We enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed. A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with punctiliousness, with enough careful attention. You must see that it keeps no dirty or destroyed pages.
But books are for use, not for show, you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up, or afraid to place on the table, wide open and face down. A good reason for marking favorite passages in books is that this practice enables you to remember more easily the important sayings, to refer to them quickly, and then in later years, it is like visiting a forest where you once walked in.
Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth; this habit can here be developed with every advantage. The best wallpaper is books; they are more varied in color and appearance than any wallpaper, they are more attractive in design, and if you sit alone in the room in the firelight, you are surrounded (包围) with close friends. The knowledge that they are there in common thought is both encouraging and refreshing. Books are of the people, by the people, for the people. They are part of history; the best part of personality.
Book-friends have this advantage over living friends; you can enjoy the most truly great society in the world whenever you want it. The great dead are beyond our physical (身体的) reach, and the great living are usually almost as too far to reach. But in a private library, you can at any moment talk with Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens. And there is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They “laid themselves out” they did their best to entertain (娱乐) you, to make a favorable impression. You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their inside heart of heart.
1. The underlined word punctiliousness refers to _________.| A．expectation | B．admiration | C．great care | D．nice view |
| A．walking into an old forest | B．treating a guest in the house |
| C．showing out a private library | D．talking to great dead and living |
| A．colors | B．books | C．library | D．friends |
| A．easy | B．nice | C．hard | D．common |
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【推荐1】Millions of people around the world love the comic strip Peanuts(连环画《花生漫画》), especially the lovely dog Snoopy. But few people know Charles Schulz. He created the dog Snoopy.
But when Charles was in high school, he always had trouble with his study. He was also poor at sports. And he was even shy to talk with a girl. When he was in his high school, he tried to publish his drawings. But he was always refused by the publish companies(出版机构).
Charles drew Peanuts for 50 years. The comic strip first appeared in seven American newspapers in 1950. In the beginning, the themes of comic strips were all children and animals. They still are. People love the characters because they showed the strong points and weak points of human beings.
In Peanuts, Brown, one of the characters, is optimistic to life. Although usually he cannot get things right, he tries his best and never stops trying. His baseball team always loses. He keeps trying to kick a football, but never succeeds. Hits trend Lucy keeps pulling the ball away. But he continues to believe that someday she will let him kick the ball.
Lucy is another character in Peanuts. She doesn't trust others and often seems angry. Her brother Linus is always under her control and afraid of his safety. His friend Schroeder likes to play a small toy piano. Snoopy is Brown's dog. He is popular and funny. He always tries to write a novel. But he cannot get beyond(超越) the first line of his book. Each time he wrote "It was a dark and stormy night…" again and again.
Charles Schulz would not permit anyone else to draw Peanuts. However, the stories about Charles Brown and his friends did not completely disappear when their creator died. And Peanuts became one of the most popular comic trips ever.
1. We can infer from the passage that Charles had a ________ life in high school.| A．relaxing | B．busy | C．lucky | D．hard |
| A．animals and women | B．children and animals | C．school life and dogs | D．toys and pianos |
| A．Lucy is very kind to others. | B．Schroeder may like to play music. |
| C．Linus often feels safe. | D．Snoopy is good at writing. |
| A．乐观的 | B．悲观的 | C．现实的 | D．绝望的 |
| A．Charles's comic strips are popular | B．Charles could make a success |
| C．Charles and characters in comic strip Peanuts | D．Charles and his history in high school |
【推荐2】Must-reads in Your Winter Holiday
| My Mommy’s Brain Is Sick By Rhiannon Baker $ 34. 99 Paperback Elijah’s mommy has a mental illness that he tries hard to understand. He learns to talk about his feelings, knowing that no matter Mommy’s sickness, she still loves him very much. | When a Cow Comes into Your House By Carmel Trovato $ 29. 99 Hardcover A little girl tries to protect her things from a strange cow who manages to get inside her home. What do you do when a cow comes into your house? |
| I Love you, My Sister By Veronica Jane Frost $ 14. 99 Paperback As a big brother tries his best to get used to life with his new little sister, their journey brings the siblings together to find peace and love in each other’s company (陪伴). | The Old Man and the Sea By Earnest Hemingway $ 13. 99 Paperback An old fisherman who has been fighting for a long time with a huge marlin. One day he caught a huge marlin, but marlin’s blood attracted a lot of sharks. He fought against the sharks hard. Although the weak fisherman didn’t bring back the fish, he won. |
| A．Rhiannon Baker. | B．Carmel Trovato. | C．Veronica Jane Frost. | D．Earnest Hemingway. |
| A．I Love You, My Sister. | B．My Mommy’s Brain Is Sick. |
| C．The Old Man and the Sea. | D．When a Cow Comes into Your House. |
| A．Father and mother. | B．Uncle and aunt. | C．Brother and sister. | D．Mother and son. |
| A．It teaches kids how to fish. | B．It’s the cheapest of the four books. |
| C．It is mainly about a family trip. | D．It’s written by more than one writer. |
| A．Sports. | B．Education. | C．Science. | D．Travel. |
【推荐3】I have always wanted to write.
The problem is that I am not a very good writer. Then I prepared a little black book and it looked very common.
Now I bring the book everywhere with me.
