1 . Parents are fighting for their child’s right to rest across the country. Twenty-three elementary schools in Orange County, Florida, have been cutting back on rest, and even canceling it to increase class time.

In a recent Orange County School Board meeting, parents demanded that rest time be carried out in all local schools for all students. Angela Browning, a parent in the area, said that schools’ rest is ranging from zero to 30 minutes per day. “Five-year-olds not getting rest means abuse,” said Browning, whose twins in the second grade benefit from taking a break and learn better.

“The main reason for reducing the rest time is Common Core exams including math, language arts and literacy, where the students’ performance often controls teachers’ pay and sometimes teachers may lose their jobs. Many teachers are using that extra 20 minutes that would have been spent on the schools’ scores, everybody is stressful,” said Diana Moore, president of the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association.

The decision of whether reducing rest takes place, and for how long is up to each school’s rule. “Florida law requires that districts provide 900 teaching hours during the school year,” Florida’s Department of Education press secretary Cheryl Etters said in a statement. “Whether test is part of the school day is a decision made by the school board.”

Reducing test also can take away an opportunity for children to learn social skills, according to many experts. “In society, who cares if you have straight A’s and you get a scholarship to Harvard if you lack social skills?” said Mallet, a mother of two children.

1. What will Angela Browning agree with?

A．Kids of five years old had better get more break time.

B．Proper rest time improves children’s learning efficiency.

C．The more rest children have, the higher grades they will get.

D．Elementary schools should limit kids’ rest time to 30 minutes.

2. What drives so many teachers to reduce students’ rest time?

A．Parents’ demand.

B．Students’ lack of social skills.

C．Students’ bad behavior.

D．The link between their pay and school’s scores.

3. What can we infer from the last paragraph?

A．Social skills are more important than high scores.

B．Whether students get A’s in school is very important.

C．Graduates from Harvard can’t find good jobs.

D．Rest time has nothing to do with students’ social skills

4. What’s the main idea of the text?

A．The government is to order schools to increase rest time.

B．Students expect to get more time to play in school.

C．Parents struggle for the rest right for their kids in school.

D．Teachers’ pay is related to their performance in teaching.

2 . The death of languages is not a new phenomenon. Languages usually have a relatively short life span as well as a very high death rate. Only a few, including Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Latin, have lasted more than 2,000 years.

What is new, however, is the speed at which they are dying out. Europe's colonial conquests caused a sharp decline in linguistic diversity, eliminating at least 15 percent of all languages spoken at the time. Over the last 300 years, Europe has lost a dozen, and Australia has only 20 left of the 250 spoken at the end of the 18th century.

The rise of nation-states has also been decisive in selecting and consolidating national languages and sidelining others. By making great efforts to establish an official language in education, the media and the civil service, national governments have deliberately tried to eliminate minority languages.

This process of linguistic standardization has been boosted by industrialization and scientific progress, which have imposed new methods of communication that are swift, straightforward and practical. Language diversity came to be seen as an obstacle to trade and the spread of knowledge. Monolingualism became an ideal.

More recently, the internationalization of financial markets, the spread of information by electronic media and other aspects of globalization have intensified the threat to “small” languages. A language not on the Internet is a language that “no longer exists'' in the modern world. It is out of the game.

The serious effects of the death of languages are evident. First of all, it is possible that if we all ended up speaking the same language, our brains would lose some of their natural capacity for linguistic inventiveness. We would never be able to figure out the origins of human language or resolve the mystery of "the first language". As each language dies, a chapter of human history closes.

Multilingualism is the most accurate reflection of multiculturalism. The destruction of the first will inevitably lead to the loss of the second. Imposing a language without any links to a people's culture and way of life stifles the expression of their collective genius. A language is not only used for the main instrument of human communication. It also expresses the world vision of those who speak it, their ways of using knowledge. To safeguard languages is an urgent matter.

1. Which of the following does not contribute to the death of languages?

A．Colonial conquests of Europe

B．The boom of human population

C．Advances in science and industrialization

D．The rise of nation-states

2. The underlined word “stifles” in the last paragraph probably means " ".

A．boosts	B．fuels
C．imposes	D．kills

3. The serious effects of the death of languages include all except that .

A．People would fail to understand how languages originated

B．Language diversity would become an obstacle to globalization

C．Monolingualism would lead to the loss of multiculturalism

D．Human brains would become less creative linguistically

4. What is the authors purpose of writing this passage?

A．To explain the reasons why languages are dying out.

B．To warn people of the negative aspects of globalization.

C．To call people's attention to the urgency of language preservation.

D．To argue how important it is for people to speak more languages.

