1 . Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954 to a Mexican American family. As the only girl in a family of seven children, she often felt like she had "seven fathers" , because her six brothers, as well as her father, tried to control her. Feeling shy and unimportant, she retreated (躲避) into books. Despite her love of reading, she did not do well in elementary school because she was too shy to participate.

In high school, with the encouragement of one particular teacher, Cisneros improved her grades and worked for the school literary magazine. Her father encouraged her to go to college because he thought it would be a good way for her to find a husband. Cisneros did attend college, but instead of searching for a husband, she found a teacher who helped her join the famous graduate writing program at the University of Iowa. At the university’s Writers’ Workshop, however, she felt lonely — a Mexican American from a poor neighborhood among students from wealthy families. The feeling of being so different helped Cisneros find her "creative voice".

"It was not until this moment when I considered myself truly different that my writing acquired a voice. I knew I was a Mexican woman, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, but it had everything to do with it! That’s when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about."

Cisneros published her first work, The House on Mango Street, when she was twenty-nine. The book tells about a young Mexican American girl growing up in a Spanish-speaking area in Chicago, much like the neighborhood in which Cisneros lived as a child. The book won an award in 1985 and has been used in classes from high school through graduate school level. Since then, Cisneros has published several books of poetry, a children’s book, and a short story collection.

1. Which of the following is TRUE about Cisneros in her childhood?

A．She had seven brothers.	B．She felt herself a nobody.
C．She was too shy to go to school.	D．She did not have any good teachers.

2. According to Cisneros, what was the key factor in her success?

A．Her early years in college.	B．Her training in the Workshop.
C．Her childhood experiences.	D．Her feeling of being different.

3. What do we learn about The House on Mango Street?

A．It is quite popular among students.

B．It is a book of poetry written by Cisneros.

C．It wasn’t a success as it was written in Spanish.

D．It won an award when Cisneros was twenty-nine.

2 . An introduction to this book is as superfluous as a candle in front of a powerful searchlight. But a convention of publishing seems to require that the candle should be there, and I am proud to be the one to hold it. About ten years ago I picked up from the pile of new books on my desk a copy of Sons and Lovers by a man of whom I had never heard, and I started to race through it with the immoral speed of the professional reviewer. But after a page or two I found myself reading, really reading. Here was—here is—a masterpiece in which every sentence counts, a book packed with significant thought and beautiful, arresting phrases, the work of a remarkable genius whose gifts are more richly various than those of any other young English novelist.

To appreciate the rich variety of Mr. Lawrence we must read his later novels and his volumes of poetry. But Sons and Lovers reveals the range of his power. Here are combined and blended(混合的) sort of “realism” and almost lyric(抒情的) imagery and rhythm. The speech of the people is that of daily life and the things that happen to them are normal adventures and accidents; they fall in love, marry, work, fail, succeed, and die. But of their deeper emotions and of the relations of these little human beings to the earth and to the stars, Mr. Lawrence makes something near to poetry and prose(散文) without violating its proper “other harmony.”

Take the marvellous paragraph on next to the last page of Sons and Lovers (Mr. Lawrence depends so little on plot in the ordinary sense of the word that it is perfectly fair to read the end of his book first):

Where was he? One tiny upright speck of flesh, less than an ear of wheat lost in the field. He could not bear it. On every side the immense dark silence seemed pressing him, so tiny a spark, into extinction, and yet, almost nothing, he could not be extinct. Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun, stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spinning round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in the darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted(气馁). So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core a nothingness, and yet not nothing.

Such glorious writing lifts the book far above a novel which is merely a story. I beg the reader to attend to every line of it and not to miss a single one of the many sentences that await and surprise you. Some are enthusiastic and impressive, like the paragraph above; others are keen, “realistic” observations of things and people. In one of his books Mr. Lawrence makes a character say, or think, that life is “mixed.” That indicates his philosophy and his method. He blends the accurately literal and trivial(琐碎的) with the extremely poetic.

To find a similar blending of tiny daily detail and wide imaginative vision, we must go back to two older novelists, Hardy and Meredith. I do not mean that Mr. Lawrence derives(源于) immediately from them or, indeed, that he is clearly the disciple(弟子) of any master. I do feel simply that he is of the elder stature(名望) of Hardy and Meredith, and I know of no other young novelist who is quite worthy of their company. When I first tried to express this comparison, this connection, I was contradicted by a fellow-critic, who pointed out that Meredith and Hardy are entirely unlike each other and that therefore Mr. Lawrence cannot resemble both. To be sure, nothing is more hateful than forced comparisons, nothing more boring than to discover parallels between one work of art and another. An artist’s mastery consists in his difference from other masters. But to refer a young man of genius to an older one, at the same time pronouncing his independence and originality, is a fair, if not very superior, method of praising him.

1. The underlined word “superfluous” in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to _______.

A．meaningful	B．unnecessary
C．fundamental	D．unbelievable

2. What is typical of Lawrence’s works?

A．They equally reveal his genius power.

B．They contain lots of great lyric poetry.

C．They present some real living situations.

D．They focus on relations between humans.

3. What does the author want to illustrate by including one paragraph from Sons and Lovers?

A．The plot of the novel has little to do with daily life.

B．It is wise to read Lawrence’s books from the end.

C．Lawrence is capable of telling good stories.

D．The language in Lawrence’s books is elegant.

4. Who were Hardy and Meredith?

A．They taught Lawrence literature when he was young.

B．They were the realistic novelists of Lawrence’s time.

C．They were novelists who resemble each other in writing.

D．They were novelists combining details with imagination.

5. According to the author, what does an artist’s mastery mean?

A．He must have personal diversity.

B．He must have the critical spirits.

C．He must be happy to be compared.

D．He must be a man of genius.

6. What is the author’s purpose in writing the passage?

A．To introduce Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers.

B．To show his experiences of reading classics.

C．To analyze Lawrence’s writing characteristics.

D．To compare the styles of different novelists.

3 . 阅读下面材料，在空白处填入适当的内容(1个单词)或括号内单词的正确形式。

Long ago the Emperor decided to hold a swimming race between 13 different animals. The order in which they finished would decide the order of their     1     (appear) on the Chinese calendar.

All the animals lined up on the river bank and were given     2     task of getting to the opposite shore. The cat wondered how he would get there     3     he was afraid of water. The ox worried he couldn’t cross the river     4     his poor eyesight. The calculating rat suggested that he and the cat     5     (jump) onto the ox’s back and guide him across. The ox, steady and hard­working, did not notice the two animals on his back. In the meanwhile, the rat ran behind the unsuspecting cat and pushed     6     into the water. As the ox came ashore, the rat jumped off and finished the race first,     7     the rat got the first year     8     (name) after him and the ox got the second year.     9     the lazy pig reached the finishing line in the 12th place, the race was over and the pig was awarded the final place on the calendar.

From that day on, the cat,     10     never finished the race and lost his place on the calendar, became the enemy of the rat.

4 . Two hundred years ago the English poet William Wordsworth wrote “I wander ‘d Lonely as a Cloud”, a poem that expresses a basic spirit of early English Romanticism.

What makes this poem an example of Romantic thinking? It isn’t just that Wordsworth chooses to write about natural scene：it is the way he describes the scene as if it had human emotions. For him, nature is not only a neutral (无感情色彩的) mixture of scenery, colours, plants, rocks, soil, water and air. It is a living force that feels joy and sadness, shares human pain and even tries to educate us human beings by showing us the beauty of life.

Wordsworth’s home, Dove Cottage, is now one of the most popular destinations in the Lake District. You can go on a tour of the garden which William planted with wild flowers and which survived in his backyard even after they disappeared from the area “He always said that if he hadn’t been a poet, he would have been a wonderful scenery gardener,” says Allan King of the Wordsworth Trust.

The place near Ullswater, where Wordsworth saw the daffodils(水仙花), is at the southernmost end of the lake. The lake is wide and calm at this turning point. There’s a bay where the trees have had their soil eroded(侵蚀)by lake water so that their roots are shockingly exposed. You walk along from tree to tree, hardly daring to breathe, because you are walking in the footprints of William from two centuries ago. The first group of daffodils appear, but they aren’t tall yellow trumpets(小号状的花)proudly swinging in the gentle wind. They’re tiny wild daffodils, most of them still green and unopened, in groups of six or seven. They’re grouped around individual trees rather than collecting together.