My book is amazing. It lets me catch all of those small things and catch them before they can go away. So far I have written a great novel and some poems.
| A．It is more important to me than my mobile phone. |
| B．I fell in love with writing when I started reading. |
| C．I never thought I would write poems! |
| D．I hated it so much at first. |
| E．Then I picked the best three ideas and wrote a short story. |
| F．It makes me become more and more famous. |
| G．However, it was a little book of dreams. |
【推荐1】Speaking English freely might be difficult for you now. But all you need are the right ways and confidence(自信) . I have some advice for you.
Stop Being a Student
Stop thinking of yourself as someone who is learning English and think of yourself as someone who speaks English. It’s a small change, but it will make you feel more confident and help you use the English you already know better.
Try to Learn Phrases
Speaking English freely means being able to express your thoughts and feelings. Your aim is to speak English in full sentences, so why not learn it in full sentences? You’ll find that English is more useful in your life if you study whole phrases, rather than just simple words.
▲__________
Studying English for an hour once a week isn’t usually enough to make any real progress. The best way to quickly improve your English is to spend at least a few minutes practicing every day.
Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
Sometimes it can be difficult to put all those rules and words together into a simple sentence. Don’t let the fear of saying something wrong stop you from speaking. Even if you think you’re making a mistake, keep speaking anyway. Most of the time, people will understand what you’re trying to say. The more you speak, the easier it will be.
1. Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?
| A．Practicing English every day helps you make greater progress. |
| B．Studying whole phrases makes you express your thoughts and feelings worse. |
| C．Thinking of yourself as an English speaker can make you more confident and use English better. |
| A．Just keep speaking | B．Stop speaking right away. | C．Think of yourself as an English speaker. |
| A．Hard Work Pays Off | B．Practice Makes Perfect | C．Failure Is the Mother of Success |
| A．In a student’s diary. | B．In a travel magazine. | C．In a study newspaper. |
| A．A writer who writes novels. | B．A teacher who teaches history. | C．A student who wants to improve English. |
【推荐2】From writing Shakespeare-style poetry to making music, ChatGPT has amazed the whole world since it came into the market in late 2022 by the US-based company OpenAI. It even passed several law exams in four courses at the University of Minnesota, US, according to CNN.
The AI program can answer questions on a whole host of topics, and write essays, stories and any other written texts you can think of. It does this by drawing on information collected from a large corpus (语料库) of text data.
What makes ChatGPT impress the whole world? As Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI said in an interview with Forbes, “it’s not actually completely new technology that made this (ChatGPT) have a moment.”
According to MIT Technology Review, ChatGPT is based on GPT-3, a large language model. Because texts are more complicated (复杂的) than the meaning of every word combined (结合), language models require a type of neural network (神经网络) that can understand texts.
A new technology behind today’s model is a network called Transformer, which was invented by Google researchers in 2017. The neural network can infer word meanings by tracking (追踪) where the word appears in a sentence. Transformer can therefore catch the meaning of texts more correctly.
The GPT models built by OpenAI combined Transformer with learning that the models can learn by themselves without being told what to look at. ChatGPT can now make a reply at once because of the large scale (规模) of texts it learned from.
“One of the biggest problems with ChatGPT is that it comes back, very confidently, with some false information,” Michael Wooldridge at the Alan Turing Institute in London. UK, told The Guardian. This means that ChatGPT doesn’t know the truth about the world—it learns information from all kinds of resources but it can’t decide what is true or false.
Some argued that ChatGPT will be used to write fake news, spread information that is not true, or be used for ill purpose. As for education, many US schools recently don’t allow the students to use ChatGPT on school networks because students began to use it as a shortcut for homework.
1. The passage is probably________.| A．a folk story | B．an instruction | C．a science fiction | D．a science report |
| A．By making use of its large collection of texts. |
| B．By dividing information into different themes. |
| C．By gathering different information. |
| D．By changing difficult texts into easy ones. |
| A．Its neural network can understand texts quickly. |
| B．Its language model can track words correctly. |
| C．Its model combines Transformer with self-learning. |
| D．Its Transformer can produce human-like replies at once. |
| A．It processes information slowly. | B．It learns from fewer resources, |
| C．It can produce false answers. | D．It can be used for ill purpose. |
Quick Cooking has four parts, one for each season. This helps you to use fresh fruit and vegetables when they are cheaper and, of course, better. There are a lot of exciting ideas from foreign countries, and most of the ways are not complicated(复杂的). You take something simple like a chicken or some cheese, and make an unusual dish out of it. For example, there are no fewer than 40 ways for cooking eggs! The beginner will have to find out a lot of things for him to try many of the ways as soon as he reads them. For people with little spare time, Helen Fry's Quick Cooking is of excellent value.
1. The writer writes this short passage in order to _________.
| A．make you like cooking |
| B．let you know the book Quick Cooking |
| C．help you to cook eggs |
| D．teach you cooking |
| A．none of the dishes are complicated |
| B．there are over l000 ways to cook dishes in it |
| C．it is written for people who don't have much time |
| D．it tells you how to cook all kinds of food quickly |
| A．it is easy to find your way around the book |
| B．how long each dish takes to cook |
| C．there are photographs and drawings in this book |
| D．the book has a strong cover |
| A．it is easy to find things around the book |
| B．it is easy to find things in the supermarket to prepare the food in the book |
| C．it is easy to find the ways you want to cook dishes in the book |
| D．it is easy to find the cover of the book |
