Stars blazed(猛烈地燃烧)in the sky above Spook like a million tiny suns. They shone through the mists, which had during the last year become thinner and weaker. At first, he had thought the world itself was changing. Then he had realized that it was just his feeling. Somehow, by burning tin in his body for so long, he had permanently strengthened his senses to a point far beyond what other Allomancers could attain.
The burned tin had begun as a reaction to Clubs’s death. Spook still felt terrible about the way he’d escaped, leaving his uncle to die. During those first few weeks, Spook had burned his metals as almost a self-punishment he’d wanted to feel everything around him, take it all in, even though it was painful, or perhaps because it was painful.
But then he’d started to change, and that had worried him. But, the crew always talked about how hard Vin pushed herself. She rarely slept, using pewter(白镴)to keep herself awake and alert. Spook didn’t know how that worked he was no Mistborn, and could only bum one metal but he figured that if burning his one metal could give him an advantage, he’d better take it, because they were going to need every advantage they could get.
The starlight was like daylight to him. During the actual day, he had to wear a cloth tied across his eyes to protect them, and even then going outside was sometimes blinding. His skin had become so sensitive that each little stone in the ground felt like a knife jabbing(猛刺)him through the bottom of his feet. The cold spring air seemed freezing, and he wore a thick cloak(斗篷).
However, he had concluded that these discomforts were small prices to pay for the opportunity to become whatever it was he had become. As he moved down the street, he could hear people turning over and over in their beds, even through their walls. He could sense a footstep from yards away. He could see on a dark night as no other human ever had.
________________. Always before, he’d been the least important member of the crew the dismissible boy who served as a handy man or kept watch while the others made plans. He didn’t feel annoyed with them for that he’d been right to give him such simple duties. ________________. Because of his street dialect, he’d been difficult to understand, and while all the other members of the crew had been carefully picked, Spook had joined through the back door since he was Clubs’s nephew.
Spook sighed, sticking his hands in his trouser pockets as he walked down the too-bright street. He could feel each and every thread of the cloth.
Dangerous things were happening he knew that: the way the mists lasted longer during the day, the way the ground shook as if it were a sleeping man, periodically(周期性地)suffering a terrible dream. Spook worried he wouldn’t be of much help in the critical days to come. A little over a year before, his uncle had died after Spook fled the city. Spook had run out of fear, but also out of a knowledge of his lack of power. ________________. He wouldn’t have been able to help during the campaign.
He didn’t want to be in that position again. He wanted to be able to help, somehow. He wouldn’t run into the woods, hiding while the world ended around him. He was sent to gather as much information as he could about the Citizen and his government there, and so Spook intended to do his best. If that meant pushing his body beyond what was safe, so be it.
He approached a large crossing. He looked both ways down the intersecting(交叉的)streets the view clear as day to his eyes. I may not be Mistborn, and I may not be emperor, he thought. But I’m something. Something new. Something people would be proud of Maybe this time I can help. ________________.
1. What is the real “change” according to Paragraph 1?| A．The thinner and weaker mists. | B．The changing world. |
| C．Spook’s sensitive feeling. | D．Allomancers’ strengthened senses. |
| A．To make himself strong. | B．To erase an emotional debt. |
| C．To show his honor to Vin. | D．To feel pain of his uncle. |
| A．A reminder of Spook’s own pain. |
| B．An encouragement to Spook’s persistence. |
| C．A comparison for Spook’s burning metal. |
| D．An implication of Spook’s own change. |
① The shining daylight that almost made him blind.
② The little stones that jabbed him like a knife.
③ The cold spring air that seemed freezing.
④ The sleepless people that turned over and over in their beds.
⑤ The awakened awareness of being unimportant when keeping watch.
⑥ His street dialect that made him hard to understand.
| A．②③ | B．①②③ | C．②③④⑥ | D．①②③④⑤⑥ |
“Perhaps he’d find a way to become useful to the others.”
| A．① | B．② | C．③ | D．④ |
| A．He’s guilty and weak nephew of the great Clubs. |
| B．He’s a carefully-picked and most powerful member of the crew. |
| C．He’s a proud and self-sacrificing handy man of the crew. |
| D．He’s a strong-willed and outstanding Allomancer. |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】Are you an “I person” or an “E person”? These two personality labels in particular are widely discussed online. They are part of a popular personality test called the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. All of the results have four letters, and there are 16 results in total. “I” and “E” refer to “introverted” and “extroverted”, respectively.
Even if someone is typically quiet, many online discussions suggest that an “I” person can still be outgoing at times. For example, when an introverted person is with a group of introverted friends, they might become more social like an “E” person.
According to psychologists, this idea of temporarily switching personalities is called “masking”. That is hiding your true personality in specific situations. “Human beings want to feel they belong, and they might become people-pleasers to do so,” wrote the Master Class website.
Using the MBTI result to identify and describe someone’s personality seems fun. However, I went too far at one time. My sister was excitedly making a day-to-day travel plan when I remembered from an article that “P people” don’t like to make or stick to plans, so I said to her, “You don’t seem like a ‘P person’.” “Why?” She asked back. “Since when do I need to follow what my personality test tells me to do?” It was then that I realized I’d taken the result too seriously.
The MBTI personality test may show something you don’t know about yourself and can even be a fun ice-breaker question when meeting new friends. And that’s all it is —for fun. On the other hand, knowing someone’s MBTI result doesn’t mean you really know this person. And those four letters of yours don’t define who you are.
