1 . Just being smart doesn’t mean someone will be successful. And just because someone is less smart doesn’t mean that person will fail. That’s one take-home message from the work of people like Angela Duckworth.
She works at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Like many other researchers, Duckworth wondered what makes one person more successful than another. When digging deeper, Duckworth found that the people who performed best shared a quality (品质) independent of smarts. They had what she now calls grit (毅力). Duckworth developed a set of questions to test it.
In one study of people 25 and older, she found that as people age, they become more likely to stick with a project. She also found that grit increases with education. People who had finished college scored higher in the grit test than people who quit before graduation did. People who went to graduate school after college scored even higher.
She then did another study with college students. Duckworth wanted to see how smarts and grit influenced performance in school. So she compared scores on college-entrance exams, which test IQ, to school grades and someone’s score in the grit test. Students with higher grades seem to have more grit. That’s not surprising. Getting good grades takes both smarts and hard work.
But some people counter that this grit means success. Among those people is Marcus Credé, a teacher at Iowa State University in Ames. He recently showed the results of 88 studies on grit. Together, nearly 67,000 people took part in these studies. And grit did not predict success, Credé found.
However, he thinks grit is very similar to someone’s ability to set goals, work toward them and think things through before acting. It’s a basic personality quality, Credé notes — not something that can be changed.
“Study habits and skills, test anxiety and class attendance are far more strongly connected to school grades than grit,” Credé says. “We can teach students how to study well. We can help them with their test anxiety,” he adds. “I’m not sure we can do that with grit.”
1. What can we know from the first two paragraphs?| A．Grit decides how smart one might be. |
| B．Grit is a quality dependent (依赖的) on smarts. |
| C．Success has nothing to do with smarts. |
| D．Smart people may not succeed. |
| A．Lifestyles. | B．Family tradition. | C．Education. | D．Personality types. |
| A．Doubt. | B．Reply. | C．Accept. | D．Warn. |
| A．It is strongly related to test anxiety. |
| B．It can hardly be taught in school. |
| C．It should be paid no attention to in teaching. |
| D．It can’t influence students’ school grades. |
People face all kinds of problems in life. There are personal crises, such as illness, loss of a loved one, abuse, bullying, job loss, and financial instability. People have to learn to cope with and work through very challenging life experiences. In those experiences, resilience is the key factor for people to overcome challenges.
Resilience is the ability of people to feel better quickly after something unpleasant. Resilient people do experience stress, setbacks, and difficult emotions, but they tap into their strengths and seek help from support systems to overcome challenges and work through problems. Resilience empowers people to accept and adapt to a situation and move forward. It is the core strength people use to lift the load of life.
Kids confront any number of challenges as they grow — from starting school and making new friends to adverse experiences, such as bullying and abuse. Building resilience can help children manage stress and feelings of anxiety and uncertainty. Young people need help learning to develop resilience in a stressful world. It isn’t as easy as telling them to try again. They need social support. Parents can help children develop resilience through positive behaviors and thoughts, such as setting realistic goals, maintaining a daily routine, encouraging self-discovery, accepting change as part of life and so on. Young people live up or down to the expectations that are set for them and need adults who love them unconditionally and hold them to high expectations. Most importantly, how parents model resilience for young people is far more important than what they say about it.
Building resilience is a process by which people use flexibility to reframe thought patterns and learn to tap into a strengths-based approach to working through challenges. With resilience, a person may feel equipped to manage stresses. Resilience is not a long-lasting state but resilience can be learned.
1. What is resilience?2. Why do people need resilience?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
What parents say plays a more important role in helping young people to develop resilience.
4. What can you do to build your resilience?
1. What problem did the senior citizens have?
| A．They got trapped in the fallen trees. |
| B．They were stuck in the wheelchairs. |
| C．Fallen leaves blocked their walking paths. |
| A．Jay Garrett. | B．Barry. | C．Wally, West. |
| A．They sent them to the landfill. |
| B．They took them to the farm. |
| C．They used them to grow crops. |
4 . Born in Wuzhen in Zhejiang, Qian Lihuai has a unique bond with bamboo and whether it’s in the form of indoor bamboo bonsai or backyard bamboo groves, the material is an essential element in his home.
Qian grew up in the village known for its bamboo weaving and after studying industrial design at the Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, he began to develop an interest in the technique, learning how to do it himself.
He also traveled widely in Hunan, Hubei, Sichuan and Yunnan provinces to learn local bamboo weaving techniques. “The variations are quite large in amount across the regions, and bamboo weaving comes in a wide arrange of forms. It’s sometimes used to make agricultural tools, sometimes to make daily necessities, and sometimes for artistic purposes.” Qian said. “In Wuzhen, each place focuses on producing a specific item. For instance, our village’s distinguishing feature is in making bamboo trays especially for raising silkworms.”
