Cartoons suit the way we like information to be presented these days: graphically and in small amounts. We are used to cartoons and comic strips that take an ironic look at modern life or provide a bit of escapism. But recently we have seen an increase in the number of graphic novels: booklength comics with a single, continuous narrative. Historically, graphic novels were not popular outside France, Belgium, Japan, and the US. The exception is the worldwide popularity of a young reporter-detective from Belgium, Tintin.
The creation of the Belgian cartoonist Herge, The Adventures of Tintin first appeared in a Belgian newspaper in 1929. Each story appeared as a cartoon strip week by week, but soon after was republished in book form. One of the main attractions for readers was that they were taken to parts of the world they had never seen and probably never would: Russia, the Congo, America. Herge himself only traveled outside Belgium later in life, but his passion was educating his readers about other cultures and places.
Two things set Herge apart as a graphic novelist. The first was his technical drawing skills: with just a few simple lines he could communicate a particular facial expression or movement. The second was the careful research he put into his stories. In The Crab with the Golden Claws, Tintin follows an opium-smuggling ring to North Africa; in King Ottakar’s Scepter, he makes an attempt at a military coup in a central European country. While telling these stories, Herge also steered a fine line between serious topics and humor.
Tintin had more than his fair share of adventures, but perhaps the greatest is his joumey to the Moon, told in Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon. Written in 1953, sixteen years before the first Moon landing, the stories show a remarkable eye for technical detail and feeling for the nature of space travel. In the early 1950s, few could imagine what it was like to be looking down at our planet from outer space. And that is Herge’s true gift: to understand what a place was like without ever having been there.
1. What can be learned about graphic novels from the passage?| A．The Adventures of Tintin is the world’s first graphic novel. |
| B．Most of them were just popular in several countries. |
| C．They present information in small amounts. |
| D．They mostly involve detective stories. |
| A．The stories were created in Belgium, a European country. |
| B．The stories were the first graphic novel published in book form. |
| C．The stories used to be cartoon strips that appeared week by week. |
| D．The stories enable them to learn about places they have never been to. |
| A．Herge liked touching on serious topics |
| B．Herge himself had a good sense of humor |
| C．Herge based his stories on the research results |
| D．Herge was expert at applying technical drawing skills |
| A．He had been longing for a trip to the Moon. |
| B．He never had any chance to leave Belgium for travelling. |
| C．He could describe accurately those experiences he never had. |
| D．He devoted himself to education before creating graphic novels. |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】If you are hungry, what do you do? Grab a piece of your favorite meal and stay quiet after that?
Once you read a book, you just don't run your eyes through the lines, but even your mind decodes it and explains it to you.
This is nothing but creativity. As the number of books you read is increasing, your mind will open up like never before.
| A．Your stomach needs food. Similarly, your mind can feel hungry too. |
| B．Why not do some reading while you are hungry? |
| C．A picture is formed in your brain and left there as a seed. |
| D．So guys do join me and give food for your thoughts by reading, reading and more reading |
| E．Also this is beneficial to you if you want to enlarge your vocabulary. |
| F．Reading can help you make more friends, too. |
| G．It is commonly thought that reading can actually make your hungry mind satisfied. |
【推荐2】An eBook library, sometimes called an e Library, is a collection of electronic books. Similar to a library filled with physical books, an eBook library can exist as a person's own collection of electronic texts or as a public library that allows users to keep electronic versions of books for a period of time.
Electronic readers Can store e-books and serve as an eBook library. These books, though they do not exist in a physical sense, are the property (财产) of the person who has purchased them. The digital format has also allowed private book collectors to leave their eBook libraries on the Internet.
Some books "live" for a long time. Other classics are preserved for a few hundred years under glass and climate controlled conditions But most paper books only last 10 - 20 years due to moisture (湿气), mold, mice, silverfish, fire, etc.