1. In which of the following situations an “I” person may perform more sociably?| A．Having a conversation with an “E” person. |
| B．Wanting to feel someone’s sense of belonging. |
| C．Taking the personality test and accepting its result. |
| D．Staying with some friends with similar personalities. |
| A．Pleasing. | B．Escaping. | C．Pretending. | D．Controlling. |
| A．The MBTI result is of great help to identify a person. |
| B．A “P” person is unwilling to make or stick to plans. |
| C．People need to follow the advice of the MBTI test. |
| D．Don’t take the MBTI result too seriously all the time. |
| A．Indifferent. | B．Objective. | C．Positwe. | D．Negative. |
【推荐2】They say music is universal, and it seems to be true since wherever we go, we see people listening, playing or dancing to it. We tend to think that music is larger than our cultural differences and shows the deeper connections between us.
But according to a recent study published in the journal Current Biology, music doesn’t speak to everyone. There is a condition, the researchers argue, called “musical anhedonia”. They say that those who have this condition lack the ability to experience pleasure from music.
For the study, 30 people listened to the same, mostly classical music pieces. They were then asked to complete a questionnaire on how they felt about the music. At the same time, the researchers measured their heart rate and skin reaction, which are considered physiological measures of emotion.
According to the researchers, most of the people in the study got pleasure from the music. They had a quicker heartbeat and sweated more. However, a small number had very little and even no pleasant feeling while they listened. These people had none or very few of the physical signs the others in the study experienced.
The researchers say that this means people have different abilities to enjoy music and that “there are people who specifically can’t enjoy music at all”, study author Josep Marco-Pallres of the University of Barcelona in Spain told Live Science.
To study the condition further, another group of scientists, at Columbia University, US, researched brain activities. They found that the key is the blood flow to the reward system in the brain.
“People who got less pleasure from music had lower blood flow to areas involved in the reward system of the brain when listening to music,” reported the Daily Mail.
The lower blood flow makes it more likely that the brain’s “reward system” will not be active. Thus, it will produce less of the “pleasure chemical” dopamine. As a result, people get less pleasure from music.
If the research is correct, according to National Public Radio, there are simply people who just don’t get music. They may get pleasure from many things, but a good song isn’t one of them.
1. What do we know about people with musical anhedonia?| A．They usually avoid listening to music. |
| B．They like to listen to certain types of music. |
| C．They believe cultural differences are larger than music. |
| D．They can’t feel the pleasure that music brings to others. |
| A．To learn how music influences people’s emotions. |
| B．To understand the relationship between music and the body. |
| C．To learn what music people love the most. |
| D．To see whether music works in the same way for all people. |
| A．Those who enjoyed music had more dopamine produced. |
| B．Those who enjoyed music had slower blood flow. |
| C．All of them had faster heartbeat and sweated more. |
| D．They showed different physical signs as the music changed. |
| A．How people get pleasure from music? |
| B．Why music isn’t for everyone? |
| C．What brain produces with music? |
| D．A new research of listening. |
阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中，选出最佳选项。
To what degree can a computer achieve intelligence？The answer to this question may lie in a newly-developed US computer program called Smarter Child and the Internet.
If you ran into Smarter Child online, you would be surprised at this kid’s huge memory. It can recite many facts. For example, Smarter Child knows every baseball player in every team this season.
He knows every word in the dictionary and the weather in every major city areas across the US. However, if you ask Smarter Child other questions, you get strange answers. A question about Smarter Child’s age returns, “One year, 11 days, 16 hours, 7 minutes, and 47 seconds!” Asking where he lives, “In a clean room in a high-tech building in California.”
Smarter Child uses the huge information on the World Wide Web as his memory bank. To answer questions about spelling, for instance, Smarter Child goes to American Heritage Dictionary online. For the weather, he visits www.intellicast.com.
Some scientists believe that by joining the many systems of the Internet, an artificial being with the combined knowledge of, say, Albert Einstein, Richard Nixon and Britney Spears could be born. However, if Smarter Child wants to think and learn on his own like the boy-computer David in the movie A. I. Artificial Intelligence, he must solve two problems.
The first is that computers find it difficult to read web pages because the files(文件) are sorted in different ways. That’s why programmers need to tell Smarter Child where to look for the weather. It would be a much more difficult task to let him find it himself.
Another problem is that while Smarter Child can deal with information more exactly and faster than any human, he lacks(缺少) common sense—a basic grounding of knowledge that is obvious(明显的) to any young child.
1. From the text we can infer that www.intellicast.com is a website ______.
| A．which is specially designed to help Smarter Child |
| B．which is about artificial intelligence |
| C．where weather forecasts are made |
| D．where people can find Smarter Child |
| A．tell us how to spell a difficult word |
| B．tell us how the American government is run |
| C．provide us with a famous poem by Shakespeare |
| D．learn the ability to tell right behaviors from wrong ones. |
| A．Smart Child has his own memory bank big enough for all kinds of information. |
| B．A.I. Artificial Intelligence is probably the name of a film about a boy-computer. |
| C．Smart Child can recognize different files and find information needed on his own. |
| D．We have similar product now which has the knowledge of Einstein, Nixon and Spears. |
| A．A New Web Child | B．Smarter Child |
| C．The Future of Internet | D．Intelligence Development |
