Penguin, Reindeer(驯鹿) and Fox were great friends. One day, Penguin and Reindeer, found a lot of fruit, and decided to keep it a secret. On the way home, they met Fox, who saw them so happy, asked them why. They told him they couldn't say, because it was a secret, but Fox asked them to trust him, so they told him about the fruit. After they arrived at the village, Fox told the secret to everyone in the village. When Penguin and Reindeer returned to the place where they had found the fruit, the animals of the village had already been there and eaten it up.
On that same day, Penguin and Reindeer found another place full of vegetables, and told Fox again. But the same thing happened again with Fox. Penguin and Reindeer were angry with the fox, and they decided to teach him a lesson. The next day they told Fox that they had found a lake so full of fish that they didn't need to make any effort to catch them. Fox again told everyone in the village about it. The next day, Fox came by, covered in cuts and the bruises(伤痕). After telling all the animals that the lake was full of fish, everyone, including the polar bear(北极熊), went there. But, not finding anything, they felt deceived(欺骗), and gave Fox a good beating.
Fox learned that keeping people's trust is very important, and that you have to get it in the first place and always keep your word.
1. What did Penguin and Reindeer find from the whole passage?2. Whom did Fox tell the secret to after Penguin and Reindeer found the vegetables?
3. Were there any fish in the lake?
4. What happened to Fox after the animals felt deceived?
5. What does the story want to tell you?
Two-drink limit at Wetherspoon’s for parents of rowdy children
The pub chain JD Wetherspoon has insisted families are welcome but on the premises despite advising staff to make them agree a limit of two alcoholic drinks per person for parents with children in town.
The two-drink limit came to light after a member of staff at a Wetherspoon’s pub in Gravesend, Kent, put up a poster detailing its policy.
“As part of our licensing it is our responsibility to ensure that we are protecting children from harm,” read the poster at The Robert Pocock pub.
“Therefore adults in charge of children will be allowed to have one alcoholic drink and a further alcoholic drink with a sit-down meal.”
It is a crime for anybody in charge of a child under the age of seven to be drunk in a public place under the 1902 Licensing Act. A person convicted of this offence can be subject to a fine or up to one month in prison.
“It’s been around eight or 10 years.... It’s a guideline, not a policy,” said Eddie Gershon.
But while the poster stressed the need to “protect children from harm”，Mr Gershon suggested the rule had been adopted to “prevent unruly behavior” among young guests. Asked whether children were welcome in Wetherspoon’s pubs, Mr Gershon replied，“Yes, we’d be a fool to say otherwise. We have a kids’ menu, coloured pencils for kids—children in pubs is a massive part of what Wetherspoon’s does.”
However, he warned that parents believed to be “using the pub as a nursery might be asked to leave. Mr Gershon added that “it is just good manners” for parents to stop their children from misbehaving and being unruly in public places.
On its website the pub operator states: “Families are welcome to dine in the majority of our pubs; however, permitted hours for customers aged under 18 years may vary from pub to pub.”
It adds: “Some of our pubs may request that all members of a party with an under-18 present order a main meal, if alcoholic is ordered.”
1. Who does the Two-drink policy apply to?2. What is the result of disobeying the 1902 Licensing Act?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why？
To protect children and those under 18 years, the pub chain JD limits the drinks but is open to those customers at any time.
4. In daily life, how do your parents keep you away from alcohol and why? (about 40 words)
Tom used to be weak in English. His reading was poor in particular, which add-ed to the anxiety of his parents. However, his teacher Alice White told him not to give up. Ms White told him that it was important to learn English well. In the ordinary way, he was supposed to read at least two articles every day if he wanted to improve his reading ability. Only in this way could he enlarge his vocabulary little by little and grasp the reading skills. Tom did as the teacher had told him. A year later, he was astonished to find that his reading ability has been improved. From this he draws a conclusion that one is sure to succeed if he never gives up and works hard. Tom is proud of his progress. Now he works harder, aiming to study English at university.
1. What’s the problem of Tom’s English study?2. What did the teacher say about learning English?
3. How to improve your reading ability according to the passage?
4. In the passage, what should you do if you want to succeed?
Learning Chinese could be one of the most important decisions you have ever made. Chinese is becoming the language to learn in the 21st century. With the world’s largest population and a rapidly growing middle class, China stands to become the engine of the world’s economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important for people in many industries, or for those of us who wish to visit China or learn from its culture and history.
There is an ongoing effort to modernize the writing system and standardize the language. An increasing number of people learning Chinese are learning Mandarin, so unless you absolutely need to learn another dialect, such as Cantonese, be sure you are studying Mandarin.
For native English speakers Chinese is one of the most difficult and most different languages to learn. The vocabulary is wholly unfamiliar and unlike anything we know. In addition, in the Chinese tone system, words are spoken in rising or falling tones, which help to distinguish between them. Furthermore, there is the Chinese writing system-a collection of thousands of individual ideograms (表意文字), or symbols, which represent a word or an idea. These ideograms have no phonetic (音标的) value — that is to say, we can’t tell how the word is pronounced by how it is written. There is a method to present written Chinese in a phonetic script called Pinyin. If you are learning Chinese, you’ll be working with this Pinyin system, but the beauty of the traditional writing system shouldn’t be passed up. All these factors make learning Chinese difficult for us. Yet, for a determined learner, there’s always a way to overcome it.
1. Find out why learning Chinese is becoming more and more important.2. Find out the main idea of the last paragraph.
3. Find out what would be probably written following this passage.
5 . Have you ever wondered how your favorite NBA team received its famous name? All NBA teams have an interesting story or a history behind their names. Some of the names reflect the city’s culture or history, others came from previous owners and many were selected through “Name the Team” contests.
For teams like Los Angeles and Utah, the names were not always a reflection of the city. Even though Los Angeles has no lakes, the Laker name has been a city treasure. Before going to Los Angeles，the team originated in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1948, team officials chose the name for its direct relationship to the state’s motto “The Land of 10000 Lakes”. The team name went unchanged after moving to Los Angeles in 1960.
Because Utah’s team originated in New Orleans, Louisiana, it was called the Jazz. In 1974, New Orleans club officials chose the name to re-present the city for its reputation as the “jazz capital of the world”. The name stayed with the team even after finding a new home in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1979.
The Chicago Bulls’ original owner, Richard Klein, named the team Bulls. He picked the name because a fighting bull is relentless, and never quits. Klein, who founded the club in 1966, believed these qualities were necessary for a championship team and hoped his Chicago athletes would live up to the team name. A belief that Bulls — winner of the six NBA championships — have definitely followed.
In 1967, the Indiana Pacers selected their team name in a different way from most other teams. Their decision was based on what they wanted to accomplish in the NBA. Team officials chose the Pacers name because the organization wanted to set the “pace” in professional basketball.
阅读短文，回答下列问题
1. Find out the main idea of the passage and then think of a proper title for it.
Main idea:
Title:
2. Find out why Los Angeles team is named “Laker”.
3. Find out what “jazz capital of the world” refers to.
We human like to conquer. For the same reason that soccer players want to hold the World Cup trophy(奖杯) and tennis players crave a Grand Slam win, mountaineers dream of reaching the highest peak on the planet - Mount
“Everybody wants to stand on top of the world,” Mirza Ali from Pakistan who had just “conquered” Mount Qomolangma, told the Los Angeles times.
However, this desire to conquer has become so strong that we have begun to travel in the wrong direction.
During the climbing season in 2019- from March to May at least 11 climbers died in the Himalayas, making it one of the worst seasons on record And the fact that/many of the climbers were inexperienced is one of the major factors (因素) contributing to the tragedy/according to USA Today.
“They don't train very hard. They underestimate(低估) [Qomolangma],” Jangbu Sherpa, who has been working as a guide on Mount Qomolangma since 2006,told NBC News. “There are lots of climbers who just want to check the box so that they can say they've been to the top of the world.”
This ignorant attitude of climbers- also leads to other problems - apart from putting their own lives at risk, of course. According to HuffPost, the mountain's cleaning group collected 12 tons of trash - including food wrappers(包装袋), and oxygen tanks - left behind this climbing season.
Perhaps what we should do now is restore meaning to the activity itself - real meaning.
“When I did make it to the summit, what I realized is that standing on top of a mountain doesn't change you and doesn't change the world,” Alison Levine, who reached the peak of Mount Qomolangma in 2010, told the NPR. “It's really about the journey. The journey is the most important thing on any mountain."
1. What does the underlined word “crave” mean in English?(no more than 8 words)2. What happened to the climbers during the climbing season in 2019? (no more than 10 words)
3. What caused the climbing tragedy according to USA Today? (no more than 10 words)
4. What problems did the ignorant attitude bf climbers lead to? (no more than 15 words)
5. If you had a chance to explore nature, what would you do and why? (no more than 20 words)
My husband received a letter a month ago from a young woman who had been his student when she was in middle school. She was writing because she wanted to thank him for having a great influence in her life.
