1 . Hundreds of people have formed impressions of you through that little device (装置) on your desk. And they’ve never actually
Powerful, yes, but not always
One morning, I had to
Rushing out
Sitting back in the car on the way to the airport, I figured it all out. Rani’s
| A．accepted | B．noticed | C．heard | D．met |
| A．came | B．moved | C．ran | D．developed |
| A．Thus | B．Yet | C．Then | D．Indeed |
| A．rather | B．also | C．just | D．already |
| A．telephone | B．voice | C．connection | D．impression |
| A．direct | B．useful | C．easy | D．accurate |
| A．in person | B．by myself | C．in public | D．on purpose |
| A．annoyed | B．interested | C．discouraged | D．confused |
| A．promote | B．train | C．find | D．know |
| A．arrange | B．postpone | C．confirm | D．book |
| A．for the first time | B．at any time | C．from time to time | D．in good time |
| A．expecting | B．seeing | C．testing | D．avoiding |
| A．shy | B．comforting | C．familiar | D．forced |
| A．bill | B．form | C．ticket | D．list |
| A．hopefully | B．disappointedly | C．gratefully | D．regretfully |
| A．careful | B．serious | C．nervous | D．pleasant |
| A．amused | B．worried | C．helpless | D．speechless |
| A．calm | B．nice | C．proud | D．clever |
| A．forgiveness | B．eagerness | C．friendliness | D．skillfulness |
| A．explanation | B．attitude | C．concept | D．behavior |
2 . What makes a word real? Who has the power to make those kinds of official decisions about words? Those are the questions many people have in mind. When most people say a word isn’t real, what they mean is that it doesn’t appear in a dictionary. That, of course, raises some other questions, including, who writes dictionaries?
Now, dictionaries are good resources, but they are changeable. If you ask dictionary editors, what they’ll tell you is that they’re just trying to keep up with people as people change the language. They’re watching what people say and what people write and trying to figure out what’s going to stick and what’s not going to stick.
Every January, dictionary editors go to the American Dialect Society Meeting every year, where among other things, they decide on the word of the year. There are about 200 or 300 people who come. Some of them are the best known linguists(语言学家) in the United States. In the past, some of the winners have been “staycation” to describe a vacation spent at home and “tweet” to describe a post made on the social networking service Twitter.
So how does a word get into a dictionary? It gets in because people use it and people keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to people. If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it’s real. That word might be informal and that word might be a word that you think is illogical(不合逻辑的) or unnecessary, but as long as people are using the word, it is real. I hope that what you can do is to find language change not annoying but fun and interesting, just the way dictionary editors do. I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it alive.
1. Why do dictionaries change over time?| A．Speakers keep changing language. |
| B．Linguists often make up new words. |
| C．Dictionary editors change every year. |
| D．Words in the dictionary are out of date. |
| A．New words inventors. | B．American Officials. |
| C．Dictionary editors. | D．Famous linguists. |
| A．Taking a holiday while working. | B．Working online at home. |
| C．Staying at home for the moment. | D．Going on a vacation at home. |
| A．Worried. | B．Positive. | C．Uninterested. | D．Confused. |
3 . Science Books for Kids of All Ages
To help you choose the perfect education al books for your child, we’ve created this handpicked list of the best science books for kids. The titles featured here spark curiosity, encourage leaning, and are lots of fun, too.
About Time: A First Look at Time and Clocks
Author: Bruce Koscielniak; Price: US $8.55
Long ago people used the sun, the moon, and the water to tell time. Soon after we began using our knowledge about the natural world to build clocks and to create calendars made up of months and years. Centuries later, we have clocks and calendars all around us. This book tells the amazing story of how it all happened!
Animalium: Welcome to the Museum
Author: Katie Scott;Price: US $8.99
This book opens the doors of the natural history museum for your child all year round! It features 200 full-color specimens accompanied by lively, informative text and more. Discover the animal kingdom inglorious detail with unique illustrations that combine science and art.
Bang!: How We Came to Be
Author: Michael Rubino; Price: US $16.00
“Bang! And that was it, the beginning of everything.” So begins this beautifully illustrated story of evolution. This book conveys not only the facts but also the excitement of the scientific explanation of our world, from the origin of the universe to the present reality of our planet.
Bedtime Math: The Truth Comes Out
Author: Laura Overdeck; Price: US $10.99
This book makes learning about math as fun as dessert after dinner! It combines math and cool facts for one fun and wild adventure. Now kids can discover the science behind all their favorite things: marshmallows, soda, ice cream, and more. With over 100 math problems on a variety of topics, kids will find math isn’t just fun — it can be found everywhere!
