【推荐2】Gently holding a baby hummingbird, Catia Lattou f says, “Hello, cute little guy. Are you hungry?” It’s the newest patient at her apartment in Mexico City, where she has nursed hundreds of the tiny birds back to health over the past ten years. Under Catia’s gentle touch, the bird relaxes little by little, allowing her to examine it. This is often how Catia’s days have gone since she turned her apartment into a home for sick, injured or baby hummingbirds.

Catia began caring for hummingbirds a year after surviving colon cancer in 2011. It started with one hummingbird that had an eye injured by another bird. A friend encouraged her to try to help it. She named it Warrior after the brand (品牌) of the glasses case she kept it in. The bird became her inseparable companion, resting on her computer screen while she worked. “It wrote me a new life,” she said of the nine months the bird stayed with her. It helped pull Catia out of the sadness and loneliness she had experienced after her husband’s death followed by her cancer.

Later, friends began bringing her more hummingbirds, and the need for her services has jumped since last year. She began studying how to better care for the tiny birds that are native to the Americans. Someone put a video about her work on the social platform TikTok, which has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.

Catia says she never turns away a bird. She cares for the birds from 5 a. m. into the night. Most of the hummingbirds stay in Catia’s bedroom until they are strong enough to fly and feed themselves before they are finally freed.

The city is filled with menace to hummingbirds. There are other birds that attack them and destroy (毁掉) their home as well as modern building projects that replace flower gardens. But Catia remains positive and is certain that other bird lovers will plant more flowers to feed the birds. “Nothing is ensured,” she said. “But we do everything possible.”

1. What can be learned about Warrior?

A．It survived for only nine months.

B．It made Catia’s cancer disappear.

C．It became well-known for its name.

D．It helped Catia through tough times.

2. What does the underlined word in the last paragraph probably mean?

A．Warning.

B．Noise.

C．Pollution.

D．Danger.

3. How can people help improve hummingbirds’ living conditions?

A．By growing more flowers.	B．By introducing more birds.
C．By freeing the injured ones.	D．By putting up more buildings.

4. Which best describes Catia?

A．Selfless and honest.

B．Kind and hard-working.

C．Sociable and humorous.

D．Knowledgeable and frank.

【推荐1】Would you leave a six-figure job to feed the homeless? This 27-year-old did. Robert Lee’s idea is seemingly simple: Get restaurants to make better use of their leftovers (剩饭菜).

When in primary school, Robert Lee would stare in disbelief at his classmates throwing away half-eaten sandwiches after lunch. His immigrant parents had taught him and his older brother not to waste food. “They said it was a bad habit,” says Robert, 27.

While studying finance and accounting at New York University, Robert remembered this lesson and joined Two Birds One Stone, a food-rescue club on campus that delivered, five days a week, uneaten pasta, vegetables, and other leftovers from the dining hall to nearby homeless shelters. In July 2013, with the $1,000 prize won in the a college entrepreneurship (创业) contest, Robert and fellow club member Louisa Chen founded Rescuing Leftover Cuisine (RLC). In just the first few weeks, Robert’s team delivered a donation of food to feed 20 people in line at a New York City homeless shelter that had run out of food.

As an analyst at J.P. Morgan, Robert devoted his spare time to creating a network of New York City restaurants that agreed to donate food, and he enlisted (招募) volunteers to make food deliveries to homeless shelters. Two years after being founded, RLC had already distributed more than 250,000 pounds of food.

Only a year into his finance job, Robert gave up his six-figure salary to focus on RLC. “I compared one hour of impact at J.P. Morgan to one hour at RLC, and the difference was just tremendous,” he says. The organization now reaches 16 cities around the country.

“One shelter told us that our donations allow them to provide entire dinners for more than 300 people, three nights a week,” Robert says. “Things like that make me glad I quit my job.”

1. What did Lee do to help the homeless?

A．He worked with with other countries.

B．He built up a network of supermarkets.

C．He employed volunteers to deliver goods.

D．He co-founded Rescuing Leftover Cuisine.

2. What does the underlined word “tremendous” in Paragraph 5 mean?

A．Slight.	B．Huge.
C．Basic.	D．Delicate.

3. What can we learn from Lee’s words in the last two paragraphs?

A．Being a volunteer is of great benefit.

B．People should follow in his footsteps.

C．Everyone can make their contributions,

D．It’s worthwhile sacrificing his well-paid job.

4. Which of the following can best describe Lee?

A．Devoted.	B．Hardworking.
C．Patient.	D．Optimistic.

【推荐2】Frank W. Woolworth was born in Rodman, New York, in 1852. His family was very poor farmers, and there was never enough to eat. Frank decided he did not want to be a farmer. He took a short business course and went to work as a salesman in a large city.