During a visit to a traditional basket maker in Shengzhou, Zhejiang, Qian saw that instead of using nails to fasten the basket together, the craftsman used a slanting (倾斜的) cut on the bamboo to create a precise fit that caused the joint to not be noticed. “I rarely encounter such a level of craftsmanship. He even creates small molds and modifies tools himself to improve the weaving process,” Qian says.
During his visits, he was moved by the dedication of the weavers to their craft. These experiences inspired him to return to his hometown of Wuzhen and throw himself into the bamboo weaving industry in 2013.
Bamboo techniques he has developed or improved are now widely used in everything from home furnishings to clothing, part of a growing trend toward replacing the use of plastic with bamboo, that demonstrates a continuity of the traditional Chinese culture in which bamboo has long been cherished as a topic for arts and a material for daily objects that we use in our home.
1. Why does he has a special bond with bamboo?| A．Because of the living environment. | B．Because of university majors. |
| C．Because of his interest. | D．Because of his family background. |
| A．There are cultural differences in different regions. |
| B．Bamboo grows in many places. |
| C．Bamboo weaving techniques have diversity and uniqueness. |
| D．Bamboo weaving techniques are used in raising silkworms. |
| A．His bamboo weaving experiences. |
| B．His experience of visiting bamboo weaving craftsmen. |
| C．The rare level of craftsmanship among craftsmen. |
| D．Craftsmen’ s dedication to bamboo weaving. |
| A．Weaving the wonder of bamboo. |
| B．Development of Bamboo techniques. |
| C．Bamboo woven items at home. |
| D．A visit to a traditional basket maker. |
I’d set off, with my friend Matthew Price, to sail down a little-known river in the rainforest, in a home-made boat. Our original idea was to go all the way by boat, carrying it past any rough bits, but the river was much rockier and faster-flowing than we’d thought, which meant we were only covering a few kilometers each day. Then, suddenly, we realized that, as the river was about to go over a waterfall, we could go no further by boat.
As it was only a home-made thing, we decided to abandon it and walk to the nearest road. As far as we knew, there were no villages or trading posts along the way and, on our map, it looked like a 100-kilometer walk.
And that walk, through thick rainforest with 25 kilos on our backs, was difficult. We walked for six days. It was hot and we were permanently wet through, before we came to any sign of civilization. There were times when we really wondered if we’d ever get out of that jungle alive.
Then, on the seventh day, we suddenly came across a path — not an animal trail, but a man-made one, so we knew there must be people living there. It was going roughly in the right direction, so we followed it and, at dusk, we came to a deserted camp in a hollow. Deserted, but not uninhabited. There was digging equipment wrapped in plastic, alongside two water-filled holes. Obviously someone had been digging in search of gold at some time or another.
Nearby, on a rough wooden table, were some cookers and a few other supplies, and whoever was camping there must have been intending to return soon because there was a large pot full of thick soup. We couldn’t identify either the strange looking pieces of meat or the unfamiliar vegetables it seemed to be made from, but we were in a desperate state. Over the previous seven days, we’d only had flour and rice to eat and, although we had plenty left, we were low on energy. This was our greatest problem.
注意：1. 续写词数应为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
So, we cooked up some of our rice.
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But before leaving, we had to take some measures to make up for what we had done.
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6 . Life can be full of challenges: starting a new school, getting along with your classmates or trying to score well in a test.
What is resilience?
Resilience means feeling better quickly after a difficult experience and trying your best to do everything or staying strong inside. The more problems you overcome, the more resilient you will be next time.
Why does resilience matter?
How can you be more resilient?
When things aren’t going well, try to pay attention to your good qualities (品德) and stay positive. Remember a time when you overcame fear or nervousness to achieve something and you felt proud of yourself.
| A．Being resilient is like having a super power. |
| B．Resilience is something you learn as you grow. |
| C．Everyone faces difficulties, but it doesn’t matter. |
| D．Learning something new helps you be more resilient. |
| E．Sleep is also a great way to make yourself free of stress. |
| F．Resilience also makes it easier to accept difficult feelings. |
| G．It is important for us to ask for help when we meet problems in daily life. |
7 . Telling jokes requires intelligence, creativity, imagination and the ability to tell a story, while listening to jokes is more passive behaviour but one that demands attention, intelligence and being in the right mood in order to enjoy jokes. Besides, there are also clear similarities between joke tellers and appreciators. A new study takes this further and tries to find other connections between creating humour and appreciating humour.
