1 . When you’re not at home, many worries may start to fill your mind. Did I turn off TV? Did I close the door? With a smart（智能的）home, you can keep all of these worries off.

A smart home is a home with a network（网络）. This network connects many things in our houses, such as our lights and TV sets, and allows you to control everything in your home from far away through your mobile phone over the Internet.

More and more people may start to get a smart home, because it makes life much easier. It can help keep your room at a certain temperature. It can help you know what happens inside the home and send the video to your phone. When you are on holiday abroad, you can use a smart home controller（控制器）to turn on or off the lights, the fridge and so on. Some smart homes can receive a visitor, allowing him to come in and offering him a drink. They can even feed the cat and water the plants.

Besides, smart homes are easy to fix and people can set up the smart homes by using only the guiding information. When something wrong appears, you can only use the guiding information to deal with it yourself without paying anybody.

But for home-users, the smart home is far from perfect. It can be quite expensive to get. Also, because the smart home system（系统）allow its owner to get home information from anywhere, it is easy for bad people to secretly use or change the information in the system.

Now, many scientists are excited at the future of smart home. Whatever it is, one thing is for sure—the smart home will change the way we live and work.

1. What does the underlined word “it” in paragraph 4 mean?

A．The problem you meet	B．The money you pay
C．The smart home you have	D．The guiding information

2. Which of the following is probably the writer’s opinion（观点）, NOT fact?

A．A smart home is easy to fix.

B．A smart home can receive a visitor.

C．A smart home costs a lot of money now.

D．A smart home will change the way we live and work.

3. Which of the following is the best structure（结构）of the whole passage?

A．

B．

C．

D．

4. The passage is probably from the part of __________ in a magazine.

A．science

B．history

C．family

D．culture

2 . As the weather changes from day to day, sometimes it's impossible to avoid catching a cold or the flu. However, that doesn't mean we have to suffer terribly. Since the only way to get better from a cold is to go through the process, many natural remedies (疗法) have helped to reduce the symptom (症状) of the common cold.

If you feel the cold, you should drink something warm. Add honey and lemon to hot water or tea. You will keep warm while you're drinking tea. In traditional Chinese medicine, ginger (姜) has been used for over two thousand years. A cup of ginger tea helps to increase the blood move and make you sweat through your body.

Garlic (大蒜) is a super food. Garlic helps to fight off germs (细菌) when eaten daily. It can reduce the number of colds you get each year and shorten cold symptoms. If you don't mind eating uncooked garlic, it's best to eat a few pieces every three to four hours when you feel the first signs of a cold.

It's no secret that salt gets rid of germs. For a sore throat, mix about half a teaspoon of salt into warm water and use as a mouthwash. Whether it's for breakfast, lunch or dinner, the Japanese enjoy umeboshi, sour and salty apricots(杏子) that help keep the doctor away. Using a neti pot is an old practice from India that helps people breathe better. As a mixture of salt and water pours into the nose, the germs are cleared away.

Although cutting an onion can make you cry, it's good for a blocked nose. People in Mexico and Spain eat hot peppers to get their sense of smell back temporarily during a cold. Of course, you'd better be ready to experience a wave of heat! In Korea, kimchi is a popular side dish that keeps people healthy. It's made from pickle vegetables, red hot sauce and sometimes garlic and ginger.

It is common to have a cold, and Mother Nature’s remedies will be there for you to lower your pain when you need to fight against that cold!

1. Which of the following best shows the structure of the passage?

A．

B．

C．

D．

2. The underlined word "It" in Paragraph 3 refers to ________ .

A．the garlic

B．the germ

C．the cold

D．the symptom

3. The passage mainly wants to tell us that ________.

A．people can catch a cold and the flu in many ways

B．natural remedies are helpful when people catch colds

C．Mother Nature's food can take the place of medicine

D．natural food helps people fight against all the illnesses

4. According to the passage, we can learn that ________.

A．a neti pot is always used to keep warm

B．ginger is newly found to be good for health

C．kimchi is a main dish made from vegetables

D．umeboshi is salty and sour apricots Japanese like