Woolworth realized he had a natural skill for displaying goods to arouse people’s interest, but he soon learned something more important. One day his boss told him to sell some odds and ends (小商品) for as much as he could get. Frank put all these things on one table with a sign which said: FIVE CENTS EACH. People fought and pushed to buy the things and the table was soon cleared.

Soon afterwards, Woolworth opened his own store, selling goods at five and ten cents. But he had another lesson to learn before he became successful. That is if you want to make money by selling low-price goods, you have to buy them in large quantities directly from the factories. Once, for example, Woolworth went to Germany and placed an order for knives. The order was so large that the factory had to keep running 24 hours a day for a whole year. In this way, the price of the knives was cut down by half.

By 1919, Woolworth had over 1,000 stores in the USA and Canada and opened his first store in London. He made many millions and his name became famous throughout the world. He always ran his business according to strict rules, of which the most important was: “THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.”

1. Frank took a short business course in order to________.

A．earn more money for his family

B．learn something from a salesman

C．get away from the farm

D．get enough to eat

2. Frank sold the odds and ends quickly because________.

A．he knew how to get people to buy his goods

B．he cut down the price by half

C．he had spread the goods on a table in a very nice way

D．the sign he put on the table was well designed

3. The price of the knives was cut down by half because________.

A．the factory workers worked 24 hours a day

B．knives were ordered in large quantities directly from the factory

C．the knives were made in Germany, where labor was cheap

D．the knives were produced in one factory

4. ________ made Woolworth a world-famous man.

A．His business skills and his wealth

B．The low price of the goods he sold

C．His trip to Germany and his huge order of knives

D．His natural skill for displaying things

5. The belief that “The customer is always right” suggests that________.

A．whenever there is a quarrel between the customer and shop assistant, the customer is always right

B．shop assistants should always show respect for and be polite to the customers during business hours

C．stores must always follow the customer’s wishes if they want to make more money

D．stores should do their best to meet the customer’s needs if they want to be successful

【推荐3】Jobs quickly became bored with college. He liked being at Reed, just not taking the required classes. In fact, he was surprised when he found out that there were strict course requirements. When Wozniak came to visit, Jobs waved his schedule at him and complained, “They are making me take all these courses.” Wozniak replied, “Yes, that’s what they do in college.” Jobs refused to go to the classes he was assigned and instead went to the ones he wanted, such as a dance class where he could enjoy both the creativity and the chance to meet girls. “I would never have refused to take the courses you were supposed to, that’s a difference in our personality.” said Wozniak surprisedly and admiringly.

Jobs also began to feel guilty about spending so much of his parents’ money on an education that did not seem worthwhile. “All of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition (学费).” he detailed his experience in a famous ceremony address at Stanford. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay."

He didn’t actually want to leave Reed；he just wanted to quit paying tuition and taking classes that didn’t interest him. Surprisingly, Reed tolerated that. “He had a very inquiring mind that was enormously attractive,” said the dean of students, Jack Dudman. “He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.” Dudman allowed Jobs to audit classes and stay with friends in the dorms even after he stopped paying tuition.

“The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting,” he said. Among them was a calligraphy (书法) class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces (字体), about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically fine in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”

It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection (相交点) of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had so many typefaces. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

Meanwhile Jobs had a hard time at Reed. He went barefoot most of the time, wearing sandals when it snowed. Elizabeth Holmes made meals for him, trying to keep up with his obsessive diets. He returned soda bottles for spare change, continued his long hard journeys to the free Sunday dinners at the Hare Krishna temple, and wore a down jacket in the heatless garage apartment he rented for $20 a month. When he needed money, he found work at the psychology department lab maintaining the electronic equipment that was used for animal behaviour experiments. Occasionally Chrisann Brennan would come to visit. Their relationship developed abnormally. But mostly he tended to the beginning of his own soul and personal goal for enlightenment (开明).

“I came of age at a magical time,” he reflected later, “Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit certain drugs for making him more enlightened. “Taking LSD was a valuable experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It heightened my sense of what was important—creating wonderful things instead of making money, putting

things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could. ”
1. Jobs and Wozniak differed in ________.

