Spectacular Waterfalls in the World

Victoria Falls, Zambia and Zimbabwe

They are accessible via the Western Zimbabwe town of the same name. Though technically not the tallest (107 meters), Victoria Falls is commonly known as the largest for its rapidly falling water. Summers can be hot and too dry to see the falls in full form, making the best views between March and August.

Iguazu Falls, Argentina and Brazil

Though Iguazu is only 82 meters tall, its curtain of water extends for over 1,600 meters. But if two stamps in your passport aren’t enough of a reason, these Falls are also considered the largest waterfall system in the world. The temperate year-round weather around Iguazu Falls only adds to its popularity.

Niagara Falls, New York and Ontario

The falls are impressively high at 99 meters but equally impressively long, stretching on for what feels like forever. While the Canadian side boasts a touristy town to spend the weekend, the American side trades mostly in natural views. For blue skies and high waterfall rainbow visibility opportunity, visit in summer. And while those making the trip in the winter shouldn’t expect the falls to freeze, they should bundle up or risk freezing themselves.

The Detian Falls, China and Vietnam

The Detian Falls is located in Daxin County of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, crossing the Sino-Vietnamese border. The roaring waterfall is separated into three-tiered falls by rocks and trees, dropping more than 70 meters. It has a maximum width of 200 meters. The waterfall is the largest naturally formed falls in Southeast Asia and has been identified as a top tourist destination.

1. Which is the tallest of the following waterfalls?

A．Victoria Falls

B．Iguazu Falls

C．Niagara Falls

D．The Detian Falls

2. What do the listed waterfalls have in common?

A．They stretch in two countries.	B．They show good view in July.
C．They are over 100 meters in width.	D．They have mild year-round weather.

3. What is an attraction of Niagara Falls unique to the Canadian side?

A．The freezing falls in winter	B．The town appealing to tourists.
C．The visible high waterfall rainbow.	D．The equally long and high waterfall.

Felicia thought she saw him standing up against a building across the street from the stop where she normally got off her streetcar, down the block from her apartment.

With her heart suddenly pounding in her ears, she turned away from the streetcar door as it opened. Excusing herself to the people lined up behind, she sat down on one of the side-facing seats just at the front across from the driver. As the car started up again, passing him, she felt a glimpse from him back behind her.

It looked very much like him. His hair may be a little longer than he’d worn it the last time she’d seen him, but the same attitude in the way he stood. Even in the freezing winter afternoon in San Francisco, he only wore a T-shirt.

She knew why he was there. He was waiting. Waiting for her.

The problem was that she used to see him everywhere, even when her mind had known that it was unlikely to the point of impossible that he could get out and find her. She’d been in witness protection. No one even knew where she’d lived back then. Hence there was no way that it could happen.

But today? Most of the other times, she came to realize, whoever she saw reminded her of him. But today was all him, not a collection of similar parts that, in her terror, she could imagine into the monster that he was.

At the next stop she stood again, deciding. She got off into the neighborhood and heard the streetcar door close behind her and then the brakes release and then the scraping sound as it moved ahead.

She did not like to spend extra money, but he might still be there hiding and if he saw her, he might…

She could not imagine.

No. She could imagine.

So she went into Starbucks and ordered a coffee. The first sip burned her tongue, and the pain seemed to break something within her.

How could he have found her?

Monster! She thought. The life-destroying monster.

In her mind, she was eighteen again.

4. What did Felicia do when she found the man standing up against a building?

A．She ran away at once.	B．She got off the streetcar.
C．She remained in the streetcar.	D．She lined up behind the people.

5. How did Felicia feel when the man appeared?

A．Disappointed.

B．Amazed.

C．Guilty.

D．Alarmed.

6. What can be inferred about the man?

A．He lived very close to Felicia.	B．He once committed a severe crime.
C．He wanted to get in touch with Felicia.	D．He has changed a lot since their first meeting.

7. What will be talked about in the following paragraph?

A．What would become of the man.	B．Why Felicia recalled her teenage life.
C．How the man managed to find Felicia.	D．What happened between Felicia and the man.

For months now, our routines have been interrupted and we’ve been forced to adapt. Reportedly, one major consequence is a state of mental tiredness. It feels as if we’re all in a state of constant distraction.

“It felt like I had a mental block preventing me from focusing on the page,” says Sophie Vershbow, who recognized the mood early in the pandemic (流行病) when her tweet about “not being able to concentrate enough to read a book” was liked more than 2,000 times.

For many people, especially working parents, the sudden switch to home working has meant a conflict between work and life. It’s tricky to focus on a document as your kids wrestle for the TV remote control. But even when work is finished for the day and the kids are in bed, it’s hard to find any focus to escape into a novel or box-set.

