J. Palacio bases Wonder on August or “Auggie” Pullman, a ten-year-old boy born with a deformed (残缺的) face that made him usually discriminated (歧视) against. Due to the twenty-seven
It was an art lesson. Rachel sat at the desk watching her classmates busy preparing the water jars and paints. She understood why Mrs. Weston asked her to sit down and got Lisa to fetch everything for her. It was always a disaster when Rachel tried to do art!
Rachel sighed and reached out to dip her brush in some black paint and—oh, no! She knocked over the jar. The water spread across the desk and drowned the paper. Lisa called Mrs. Weston to see what Rachel had done. Rachel went red in the face. She jumped to her feet to get a cloth. Her chair fell over backwards. She turned round and her paintbrush caught Lisa across the face, giving her a black moustache. Lisa was so surprised that she fell back against a wire bookstand. It came crashing down and the books went all over the floor.
How clumsy (笨拙的)! Rachel thought as she went home on the bus. The bus stopped outside her house. She jumped up and her elbow (肘部) knocked a woman’s hat right over her eyes. Oh, no! Rachel said sorry, got off and ran indoors. Mum wasn’t in the kitchen but lay in bed as she caught an awful cold. Rachel offered to make a cup of tea but Mum would rather wait for Dad. Rachel sighed. She understood Mum was afraid that she would spill (溅出) it.
“But would you go to Mrs. Willow for some cold medicine?” asked Mum. Rachel turned to the door at once. “But Mrs. Willow’s house is full of beautiful things, so if she asks you to come in, you’d better say no.” Rachel sighed and ran out.
Mrs. Willow was an old lady with white hair and sharp blue eyes living in an old house. She opened the door and invited her in. Rachel said why she came and that she preferred to wait outside remembering her mother’s warning. Mrs. Willow insisted Rachel come inside. Rachel took a deep breath and stepped in. She looked round Mrs. Willow’s sitting room and saw at once why Mum had been worried.
Paragraph 1:There were beautiful things everywhere — pretty vases and pots.
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With a smile, Mrs. Willow comforted her saying it had been broken before.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________3 . Move over, helicopter parents. “Snowplow (扫雪机) parents” are the newest reflection of an intensive (强化的) parenting style that can include parents booking their adult children haircuts, texting their college kids to wake them up so they don’t sleep through a test, and even calling their kids’ employers.
Helicopter parenting, the practice of wandering anxiously near one’s children, monitoring their every activity, is so 20th century. Some rich mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: machines moving ahead, clearing any difficulties in their children’s path to success, so they don’t have to suffer failure, frustration (挫折) or lose opportunities.
It starts early, when parents get on wait lists for excellent preschools before their babies are born and try to make sure their kids never do anything that may frustrate them. It gets more intense when school starts: running forgotten homework to school or calling a coach to request that their children make the team.
Rich parents may have more time and money to devote to making sure their children don’t ever meet with failure, but it’s not only rich parents practicing snowplow parenting. This intensive parenting has become the most welcome way to raise children, regardless of income, education, or race.
Yes, it’s a parent’s job to support the children, and to use their adult wisdom to prepare for the future when their children aren’t mature enough to do so. That’s why parents hide certain toys from babies to avoid getting angry or take away a teenager’s car keys until he finishes his college applications.
But snowplow parents can take it too far, some experts say. If children have never faced a difficulty, what happens when they get into the real world?
“Solving problems, taking risks and overcoming frustration are key life skills,” many child development experts say, “and if parents don’t let their children experience failure, the children don’t acquire them.”
1. What do we know about snowplow parenting?| A．It appeared before helicopter parenting. |
| B．It costs parents less than helicopter parenting. |
| C．It was a typical phenomenon of the 20th century. |
| D．It provides more than enough services for children. |
| A．Its cost. | B．Its benefits. | C．Its popularity. | D．Its ending. |
| A．To show teenagers are no better than babies. |
| B．To advise teenagers not to treat their cars as toys. |
| C．To advise parents not to buy cars for their teenagers. |
| D．To show it’s appropriate to help children when necessary. |
| A．Children lacking problem-solving ability in reality. |
| B．Children mastering more key life skills than parents. |
| C．Children gaining great success in every aspect of life. |
| D．Children meeting no problems or frustration after growing up. |
4 . If you are a person who remains busy in work and pays no attention to your health and well-being, you may experience stress, depression, and anxiety. Take a break from the robotic routine and pick healthy habits. According to a psychologist, true wellbeing comes with balance, constant growth and acceptance.
