1 . Directions: After reading the passage below, choose the best answers from the six statements according to what you have just read.

The price of a piece of history

A fresh lemon can be purchased for less than $1. But in 2008, Cowan's Auctions in Cincinnati sold a lemon blackened with age for $2,350.

What was so special about this lemon?     1     According to a handwritten note in ink attached to a partly sealed bottle containing the lemon, the fruit was picked in May 1842 by Washington's "old gardener" some 43 years after the first president's death

Two thousand dollars is a lot to pay for produce, even from the estate of a founding father. This sale, however, just might be considered a bargain compared with prices paid for other historical collectibles in recent years.     2    

Collecting a piece of history, or an object associated with a famous person, is not brand new. Ordinary objects with extraordinary stories have increasingly been coming to auction and achieving high prices, says Thomas Venning, director of Christie's department of books and manuscripts in London. Prices are being driven up, he says, by collectors in the U.S. and, increasingly, in Asia. The Hawking wheelchair, for example, was purchased by a private museum in China.

    3     For one thing, their history of ownership is both crucial and sometimes difficult to prove. Photographs of the famous person with the object, as well as documentation (such as letters, diaries or recollections by acquaintances referring to the object) can also help.       4     To evaluate the value of a Picasso painting, one can look at recent prices paid for other Picasso paintings of the same period, similar size or style. Finding another recent sale of a lemon planted by George Washington is a different matter.

Katie Horstman, head of Cowan's American History department, says she could find no comparable items for the lemon as she prepared the piece for its auction. Ms. Horstman nevertheless eventually arrived at the estimated value at $3,000 to $4,000, she says, by researching auction records for objects somehow associated with Washington that had appeared on the market.

Cowans ended up estimating the value of the lemon at $3,000 to $4,000, according to description on its website. Objects associated with Washington these days, Ms. Horstman says, can sell for anywhere from 1,000 up to tens of thousands of dollars.

A．Stephen Hawking’s wheelchair fetched 296, 750 at a sale at Christie's in London last November.

B．Yet determining potential values of such objects isn't easy.

C．It was said to be from a tree planted by George Washington at Mount Vernon.

D．The auction result surely drew the attention from both the business and economics worlds.

E．The uniqueness of many of these objects further complicates efforts to put a value on them.

F．Therefore the unique value of many objects proved the worth of collection.

2 . Leonardo da Vinci was one of the great creative minds of the Italian Renaissance(文艺复兴), not only hugely influential as an artist and sculptor but also immensely talented as an engineer, scientist and inventor.

Da Vinci was born on 15 April 1452 near the Tuscan town of Vinci. He was apprenticed(便当学徒) to the sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence and in 1478 became an independent master. In about 1483, he moved to Milan to work for the ruling Sforza family as an engineer, sculptor, painter and architect. From 1495 to 1497 he produced a mural of The Last Supper in the refectory of the Monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan.

Da Vinci was in Milan until the city was invaded by the French in 1499 and the Sforza family was forced to flee. He may have visited Venice before returning to Florence. During his time in Florence, he painted several portraits, but the only one that survived was the famous Mona Lisa (1503-1506).

In 1506, Da Vinci returned to Milan, remaining there until 1513. This was followed by three years based in Rome. In 1517, at the invitation of the French king Francis I, Leonardo moved to the Chateau of Cloux, near Amboise in France, where he died on 2 May 1519.

The fame of Da Vinci’s surviving paintings has meant that he has been regarded primarily as an artist, but the thousands of surviving pages of his notebooks show the most brilliant of minds. He wrote and drew on subjects including geology, anatomy (which he studied in order to paint the human form more accurately), flight, gravity and optics, often moving from subject to subject on a single page, and writing in left-handed mirror script. He “invented” the bicycle, airplane, helicopter, and parachute some 500 years ahead of their time.

If all this work had been published in a form easy to understand, Da Vinci’s place as a pioneering scientist would have been beyond dispute. Yet his true genius was not as a scientist or an artist, but as a combination of the two – an ‘artist-engineer.’ His painting was scientific, based on a deep understanding of the workings of the human body and the physics of light and shade. His science was expressed through art, and his drawings and diagrams show what he meant and how he understood the way the world works.

1. How many years did Da Vinci spend in Milan altogether?

A．2 years.	B．23 years.
C．7 years.	D．16 years.

2. Which of the following places may Da Vince not have visited?

A．Florence	B．France
C．Venice	D．Rome

3. What does the word “anatomy” in Paragraph 5 mean?

A．The scientific study of the structure of human or animal bodies.

B．The scientific study of people, their societies, cultures, etc.

C．The study of ancient societies by examining what remains of their buildings, tools, etc.

D．The scientific study of the stars and planets.

4. Which of the following statements is NOT true according to the passage?

A．Da Vinci passed away at the age of 67 in France.

B．Da Vinci tended to focus on several subjects on one single page in his notebook.

C．Da Vinci had designed the helicopter centuries before it was actually invented.

D．Da Vinci was more of a scientist than an artist because he was a pioneer scientist of his age.