A psychological theory called Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) might help explain why living in the age of COVID-19 may have turned our minds to soup. Put simply, CLT characterizes our minds as information processing systems. When we’re working on a problem, especially an unfamiliar one, we depend on our “working memory”, which is very limited both in its capacity and the length of time it holds information. The less familiar you are with a task, the more you depend on your working memory to help deal with the relevant information; in contrast, when you’re an expert, most of what you need to know is stored in long-term memory and you can complete the task automatically.

So COVID-19 has robbed you of the ability to do things on auto. Take a work meeting for example, before, you would just have turned up and joined in the discussion, but now if you’re working remotely you have to fire up your video-conferencing software, worry about your Wi-Fi and so on. The same applies to domestic challenges too, like ordering your groceries online instead of shopping in person. These adaptations force you out of auto-pilot and draw on your limited working memory capacity.

8. What is the result of COVID-19 mentioned in the text?

A．Being worn out mentally.	B．Drawing online attention.
C．Lack of interest in reading	D．Sticking to the old routines.

9. What can we know about the parents in Paragraph 3?

A．They wrestle with children for the TV remote control.

B．They can strike a balance between work and life.

C．They enjoy no form of entertainment.

D．They find it hard to concentrate.

10. What turns our minds to soup while living in the COVID-19 age?

A．Being interrupted by our kids.

B．The decline of our memory capacity.

C．Being occupied with new daily routines.

D．The independence of our working memory.

11. Which is the best title for the text?

A．New situation, new solution	B．CLT accounts for new challenges
C．New life in the age of COVID-19	D．Adjust yourself to working online

Secret parenting can start as early as pregnancy. Research shows that some women hide their pregnancies, especially in roles in which they feel they have to compete with men and don’t want to reveal anything that might “get in the way” of work. Working women often feel the need to go “above and beyond” normal standards during pregnancy.

It continues after birth. Women report wanting to hide their breastfeeding at work because it is forbidden, and doing so is such an obvious sexual difference that highlights their new status as mothers. There are dozens of stories about women feeling forced to prove they can still work overtime even when their children are ill as well as those who purposely don’t share photos of their children or talk about them at all.

That women feel the need to behave this way is no surprise. Mothers have long been seen as less committed and less competent in a work environment. They are passed over for promotions with greater frequency than fathers, and are less likely to be hired than non-mothers. When flexibility is available, those who use it face prejudice and are more likely to be classified into roles with less responsibility. We know the gender pay gap widens after childbirth; salaries of working mothers decline for each child a woman has.

This is because workplaces are structured around men rather than women, and still have an image of the “ideal worker”: an employee who always puts work first. “Anything that signals otherwise diminishes you in the eyes of your employers,” says Daniel Carlson of the University of Utah.

Then there’s the fixed idea that women are more capable in the domestic area, men in the office, which still has a significant impact on how we frame paid work and family life. “It’s understandable that women feel this continuous work/family conflict because we’re asking the impossible. Women have entered the paid labor force, but we have not seen the changes in men at home to pick up more of the domestic work,” says Caitlyn Collins of Washington University.

12. Why do some women hide pregnancies?

A．Because they have to work overtime.

B．Because they hate to talk about children.

C．Because they want to keep competitive in work.

D．Because they hope to reach the peak of their careers.

13. What will be affected for a working mother?

A．Her love for her children.	B．Her chances of being promoted.
C．Her relationship with co-workers.	D．Her capacity for coping with housework.

14. What does the underlined word “diminishes” in Paragraph 4 mean?

A．Strengthens.

B．Restricts.

C．Ignores.

D．Weakens.

15. What is the purpose of this text?

A．To reveal a phenomenon in the workplace.	B．To praise women’s work in the workplace.
C．To appeal for sexual equality in profession.	D．To propose a solution to work/family conflict.

Literature is not practical, especially the classic literary works. They are old, and simply relics of time. Certainly they will not help us find a better job or guide us to make more money in the future.     16     But why should we learn it?

Our ancient master Confucius said that a superior man should not be a practical utensil. We read not to make money but to be a better person.     17    

Literature is the record of human history. All human experience in history has been recorded in literature. The sweetest love, the most heartbroken betrayal, the cruelest war, the hardest struggle, the joyful laughter and the miserable cry, the most precious friendship and the most fierce hatred.     18     Reading it makes us a full man.

Literature can make us wise, since we may take good lessons from it. Reading a good book is like talking to a wise man, let alone the great joy that a book may bring to us in loneliness.