Deal with stress
Although it is difficult to avoid stress nowadays, it is definitely possible to deal with it.
Be social as much as you can
A man cannot stay healthy without interacting with other people.
Find and practice new hobbies
Hobby helps us keep busy and engaged. When you have an interest in some activities and enjoy doing them, you take healthy steps to improve your emotional well-being.
The biggest reason for experiencing depression and anxiety is when a person remains stuck in past events. Negative self-talking such as “why people did this to me” steals not only the happiness but makes the person miss opportunities that the present moment tries to offer. We should learn to enjoy the present life and try not to think too much about the future.
| A．Learn to live in the present. |
| B．Keep a positive attitude about future. |
| C．Communicating with others lowers the stress level. |
| D．Here are a few tested ways to improve your quality of life. |
| E．It also keeps the work and daily life’s pressure off your brain. |
| F．Staying happy and laughing more is essential for a quality life. |
| G．It is very important to learn to deal with stress in a smart way. |
1. When does the class finish?
| A．At 5:00 p.m. | B．At 5:30 p.m. | C．At 6:00 p.m. |
| A．Twice. | B．Three times. | C．Four times. |
| A．Photocopy her lessons. | B．Visit the school website. | C．Buy the student’s book. |
| A．She’s ambitious. | B．She’s strict. | C．She’s humorous. |
In our kitchen, there was a wooden table and three chairs — one for Dad, one for Mom, and one for me. In the cellar (地窖), the very last jar of apple jam lay quietly on the shelf, waiting to be turned into an apple pie when Dad came back. Mom sat at one end of the table. I sat in the middle between her and Dad. I tried not to look at Dad’s empty place. Dad had gone to the city to look for work for a long time.
Every night, I lay awake in bed and waited for the train to stop. Waited to hear the creaky (嘎吱作响的) gate Dad’s going to fix when he came home. Waited to hear the sound of his work boots dropping on the step by the kitchen door, and his voice calling, “I’m home!”
Every night, as I lay there, I stared at the window and the curtains Mom made from empty flour sacks (麻布袋).
Every night, Mom came to kiss me good-night — after the train’s gone by. She had been listening, too. “Go to sleep. Your dad will be home soon. Maybe for Thanksgiving.”
Time dragging by, it finally came the day before Thanksgiving. I went to sleep with the sound of train wheels in my head, whispering, “Maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow.”
Early the next morning, the smell of coffee woke me. I ran into the kitchen. There he was! Dad lifted me onto his shoulders and pretended to stagger from my weight. “How’s my boy? You’ve gotten so big that I can barely lift you up anymore.”
He put me down, and I stared at the two sacks on the table. One said FLOUR — I knew that word. I tried reading the other: S-U-G-A-R. Dad whistled admiringly and winked at me. Mom and I had been practicing my letters most days. I could see that Mom was pleased with me. “I’m going to bake a pie for your dad’s homecoming dinner. Jimmy, bring me that jar of apple jam from the shelf in the cellar.” Mom smiled at me.
注意:
1. 续写词数应为150左右:
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Hearing this, I took the steps two at a time to the cellar.
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“Never mind, boy, accidents happen,” Dad said and wiped my tears.
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7 . Shining just 12 light-years from Earth, the star Tau Ceti so resembles the sun that it has appeared in numerous science- fiction stories and was the first star astronomers ever searched for signs of intelligent life, half a century ago. In 2012 Tau Ceti grew still more interesting when astronomers reported five possible planets somewhat larger than Earth circling closer to the star than Mars orbits (围绕……运动) the sun—one of which is in the star’s habitable zone. Newly released images taken by the Herschel Space Observatory provide even more insight about Tau Ceti’s solar system: greater detail about its dust belt.
Dust arises when asteroids and comets (小行星和彗星) crash into one another, so its location reveals where these dust- creating objects—which are too small to be seen directly—orbit a star. In Tau Ceti’s case, “it’s quite a wide dust belt,” says Samantha Lawler of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. As her team reported in November, the belt’s inner edge is roughly two to three astronomical units (AUs) from the star, which is the position of our own sun’s asteroid belt. (An AU is the distance from Earth to the sun.) Tau Ceti’s dust belt extends out to 55 AU, which would be just beyond our system’s main Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, the zone of small bodies whose largest member is probably Pluto. Presumably full of asteroids and comets, Tau Ceti’s dust belt most likely lacks a planet as large as Jupiter, Lawler says. The gravity of such a massive planet would have driven away most small space rocks.
