【推荐2】Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. stillness       B. refuge   C. thundering   D. withered   E. oppressive F. unattended G. gripped       H. creaked   I. approaching J. somewhere   K. hastily

On the morning of the first of September, Scarlett awoke with suffocating sense of dread upon her, a dread she had taken to her pillow the night before. She thought, dulled with sleep: ‘What was it that I was worrying about when I went to bed last night? Oh, yes the fighting. There was a battle,     1    ,yesterday! Oh, who won?’ She sat up    2    , rubbing her eyes, and her worried heart took up yesterday’s load again.

The air was    3     even in the early morning hour, hot with the scorching promise of a noon of glaring blue sky and pitiless bronze sun. The road outside lay silent. No wagons    4     by. No troops raised the red dust with their tramping feet, no pleasant sounds of breakfasts being prepared, for all the near neighbors except Mrs. Meade and Mrs. Merriwether had sought    5    in Macon. And she could hear nothing from their houses either. Farther down the street the business section was quiet and many of the stores and offices were locked and boarded up, while their occupants were somewhere about the countryside with rifles in their hands.

The     6    that greeted her seemed even more sinister this morning than on any of the mornings of the queer quiet week preceding it. She rose quickly, without her usual preliminary burrows and stretches, and went to the window, hoping to see some neighbor’s face, some heartening sight. But the road was empty. She noted how the leaves on the trees were still dark green but dry and heavily coated with red dust, and how     7    and sad the untended flowers in the front yard looked.

As she stood, looking out of the window, there came to her ears a far-off sound, faint and sullen as the first distant thunder of a(n)    8    storm.

‘Rain,’ she thought in the first moment, and her country-bred mind added, ‘We certainly need it.’ But, in a split instant: ‘Rain? No! Not rain! Cannon!’

Her heart racing she leaned from the window, her ear cocked to the far-off roaring, trying to discover from which direction it came. But the dim     9    was so distant that, for a moment, she could not tell. ‘Make it from Marietta,’ she prayed. ‘Or Decatur. But not from the south! Not from the south!’ She    10    the windowstill tighter and strained her ears and the far-away booming seemed louder. And it was coming from the south.

【推荐1】Complete the passage about culture shock with the words from the box. What are the four stages of it? How do you think people can overcome culture shock?

what     that     who       when     whatever     because

    1    people move to a new country, they often feel worried and stressed     2    they don’t know the customs and traditions of the new place. This feeling is     3     is generally called culture shock. Kalervo Oberg was the one     4    first used this phrase. According to Oberg, there are several stages of culture shock. First there is the honeymoon period. During this period,     5     people experience is fresh and exciting to them. In the next stage, frustration, people notice more differences between their own culture and the new one.     6     people usually do about these differences is either to change their behaviour or return to their home country. If people stay, they come to the third stage which occurs     7     they begin to adjust to the new culture. They begin to become familiar with the customs, the thinking, and the habits of the new place. Acceptance is the fourth stage. People finally begin to fit into the new culture. Differences no longer trouble them as much, and they feel    8     they might actually belong in the new place.

【推荐2】Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. confusion   B. delivered     C. reflection        D. offer   E. context    F. set       G. signaled       H. fluent     I. torn       J. culture     K. genuine

This is a story about how a foreigner got confused about a Mexican word even though she could speak     1     Spanish. It happened when she     2     foot on Mexican soil for the first time. She asked an ice-cream seller for an ice-cream, and he said “ahorita.” She thought it would be     3     immediately because the word can be directly translated to “right now.” But she waited for half an hour and still no ice-cream came. When she asked the seller about it, he said “ahorita” again, with his face showing     4    . She felt     5     between waiting and walking away. Finally, she had to go home, so she     6     to the seller that she could not wait any longer. Years later back in Mexico, she came to realise that the meaning of “ahorita” changes according to its     7    . It could mean “tomorrow,” “within five years,” “never,” or even “no, thanks” when one wants to refuse an     8    . “Ahorita Time” is a     9     of different cultural understandings of time. That is, understanding “ahorita” takes not a fluency in the language, but a fluency in the    10    .