Even if you deny these two purposes, how many of you have cited about beautiful love poems in dating?

    19     When standing in front of the shelves of books in English literature, which are the most valuable ones we should digest? Firstly, we need to know who the most important writers are and what their important literary works are.     20     Finally, we need to learn to form our own literary taste, to know what a good literary work is like and what an ordinary one might be. We shall learn to appreciate the literariness of it, the beauty of the language, the wit in the structure, the inspiration of the story and etc.

A．Literature brings us delight.

B．None that you can’t find in literature.

C．It seems that literature has no use at all.

D．Reading literature can serve several purposes.

E．Entering the world of literature is like walking into a library.

F．In addition, we should ask which ones we can simply taste or swallow.

G．Secondly, we need to know how the literary works reflect society and the culture.

Francis Kéré is the first African to win the Pritzker Prize, known as the Nobel Prize of architecture. However, his journey to the peak of his field was far from _______. Growing up in a village where there was no kindergarten, he was _______ into an extremely hot classroom with over 100 students until seven years old. This experience of poor building facilities was his earliest _______ to improve the educational lives of local children, using architecture.

His early reputation came in helping _______ a school in his village after graduating from college. He _______ the whole village to provide ideas and drew the _______ on sand for all to see. _______, he involved them in constructing the school, using local wood and local clay (黏土).

The result of their hard work was a welcoming structure with a “floating” roof that _______ ventilation (通风) in a hot climate and wall openings that bring _______ for students to learn even without electricity. He showed the villagers that ideas to __________ climate or other challenges are always at hand.

In this process, local people learned __________ skills that they could later use to find work. By cooperating with them, Kéré __________ the idea that climate solutions started with big institutions. He __________ that everyone could contribute to addressing the major issues related to education and climate and __________ a global impact by acting locally.

Adopted by architects in dozens of countries, his __________ is rooted in the “unique” aspects of each community now.

21.

A．straightforward

B．frustrating

C．professional

D．reliable

22.

A．tricked

B．crowded

C．persuaded

D．accompanied

23.

A．commitment

B．foundation

C．qualification

D．motive

24.

A．design

B．donate

C．restore

D．reform

25.

A．reminded

B．entitled

C．commanded

D．encouraged

26.

A．plot

B．draft

C．sample

D．clue

27.

A．Merely

B．Otherwise

C．Therefore

D．Moreover

28.

A．blocks

B．affects

C．allows

D．conveys

29.

A．hope

B．light

C．desire

D．imagination

30.

A．find out

B．bring on

C．deal with

D．leave off

31.

A．practical

B．physical

C．educational

D．commercial

32.

A．challenged

B．declared

C．formed

D．promoted

33.

A．denied

B．suspected

C．guaranteed

D．demonstrated

34.

A．receive

B．access

C．generate

D．witness

35.

A．patent

B．expectation

C．innovation

D．regulation

47. 阅读下面材料，根据其内容和所给段落开头语续写两段，使之成为一篇完整的短文。

It was Saturday. My daughter and I were chatting in the backyard when I heard someone calling me. I turned around. Standing in the yard was a little boy, strong, brown-haired and dusted with a fine layer of dirt. “William!” I cried in surprise, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m taking care of the lawn,” he answered proudly, sticking his chest out — William’s father owned a lawn sodding company. “I’m sure he appreciates that,” I said to my daughter, “This is William, one of my students. Grade 2. He’s a joy to have in class.”

It was true. Little William was a delight. He loved plants and animals and playing outside during break. And even though he struggled with his study, he never once complained. There was a brightness he brought with him wherever he went.

I’d never forget the day in class when another student was having trouble understanding the lesson. “Don’t worry,” William comforted, eyes wide and sincere. “Sometimes, second grade is really hard.” He was a gentle soul, wise beyond his years.

Still, I couldn’t help but worry. Despite his firm determination, William’s grades were poor. Sometimes, I wondered if he’d be able to pass.

“See you Monday, Ms. Woodall!” he said, running to his father’s side. My daughter and I waved, but William stayed on my mind for the rest of the weekend.

Back at school, William’s grades showed no sign of improvement until the last few weeks of the year. When we studied the life cycle of plants, William stood out. I’d never seen him se invested in the classroom. Though I was happy for him, the worry remained. Would he be able to enter Grade Three?

Every year, as a class project, each child planted a sunflower seed in one of those containers. I did this every year but had never seen blossom. This year, I together with William, planted 20 seeds behind the library. Planting the seeds was exciting for many of the students, but not the growing part.

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。

Actually, it took too long to see results from daily watering, various results.

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About a month into the summer vacation, I happened to drive by the library.

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