【推荐1】根据短文内容，从短文后的选项中选出能填入空白处的最佳选项。选项中有两项为多余选项。

Country music is very old. It came from the United States, Canada, Ireland and Great Britain.    1    .

In the west of America, cowboys had to take care of the cattle. They had to watch them all day and all night because the cattle were nervous and sometimes ran away.    2    When they were alone in the desert with the cattle, they drank strong coffee to keep awake at night. They sang about the stars and the moon, about their family and their friends.    3    They would not run away if cowboys sang beautiful and peaceful songs.

In the south of America, many people came from Ireland, Scotland and England. Other people came from France and Canada. They enjoyed their own kind of music.    4    They also added instruments from their homes, like bottles and plates. When they visited their friends and families on holidays, they usually sang and played country music.

    5    It takes about love, jobs, home and money. It talked about friends and enemies, trucks and highways, farms and crops. People in many parts of the world like country music because everyone knows something about these ideas. Also, many country music fans wear Western clothes and dance together to country music.

A．Cowboys’ life was lonely and dangerous.

B．It is a mixture of music from all of these places.

C．Country music gained popularity in the 1940s.

D．Country music describes life clearly.

E．Country music has produced two top artists.

F．The cattle listened to the cowboys and went to sleep.

G．They used guitars, violins and other musical instruments.

【推荐2】“What is civilization?” asked Kenneth Clark 50 years ago in the BBC series on the subject. “I don’t know, and I can’t define it in abstract terms, yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it, and I’m looking at it now.” And he turned to gesture behind him, at the soaring Gothic towers and flying buttresses of Notre Dame.

It seems inhuman to care more about a building than about people. That the sight of Notre Dame going up in flame has attracted so much more attention than floods in southern Africa which killed over 1,000 arouses understandable feelings of guilt. Yet the widespread, intense grief at the sight of the cathedral’s collapsing steeple (尖塔) is in fact profoundly human—and in a particularly 21st-century way.

It is not just the economy that is global today, it is culture too. People wander the world in search not just of jobs and security but also of beauty and history. A building on whose sunny steps you have rested, in front of which you have taken a selfie with your loved one, becomes a warm part of your memories and thus of yourself. That helps explain why China is in mourning—WeChat, young China’s principal means of talking to itself, has been throbbing with the story, and XiJinping, the country’s president, sent a message of condolence (慰问) to Emmanuel Macron, his French counterpart—while India was largely indifferent. Tourism from India to the West is a stream compared with the flood from China.

This visual age has blessed beauty with new power, and social media have turned great works of art into superstars. Only a few, though, have achieved this status. Just as there is only ever a handful of world-famous actors, so the number of globally recognisable cultural symbols is tiny: the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo’s David, the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramid—and Notre Dame. Disaster, too, is visual. In the 24 hours after the fire started videos on social media of the burning cathedral were viewed nearly a quarter of a billion times.

Yet the emotions the sight aroused were less about the building itself than about what losing it might mean. Notre Dame is an expression of humanity at its collective best. Nobody could look up into that vaulted ceiling without wondering at the genius of the thousands of anonymous craftsmen who, over a century and a half, realised a vision so grand in its structural ambition and so delicate in its hand-chiselled detail. Its survival through 850 years of political turbulence—through war, revolution and Nazi occupation—binds the present to the past.

The fire also binds people to each other. The outpouring of emotion it has brought forth is proof that, despite the dark forces of division now abroad, we are all in it together. When nationalism is a rising threat, shared sadness makes borders suddenly irrelevant. When politics is polarised, a love of culture has the power to unite. When extremism divides Muslim from Christian and religious people from atheists, those of all faiths and none are mourning together. An edifice (宏伟建筑) built for the glory of God also represents the unity of the human spirit.