But as you look north, from beside a huge ancient oak, you realize this is what delighted Wordsworth:group after group of the things, spread out to left and right but coming together in your sight so that they form a beautiful, pale-yellow carpet. What you’re seeing at last is nature transformed by human sight and imagination.

1. What was Wordsworth’s attitude to nature?

A．Nature had a character of its own.	B．Nature could talk to people.
C．Man could influence nature.	D．Nature was human-like.

2. We can learn from the text that Dove Cottage______.

A．has gardens designed by a scenery gardener	B．has a wide range of flowers in its garden
C．receives a lot of visitors every year	D．is famous for an actor

3. In what way is the scene at the southernmost end of the lake different from Wordsworth’s description?

A．The daffodils are fewer and smaller.	B．All the daffodils are green and small.
C．There are no daffodils around trees.	D．There are no daffodils by the lake.

4. The writer implies that the poem describes ______.

A．exactly what Wordsworth saw in detail

B．the effect the daffodils had on Wordsworth

C．what Wordsworth saw around an ancient oak

D．groups of daffodils on the left and on the right

5 . The history of Chinese poetry dates back almost 2,700 years to the Spring and Autumn period(770-476BC). Records are rare    1    that time because Qin Shi Huang destroyed all the books    2    could be found. The styles, rules, and regulations for Chinese poetry gradually    3    (change) over the centuries    4    the time of the Tang Dynasty (618-907AD). This became the golden age for Chinese poetry. During that time a number of    5    (product) poets turned out as many as 50,000 classical poems. All aspects of Chinese society    6    (high) regarded these poets. Seven-character lines became very popular.

Poetry, paintings, and calligraphy(书法)are three of these art forms that go particularly well together. Many poets were also excellent    7    (paint) and calligraphers. A poem would be written for    8    purpose of matching a painting with traditional Chinese calligraphy. This gives the paintings deeper    9    (mean) and more elegance. It is common    10    (find) this type of poetry, calligraphy art hanging in people’s homes.

6 . If he’d survived his sudden illness in 1990, Jim Henson might be turning 79 years old on September 24, 2015. He would probably still be at work. We can only guess where his imagination would have taken him — and us — in the 25 years we missed. There’s no doubt that he would have broken new ground, for Henson was a never­stopping innovator (创新者)．

His long career began far back in 1955, when he created Sam and Friends for a Washington D．C. television station. The programmes were just five minutes long and scheduled in the no­man’s­land between afternoon and evening programming. Yet the show won an Emmy for best local entertainment programme in 1958.

When it ended in 1961, Henson struggled to find work. He could only get brief appearances on other programmes like The Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live.   Only in 1976 did a British producer finally give Henson the green light to start a full­scale television show. The Muppet Show was produced and broadcast in Great Britain before finally arriving on prime time (黄金时间) US television. The network continued to identify it as a children’s programme, though the programme won a wide following of adult viewers.

One reason for its appeal to grown­ups was the obvious skill in catching the imagination. Henson’s talent was so great that it’s difficult to think of Kermit or Miss Piggy as nothing more than piles of cloth when they aren’t being operated. But Henson himself never forgot how much work went into creating his characters.

Way back in his early days, Henson created Kermit the Frog. His body was made from a green coat his mother had thrown away and his eyes were two halves of a ping­pong ball. Over the years, his shape became more expressive. “Kermit is the character through whose eyes the audience is viewing the show. He’s a nice guy，” Henson said.

1. Which of the following programmes marked the start of Jim Henson’s career?

A．The Tonight Show.	B．Sam and Friends.
C．Saturday Night Live.	D．The Muppet Show.

2. It can be inferred from the passage that Miss Piggy was ________.

A．a character Jim Henson created

B．Jim Henson’s close friend

C．a television programme

D．Kermit’s girlfriend

3. From the passage, we can infer that ________.

A．it was easy for Jim to create his characters

B．Jim Henson died of illness at the age of 54

C．the Muppet Show was broadcast in the US first

D．the programme Sam and Friends was not popular locally

7 . Folk-rocker Richie Havens, who died on April 22 at the age of 72, will be remembered for many things, among which his performance at Woodstock in 1969 made him into music history.