3 . 完形填空
阅读下面短文，从短文后各题所给的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中，选出可以填入空白处的最佳选项，并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。
If you ever have a chance to go to Finland, you’ll probably be surprised to find how “foolish” the Finnish people are.
Take the taxi drivers for example. You can go_______on a journey, tell the driver to_______you at any place, say that you have some business to_______, and that you will pay the taxi driver later. He will agree without any_______but just accept your words in good_______.
The dining rooms in all big hotels not only serve their_______, but also provide food for outside_______. Hotel guests have their meals free, so they_______go to the free dining rooms to have their meals, and the_______they would do to show their good faith is to wave their registration card to the waiter. With such________check, you can easily use any old registration card to take a couple of friends to wine and dine free of________.
Finnish workers are paid by the hour. If you work in Finland and have________the boss on the hourly rate, then you just say how many hours you have worked and you’ll be paid________.
With so many loop holes in everyday life, surely Finland must be a good country to those who________to take “petty advantages”. But the__________ thing is, all the taxi passengers always come back to pay their________after they have attended to their business; not a________outsider has ever been found in the free hotel dining rooms; workers always give the exact hours they have________. As the Finns always act on good faith and always have a (an)_______of “right is right” and “wrong is wrong” in everything they do, so to live in such a society has turned everyone into a real “gentleman”.
What we regarded as “foolish” is________the Finnish people’s way of life.1.

A．somewhere

B．anywhere

C．sometime

D．anytime

2.

A．stop

B．pass

C．drop

D．pick

3.

A．attend to

B．take care

C．take up

D．appeal to

4.

A．guarantee

B．anxiety

C．passenger

D．money

5.

A．smile

B．place

C．seat

D．faith

6.

A．meals

B．visitors

C．guests

D．cards

7.

A．waiters

B．diners

C．drivers

D．workers

8.

A．naturally

B．respectively

C．secretly

D．contently

9.

A．best

B．worst

C．most

D．least

10.

A．strict

B．complete

C．troublesome

D．loose

11.

A．registration

B．care

C．charge

D．noise

12.

A．paid for

B．debated with

C．talked about

D．agreed with

13.

A．accordingly

B．reluctantly

C．separately

D．automatically

14.

A．hesitate

B．hate

C．love

D．refuse

15.

A．strange

B．confusing

C．complex

D．imaginative

16.

A．business

B．trip

C．fine

D．fare

17.

A．single

B．faithful

C．familiar

D．usual

18.

A．worked on

B．put in

C．spent on

D．run out

19.

A．religion

B．law

C．idiom

D．attitude

20.

A．eventually

B．accidentally

C．actually

D．temporarily

4 . Social media and the mobile web have given rise to a strange phenomenon called the selfie(自拍). It refers to a picture of yourself, usually shared on any social networking website.

    1    Some selfies are extreme close-ups(特写镜头), and others show part of an arm held straight outward. A few of them even feature the subject standing in front of a bathroom mirror.

Everyone takes selfies, but the younger crowd seems to be especially involved in the trend. Young people are relatively heavier digital users. They are interested in staying connected to their friends.       2    .

There are also kinds of psychological (心理上的)actors driving people to take a selife and upload it to a social networking site.     3    . A quick and easy way to attract other’s attention is to get “likes” and comments from friends. Secondly, it’s human nature to show off your own great achievements. When you feel good about yourself or look good, it’s far too easy to take out your phone and document it all through one or several selfies.     4    That’s right. Sometimes people are bored at work, bored at school, bored at home and even bored on the toilet. Last but not least, social media is about being social. If that means uploading as many selfies as possible, then so it be. It’s fun, and it’s a cool way to sort of document your own life.

Finally, there are things to be mindful of when you’re posting. It’s easy to think you’re sharing a photo with a few people.     5    So don’t post anything online, selife especially.

A．There are lots of selfie styles.

B．The rise of selfies has become universal.

C．Social media, to some extent, is the driving force of their selife activity.

D．The desire to take, post and get “likes” on selfies goes back to a biological behavior.

E．But the whole world of social media is public and every individual can get access to it.

F．There are also people who will take selfies because they have nothing else better to do

G．The leading factor is that people want to get attention from as many people as possible.

5 . Plastic surgery (整形手术) is not only popular in the US, but is also spreading across Asia. It is reported that South Korea is now the world’s largest market for plastic surgery.

In order to change their looks, 20 percent of women aged between 19 and 49 in Seoul said they had gone under the knife. The growth of South Korea’s pop music industry increases the popularity. Many patients visit clinics with photos of singers, asking doctors to copy their noses or eyes.

Joo Kwon, who founded one of the largest clinics in Seoul, recently opened a hotel to better serve customers. People will spend about $ 17,675 in a single visit. An increasing number of customers are non-Koreans, from China, Japan, the Middle East and even Africa. Leaders in South Korea say that this will help the Korean economy.

