notes in his shoulder bag , and he had put Rupert , the skeleton (人体骨架）to be used in his lecture , in a large brown suitcase. At the airport desk, he suddenly thought that he had forgotten to buy a newspaper. He left his suitcase near the desk and went over to the shop.
When he got back he discovered that someone had taken his suitcase by mistake. He often wonders what they said when they got home and found Rupert.
1.Who wrote the story?
A. Rupert's teacher. B. The teacher's neighbour.
C. A medical school teacher. D. The neighbour's teacher.
2.Why did the teacher put a skeleton in his suitcase?
A. He needed it for the summer term in London.
B. He wanted to take it home as he had finished his teaching.
C. He wanted to take it to Russia for medical research.
D. He needed it for the lecture he was going to give.
3.What happened at the airport?
A. The teacher forgot his suitcase. B. The skeleton was stolen.
C. The skeleton went missing. D. The teacher took the wrong suitcase.
4.Which of the following best tells the teacher's feeling about the incident?
A. He was angry. B. He thinks it very funny.
C. He feels helpless without Rupert. D. He feels good without Rupert.
If you want to become a fluent English speaker you should take some advice. There are four skills in learning English. They are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The most important thing you must remember is that if you want to improve your speaking and writing skills, you should first master the skills of reading and listening.
Read as much as you can. But your reading must be active. It means that you must think about the meaning of the sentence, the meaning of the unfamiliar words, etc. There is no need for you to pay much attention to grammars or try to understand all the unfamiliar words you come across, but the fact that you see them for the first time and recognize them whenever you see them, for example, in other passages or books, is enough. It would be better to prepare yourself a notebook so you can write down the important words or sentences in it.
As for listening, there are two choices: besides reading, you can listen every day for about 30 minutes. You can only pay attention to your reading and become skillful at your reading, then you can catch up on your listening. Since you have lots of inputs in your mind, you can easily guess what the speaker is going to say. This never means that you should not practice listening. For listening you can listen to cartoons or some movies that are specially made for children. Their languages are easy. Or if you are good at listening you can listen to VOA or BBC programs every day. Again the thing to remember is being active in listening and preferably taking some notes.
If you follow these pieces of advice, your speaking and writing will improve quickly, and you can be a fluent English speaker one day.
1.According to the writer, which should you improve first among the four skills?
A. Reading and listening. B. Reading and writing.
C. Writing and speaking. D. Speaking and listening.
2.To improve your reading, when you read you should ______.
A. look up all the new words in the dictionary
B. think about what you are reading actively
C. spend more time studying grammars
D. copy as many words and sentences as possible
3.The underlined phrase “come across” in Paragraph 2 can probably be replaced by “______”.
A. meet B. discover
C. hear D. look for
4.The author seems to agree with the view that ________ .
A. everyone should listen to VOA or BBC programs every day
B. you needn’t practice listening if you keep on reading every day
C. being good at reading is helpful in improving your listening
D. you should take notes of whatever you hear
请阅读下面短文，并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。注意：请将答案写在答题卡上相应题号的横线上，每个空格只填一个单词。
Acting is the activity of performing in plays or films. It’s about living an alternative reality. It lets you explore all kinds of possibilities of what you could be. Just being your own self can be boring sometimes, and acting gives you an opportunity to be someone else for a while. It is voluntarily entering the psyche(心灵) of another personality and thinking according to a different set of values and constraints (约束). It lets you explore many parts of you, which you thought never existed. It lets you deeply explore what it means to be a human being.
One of the best ways to begin your own acting studies is to start reading some good plays. Choose your favorite role from one of your favorite plays and prepare to act it out in front of the audience. To learn to act, you must act. Here are some tips on how to become an actor with no experience:
To play a role, you must understand the character that you are going to play with open arms. Understand the plot of the play, as well as the psyche of your character. Understand the conditions in which your character lives. Try to understand why your character behaves in that way. So you must learn the lines or dialogues thoroughly and explore the thought behind every sentence. This will help you picture the circumstances in which the character finds himself/herself. Some actors go as far as “living” as that person for a while, to understand him or her. The idea is to go as close as possible to being that person. More importantly, only through practice can you get close to actually being that person. So seize every chance and perform as frequently as you can. This will help you develop confidence and overcome stage fright.