A．approach to freedom	B．appetite for knowledge
C．attitude to requirements	D．affection for college life

2. One factor in Jobs’ decision to leave college is that ________.

A．his family was in absolute poverty

B．he wanted to be independent of his parents

C．he wouldn’t have his parents’ money wasted

D．the college couldn’t prepare him for his set goal

3. From Jack Dudman’s statement we can see that Jobs was ________.

A．rather difficult to get along with

B．quite good at solving problems

C．too stubborn to change his mind

D．very serious about existing beliefs

4. The underlined word “audit” in Paragraph 3 means “________”.

A．attend informally	B．miss occasionally
C．give successfully	D．conduct irregularly

5. Jobs worked on typefaces while suffering from a hard life ________.

A．to prove his value to the whole world

B．to bring something great into existence

C．to make himself wealthy for a better life

D．to show college was unimportant to him

6. Which of the following can be the proper title for the passage?

A．Stay Out

B．Drop Out

C．Hold Out

D．Work Out

【推荐1】A few years ago, I took a sightseeing trip to Washington, DC. I saw many of our nation’s treasures, and I also saw a lot of citizens on the street — unfortunate ones, like beggars and homeless folks.

Standing outside the Ronald Reagan Center, I heard a voice ask. “Can you help me?” When I turned around, I saw an old blind woman with her hand extended. In a natural reflex (自然反射), I reached into my pocket, pulled out all of my loose change and placed it in her hand without even looking at her. I hated being disturbed by a beggar.

But the blind woman smiled and said: “I don’t want your money. I just need help finding the post office.” In an instant, I realized what I had done. I had acted with prejudice (偏见) — I had judged another person simply for what I thought she had to be.

I hated what I saw in myself. This incident brought back my central belief. It reminded me that I believed in being humble (卑下的), even though I’d lost that belief for a moment.

The thing I had forgotten about myself is that I am an immigrant (移民). I left Honduras and arrived in the US at the age of 15. I started my new life with two suitcases, my brother, my sister and a strong mother. Through the years, I have been a dish washer, roofer, mechanic, cashier and pizza delivery driver, among many other humble jobs. Eventually, I became a network engineer.

In my own life, I have experienced many acts of prejudice. I remember a time at age 17 — I was busboy (餐馆工), and I heard a father tell his little boy that if he did not do well in school, he would end up like me. I have also seen the same treatment of family and friends, so I know what it’s like, and I should have known better.

But now, living my American middle-class lifestyle, it is too easy to forget my past, to forget who I am and where I have been, and to lose sight of where I want to go. The blind woman cured me of my blindness. She reminded me of my belief in being humble, and to always keep my eyes and heart open.

By the way, I helped that lady to the post office. And in writing this essay, I hope to thank her for the priceless lesson she gave me.

1. At the very beginning, the author regarded the old blind woman as       .

A．a great teacher	B．a poor beggar
C．a humble immigrant	D．a passer-by asking for help

2. How did the author feel when the old woman asked him for directions?

A．Concerned.	B．Confused.
C．Amused.	D．Ashamed.

3. What is the lesson that the author learned from the old woman?

A．Help but don’t judge.	B．Efforts will pay off.
C．Stay humble, stay happy.	D．Kindness is well rewarded.

【推荐3】What makes a gift special? Is it the price you see on the gift receipt？Or is it the look on the recipient's face when they receive it that determines the true value? What gift is worth the most?

This Christmas I was debating what to give my father. My dad is a hard person to buy for because he never wants anything. I pulled out my phone to read a text message from my mom saying that we were leaving for Christmas shopping for him when I came across a message on my phone that I had locked. The message was from my father. My eyes fell on a photo of a flower taken in Wyoming, and underneath a poem by William Blake. The flower, a lone dandelion (蒲公英) standing against the bright blue sky, inspired me. My dad had been reciting those words to me since I was a kid. That may even be the reason why I love writing. I decided that those words would be my gift to my father.

I called back. I told my mom to go without me and that I already created my gift. I sent the photo of the cream-colored flower to my computer and typed the poem on top of it. As I was arranging the details another poem came to mind. The poem was written by Edgar Allan Poe; my dad recited it as much as he did the other. I typed that out as well and searched online for a background to the words of it. The poem was focused around dreaming, and after searching I found the perfect picture. The image was painted with blues and greens and purples, twisting together to create the theme and wonder of a dream. As I watched both poems passing through the printer, the white paper coloring with words that shaped my childhood, I felt that this was a gift that my father would truly appreciate.

Christmas soon arrived. The minute I saw the look on my dad’s face as he unwrapped those black letters carefully placed in a cheap frame, I knew I had given the perfect gift.

1. The author’s inspiration for the gift came from _________.

A．a photo of a flower	B．a story about a kid
C．a call from the mother	D．a text about Christmas

2. The author made the gift by ________.

A．searching for the poems online	B．drawing the background by hand
C．painting the letters in three colors	D．matching the words with pictures

3. What is the main purpose of the passage?

A．To show how to design images for gifts	B．To suggest making gifts from one’s heart
C．To explain how computers help create gifts	D．To describe the gifts the author has received