However, Mr. Kwon warned that young people should be careful when taking such operations. “I think South Korea doesn’t understand the word ‘beauty’, because everyone looks pretty much the same. It is also related to low self-confidence. I think the situation will somewhat become better in the future as the society becomes more different. But it will take quite a bit of time until we get there,” he told reporters.

Last year, a booklet (小册子) was given out to Korean high school students by the government. There was a story that a local woman who was crazy about plastic surgery ended up with an ugly face.

1. What is the main cause of the increase in plastic surgery in South Korea?

A．The increasing understanding of beauty.	B．The increasing number of clinics.
C．The rise of the pop music industry.	D．The rise of the Korean economy.

2. What is Mr. Kwon’s attitude toward plastic surgery?

A．He feels it is worth a try.	B．He is strongly against it.
C．He is not interested in it.	D．He is objective about it.

3. We can learn from the last paragraph that ________.

A．plastic surgery is supported by the government

B．high school students are encouraged to have plastic surgery

C．high school students in South Korea are fond of plastic surgery

D．plastic surgery is bad for people’s health

4. What is the main idea of the text?

A．How to have plastic surgery.

B．Why women have plastic surgery.

C．The famous singers in South Korea.

D．Rapid growth of plastic surgery in South Korea.

6 . Most children now chat daily either online or through their mobile phones. They are connecting to a huge number of other children all over the world. Some are shy "in real life" but are confident to communicate with others online; others find support from people of their own age on relationship problems, or problems at home.

Sometimes the online world, just like the real world, can introduce problems, such as cheating or arguments. Going online is great fun, but there are also a few people who use the Internet to do bad things. Children must know that there are both the good things and the dangers on the Internet.

To keep children safe ,your management must cover the family computer. Just as you decide which TV programs are suitable, you need to do the same for the websites and chatrooms your children visit. Remind your children that online friends are still strangers and there are dangers too.

Computer studies are part of schoolwork now, so it's likely that your children may know more than you do. We get left behind when it comes to the interactive areas of websites, like chatrooms and message boards, which are especially strange. The language of chat is strange to many parents, too. Chatters love to use abbreviations (缩写) such as: atb—all the best, bbfn—bye bye for now, cul8er—see you later, gr8—great, Idk—I don't know, imbl—it must be love, kit—keep in touch, paw—parents are watching, lol—laugh out loud, xlnt—excellent!

It seems like another language, and it is!

1. The passage is meant for     .

A．children	B．teachers
C．parents	D．Net bar owners

2. In order to keep children safe online, you'd better       .

A．not allow them to use the Internet	B．surf the Internet together with them
C．teach them to use correct Net words	D．choose suitable websites and chatrooms for them

3. If you stand beside him when your son is chatting about something secret online, he may use                      

A．bbfn

B．1ol

C．cul8er

D．paw

4. Which of the following will the author probably agree with?

A．The chat language is strange to adults.	B．The Internet is not good for children.
C．Children can chat so much online.	D．The Internet is a good place for children.

7 . How long can human beings live? Most scientists who study old age think that the human body is ___ to live no longer than 120 years. However, 110 years is probably the longest that anyone could hope to live — if he or she is ___ healthy and lucky. Some scientists even say we can live as long as 130 years! Yet, our cells simply cannot continue to reproduce ___. They wear out, and as a result, we get old and ___ die.

Even though we can’t live forever, we are living a ___ life than ever before. In 1900, the average American life span(寿命)was only 47 years, but today it is 75 years!

When does old age begin then? Sixty-five may be out-of-date as the ___ line between middle age and old age. After all, many older people don’t begin to experience physical and mental ___ until after age 75.

People are living longer because more people ___ childhood. Before modern medicine changed the laws of nature, many children died of common childhood ___. Now that the chances of dying ____ are much lower, the chances of living long are much higher due to better diets and health care.

On the whole, our population is getting older. The ____ in our population will have lasting effects on our social development and our way of life. Some people fear such changes will be for the worse, while some see ____, not disaster. Today, many men and women in their "golden years" are healthy, still active, and young in ____ if not in age.

As our society grows old, we need the ____ of our older citizens. With long lives ahead of them, they need to ____ active and be devoted.

1.

A．designed

B．selected

C．improved

D．discovered

2.

A．completely

B．generally

C．apparently

D．extremely

3.

A．rapidly

B．harmlessly

C．endlessly

D．separately

4.

A．eventually

B．hopelessly

C．automatically

D．desperately

5.

A．busier

B．longer

C．richer

D．happier

6.

A．finishing

B．guiding

C．waiting

D．dividing

7.

A．stress

B．damage

C．decline

D．failure

8.

