【推荐1】If feels like every time my mother and I start to have a conversation，it turns into an argument．We talk about something as simple as dinner plans and suddenly，my mother will push the conversation into World War？She'll talk about my lack of a bright future because I don't plan to be a doctor．And much to her disappointment，I don't want to do any job related to science，either．In fact，when I was pushed to say that I planned to major （主修） in English and communications，she nearly had a heart attack．

"Why can't you be like my coworker's son？"she bemoans all the time．Her coworker's son received a four year scholarship and is now earning 70，000 dollars a year as an engineer．I don't know what to answer except that I simply can't be like Mr Perfect as I've called the unnamed coworker's son．I can't be like him．I'm the type of person who loves to help out in the community，write until the sun goes down，and most of all，wants to achieve a career because I love it，not because of fame （名声） or salary．

I understand why my mother is worried about my future major．I've seen my mother struggle to raise me on her small salary and work long hours．She leaves the house around 6：30 am and usually comes home around 5 pm or even 6 pm．However，I want her to know that by becoming a doctor，it doesn't mean I'll be successful．I'd rather follow my dreams and create my own future．

1. Which of the following topics do the writer and his mother often talk about？ ______

A．The writer's studies．	B．The writer's future job．
C．Dinner plans．	D．Wars around the world．

2. We can infer from Paragraph 1 that the writer's mother ______ ．

A．doesn't want the writer to major in English

B．doesn't think the writer should be a doctor

C．gets along very well with the writer

D．doesn't think working in the science field is a good idea

3. The underlined word"bemoans"in Paragraph 2most probably means" ______ "．

A．agrees	B．shouts
C．complains	D．smiles

4. Which of the following statements is probably TRUE about the writer？ ______

A．He wants to be like his mother's coworker's son．

B．He wants to find a job in his community in the future．

C．He doesn't think his mother's coworker's son is perfect．

D．He wants to do something he really likes in the future．

【推荐2】When I was growing up, I was embarrassed to be seen with my father. He was badly crippled (跛脚), and when we would walk together, his hand on my arm for balance, people would stare, I would be ashamed of the unwanted attention.

It was difficult to walk together—and because of that, we didn’t say much as we went along. But as we started out, he always said, “You set the pace. I will try to follow you.”

Our usual walk was to or from the subway, which was how he got to work. He went to work sick, and even in bad weather. He almost never missed a day, and would make it to the office even if others could not. It was a matter of pride for him.

When snow or ice was on the ground, it was impossible for him to walk, even with help. At such times my sister or I would pull him through the streets of Brooklyn, N.Y., on a child’s sleigh to the subway entrance. Once there, he would try to grasp handrail until he reached the lower steps that the warmer tunnel air kept ice free. In Manhattan the subway station was the basement of his office building, and he would not have to go outside again until we met him in Brooklyn on his way home.

When I think of it now, I am surprised at how much courage it must have taken for a grown man to suffer from shame and disability. And I am also surprised at how he did it—without bitterness or complaint.

He never talked about himself as an object of pity, nor did he show any envy of the more fortunate or able. What he looked for in others was a “good heart”, and if he found one, the owner was good enough for him.

Now that I am older, I believe that is a proper standard by which to judge people, even though I still don’t know exactly what a “good heart” is. But I know the times I don’t have one myself.

He has been away for many years now, but I think of him often. I wonder if he sensed my reluctance to be seen with him during our walks. If he did, I am sorry I never told him how sorry I was, how unworthy I was, how I regretted it. I think of him when I complain about my troubles, when I am envious of another’s good fortune, when I don’t have a “good heart”．

1. How did the man treat his father when he was young?

A．He helped his father happily.

B．He never helped his father.

C．He helped his father, but not very happily.

D．He only helped his father take a walk after supper.

2. As a disabled man, his father ________.

A．didn’t work very hard

B．didn’t go to work from time to time

C．hated those who had good fortune

D．was happy and satisfied, and never lost hope

3. What does the underlined word “reluctance” mean in the article? It means ________.

A．anger	B．sadness
C．happiness	D．unwillingness

4. How did the father get to work usually?

A．By subway.	B．By bus.
C．By wheelchair.	D．By bike.

【推荐3】Once when I was a teenager, my father and I were standing in line to buy tickets for the circus (马戏团). There were so many people that we waited for a long time.     1     This family made a big impression on me.

There were eight children, all probably under the age of 12. You could tell they didn't have a lot of money. Their clothes were not expensive but they were clean. The children talked excitedly about the clowns, elephants and other acts they would see that night. I could tell they'd never been to the circus before.     2     The father and mother seemed happy as they could be.

The ticket lady asked how many tickets the father wanted. He proudly answered, “Please let me buy eight children's tickets and two adults' tickets, so I can take my family to the circus.”

    3    

The man's wife lowered her head. There was no longer a smile on the man's face. He quietly asked, “How much did you say?”