As a student of acting, you need to always be a sponge (海绵), ready to absorb, learn, and observe the performances of great actors, to learn the slight differences of the art. While you watch movies, plays and any other performance, study the differences of a role played by any actors, especially the masters. By just keeping your eyes open, you can pick up a lot of things.
Why do you want to act? Is it for money, fame, or genuine love for the art? Would you do it if you were not paid for it? If the answer and your motivation is love for acting, you are sure to eventually succeed.
About acting | ||
1.of acting | ● It allows you to explore various possibilities of what you could be. ● It helps remove your 2.by enabling you to be someone else. ● It allows you to enter another psyche and life. ● It can 3.your life and let you explore the4.of being a human being. | |
A good way for beginners | Read good plays and choose a favourite role to act. | |
About acting | ||
Tips on acting | Understand your character 5.. | ● Understand the plot of the play and your character’s psyche. ● Understand your character’s living conditions and the reason for his/her 6.. ● Try various ways to get close to your character’s life. ● Never miss an 7.to perform. |
___8__ and learn. | Watch movies and plays to learn from professional actors’ performing skills. | |
Have a love for acting. | ● Try to 8.out the reasons for your desire to act. ● If you act out of love, you will keep 9.and finally succeed. |
About 15 years ago, I taught A Problem from Hell, a book on genocides (大屠杀), to a group of 18- and 19-year-olds in a mid-west university in the US. In my class there was a young man who had spent his boyhood in Bosnia as NATO bombed his hometown. My other students, amazed by his connection to the genocide in the textbook, asked him what it was like to grow up in a war-zone. “A pretty normal childhood as you had here,” he said. “We played cards inside a lot, and when there was no bombing we kicked a ball in the street.”
In the past few years, the world has seen a rapid increase in refugees (难民), with the number hitting 60 million. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s story collection The Refugees reminds us that literature is news that stays news. Set in the Vietnamese communities in California as well as in Vietnam, the stories do not aim to surprise us with new twists or shock us with wonderful details, as war and refugee stories could easily choose to do. Rather, like the young man from Bosnia, Nguyen’s characters tell these stories because they are the only ones known to them.
Included in the collection are two of the most touching pieces, both about siblings (兄弟或姊妹) separated by geography and history. In “Black-Eyed Women”, the narrator (讲述人), a young Vietnamese woman, is visited by the ghost of her elder brother, who died young on the boat when the family took flight from the war. The tale of love and loss, violence and violation, may not be unfamiliar to the reader, but the determination of the brother’s ghost (he has taken decades to swim across the Pacific to reach America) and the sister’s abandoning herself to a half death make the story lasting.
As an echo, the closing story, “Fatherland”, explores a more complex situation between two siblings. The narrator, a young Vietnamese woman, meets her half-sister, visiting from the US for the first time. Adding to the tension is the fact that her father has named the narrator and her siblings after his first set of children. Two sisters, one American and one Vietnamese, yet named the same by the father – it may sound strange, but isn’t it the fate many refugees have to face: a life left behind, that could have been theirs; and a life in an adopted country.
The theme of doubleness – choice and inevitability (不可避免性), home and homelessness, starting afresh and being stuck – is present not only in the stories of Vietnamese refugees, but also of those who have become refugees from their own homes and loved ones. “Smiling at your relatives never got you very far, but smiling at strangers and acquaintances sometimes did.” So a pilot, who fought in the Vietnam war and is now revisiting the country for the first time, thinks while waving at the locals from a tour bus. He’s distant from his daughter, just as a Mexican American in the collection is distant from his wife, or a young man from Hong Kong is distant from his father.
The collection is full of refugees, whether from external or from a deeper, more internal conflict between even those who are closest to each other. With anger but not despair, with reconciliation (和解) but not unrealistic hope, and with genuine humour that is not used to insult anyone, Nguyen has breathed life into many unforgettable characters.
1.The first paragraph is intended to .
A. describe the boring life of war victims
B. appeal to the readers to help war victims
C. criticize NATO’s killing of innocent people
D. introduce the story collection The Refugees
2.Which of the following about The Refugees is True?
