【推荐1】Each year the Pritzker Architecture Prize (普立兹克建筑奖) goes to a star designer with a long list of attractive buildings around the world. This year’s winner is a little different.

Shigeru Ban has designed museums, homes and concert halls. But Ban is best known for a more simple kind of work: the temporary (暂时的) buildings for people who became homeless after disasters.

Ban may be the only designer in the world who makes buildings out of paper — cardboard paper tubes (管). Ban actually tested the strength of cardboard tubes, and said he was surprised by what he had discovered. He has used them to build temporary buildings in Japan, Haiti, China and elsewhere.

“After a disaster, the building material is going to be more expensive,” Ban explains. “But the paper tube is actually not a building material. It is cheap and plentiful. We can get the material easily anywhere. And unlike costs for traditional building materials, the price of paper tubes doesn’t jump after an earthquake or flood. The tubes are also lightweight, so you don’t need heavy machines to work with them.”

Ban started using cardboard paper tubes in the 1980s. At that time he had just graduated from the architecture school, and he was looking for a cheap substitute for wood. So he started reusing the paper cardboard tubes that were left over from rolls of paper in his office.

Ban was born in Tokyo and studied architecture in the U.S. before moving back to Japan to start his practice. Some of Ban’s temporary buildings have become permanent (永久的), like the paper church he built after the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan.

1. The author uses the first paragraph to 　　　.

A．raise an argument	B．give an introduction
C．give an example	D．offer a description

2. What is special about Shigeru Ban?

A．He failed to get this year’s architecture prize.

B．He graduated from the best architecture school in the U.S.

C．He is good at building houses for homeless people.

D．He builds special houses for special groups of people.

3. Why did Shigeru Ban choose cardboard paper tubes?

A．Because they are cheap and easy to take away.

B．Because they are strong and last for a long time.

C．Because they are plentiful and look very beautiful.

D．Because they are common and hard to break.

4. What does the underlined word “substitute” probably refer to?

A．A new way of building houses by using wood.

B．A new method of producing cardboard paper tubes.

C．A new kind of building material to take the place of wood.

D．A new machine to produce a new kind of building material.

【推荐2】One day when some government officials were rebuilding a barn (谷仓), they found a mouse hole in a corner and used smoke to force the mice inside the hole to come out. A while later they really saw mice running out, one after another. Then, everyone thought that all the mice had escaped. But just as they began to clean up, they saw two mice squeezing (挤) out at the mouth of the hole. With some efforts, the mice finally got out. However, it was strange that after they came out of the hole, they did not run away immediately. Instead, one chased after the other near the mouth of the hole. It seemed that one was trying to bite the tail of the other.

Everyone was puzzled, so they stepped nearer to take a look. They realized that one of the mice was blind and could not see anything, and the other was trying to allow the blind mouse to bite on his tail so that he could pull the blind one with him to escape.

After seeing what happened, everyone was speechless and lost in thought. During the meal time, the group of people sat down in a circle and started to talk about what happened to the two mice.

One serious American official said, “I think the relationship between those two mice was that of king and guard.” The others thought for a while and said, “That was why!”

A clever French said, “I think the relationship between those two mice was that of husband and wife.” Again the others thought for a while, and all felt it made sense.

A Japanese said, “I think the relationship between those two mice was that of mother and son.” Once again the others thought for a while, and felt this was more reasonable. So they expressed agreement another time.

At that moment, one Chinese asked, “Why did those two mice have to have a certain relationship?”

Suddenly, the group looked back at the Chinese and remained speechless. The American official, the French and the Japanese who had spoken earlier all lowered their heads in shame, and did not dare to answer.

In fact, true love is not built on friendship, loyalty or blood relationship. Instead, it is built on no relationship.

1. Neither of the two mice ran away immediately because ________.

A．one was biting the other

B．the mouth of the hole was too small

C．they were not afraid of smoke

D．one was trying to help the blind one

2. Why did they lower their heads in shame according to the passage?

A．They did not dare to answer.

B．They had mistaken the relationship of the mice.

C．They regretted driving a poor blind mouse away.

D．They did not express themselves much better.