A．survive

B．enjoy

C．remember

D．value

9.

A．problems

B．fears

C．worries

D．diseases

10.

A．poor

B．young

C．sick

D．quiet

11.

A．changes

B．recovery

C．safety

D．increases

12.

A．dreams

B．chances

C．strengths

D．choices

13.

A．mind

B．appearance

C．voice

D．movement

14.

A．protection

B．suggestions

C．contributions

D．permission

15.

A．sound

B．appear

C．turn

D．stay

8 . More students than ever before are taking a gap year (间隔年) before going to university. It used to be called the “year off” between school and university. The gap-year phenomenon originated (起源) with the months left over to Oxbridge applicants between entrance exams in November and the start of the next academic year.

This year, 25,310 students who have accepted places in higher education institutions have put off their entry until next year, according to statistics on university entrance provided by the University and College Admissions Service (UCAS).

That is a record 14.7% increase in the number of students taking a gap year. Tony Higgins from UCAS said that the statistics are good news for everyone in higher education. “Students who take a well-planned year out are more likely to be satisfied with, and complete, their chosen course. Students who take a gap year are often more mature and responsible.” he said.

But not everyone is happy. Owain James, the president of the National Union of Students (NUS), argued that the increase is evidence of student hardship—young people are being forced into earning money before finishing their education. “New students are now aware that they are likely to leave university up to £ 15,000 in debt. It is not surprising that more and more students are taking a gap year to earn money to support their study for the degree. NUS statistics show that over 40% of students are forced to work during term time and the figure increases to 90% during vacation periods,” he said.

1. What do we learn about the gap year from the text?

A．It is flexible in length.	B．It is a time for relaxation.
C．It is increasingly popular.	D．It is required by universities.

2. According to Tony Higgins, students taking a gap year       .

A．are better prepared for college studies

B．know a lot more about their future jobs

C．are more likely to leave university in debt

D．have a better chance to enter top universities

3. How does Owain James feel about the gap-year phenomenon?

A．He’s puzzled.	B．He’s worried.
C．He’s surprised.	D．He’s annoyed.

4. What would most students do on their vacation according to NUS statistics?

A．Attend additional courses.	B．Make plans for the new term.
C．Earn money for their education.	D．Prepare for their graduate studies.

9 . Kids with Special Needs

Kids with special needs refer to any kid who might need extra help because of medical, emotional, or learning problems. For example, disabled kids need wheelchairs. They not only need the equipment that helps them get around, but they might need to have ramps(斜坡) or elevators available.     1    

Kids with an illness would have special needs, too.     2     Kids with sight problems might need Braille books to read. Kids with hearing problems might need hearing aids.

    3     It might be harder to do normal things—like learning to read or just getting around school. The good news is that parents, doctors, nurses, teachers, and others can help. The goal is to help kids be as independent as possible.

Other kids also can be a big help. How? By being a friend. Kids who use a wheelchair or have lots of health problems want friends just as you do. But meeting people and making friends can be difficult.     4    Be sure to tell a teacher if you see someone being bullied(欺侮) or teased.

    5     You might carry the person’s books or do something simple, such as asking him or her to join you and your friends at lunch. It’s also important not to be “overly helpful” when no help is needed. Why? Because just like you, kids with special needs like to be as independent as they can be. Being friendly to kids with special needs is one of the best ways to be helpful. As you get to know, they may help you understand what it’s like to be in their shoes. And you’ll be helping fill a very special need, one that everybody has—the need for good friends.

A．Some kids might laugh at or make fun of them.

B．They also might need to get a special bus to school.

C．Life can be challenging for a kid with special needs.

D．It’s good manners to try to offer help to kids with special needs.

E．Also try to be helpful if you know someone with special needs.

F．Kids with special needs usually live a harder life than normal kids.

G．They might need medicine or other help as they go about their daily activities.

10 . Many kids and teenagers have mobile phones in their hands. However, is it really necessary for them to have phones at school? Here are the pros and cons.
Pros
They can get in touch when necessary. The main benefit of having a phone is that your child can get in touch with you whenever you need to.    1    .
They can call ring the emergency services if necessary. If your child is in immediate danger, they can use their phones to call not only you but the emergency services. This is of great benefit and could potentially save your child’s life.
    2    As long as your child remembers to do this, their phones won’t cause distraction(分心) in class. Giving them a standard instead of a smart phone will also reduce the risk of distraction.
Cons
The latest smartphones can almost double as a computer. It means they offer far more of a distraction to kids than they used to.
    3    All these characteristic could disturb your child’s concentration if they play with them in class.
Mobile phones could interrupt lessons. Many children, even through they are asked to do so, forget to turn off their phones during lessons and their phones may make sounds.    4    . