1 . A fresh and gentle wind on your face, soft sand under your feet and blue waters as far as the eye can see. Is there any other Olympic sport that is played in such pleasant conditions as beach volleyball？
“I’ve gone to a lot of beautiful places, and met a lot of beautiful people. That wouldn’t have happened if I had been playing another sport.” said Randy Stoklos, America’s most famous beach volleyball player.
The sport began as a four-a-side game on beaches in Southern California in the 1920s. The first recorded two-man game took place there in 1930, and the first tournament (锦标赛) was held in Los Angeles 18 years later. The winners were awarded a case of Pepsi. In the 1950s, women started playing and the sport soon spread to Europe and South America. Yet at that time, beach volleyball was more an entertainment show than a sport, with beauty contests included. The Association of Volleyball Professionals was founded in 1983 and beach volleyball developed into a fast, athletic sport. Its world-wide popularity won beach volleyball a place at the 1996 Olympics in Atalanta, where 24 male teams and 16 female teams took part. At present, the US and Brazil are the best in the world at beach volleyball.
The game came to China in the early 1990s and there have been national tournaments since 1994. It became an official event at the Eighth National Games in 1997. China’s You Wenhui and Wang Lu finished ninth in the women’s beach volleyball world championships in Brazil.
1. The passage is mainly about ______.| A．the history of beach volleyball |
| B．how to play beach volleyball |
| C．the importance of beach volleyball |
| D．women’s beach volleyball in China |
| A．Beach volleyball was first played like other Olympic: sports. |
| B．Beach volleyball has always been an entertainment show rather than a sport. |
| C．Beach volleyball began on beaches in Souther California. |
| D．Women started playing beach volleyball in South America in 1945. |
| A．In 1948, | B．In 1996. | C．In 1950. | D．In 1997. |
| A．in 1996, beach volleyball became an official event in China |
| B．China’s beach volleyball team is the best in the world |
| C．China’s beach volleyball players won the first place in Brazil |
| D．beach volleyball came to China in the early 1990s |
2 . To take the apple as a forbidden fruit is the most unlikely story the Christians ever cooked up. For them, the forbidden fruit from Eden is evil (邪恶的). So when Columbus brought the tomato back from South America, a land mistakenly considered to be Eden, everyone jumped to the too obvious conclusion. Wrongly taken as the apple of Eden, the tomato was shut out of the door of Europeans.
What made it particularly terrifying was its similarity to the mandrake, a plant that was thought to have come from Hell (地狱). What earned the plant its awful reputation was its roots which looked like a dried-up human body occupied by evil spirits. Though the tomato and the mandrake were quite different except that both had bright red or yellow fruit, the general population considered them one and the same, too terrible to touch.
Cautious Europeans long ignored the tomato, and until the early 1700s most of the Western people continued to drag their feet. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well-known farmer wrote that the most interesting part of an afternoon tea at her father’s house had been the “introduction of this wonderful new fruit---or is it a vegetable?” As late as the twentieth century, some writers still classed tomatoes with mandrakes as an “evil fruit”.
But in the end tomatoes carried the day. The hero of the tomato was an American named Robert Johnson, and when he was publicly going to eat the tomato in 1820, people journeyed for hundreds of miles to watch him drop dead. “What are you afraid of ?” he shouted. “I’ll show you fools that these things are good to eat!” Then he bit into the tomato. Some people fainted. But he survived and, according to a local story, set up a tomato-canning factory.
1. The tomato was shut out of the door of early Europeans mainly because ________.| A．it was religiously unacceptable | B．it was the apple of Eden |
| C．it came from a forbidden land | D．it made Christian evil |
| A．The process of ignoring the tomato slowed down. |
| B．The tomato was still refused in most western countries. |
| C．There was little progress in the study of the tomato. |
| D．Most western people continued to get rid of the tomato. |
| A．To make himself a hero. |
| B．To persuade people to buy products from his factory. |
| C．To speed up the popularity of the tomato. |
| D．To remove people’s fear of the tomato. |
| A．To present the change of people’s attitudes to the tomato. |
| B．To give an explanation to people’s dislike of the tomato. |
| C．To challenge people’s fixed concepts of the tomato. |
| D．To show the popularity of the tomato in Europe |
It seems inhuman to care more about a building than about people. That the sight of the Notre Dame's
It is not just the economy that is
However, the emotions are less about the building itself than about
And it will be rebuilt. It will never be the same, but that is as it should be.
1. How did Jack Hawken become wealthy?
| A．By growing crops. |
| B．By exporting wool. |
| C．By developing tourism. |
| A．For around 10 years. | B．For around 50 years. | C．For around 200 years. |
| A．It was originally called Dawson Hall. |
| B．It has changed a lot in the last 500 years. |
| C．It was once used by the army. |