And it will be rebuilt. The morning after the fire, the many Parisians who went to the cathedral to mourn its destruction found comfort instead. Although the spire is gone, the towers are still standing and it seems likely that the whole building can be revived. The effort to rebuild it, like the fire, will bring people together. Within 24 hours,￡6000m ($677m) had been raised from businesses and rich people, and a lot of crowdfunding campaigns started. A high-resolution laser scan of the building, carried out recently, should help.

It will never be the same, but that is as it should be. As Victor Hugo wrote in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, a three-volume love-letter to the cathedral: “Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art is often transformed as it is being made...Time is the architect, the nation is the builder.”

1. What do the first two paragraphs imply?

A．We should feel guilty about ignoring the floods in southern Africa.

B．People in modern times tend to care a lot about history and civilization.

C．The destruction of a historic building is more serious than the loss of life.

D．The human civilization is gone with the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral.

2. Which of the following can explain why China and India respond differently to the cathedral on fire?

A．Familiarity produces affection.

B．A friend in need is a friend indeed.

C．Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

D．Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

3. The cultural symbols in the fourth paragraph are mentioned to prove that ________.

A．news has wings in the age of social media nowadays

B．only a few cultural symbols can become world-famous

C．disasters become more powerful with some visual effect

D．cultural symbols have taken on new meanings in the visual age

4. When the cathedral was on fire, people felt most painful about ________.

A．the destruction of its artistic and time-honored ceiling

B．the fading of its structure with carefully made details

C．the loss of the link between the past and the present

D．the death of the unknown craftsmen who created it

5. Which of the following about what happened after the fire is TRUE according to the passage?

A．Technological support is more important than anything else in the rescue work.

B．The fire has united everyone in the world to focus on the restoration of the cathedral.

C．Donations were made overnight, most of which were from the rich businesses and people.

D．Influenced by the disaster, people with different beliefs have abandoned their prejudices.

6. Victor Hugo’s words are quoted in the last paragraph to prove that ________.

A．Notre Dame like any other art should be transformed

B．time heals everything and we will soon forget the sorrow

C．the rebuilt Notre Dame will not enjoy the same reputation

D．time constantly gives Notre Dame new meaning and value

【推荐1】Stephen Wiltshire is a famous artist. His drawings — often drawn from memory and at great speed— are drawn on the spot at street level.

Stephen, who was born in London in 1974, didn’t say a word as a small child, and found it hard to relate to other people. At the age of five, Stephen was sent to Queensmill School, London, where it soon became obvious that he communicated through the language of drawing. His teachers encouraged him to speak by taking away his art materials for a short time; eventually he said his first words —“paper”and “pencil”— but didn’t learn to speak fully until the age of nine.

Stephen loved drawing and he was seldom to be found without pen and paper. Once he took part in art competitions, news of his great talent began to spread. Early fans included the late Prime Minister Edward Heath who bought his drawing of Salisbury Cathedral, made when Stephen was just eight.

But Stephen came to wider public attention when the BBC featured him in the programme, “The Foolish Wise Ones” in 1987, when he was introduced by Sir Hugh Casson(A past president of the Royal Academy), as “the best child artist in Britain”

After that, Stephen’s reputation grew worldwide. A second BBC documentary(纪录片)in 2001 showed Stephen flying over London in a helicopter and later completing a detailed drawing of London within three hours, which included 12 historic landmarks(地标性建筑)and 200 other structures.

In 2006 Stephen was recognized for his services to the art world, when he was made a member of the Order of the British Empire. Today wherever Stephen goes, people are attracted by his outstanding talent.

1. What problem did Stephen have when he was a small child?

A．He couldn’t speak.	B．No schools wanted him.
C．No teachers liked him.	D．He couldn’t spell.

2. What does the underlined word “reputation”in the fifth paragraph mean?

A．ability.

B．works.

C．talent.

D．honor.

3. What is special about Stephen’s drawing of London?

A．It was his greatest work.	B．It was drawn in a helicopter.
C．It was finished in a short time.	D．It featured historic landmarks.

4. The text is likely to appear in         .

A．a novel.	B．an official report.
C．a history of a person’s life.	D．a guidebook.