Within a year a new series of radio telescopes in Chile called ALMA should provide a sharper view of the disk, especially of its inner edge. The ALMA images will help astronomers confirm whether the star’s five proposed planets are indeed real. If the disk overlaps the planets’ hypothesized (假设的) orbits, then they probably do not exist; they would have kept away most asteroids near the star, removing the source of dust.
If those planets do exist, however, Lawler’s team suggests that Tau Ceti’s planetary system may resemble what our solar system would have looked like had the four giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune- never formed: small planets orbiting close to the star, and nothing but asteroids, comets and dust beyond.
1. According to astronomers, the five possible planets of Tau Ceti________.| A．resembled Earth in size |
| B．functioned like a solar system |
| C．were located in Tau Ceti’s habitable zone |
| D．were nearer to Tau Ceti than Mars to the sun |
| A．It is narrower than the asteroid belt in our system. |
| B．The bodies inside it are all smaller than Jupiter. |
| C．The gravity of Tau Ceti makes it get denser. |
| D．It is over 55 astronomical units in width. |
| A．they don’t move into the dust belt while orbiting Tau Ceti |
| B．they have kept away most asteroids and comets |
| C．they don’t crash into any asteroid or comet |
| D．they can be seen clearly by ALMA |
| A．is useful because it stops asteroids or comets crashing into the star |
| B．makes Tau Ceti different from the sun because it extends farther |
| C．is interesting because it keeps other planets away from Tau Ceti |
| D．plays a role in helping decide whether the five planets are real |
8 . A robot with a sense of touch may one day feel “pain”, both its own physical pain and sympathy for the pain of its human companions. Such touchy-feely robots are still far off, but advances in robotic touch-sensing are bringing that possibility closer to reality.
Sensors set in soft, artificial skin that can detect both a gentle touch and a painful strike have been hooked up to a robot that can then signal emotions, Asada reported February 15 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This artificial “pain nervous system,” as Asada calls it, may be a small building block for a machine that could ultimately experience pain. Such a feeling might also allow a robot to “sympathize” with a human companion’s suffering.
Asada, an engineer at Osaka University, and his colleagues have designed touch sensors that reliably pick up a range of touches. In a robot system named Affetto, a realistic looking child’s head, these touch and pain signals can be converted to emotional facial expressions.
A touch-sensitive, soft material, as opposed to a rigid metal surface, allows richer interactions between a machine and the world, says neuroscientist Kingson Man of the University of Southern California. Artificial skin “allows the possibility of engagement in truly intelligent ways”.
Such a system, Asada says, might ultimately lead to robots that can recognize the pain of others, a valuable skill for robots designed to help care for people in need, the elderly, for instance.
But there is an important distinction between a robot that responds in a predictable way to a painful strike and a robot that’s able to compute an internal feeling accurately, says Damasio, a neuroscientist also at the University of Southern California. A robot with sensors that can detect touch and pain is “along the lines of having a robot, for example, that smiles when you talk to it,” Damasio says. ‘It’s a device for communication of the machine to a human.” While that’s an interesting development, “it’s not the same thing” as a robot designed to compute some sort of internal experience, he says.
1. What do we know about the “pain nervous system”?| A．It is named Affetto by scientists. | B．It is a set of complicated sensors. |
| C．It is able to signal different emotions. | D．It combines sensors and artificial skin. |
| A．Delivered. | B．Translated. | C．Attached. | D．Adapted. |
| A．Robots can smile when talked to. |
| B．Robots can talk to human beings. |
| C．Robots can compute internal feelings |
| D．Robots can detect pains and respond accordingly. |
| A．Machines Become Emotional | B．Robots Inch to Feeling Pain |
| C．Human Feelings Can Be Felt | D．New Devices Touch Your Heart |
9 . One evening in February 2007, a student named Paula Ceely brought her car to a stop on a remote road in Wales. She got out to open a metal gate that blocked her path .That’s when she heard the whistle sounded by the driver of a train. Her Renault Clio was parked across a railway line. Seconds later, she watched the train drag her car almost a kilometre down the railway tracks.