In the letters he wrote, “You were the teacher who helped me discover my talent for math. Before you came to teach us, I had been terribly poor at math, and had never thought that I would be interested in it. To my surprise, you magically showed me the beauty of math. I guess that was the turning point of my attitude towards it. Gradually my interest in it began to grow. Thanks to your encouragement, I made continuous progress in math, and finally made up my mind to study it in the university. Today I am working as an accountant at Valley Medical Center in California. You played an important part. Thankyou!”
What a wonderful gift to a retired teacher! My husband has received many letters from students over the years. This one was special, for it arrived at this time in his life when he is in very poor health.
1. Who did what?2. What was the result?
3. What was the meaning?
4. Summary.
Not long after Freddy and the band became famous, they visited Britain on a brief tour. Fans showed their devotion by waiting for hours to get tickets for their concerts. Freddy was now quite confident when he went into a concert hall. He enjoyed singing and all the congratulations afterwards! His most exciting invitation was to perform on a TV programme called Top of the Pops. He had to go to London, wear an expensive suit and give a performance to a TV camera. It felt very strange. But as soon as the programme was over, the telephones which were in the same room started ringing. Everybody was asking when they could see Freddy and his band again. They were truly stars.
Then things went wrong. Freddy and his band could not go out anywhere without being followed. Even when they wore sunglasses or beards, people recognized them. Fans found them even when they went into the toilet. They tried to hide in the reading rooms of libraries, but it was useless. Someone was always there! Their personal life was regularly discussed by people who did not know them but talked as if they were close friends. At last feeling very upset and sensitive, Freddy and his band realized that they must leave the country before it became too painful for them. So they left Britain, to which they were never to return.
1. What was the trouble the band had when they became famous?2. How would your life change if you became famous overnight? Discuss with your classmates.
China will encourage overseas Chinese students to start their own businesses at home, a State Council executive meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang decided on April 5th, 2018.
The meeting made decisions to make it easier for overseas Chinese students to meet different kinds of requirements that are necessary when to start businesses. Besides, the steps to get hukou in big cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, will be greatly simplified. It also paid much attention to the schooling of returnees, children by deciding to make more supporting policies (政策).
Nowadays, a large number of Chinese students each year choose to return home after completing studies overseas. They hope to live in a familiar environment and make motherland stronger. So supporting policies are expected to be provided. “The encouraging policies require different departments (部门) to work together and good results are expected,” he said.
From 1978 to 2017, 83.73 percent of overseas Chinese students, totaling 3.132 million, returned to China after completing their studies, according to the Ministry of Education. In 2017 alone, 480,900 returned, an 11.19 percent increase over 2016.
China now has 351 entrepreneurship parks (创业园区) around the country. Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai are the most common choices. They are home to more than 23,000 companies and have attracted more than 86,000 overseas returnees.
A public service system open to all overseas Chinese students will be set up to provide all-around support for their start up businesses.
1. What will China encourage overseas Chinese students to do?2. According to the passage, how many decisions were made at the meeting?
3. Why do overseas Chinese students want to come home?
4. Did the number of overseas Chinese students returning home rise in 2017?
5. Where are most entrepreneurship parks set up in China?
The Internet is not only a virtual (虚拟的) world but also has become a necessity for people. With the development of the Internet, online friendship has also become very popular. Online friends are those people who have known each other through the Internet. Making online friends is the same as making pen friends.
Many famous websites offer quite warm online friendship. One can find many people who share the same interests on these websites. It is difficult to make friends with someone you can’t see or feel. That is the main problem of online friendship. A virtual friendship would not last forever without seeing each other, but it is an advantage for some people because they are afraid to speak in public.
On the other hand, the chances of cheating (欺骗) are very high in an online friendship. Some people make friends on the Internet with wrong intentions (企图). So while making friends over the Internet, one has to be very careful. Here are some suggestions for you.
● Do not give personal information, such as your telephone number, address, location, school name as well as your parents’ information, to strangers on the Internet.
● Do not exchange personal photos of you or any family member with people you meet over the Internet.
● Do not go to meet a person you have just met over the Internet. You’d better ask older or other experienced people for advice if you want to go to meet an online friend.
● Do not accept someone’s request (要求) if you feel he or she is dishonest.
1. Is the Internet necessary for people?2. What is the main problem of online friendship?
3. Why is the virtual friendship an advantage for some people?
4. Who can you ask for advice if you want to go to meet an online friend?
5. How many suggestions does the passage give to make online friends?