However, there are some disadvantages of e-books. For/example, some texts and other resources are simply not available in an electronic format.
| A．E-books can be read on a number of electronic readers. |
| B．No trees are consumed in the process of creating e-books. |
| C．In this way they can redownload their books whenever they want. |
| D．E-books, however, could potentially last thousands of years as digital files. |
| E．There is just nothing that will compare to the magic of a room full of books. |
| F．The popularity of digital books has affected the public library system greatly. |
| G．This is often the case with limited edition print journals or texts from centuries ago. |
【推荐3】When I was young, a friend and I came up with a “big” plan to make reading easy. The idea was to boil down great books to a sentence each. “Moby-Dick” by American writer Herman Melville, for instance, was reduced to: “A whale of a tale about the one that got away.” As it turned out, the joke was on us. How could a single sentence convey the essence (精髓) of a masterpiece with over five hundred pages?
Blinkist, a website and an app, now summarizes nonfiction titles in the form of quick takes labeled “blinks”. The end result is more than one sentence, but not by much. Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café” is broken into 11 screens of information; Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” fills 13.
Blinkist has been around since 2012. It calls its summaries “15-minute discoveries” to indicate how long it takes to read a Blinkist summary. “Almost none of us,” the editors assure us, “have the time to read everything we’d like to read.”
But I think a book is something we ought to live with, rather than speed through and categorize. It offers an experience as real as any other. The point of reading a book is not accumulating information, or at least not that alone. The most essential aspect is the communication between writer and reader. The idea behind Blinkist, however, is the opposite: Reading can be, should be, measured by the efficient uptake (吸收) of key ideas.
No, no, no. What’s best about reading books is its inefficiency. When reading a book, we need to dive in, let it take over us, demand something of us, teach us what it can. Blinkist is instead a service that changes books for people who don’t, in fact, want to read. A 15-minute summary misses the point of reading; speed-reading with the app isn’t reading at all.
1. What does the underlined part “the joke was on us” in Paragraph 1 mean?| A．We were actually joking. | B．We were laughed at by others. |
| C．We were underestimating’ ourselves. | D．We were just embarrassing ourselves. |
| A．What Blinkist is. | B．Why Blinkist is popular. |
| C．How to use Blinkist. | D．Where you can use Blinkist. |
| A．Obtaining key ideas efficiently. | B．Further confirming our beliefs. |
| C．Accumulating information quickly. | D．Deeply involving ourselves in books. |
| A．Positive. | B．Negative | C．Uncaring. | D．Tolerant. |
Retirement is a major life change. Even good changes usually involve some kinds of loss. When you retire, you find yourself lacking whatever working used to provide. That could include, for example, 1. knowing you’re working for society, 2. getting admiration from your skills, 3. having “aha” moments when you solve problems, 4. having people to socialize with, and 5. simply having a place to go and a reason to get out of bed every day. For most people, there’s a financial loss, too. Also, retirement age is a time when a lot of people have to deal with losing their parents or having serious health problems of their own.
Because of all these, retirees are more likely to get depressed.
Depression is very harmful. First, depression can make physical health problems worse. Second, it takes a toll on relationship because it can make people angry. Third, it’s hard to get much done when you’re depressed.
What can we do to overcome (克服) the feelings of depression? First, do all the things that help depression in general: drink enough water, exercise, talk to friends, have a hobby, laugh, and spend time in nature. If you feel depressed more often than not, it’s probably time to talk to a doctor about your feelings. Second, it’s important to keep busy and get out of the house when you can. Make specific plans with friends. Take a class Volunteer. Or just make sure you start each day with some kind of goal. Third, try to focus on what you’ve gained by retiring. Think about what you may have now that you wished you had before you were able to retire. For example, days that are less stressful, a chance to rest and take better care of your body, more time for your family and yourself. To write, to start a hobby and to learn something new are all new possibilities. Finally, tell your story. You’ve lived a long time and you become an oral historian each time you talk with someone about your experiences. You can also write in a journal or make a video recording of your memories. Telling your stories can help you look back on your life and career with a sense of wholeness and achievements.
1. People may find life very hard after they retire because of ___________.
| A．freedom | B．nervousness |
| C．discouragement (losing heart) | D．hard work |
| A．they will suffer from financial loss |
| B．they have to support their parents |
| C．they may lose the reason to get up early |
| D．they may have fewer people to socialize with |
| A．it makes people’s relationships unusual |
| B．it makes people’s relationships in peace |
| C．it makes people’s relationships in danger |
| D．it makes people stay in touch with each other. |
| A．Depression and Retirement |
| B．Depression During Retirement Is Harmful |
| C．Reasons for Depression During Retirement |
| D．How to Overcome Depression During Retirement |
【推荐2】German physicist Albert Einstein is one of the most famous scientists of all time, the personification of genius and the subject of a whole industry of scholarship. In The Einsteinian Revolution, two experts on Einstein’s life and his theory of relativity―Israeli physicst Hanoch Gutfreund and German historian of science Jurgen Renn—offer an original and penetrating(厚利的) analysis of Einstein’s revolutionary contributions to physics and our view of the physical world.