1. What can kids learn in the book About Time?| A．The tough life of ancestors. | B．The origin of the sun and the moon. |
| C．The old ways to measure time. | D．The wildlife in the natural world. |
| A．They are children’s novels. | B．They are popular for cheap price. |
| C．They are collected in the museum. | D．They are illustrated stories for kids. |
| A．Bang. | B．Bedtime Math. | C．Animalium. | D．About Time. |
4 . Thinking about the past week, did any of you forget where you put your phone? Did you have a word stuck on the tip of your tongue? You couldn’t remember the name of the movie a friend recommended? What is going on here? Is your memory failing?
It’s not.
The other has something to do with stimulus(刺激物). For example, the tip of the tongue is one of the most common experiences of memory failure.
So when you walk into a room and suddenly don’t know why you’re there, you’re not going crazy or getting Alzheimer’s disease, and your memory isn’t terrible. Go back to the room you were in before you landed in this one and imagine the clues that were there.
| A．One necessary factor is attention. |
| B．It’s doing exactly what it's supposed to do. |
| C．These imperfections are simply the factory settings. |
| D．Our brains tend to remember what is meaningful and forget what isn’t. |
| E．You’re trying to come up with a word, but you cannot find it in your memory. |
| F．It will instantly deliver what you were completely confused about a moment ago. |
| G．Memory is amazing and is essential for the functioning of almost everything we do. |
More than three decades after writing his first poem
His poems speak of the
Chen
6 . Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums (贫民窟).” More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurrences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it. )
But the attacks were and are silly — and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction — a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”
There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior (低等的) to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold South, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
The point was difficult to miss: nurture (养育), not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice — manner of speech, for example — were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
Twain’s racial tone was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth — mostly with white men performing in black-face — and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
Was Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.
1. How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowe’s?| A．Twain was more willing to deal with racism. |
| B．Twain was openly concerned with racism. |
| C．Twain’s themes seemed to agree with the plots. |
| D．Twain’s attack on racism was much less open. |
| A．Jim grew up into a man and a father in the white culture. |
| B．The slave’s voice was first heard in American novels. |
| C．Twain suspected that the slaves were less intelligent. |
| D．Jim’s search for his family was described in detail. |
| A．The attacks. | B．The shows. | C．White men. | D．Slavery and prejudice. |
| A．Twain’s works had been banned on unreasonable grounds. |
| B．Twain’s works should be read from a historical point of view. |
| C．Twain was an admirable figure comparable to Abraham Lincoln. |
| D．Twain had done more than his contemporary writers to attack racism. |
7 . When delivering medications to patients, one of the most effective methods is direct injection (注射) into the bloodstream using a needle. But this can be an uncomfortable experience, especially for kids or adults with a fear of needles. While patients do have the option to take oral pills instead, drugs containing large molecules (分子) are not absorbed effectively this way.
Now, inspired by octopus suckers (章鱼吸盘), researchers from China and Switzerland have designed a needle-free alternative: a tiny, drug-filled, cup-like patch (贴片) that sticks to the inside of the cheeks. The device is easily accessible, and it can be removed at any time and the drug gets absorbed through the lining of the inner cheek, the team reports in a paper in Science Translational Medicine.
To test the design, the team 3D printed the suckers. They loaded each with the drug and stuck them inside the cheeks of three beagles, a kind of dog which has a similar inner cheek lining to humans. For comparison, they also delivered the drug to beagles via a pill. After three hours, the team found that drug blood concentrations in dogs with the patch were more than 150 times higher than in the dogs that took a tablet. They also found patches worked effectively for drugs with large molecules.
40 healthy human volunteers self-applied water-filled patches to see how well they would stay on while talking and moving their mouths. After 30 minutes, only five of the 40 patches had fallen off, which was because of improper placement. Most volunteers said they would prefer a patch over injections for daily applications.
Still, the team only tested the patch for a short time so they would need to find out what would happen if it was used repeatedly. They’d also need to determine which drugs would work with the technology: the target is large molecules, such as those used to treat obesity or osteoporosis, but they can’t be too large to fit in the cup.