A. It tells the news in a literary form.
B. It is full of surprising twists and plots.
C. The author experiences the stories himself.
D. Its characters narrate their own stories.
3.How are Black-Eyed Women and Fatherland mainly developed?
A. By giving examples.
B. Bymaking contrasts.
C. By providing evidence.
D. By making classifications.
4.We can infer from Paragraph 5 that .
A. relatives hate their loved ones for being left behind
B. separation from loved ones tends to make them distant
C. people become refugees due to their double character
D. smiling is a good way to keep loved ones together
5.Which of the following is the theme of The Refugees？
A. Despair, suffering, and regret.
B. Anger, humour and hope.
C. Sympathy, regret, and reconciliation.
D. Dream, hope, and expectation.
6.The Refugees mainly focuses on .
A. the problems of identity, love, and family for refugees
B. the miserable lives of refugees in the adopted countries
C. the refugees’ reunion with their families after separation
D. the various reasons for people’s being reduced to refugees
A person’s chances of falling ill from a new strain (菌株) of flu are at least partly determined by the first strain they ever met with, a study suggests.
Research in Science Journal looked at the 18 strains of influenza A ( 甲型流感) and the hemagglutinin protein (红血球凝集素蛋白) on its surface. They say there are only two types of this protein and people are protected from the one their body meets first, but at risk from the other one. A UK expert said that could explain different patterns in flu pandemics (流行病).The researchers, from University of Arizona in Tucson and the University of California, Los Angeles, suggest their findings could explain why some flu outbreaks cause more deaths and serious illnesses in younger people. The first time a person's immune system meets a flu virus, it makes antibodies targeting hemagglutinin protein that sticks out of the surface of the virus — like a lollipop (棒棒糖).
Even though there are 18 types of influenza A, there are only two versions of hemagglutinin. The researchers, led by Dr Michael Worobey, classed them as “blue” and “orange” lollipops. They said people born before the late 1960s were exposed to “blue lollipop” flu viruses — H1 or H2 — as children. In later life they rarely fell ill from another “blue lollipop” flu — H5N1 bird flu, but they died from “orange” H7N9. Those born in the late 1960s and exposed to “orange lollipop” flu — H3 — have the opposite pattern.
His team looked at cases of H5N1 and H7N9 — two kinds of bird flu which have affected hundreds of people, but have not developed into pandemics. The researchers found a 75% protection rate against severe disease and 80% protection rate against death if patients had been exposed to a virus with the same protein version when they were children.
Dr Worobey said the finding could explain the unusual effect of the 1918 “Spanish flu” pandemic, which was more deadly among young adults. “Those young adults were killed by an H1 virus and from blood analysed many decades later there is a pretty strong indication that those individuals had been exposed to a mismatched H3 as children and were therefore not protected against H1. The fact that we are seeing exactly the same pattern with current H5N1 and H7N9 cases suggests that the same fundamental processes may govern both the historic 1918 pandemic and today’s contenders (斗争者) for the next big flu pandemic.”
Jonathan Ball, professor of University of Nottingham, said, “This is a really neat piece of work and provides a reason why human populations have been sensitive to different strains of bird influenza over the past 100 years or so. The findings are based on analysis of patient records and they certainly need further proof in the laboratory, but nonetheless the results are pretty amazing and inspiring.”
1.The findings, if proved, will help people .
A. protect themselves from flu attacks
B. analyze more clearly the records of a patient infected with a bird flu
C. find out who are easier to get infected with a bird flu than others
D. find new drugs to cure patients of flu infections
2.The researchers use “blue lollipop” and “orange lollipop” for two versions of hemagglutinin in order to produce .
A. a good visual effect B. a good logic effect
C. an effect of being abstract D. an effect of being clear
3.While what Dr Worobey said is focused on the facts, Jonathan Ball’s remarks on the research are focused on .
A. the popularity of the research B. challenges and current situation
C. summary and future plans D. evaluation and influences
4.What can serve as the best title of this passage?
A. Cure for Bird Flu Not Far Away
B. First Flu Affects Lifetime Risk
C. New Classification of Flu Pandemics
D. How Bird Flu Affects People