By setting Einstein’s work in the long course of the evolution of scientific knowledge, Gutfreund and Renn discover the popular misconception of Einstein as an unconventional scientific genius who single-handedly created modern physics—and by pure thought alone.
As a large part of the book explains, Einstein typically argued that science progresses through steady evolution, not through revolutionary breaks with the past. He saw his theory of relativity not as something from scratch, but a natural extension of the classical physics developed by pioneers such as Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei and English physicist Isaac Newton in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as nineteenth-century physicists.
The authors highlight how classical physics cannot be separated cleanly from modem Einsteinian physics. The book also includes substantial sections on Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo whose methods inspired Einstein. When Einstein considered himself as standing on their shoulders, he meant that, without their contributions, he would not have formulated(阐述) the theory of relativity.
The Einsteinian Revolution is an important and thought-provoking contribution to the scholarly literature on Einstein and his surprising scientific creativity between 1905 and 1925. Gutfreund and Renn might not have given the final answer as to why Einstein, of all people, revolutionized physics in the way that he did. But they argue in fascinating detail that, to understand his genius, one must take into account not just the earlier history of physics but also the history of knowledge more broadly. Although not always an easy read, the book will interest physicists and historians alike.
1. Where is the text most probably taken from?| A．An essay on Albert Einstein. | B．An introduction to a book |
| C．A guidebook to a course. | D．A review of physics development |
| A．Unclear. | B．Favorable. | C．Dismissive | D．Opposing. |
| A．Up to standard | B．From nothing. |
| C．By learning from others. | D．With previous knowledge. |
| A．Their ideas were rejected by Einstein， |
| B．Their devotion to physics impressed Einstein |
| C．Their researches contributed to Einstein’s success. |
| D．Their hard work deserved the worldwide respect. |
【推荐3】A new study has found the amount of antibiotics (抗生素) given to farm animals is expected to increase by two-thirds over the next 15 years. Researchers are linking the growing dependence on the drugs to the increasing need for meat, milk and eggs. However, the drugs could quicken the development of antibiotic-resistant infections (感染). Such infections are already a major public health concern in the United States.
The World Health Organization notes that when people stop living in poverty (贫困), the first thing they want to do is eat better, rather than earn more money. For most people, that means their diet should contain more meat. With the rapid development of Asia, people there are eating nearly four times as much meat, milk and other milk products as they did 50 years ago.
To meet the need, farmers have put many animals into smaller spaces. As the animals are crowded together, the easiest way to deal with some of the problems of crowding is to give them antibiotics. It’s clear that antibiotics help animals stay healthy in a crowded environment and grow faster. But bacteria can develop resistance to the drugs gradually.
Nowadays, doctors find antibiotics that once worked against the infections no longer work. The bacteria have learned ways to fight against the drugs. The heavy use of antibiotics in animals is responsible for the growth of antibiotic resistance worldwide. In the United States, at least two million people get drug-resistant infections each year and at least 23,000 die from an infection.
Europe has banned the use of antibiotics to increase animal growth. And the United States is hoping to persuade farmers to stop using antibiotics for that purpose.
1. What accounts for the increasing amount of antibiotics given to farm animals?| A．The desire for new drugs. | B．The less effective antibiotics. |
| C．The outdated farm technology. | D．The need for more various foods. |
| A．Make a lot of money. | B．Focus more on health. |
| C．Have more meat in their diet. | D．Live in a better environment. |
| A．Antibiotics do harm to animals. |
| B．Antibiotics make animals more nutritious. |
| C．Antibiotics are used heavily in Europe. |
| D．Antibiotic-resistant infections spread to people. |
| A．A new way of raising farm animals. |
| B．The advantages of using antibiotics. |
| C．The reason for banning the use of antibiotics. |
| D．The negative effects of the heavy use of antibiotics in farm animals. |
