【推荐1】Wonder material

Maurice Ward and his family ran ladies' hairdresser’s in Yorkshire, England. Ward was an inventor by nature and liked to mix his own hair dyes and products, claiming that they were more effective than the products supplied by cosmetics manufacturers like L'Oreal and Garnier. In the 1980s his inventiveness found a new outlet when he bought an industrial extruder--a machine that forms plastics-and began experimenting with making different types of sheet plastic. Then in 1985 something happened which was to change his life.

A British Airtours plane bound for Corfu caught fire at Manchester Airport just before it took off. Although the plane was still on the ground, the results of the fire were destructive within forty seconds, 55 of the people inside died from smoke and poisonous air breathed in. Ward determined that he would make a material that would be much more fire-resistant than the plastics from which the interior was largely constructed. He began trying out different mixtures in a kitchen food blender. When he found a formulation that looked promising, he would shape it into sheet form and then test its fire resistance. The results got better and better until finally he hit on a material that would resist temperatures of 2, 500 C, not give off poisonous air and still remain cool enough to be touched. Starlite was born

Yet here we are, thirty years on, and Starlite is still an unpatented and unexploited material. So what went wrong?

Naturally, Ward kept the formula a secret. He never wrote it down, only telling the exact proportions of its 21 ingredients to a few of his closest family members. He refused to apply for a patent, since that would involve revealing its composition. No one else was allowed to analyse it nor was any company given a sample for fear that they might reverse-engineer it.

Consequently, no deal was ever struck and in May 2011 Maurice Ward died. It would be incorrect to say that he took his secret to the grave because some of the family still know it, but he certainly took his own dreams of personal wealth and fame with him. Why? Was it greed? Was it that, as an amateur, he felt a lack of respect from the scientific community? Or was he simply too protective of his idea to share it with others? We may never know. What is certain is that his loss is the world’s loss, too.

1. What can we most probably infer about Maurice Ward according to the passage?

A．He preferred fame to money.	B．He was born with a creative spirit.
C．He opposed established institutions.	D．He got his genius partly from his parents.

2. How did Ward develop Starlite?

A．He converted it in the kitchen food blender.

B．He found the material from the interior of planes.

C．He got inspiration from the hair dyes and products.

D．He experimented with materials and examined their fire-resistance.

3. Which of the following statements about Starlite is TRUE?

A．Its secret died with Maurice Ward.

B．It gets warmer than plastics when heated.

C．It could have brought Maurice great wealth.

D．Some company reverse-engineered it without permission.

4. We can learn from the passage that _______ .

A．Innovation requires lots of efforts and deserves protection

B．The protectiveness of an invention may cause the world great losses.

C．The big companies' ill intentions are to blame for the loss of Starlite.

D．The neglect of talented people may cost the world valuable discoveries.

【推荐2】I’d gone snowboarding in France with my little brother, and what we lacked in skill we made up for in enthusiasm. That day, fresh snow had been falling, and we were in high spirits. We stopped near the top of an off-path section that went through forests. I let my brother disappear into the trees ahead, figuring I would soon catch up.

I began to pick up speed when I was suddenly thrown off balance. Just as I was regaining control, I ran into the trunk of a large tree.

It was like hitting a solid wall. The pain was instant. I knew immediately that my back was broken and quickly realized the situation could get very serious. Nobody would be coming past. There was no phone signal. It was snowing and cold. If I waited, I would probably be rescued eventually. But the chance of freezing to death before that happened was too high for me to risk staying put.

I tried to stand but fell down and almost blacked out with pain. I managed to get the board off from my feet and moved it under my stomach so I was lying on it. I faced down the mountain and used the board to slowly drag and slide my body down the steep, tree-lined slope.

It took about two hours before a skier found me and I got help. The mountain rescue team came, with my brother arriving shortly afterwards. I couldn’t feel my hands or my toes from the cold, but the relief at knowing I was safe was enormous.

A helicopter took me to hospital. I had broken one of my backbones, so I had an operation where the doctors inserted plates. The constant pain was huge, but it wasn’t as bad as seeing the pain and worry I put my family through.

The recovery road was tough, but I was lucky. Gradually, I was able to walk, then swim, then cycle and then run. I haven’t been back to the slopes yet, but it might happen someday—I will, however, be sticking to the paths.

1. What happened to the author when he was snowboarding with his little brother?

A．He lost his way in the forest.	B．He got injured by accident.
C．The author hit the trunk before he lost his balance.	D．His brother knocked him down.

2. What did the author intend to do according to the underlined sentence?

A．He decided to seek help himself.	B．He intended to phone his brother at once.
C．He was to remain where he was.	D．He intended to give up asking for help.

3. What’s the author’s attitude towards his chance of snowboarding again?

A．Optimistic	B．Pessimistic
C．Uncertain	D．Concerned

4. What’s the best title of the passage?

A．A Tough Snowboarding Rescue	B．A Snowboarding: A Risky Sport
C．My Snowboarding Life	D．Snowboarding Survival Story

【推荐3】When I was growing up, my family kept chickens. We always had about a dozen of them at any given time and whenever one died—taken away by hawks or foxes or by some obscure chicken illness—my father would replace the lost chicken.

He’d drive to a nearby poultry farm and return with a new chicken in a bag. The thing is, you must be very careful when introducing a new chicken to the general flock. You can’t just throw it in there with the old chickens, or they will see it as an invader. What you must do instead is to slip the new bird into the chicken house in the middle of the night while the others are asleep. Place her beside the flock and walked away quietly. In the morning, when the chickens wake up, they don’t notice the newcomer, thinking only, “She must have been here all the time since I didn’t see her arrive.”The clincher of it is, awaking within this flock, the newcomer herself doesn’t even remember that she’s a newcomer, thinking only, “I must have been here the whole time...”