3. It is clear that ________.

A．all the mice came out of the hole easily

B．each of the people understood the relationship differently

C．the people wanted to kill the mice with smoke

D．the people knew one of the mice was blind at first sight

4. The underlined sentence “it made sense” probably means ________.

A．it was correct	B．it was strange
C．it was funny	D．it was sweet

5. The best title for the passage is ________.

A．Two Lovely Mice	B．Help Produces Love
C．Friends In Need	D．Love Is All

【推荐3】When my friend went to Europe last summer, instead of snapping photographs of the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower or Stonehenge, she brought back 32 rolls of ... Cathedral(大教堂的) ceilings. Ceilings. For the 10 years I’ve known her I had never suspected that she was this passionate about stained glass.
Still one of the best things about such pictures — despite their obvious narrow appeal — is that they can’t help but tell us a great deal about the people who took them.
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I got the roll of film back from my 5-year-old son’s first camping trip. I opened the envelope, naively expecting to see pictures of the nightly campfire, the sun setting over the forest, and possibly even a deer or two.
Instead, I saw an off-center picture of tennis shoes. Not even his tennis shoes, mind you, but a pair someone had lost and left in the cabin. Mystery shoes. And that’s not all.
As I went through the stack, I found that my son had also taken a picture of his sleeping bag, a penny he found in the gravel next to the car, a leaf, an orange sock, a close-up of his father’s ear, a burned hot dog, his thumb, a piece of gum, and many other similar things.
There was barely one sign of nature in the whole stack. I couldn’t help thinking that if he’d wanted pictures of assorted junk, it would’ve been cheaper had he spent the weekend in our back-yard.
AT LEAST that is what I thought until I showed the photographs to my ceiling-snapping friend, the mother of three teenagers, who said simply, “There’s nothing wrong with these.”
But of course, this is just the type of answer you’d expect from someone who photographs ceiling.
Then she told me about the time her daughter went to Yosemite Valley and returned with rolls of photographs of the hotel, restaurant, and gift shop. She also told me about the time her son took his camera to a Major League Baseball game and returned with 24 pictures of cloud formations.
I had a feeling she was just trying to make me feel better.
Then again, to a 5-year-old boy, finding a penny is more exciting than seeing a squirrel. And why would he waste good film on something like, say, some endangered water buffaloes, when he could take a picture of cool tennis shoes? Or his shiny new green sleeping bag?
Face it: Things like beautiful sunsets and campfires can’t compare to a bag of extra-large marshmallow.
So I did what any good mother would do: I marked the date on the back of the pictures and slid them into our family vacation photo album — right after the five pages of ice sculptures I took last year on our cruise to the Bahamas.
1. Who might have taken a picture of the back seat of the family car in his or her trip mentioned in this   passage?

A．The author’s friend.

B．The author’s son.

C．The author.

D．The author’s friend’s daughter.

2. The author changed her mind on her son’s picture taking because______ .

A．her friend persuaded her to do so

B．her son’s pictures finally struck her

C．she realized the truth by herself inspired by the surrounding examples

D．it suddenly occurred to her that she herself had also taken unique pictures before

3. What can we infer from this passage?

A．Different people perceive the world from different angles, which may vary according to their age,gender, life experiences and so on.

B．The author’s friend is a better mum in terms of educating children.

C．The author will educate her son to take pictures of nature instead of some boring things.

D．The author will take vacation pictures of different kind from her past ones.

【推荐1】Leonardo da Vinci was one of the great creative minds of the Italian Renaissance(文艺复兴), not only hugely influential as an artist and sculptor but also immensely talented as an engineer, scientist and inventor.

Da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci. He was apprenticed(便当学徒) to the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence and in 1478 became an independent master. In about 1483, he moved to Milan to work for the ruling Sforza family as an engineer, sculptor, painter and architect. From 1495 to 1497 he produced a mural of The Last Supper in the refectory of the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.

Da Vinci was in Milan until the city was invaded by the French in 1499 and the Sforza family was forced to flee. He may have visited Venice before returning to Florence. During his time in Florence, he painted several portraits, but the only one that survived was the famous Mona Lisa (1503-1506).

In 1506, Da Vinci returned to Milan, remaining there until 1513. This was followed by three years based in Rome. In 1517, at the invitation of the French king Francis I, Leonardo moved to the Chateau of Cloux, near Amboise in France, where he died on 2 May 1519.

The fame of Da Vinci’s surviving paintings has meant that he has been regarded primarily as an artist, but the thousands of surviving pages of his notebooks show the most brilliant of minds. He wrote and drew on subjects including geology, anatomy (which he studied in order to paint the human form more accurately), flight, gravity and optics, often moving from subject to subject on a single page, and writing in left-handed mirror script. He “invented” the bicycle, airplane, helicopter, and parachute some 500 years ahead of their time.

If all this work had been published in a form easy to understand, Da Vinci’s place as a pioneering scientist would have been beyond dispute. Yet his true genius was not as a scientist or an artist, but as a combination of the two – an ‘artist-engineer.’ His painting was scientific, based on a deep understanding of the workings of the human body and the physics of light and shade. His science was expressed through art, and his drawings and diagrams show what he meant and how he understood the way the world works.

1. How many years did Da Vinci spend in Milan altogether?

A．2 years.	B．23 years.
C．7 years.	D．16 years.

2. Which of the following places may Da Vince not have visited?

A．Florence	B．France
C．Venice	D．Rome

3. What does the word “anatomy” in Paragraph 5 mean?

A．The scientific study of the structure of human or animal bodies.

B．The scientific study of people, their societies, cultures, etc.

C．The study of ancient societies by examining what remains of their buildings, tools, etc.

D．The scientific study of the stars and planets.

4. Which of the following statements is NOT true according to the passage?

A．Da Vinci passed away at the age of 67 in France.

B．Da Vinci tended to focus on several subjects on one single page in his notebook.

C．Da Vinci had designed the helicopter centuries before it was actually invented.

D．Da Vinci was more of a scientist than an artist because he was a pioneer scientist of his age.

【推荐2】Huang Danian, the well-known Chinese geophysicist, was born in 1958 in Guangxi, China. As a keen and able student, Huang went to the UK in 1993 to further his studies.

By the time Huang moved back to China in 2009, he had been living and working in the UK for many years. He had a good job and a life there, but he gave it all up to return to home driven by the idea that he needed to contribute to his country. As one of the world’s leading experts in deep-Earth exploration technology, Huang was invited to participate in the “Thousand Talent” programme. He took up a position at Jilin University, Changchun.

Huang was named lead scientist of a branch of China’s largest deep-Earth exploration programme, developing advanced cameras that can see through the Earth’s crust (地壳) so that it can be analysed without having to dig into it. He set up an advanced lab, sometimes paying for equipment with his own money. Some described him as a “lunatic”, but this passion and drive enabled Huang to push forwards China’s deep-Earth exploration technology into a world-leading position. Huang’s devotion contributed to China’s lunar probe (月球探测器) Chang’e 3 being landed on the moon in 2013 and the launch of the spacecraft Shenzhou-11 and Tiangong-2 in 2016.

Huang’s health also paid the price for his commitment to his work. He began having fits (昏厥) in 2012, but paid little attention to them, stating he did not have time to go to see a doctor—his work always came first. In November 2016, Huang fainted and was taken to hospital, where he was diagnosed with cancer. The disease was so advanced that he had just a couple of months to live.

Huang never gave up, and always tried to push forwards. Even from his hospital bed, he continued his work, writing references for his colleagues and replying to questions from his students. Huang died in January 2017, aged just 58. More than 800 people attended his funeral to celebrate a life that burned so bright, but was so short.

1. Huang returned to China in 2009 because ________.

A．he desired to devote himself to his motherland

B．the “Thousand Talent” program attracted him

C．Jilin University offered him a top position

D．he wasn’t satisfied with the life in the UK

2. What is Paragraph 3 mainly about?

A．China’s aerospace development.

B．Huang’s working attitude and style.

C．Huang’s great contributions to China.

D．China’s deep-Earth exploration technology.

3. What can we learn from the last two paragraphs?

A．The working environment caused Huang’s disease.

B．Huang worked continuously despite his poor health.

C．Huang was taken to hospital after he fainted in 2012.

D．A large sum of money was paid to treat Huang’s illness.

4. Which of the following can be used to describe Huang Danian?

A．Generous and honest.

B．Passionate and patient.

C．Modest and courageous.

D．Patriotic (爱国的) and committed.

【推荐3】An 89-year-old man from the American state of Rhode Island has reached a goal he spent 20 years working toward and nearly a lifetime thinking about. He earned his Ph, D. and became a physicist.

Manfred Steiner successfully passed his paper recently at Brown University in Providence. Steiner values this degree because it is what he always wanted, and because he overcame health problems that could have affected his studies to get it.

As a young person in Vienna, Austria, Steiner wanted to become a physicist after reading about Albert Einstein. But after World War I, his mother and uncle told him that studying medicine would be a better choice. He earned his medical degree in 1955 and moved to the United States soon after. In America, he had a wonderful career studying blood. Then he became a full professor and led the hematology (血液学) department at Brown’s medical school from 1985 to 1994. Steiner helped set up, a research program in hematology at the University of North Carolina. He directed that program until he retired from medicine in 2000 and returned to Rhode Island.

Steiner found medical research pleasing, but it was not quite the same as his interest in physics. At age 70, he started taking undergraduate classes. He was planning to just take a few classes that interested him. But by 2007, he had managed to join the doctoral program.

Physics professor Brad Marston was surprised when Steiner entered his class. But the professor soon realized how serious Steiner was about the subject and how hard he worked. “He has written many papers in medical science, more papers than I’ve written in physics. He already had a scientific way of thinking that younger students have to develop,” Marston said. Steiner now hopes to help the professors he befriended during his studies with their research.

1. What happened to Steiner on his way to get a Ph, D. in physics?

A．He left the United States.

B．He began to dislike medicine.

C．His physical condition was bad.

D．He was always supported by his mother.

2. What does paragraph 3 mainly tell us about Steiner?

A．His interesting classes.

B．His career in medicine.

C．His effort to become a physicist.

D．His childhood experiences in Austria.

3. What is Marston’s attitude to Steiner’s study of physics?

A．Opposed.

B．Positive.

C．Uncaring.

D．Impatient.

4. Which word can best describe Steiner?

A．Odd.

B．Ashamed.

C．Athletic.

D．Hardworking.