Ceely’s near miss made the news because she blamed it on her GPS (导航仪). She had never driven the route before. It was dark and raining heavily. Ceely was relying on her GPS, but it made no mention of the crossing. “I put my complete trust in the device and it led me right into the path of a speeding train,” she told the BBC.
Who is to blame here? Rick Stevenson, who tells Ceely’s story in his book When Machines Fail Us, points the finger at the limitations of technology. We put our faith in digital devices, he says, but our digital helpers are too often not up to the job. They are filled with small problems. And it’s not just GPS devices: Stevenson takes us on a tour of digital disasters involving everything from mobile phones to wireless keyboards.
The problem with his argument in the book is that it’s not clear why he only focuses on digital technology, while there may be a number of other possible causes. A map-maker might have left the crossing off a paper map. Maybe we should blame Ceely for not paying attention. Perhaps the railway authorities are at fault for poor singalling system. Or maybe someone has studied the relative dangers and worked out that there really is something specific wrong with the GPS equipment. But Stevenson doesn’t say.
It’s a problem that runs through the book. In a section on cars, Stevenson gives an account of the advanced techniques that criminals use to defeat computer-based locking systems for cars. He offers two independent sets of figures on car theft; both show a small rise in some parts of the country. He says that once again not all new locks have proved reliable. Perhaps, but maybe it’s also due to the shortage of policemen on the streets. Or changing social circumstances. Or some combination of these factors.
The game between humans and their smart devices is amusing and complex. It is shaped by economics and psychology and the cultures we live in. Somewhere in the mix of those forces there may be a way for a wiser use of technology.
If there is such a way, it should involve more than just an awareness of the shortcomings of our machines. After all, we have lived with them for thousands of years. They have probably been fooling us for just as long.
1. What did Paula Ceely think was the cause of her accident？| A．She was not familiar with the road. |
| B．It was dark and raining heavily then. |
| C．The railway workers failed to give the signal. |
| D．Her GPS device didn’t tell her about the crossing. |
| A．close hit | B．heavy loss | C．narrow escape | D．big mistake |
| A．Modern technology is what we can’t live without. |
| B．Digital technology often falls short of our expectation. |
| C．Digital devices are more reliable than they used to be. |
| D．GPS error is not the only cause for Ceely’s accident. |
| A．one-sided | B．reasonable | C．puzzling | D．well-based |
A.J. shut the door of the truck. “Ready，” he said. His dad started the truck. It was six o'clock and freezing, but the strong morning sun promised warmer temperatures. It had been colder than normal over the past week, and the ground and ponds were already frozen.
“After we check on the cows，” Dad said, “you should have some time to practice roping.” A.J. wanted to enter the rodeos(竞技表演) in which cowboys rode wild horses, and caught cattle with ropes.
The best professionals could break from the gate on horseback, rope a calf(小牛), and hogtie the calf in less than ten seconds. So far, A.J. needed nearly a minute and a half, but he’d only been at it a few months.
The truck bounced down the dirt road. In a few minutes, they turned through the field gate. A.J. pulled a pair of telescopes(望远镜). The black spots of cows on the far hill took shape. The cows gathered around the pond. A.J. guessed they wanted the water locked under the ice. The windmillpowered water pumps sometimes froze, leaving the cows with nothing to drink.
As they reached the top of the hill, they heard extremely frightened shouts from one cow and an answering bellow from another. Dad stopped the truck, and he and A.J. stared at the frozen pond anxiously.
A calf lay on the ice in the middle of the pond. A cow, no doubt the calf’s mother, stood onshore, shouting desperately. The calf struggled to get up but slipped and fell each time.
Suddenly, the morning sun seemed warmer. Too warmer. A.J. knew that the situation was urgent. If the calf lay there too long, she could fall through the ice and drown.
Dad eased the pickup down the hill and stopped at the edge of the pond. “No telling how long she’s been there，” he said.”The ice could be about to melt through. I don’t think we can risk it.”
“But, Dad...” Dad shook his head. “It’s just not safe.”
Paragraph 1:
A.J. watched the calf, whose eyes were wide with fright.
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Paragraph 2:
It would be just like rodeo practice, A.J. thought, trying to stay calm.
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