My arrival in India does likewise.

My plane landed in Mumbai around 1:30 AM. It was December 30. I found my luggage, and then found the taxi that would take me hours hours out of the city to the Ashram, located in a remote rural village. I fell asleep on the drive through nighttime India, sometimes waking up to look out the window, where I could see thin women in saris walking alongside the road with bundles of firewood on their heads. Buses with no headlights passed us, and we passed cattle carts.The banyan trees spread their elegant roots throughout the ditches.

1. The author writes Paragraph 1 to __________ .

A．make a summary of his childhood

B．tell readers about his family members

C．arouse readers’ interest in the passage

D．To introduce the following paragraphs

2. What does the underlined word “flock” in Paragraph 2 mean?

A．house

B．group

C．farm

D．chicken

3. What is the author most probably going to talk about next?

A．His working plans in the new place

B．The uniqueness of the village culture.

C．How he quickly adjusted to local life.

D．Why he traveled to Ashram in India.

【推荐2】Some people can be pretty anxious about their first airplane flight alone, but 16-year-old Ashley was even more nervous.

Since the teen was born deaf, she was worried that her deafness would prevent her from receiving any details about her flight from Baltimore, Maryland to Rochester, New York. To make matters worse, she had a connecting flight from the big JFK International Airport, which can be an extremely busy airport for even the most experienced fliers. “I felt nervous because… what if I miss my flight?” Ashley told WJLA through an American Sign Language (ASL) Interpreter (口译员).

Thankfully, Ashley had a safe and successful flight—and thanks to a kind flight attendant (乘务员), it was also a particularly memorable one. Shortly after Ashley’s plane took off from Baltimore, her Delta airline flight attendant handed her a handwritten note which explained everything about the flight and safety information. Ashley told reporters that she had never experienced such kindness before, and the note, which she now plans to keep forever, meant the world to her.

Delta later responded to the story by praising their flight attendant for her communication and announcing their plans to make airline travel more helpful for deaf passengers. Over the course of the next few months, airline attendants who can speak ASL will be encouraged to wear a sign that will identify them to passengers. “With this improvement, customers will immediately be able to recognize when they hold sign language as a common connection,” a Delta spokesperson told WJLA.

1. What made the travel even harder for Ashley?

A．Having no ASL interpreter.	B．Missing the connecting flight.
C．Taking a plane to travel alone.	D．Having to change planes at a big airport.

2. How did Ashley feel after receiving the note from the attendant?

A．Nervous.

B．Moved.

C．Relaxed.

D．Calm.

3. Why are attendants who can speak ASL encouraged to wear signs?

A．To be recognized easily.	B．To improve their image.
C．To show off their abilities.	D．To be praised by their leaders.

4. What can be the suitable title for the text?

A．A Written Note to an Airline	B．Teenager’s First Travel by Plane
C．Airline’s Requests for Attendants	D．Deaf Teen’s Thanks to Flight Attendant

【推荐3】America was where all my mother’s hopes lay. My mother believed one could be anything he wanted to be in America. “You can be a prodigy (神童), too,” my mother told me when I was nine. “You can be best at anything.” We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple. We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films. My mother would poke my arm and say, “Ni kan”—You watch.

Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to a beauty training school and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking. Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz.

In fact, in the beginning, I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this prodigy part of me as many different images, trying each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing by the curtains, waiting to hear the right music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was Cinderella stepping from her pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air.

In all of my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect. My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach (责备). I would never be annoyed by anything. Every night after dinner, my mother and I would sit at the Formica kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children she had read and a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. She would look through them all, searching for stories about remarkable children.

The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states and even most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying the little boy could also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly.

“What’s the capital of Finland?” my mother asked me, looking at the magazine story.

All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento was the name of the street we lived on in Chinatown. “Nairobi!” I guessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if that was possibly one way to pronounce “Helsinki” before showing me the answer.

The tests got harder — multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards, trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los Angeles, New York, and London.

And after seeing my mother’s disappointed face once again, something inside of me began to die. I hated the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night, I looked in the mirror and when I saw only my face staring back — and that it would always be this ordinary face — I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched (尖锐的) noises like a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.

And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me — because I had never seen that face before. I looked at my reflection, blinking so I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. This girl and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lots of won’ts. I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I’m not.

1. Why did the mother and the girl watch Shirley Temple’s old movies on TV?

A．Because the mother was a fan of Shirley Temple

B．Because the girl resembled Shirley Temple in appearance.

C．Because Shirley Temple’s hairstyle was very popular among children.

D．Because the mother wanted her daughter to be a Chinese Shirley Temple.

2. Which of the following statements is TRUE about the tests the girl did every night?

A．She got through the tests painfully.

B．She felt confident and finished them smoothly.

C．She failed the tests and began to lose confidence.

D．She made preparations for tests to please her mother.

3. What does the underlined sentence in the passage mean?

A．The mother was disappointed and gave up her daughter.

B．The mother expected her daughter to know the right answer.

C．The answers were more than one and the mother checked them.

D．The mother was not sure about the answer and wanted to confirm it.

4. What might happen after the last paragraph?

A．The girl might do what she really likes.

B．The girl might do whatever her mother asks.

C．The girl might try her best to become successful.

D．The mother might change her attitude and listen to her daughter.