1. Why do the researchers develop the patch?| A．To help patients overcome the fear of needles. |
| B．To enable kids to swallow tablets smoothly. |
| C．To offer a better way of drug delivery. |
| D．To guarantee the efficiency of oral pills. |
| A．It is technologically possible to 3D print the patches. |
| B．The cheek lining of dogs is similar to that of humans. |
| C．Patches fall easily with their mouth movement. |
| D．Drugs are absorbed better through patches than pills. |
| A．Innovative and profitable. |
| B．Effective and user-friendly. |
| C．Affordable and accessible. |
| D．Flexible and long-lasting. |
| A．The related issues to be solved. |
| B．The risk of using patches repeatedly. |
| C．The way to identity large molecules. |
| D．The trouble of improving the technology. |
8 . Walk and dance on the ceilings, sit in a bathroom with an upside-down toilet, grab a chair in the home office, and traverse the entry way, sitting-room, bedroom, kitchen and more. Come on down, upside-down, to House Down Under, Australia’s first inverted house photo experience!
This hugely successful, unique and exciting attraction is back just in time for the school holidays at Rouse Hill Town Centre in Western Sydney. It is a must-see, family-friendly, fun experience with a range of installations and activities inside a completely inverted house.
Visitors can spend as much time as they like inside the house, so they can take their time perfecting poses and taking as many photos as they like. House Down Under staff are always on hand in the house,offering advice, tips on best photo ops and to snap pictures of the whole group.
House Down Under is open from 1 April and opening hours can be found at the end of this article or on the official website. The building is located between the Metro and the Town Centre at Market Square, Rouse Hill Town Centre and you won't be able to miss it.
Rouse Hill Town Centre is also a great place for families with a variety of entertainment and food options, so make it a day out and enjoy everything on offer.
Entry tickets to House Down Under are $27 for an adult; $19 for a child;$23 for a concession (优惠), with family passes ranging from $52-$74 for a family of four. For further information on House Down Under, visit the website, www. house downunder.com.au.OPEN DAILY-Weekdays 9 am to 6 pm; Weekends 10 am to 6 pm.
1. What is special about House Down Under?| A．It is conveniently located. |
| B．All staff are properly trained. |
| C．All things are upside-down in it. |
| D．It supplies flexible food options. |
| A．Take pictures at will. |
| B．Enjoy a shopping trip. |
| C．Have a family party. |
| D．Visit its occupants. |
| A．$23. | B．$27. | C．$52. | D．$74. |
Lost & Found
Emily was very sad because her little sister drew pictures on her science project. This was not the first time that her sister had ruined her school work. So, Emily requested her parents to buy her a study table with drawers (抽屉) where she could safely keep her books.
Emily’s parents could not afford to buy a new table. However, they agreed to buy her a second-hand table. One day after school, Emily’s mother took her to the second-hand store so that she could buy the table of her choice. By accident, she opened a drawer in an old black table. And, guess what? A small plastic bag with some dollar bills!
“Maybe I have found somebody’s secret bag. Am I the luckiest twelve-year-old? My birthday is coming up soon. With this money, I can buy myself great presents. And maybe I can even buy things for my family.” Emily thought. She stared at it with greedy (贪婪的) eyes and quickly pushed the bag to the end of the drawer. She told her mother she wanted that black table and later it was organized in her room.
When everybody left, she locked the room, quickly opened the drawer and took the plastic bag with dollars out. There was a note in the money bag. It seemed that some old lady was saving the money for her children and grandchildren. She could hear her heart beat louder and louder when finally she counted twelve thousand dollars.
But now, with the money she had, she thought that she would have to make up many lies to spend it. She would have to hide the money all the time. She thought, “This money is not meant for me.” She had felt the worst fear of getting caught from the moment she thought of stealing.
注意:1.续写词数应为150左右；
2.请按如下格式在相应位置作答。
Finally, she called her parents into her room.
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The store owner was quite surprised on hearing the story.
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10 . How Weather Affects Our Mood
The weather supplies many metaphors (隐喻) for our changeable minds. Moods can brighten and darken, futures can be under a cloud, and relationships can be stormy.
Of the many aspects of weather, sunshine is the most closely tied to mood. Although the link is weaker than many people imagine, sunlight has repeatedly been found to increase positive moods and reduce tiredness.
Indeed, the effects of weather on mood depend on our behavior and on how we think.
| A．Similarly, grey weather may encourage serious and calm thinking |
| B．Aspects of weather beyond heat and sunshine have also been shown to affect mood |
| C．Weather provides a vivid language for describing our emotional atmosphere |
| D．Temperature can also affect our mind and behavior |
| E．But the effects of weather on mood are not entirely biological |
| F．Anything that changes our moods can affect our behavior |
| G．Basically, weather will only influence us if we are outdoors experiencing it |