The ticket lady again told him the price.

The man obviously didn't have enough money. But how could he tell his kids the bad news?     4     (We were not rich ourselves at all!) He then tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “Excuse me, sir, you dropped this."

The man understood my father was helping him. He picked up the money, looked straight into my dad's eyes, and in tears replied, “Thank you, sir, thank you. This really means a lot to me and my family."

    5    

A．The ticket lady told him the price.

B．It was clearly a very important day out for them.

C．My father decided to help them and give them some money.

D．Finally, there was only one family between the ticket office and us.

E．Although we did not go to the circus that night, we didn't feel regretful.

F．Seeing this, my dad took a $20 note from his pocket and dropped it on the ground.

【推荐1】Almost everyone has heard the expression, “the calm before the storm.” It is usually used to describe a peaceful period just before a very stressful situation or a tense argument.

British sailors coined the phrase in the late 1600s; they noted that before certain storms the seas would seem to become static and the winds would drop. But why is it often so calm before a storm?

Science has given us the answer. According to a US website How Stuff Works, a calm period occurs because many storms, such as tornadoes and hurricanes draw in all the warm and humid air from the surrounding area. As this air rises into the storm clouds, it cools and acts as “fuel for the storm like petrol in a car”. Once the storm has taken all the energy it can from the air, it is pushed out from the top of the storm cloud sand falls back down to ground level. As the air descends (下降), it becomes warm and dry. Warm, dry air is stable, so once it covers an area, it causes a calm period before the storm. This same process also causes the “eye of the storm” in hurricanes and tornadoes. In these conditions, the calm occurs in the center of the storm because of the strong rotating(旋转的) winds.

The Weather Network has a tip for working out how far away a storm is. First, count how many seconds there are between a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder. Roughly three seconds equal one kilometer. So, for example, if you count nine seconds, the storm is about 3 kilometers away. A good gauge(评估) is that if your count is below 30 seconds, you should seek safe place straight away.

However, due to the complexity of storm system, not all storms come after calm. Given the right conditions, some storms announce themselves with heavy rain and chilling (寒冷的) winds. So, your best bet is to keep yourself updated with weather reports for any predictions regarding a coming storm in your area. That’s the most reliable and sensible way to predict the next display of nature’s temper.

1. The underlined word “static” in Paragraph 2 probably means ______.

A．violent

B．quiet

C．fast-changing

D．warm

2. What is Paragraph 3 mainly talking about?

A．To explain how a storm comes into being.

B．To support previous research on storm clouds.

C．To explain why a peaceful period occurs before a storm.

D．To show how dangerous a storm can be in certain situations.

3. What can we learn from the last paragraph?

A．It is not always quiet before a storm.	B．Storms have a big influence on life.
C．Weather reports may fail to predict a storm.	D．Heavy storms don’t usually last for a longtime.

【推荐3】Having lived in California until 1970, my family has felt a number of earthquakes. We have been fortunate, however, to have suffered no bodily harm or property (财产) damage.

There is a website that lists all California earthquakes recorded from 1769 to the present. The site lists the dates and times as well as the magnitude (震级) and the exact location of any quake that measured more than 6.0. There are only a few quakes that stand out in my memory and, luckily, none is shown in the website. So, my personal experience with earthquakes might be considered insignificant (微不足道).

There are three earthquakes that are difficult to forget. The first one was in 1955 and our oldest daughter was walking with me in our backyard in Redwood City in California. As the shaking became stronger I held her to me with one arm as I held on to one of our fruit trees with the other.   All three of us (my daughter, I and the tree) shook for two or three minutes that to us felt like hours.

The second one was in 1963. Our entire family was visiting Disneyland in Southern California. The earth started to shake just as we were beginning to walk from our hotel toward the famous landmark.

My third experience with an earthquake was a lonely one in California. It was in my sixties and I was alone in an old church. As the building started to shake, I quickly headed for the door to go outside. I remember I said a little prayer-something like, “Help me get out of here in time, Dear Heavenly Father”．Minutes later, I was safe outside.

1. The author writes the passage mainly to tell us about________.

A．a new film about an earthquake	B．how to survive an earthquake
C．his three earthquake experiences	D．how to save children in an earthquake

2. The earthquakes the author has experienced________.

A．all caused bodily harm	B．are all recorded in a website
C．all measured more than 6.0	D．all happened in California

3. When the first earthquake happened, the author________.

A．was staying with his daughter	B．was planting fruit trees
C．was working	D．was in a hotel

4. What does the underlined part “the famous landmark” refer to?

A．A church.	B．Disneyland.
C．A building destroyed by an earthquake.	D．The place where the author was born.

【推荐2】

Franz Kafka wrote that “A book must be the ax (斧子) for the frozen sea inside us.” I once shared this sentence with a class of seventh graders, and it didn't seem to require any explanation.

We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men. When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she got out of her chair to take a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”

But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with imprisoned parents, abusive parents, irresponsible parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless; kids who grew up in violent neighborhoods. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel's terrible logic — the giving way of dreams to fate.

For the last seven years, I have worked as a reading enrichment teacher, reading classic works of literature with small groups of students from grades six to eight. I originally proposed this idea to my headmaster after learning that a former excellent student of mine had transferred out of a selective high school — one that often attracts the literary-minded children of Manhattan's upper classes — into a less competitive school. The daughter of immigrants, with a father in prison, she perhaps felt uncomfortable with her new classmates. I thought additional “cultural capital” could help students like her develop better in high school, where they would unavoidably meet, perhaps for the first time, students who came from homes lined with bookshelves, whose parents had earned Ph.D.’s.

Along with Of Mice and Men, my groups read: Sounder, The Red Pony, Lord of the Flies, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. The students didn’t always read from the expected point of view. About The Red Pony, one student said, “it's about being a man, it’s about manliness.”I had never before seen the parallels between Scarface and Macbeth, nor had I heard Lady Macbeth's speech read as raps, but both made sense; the interpretations were playful, but serious. Once introduced to Steinbeck's writing, one boy went on to read The Grapes of Wrath and told me repeatedly how amazing it was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” His historical view was broadening, his sense of his own country deepening. Year after year, former students visited and told me how prepared they had felt in their first year in college as a result of the classes.

Year after year, however, we are increasing the number of practice tests. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, not for emotional punch but for text complexity. Yet, we cannot enrich the minds of our students by testing them on texts that ignore their hearts. We are teaching them that words do not amaze but confuse. We may succeed in raising test scores, but we will fail to teach them that reading can be transformative and that it belongs to them.

1. The underlined words in Paragraph 1 probably mean that a book helps to________.

A．realize our dreams

B．give support to our life

C．smooth away difficulties

D．awaken our emotions

2. Why were the students able to understand the novel Of Mice and Men?

A．Because they were bred in a violent society.

B．Because they had read the novel many times.

C．Because they got the explanation from the teacher..

D．Because they had similar life experiences.

3. The girl left the selective high school possibly because________.

A．she was a literary-minded girl

B．her parents were immigrants

C．she couldn't fit in with her class

D．her father was then in prison

4. The author writes the passage mainly to ________.

A．suggest reading classic works of literature creatively

B．advocate teaching literature to touch the heart

C．argue for equality among high school students

D．criticize the current education system bitterly

【推荐3】It is that time of year when people need to lock their cars. It’ s not because there are a lot of criminals running around stealing cars. Rather, it’ s because of the good-hearted neighbors who want to share their harvest. Especially with this year’s large crop, leaving a car unlocked in my neighborhood is an invitation for someone to stuff it full of zucchini(西葫芦).

My sister-in-law, Sharon, recently had a good year for tomatoes. She and her family had eaten and canned so many that they began to feel their skin turn slightly red. That ’ s when she decided it was time to share her blessings. She started calling everyone she knew. When that failed, she began to ask everyone in the neighborhood like a politician, eventually finding a neighbor delighted to have the tomatoes. “ Feel free to take whatever you want,” Sharon told her. She felt happy that she could help someone and that the food didn’t go to waste.

A few days later, Sharon answered the door. There was the neighbor, holding some bread. The neighbor smiled pleasantly, “I want to thank you for all of the tomatoes, and I have to admit that I took a few other things and hope you wouldn’t mind.”

Sharon couldn’t think of anything else in her garden that had been worth harvesting and said so. “Oh, but you did,” the neighbor said.   “You had some   of the prettiest zucchini I’ve ever seen.”

Sharon was confused. Zucchini in her garden? They hadn’ t even planted any zucchini. But her neighbor insisted that there really were bright-green zucchini in her garden. The two of them walked together into the backyard. When the neighbor pointed at the long green vegetables, Sharon smiled, “ Well, actually, those are cucumbers that we never harvested, because they got too big, soft and bitter for eating or canning.”

The neighbor looked at Sharon, shock written all over her face. Then she smiled, and held out the bread that she had shared all over the neighborhood, “I brought you a loaf of cucumber bread. I hope you like it.”

1. Why does the author suggest that people in the neighborhood should lock their cars?

A．They might be stolen by thieves.

B．They might be moved away by the police.

C．Their neighbors might fill them with their harvest.

D．Their neighbors might throw rubbish in them.

2. What does the underlined word “blessings” in the second paragraph mean?

A．Tomatoes.	B．God’s protection.
C．Helpful things.	D．Best wishes.

3. What did the neighbor do in Sharon’s garden?

A．She harvested tomatoes only.

B．She harvested zucchini by accident.

C．She took some cucumbers mistakenly.

D．She stole something without Sharon’s permission.

4. We can infer from the article that the neighbor’s bread would taste________.

A．bitter but tasty	B．strange and bitter
C．hard and sour	D．soft and sweet