He wasn’t supposed to open the festival—he was scheduled to play fifth that day. Plans changed when the opening band, Sweetwater, got caught in traffic, Michael Lang, producer of the festival, said he chose Havens “because of his calm but powerful manner”. His performance went overtime because the next act was stuck in traffic, too. This led Richie Havens to create on the spot what became one of the most significant moments of the Woodstock Festival: his performance of “Freedom”.

The oldest of nine children, Havens was raised in the poor Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York. As a child, he dreamed of growing up to be a surgeon, but set off on a musical path as a teenager. Forming a music group in high school, he then landed in New York’s Greenwich Village folk clubs at 17. He soon stood out from the other young singers.

He recorded two albums on small labels (公司) before signing with Bob Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. He then joined a larger label and went on to tour for more than 40 years, making close to 30 albums.

Besides a good songwriter, Richie Havens was also an outstanding song interpreter. In many occasions he’d tell of spending three days learning Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”: “I wasn’t born to sing so I practiced the song over and over again in a stairwell.” One night, a man stopped him and said it was the best version he’d ever heard. Havens always ended the story by saying: “that’s how I first met Bob Dylan.”

1. What can we know about the Woodstock Festival in 1969?

A．Michael Lang was to blame for the traffic.

B．The first four bands all got stuck in the traffic.

C．Richie Havens was the only one invited to play.

D．It offered a chance to Richie Havens to success.

2. What plays an important role in Havens’ success?

A．Good luck.

B．Timely help.

C．Hard work.

D．Great talent.

3. The underlined “a man” in the last paragraph actually refers to ________.

A．Bob Dylan

B．Alert Grossman

C．Michael Lang

D．Richie Havens

4. It can be inferred from the passage that ________.

A．Richie released 30 albums in total in his life

B．Richie grew up in a wonderful environment

C．Richie played Freedom without preparation

D．Richie dreamed to be a singer since childhood

8 . 听下面一段独白，回答以下小题。
1. Why does the wise author write the fable?

A．To earn more money.

B．To tell a lesson.

C．To sell animals.

2. What’s wrong with the hare in the fable The Tortoise and the Hare?

A．It shows off.

B．It runs too fast.

C．It shouldn’t attend the match.

3. Where can animals talk according to the passage?

A．In real life.

B．In the fables.

C．On the farm.

4. What can you learn from the fable about the crow?

A．One should show off.

B．One should work hard.

C．One should be careful.

9 . One day, my friend showed his favorite book to me. He also said it was     1     second part of the very famous book—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I borrowed the book from a young librarian and I enjoyed reading it     2     (immediate). I realized     3     wonderful books could be! Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is filled with adventures. The main character was Huckleberry Finn, a poor English boy,     4     father was a low class drunk, and wanted to get his son's fortune which Finn had gotten previously in another adventure with his friend, Tom Sawyer. Therefore, Finn ran away from his father and met another boy called Jim.     5     friends went to the sea and got on a ship. They also went to     6     (variety) islands in the sea and had many     7     (adventure). Eventually Finn returned home, only     8     (find) that his father had died. From then on he has no longer been in any danger. Jim also got his freedom     9     Finn's help.

This novel     10     (write) by the well­known American author Mark Twain who also wrote the famous book Tom Sawyer.

10 . 阅读下面课文缩写材料，在空白处填入适当的内容（1个词）或括号内单词的正确形式。
     Some poems tell a story or describe something in a way that will give the reader     1     strong impression. Others try to express certain emotions. Poets use different forms of poetry to express     2     (they). For example，the language of nursery rhymes is concrete but     3     (imagine), and they delight small children because they have strong rhyme and a lot of     4     (repeat). And list poems have a flexible line     5     (long) and a rhythm to the poem. Another simple form of poem is the cinquain,     6     is made up of five lines and can convey strong     7     (feel) in just a few words. Haiku is a Japanese form of poetry that is made up of 17 syllables. And of course there are Tang poems from China which you may enjoy     8     particular. With so many different     9     (form) of poetry to choose from, students may     10     (eventual) want to write poems of their own.