The author carried on the cartoon caption (字幕) task. 159 participants were shown more than 30cartoons without captions and were asked to come up with a funny caption for each one of them. Later, independent judges classified those captions based on how funny they were.
The results showed that those who produced the funniest captions also produced more captions overall. What was more interesting was that creating funny captions was negatively related to appreciation of humour. In other words, funny people tend to find jokes less funny than other people do. It is not clear why this is the case, but it might be because creators of great humour have higher standards of humour creativity and expect higher levels of creativity from people who tell jokes, compared to those who are not so good at creating humour.
Moreover, outgoing people and those who are open to new experiences found the cartoons funnier, but surprisingly, outgoing people are less likely to be funny. This is consistent with my own research that comedians were more introverted than the general population. They usually don’t like to express themselves in social situations.
Appreciation and production of humour are two different cognitive (认知的) tasks, each with unique characteristics. This is why when someone tells you he or she has a great sense of humour, you may ask, “Are you good at telling jokes or do you tend to laugh more?”
1. What qualities do joke tellers and appreciators have in common?| A．attention | B．creativity | C．imagination | D．intelligence |
| A．The results of the study. | B．The process of the study. |
| C．The judgement of the study. | D．The importance of the study |
| A．are good at appreciating humour | B．are more likely to be comedians |
| C．are more likely to be funny | D． are unwilling to express themselves in social situations |
| A．Being very successful. | B．Being easy to talk to. |
| C．Being quiet and shy. | D．Being kind to others. |
8 . 阅读下面材料，根据其内容和所给段落开头语续写两段，使之构成一篇完整的短文。
We sat on the bus waiting while other passengers piled on. A blond-haired girl, about fifteen years old, took the seat in front of us. The bus driver followed behind her. He demanded her fare (车费).
“You should pay $40, young lady,” the driver said.
“I paid already. Yesterday, online.” the girl said.
“No, no record of it,” the bus driver pointed to the paper in his hand and waved it in her face. “See? No pay. You pay, or you must get off,” the bus driver pointed to the exit door.
“But I don’t have money. And I paid already,” the girl insisted.
The bus driver picked up his mobile phone and made a call to find out if there had been an error with the paperwork. And a few minutes later, he cut the call and said to the girl. “You haven’t paid. You must pay now.”
“But please, I don’t have any money on me now. I must get to Los Angeles today. Please…” the girl begged. Tears streamed down her face.
John and I had boarded the bus heading to Los Angeles. I was excited about experiencing Los Angeles. But while I was sitting there comfortably in my seat, thinking about my next adventure, this girl was in tears, with a man standing in front of her to demand money.
I wasn’t sure what I should do. Was she telling the truth? It wouldn’t be the first time that someone had asked for money by telling a sad story that turned out untrue. Was she really short of money? Maybe the bus driver would show some sympathy and allow her to sort the payment out later?
But no, the bus driver continued to demand that she pay $40 or get off the bus. The girl insisted that she didn’t have money for the fare and had no one she could contact for help. It seemed that the driver would throw her off the bus.
注意：1. 续写词数应为150个左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Suddenly, an old woman with grey hair walked up from the back of the bus.
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I was touched by the kind act done by the old woman who looked in need herself.
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What’s honesty? Being honest is being open and worth
If someone seems friendly, honesty means they are
Honesty is telling the truth even when the truth could make someone
Why should we practice honesty? When someone lies, cheats, or steals, people around him can’t trust him. If someone makes up lots of
10 . Why Hard Work Is the Key to Success
Hard work and success go hand in hand.
Everything Comes at a Price
Success, for the vast majority of people, does not come without hard work.
Hard Work Helps You Make Your Luck
If you are an average Joe and simply idle your way through life, you are likely just a spectator (观察者) waiting for something to happen or fall into your lap. The truth of the matter is that the odds of this happening are improbable. Success will not happen suddenly, but with the right amount of strong determination and hard work, your luck tends to get better.
Hard Work Promotes Discipline
It is not always going to be easy, and even the most determined people may give up and admit that they are defeated and stop trying.
You Harvest What You Sow
| A．Life is certainly full of challenges. |
| B．That is where discipline comes into play. |
| C．Obtaining success without hard work is impossible. |
| D．When opportunities come your way, do not let them pass you by. |
| E．If you invest money over time wisely, you will make a good profit eventually. |
| F．You have to wake up early and head to work even when you do not feel like it. |
| G．When you hit a failure, the first thing coming to mind is whether you worked hard. |
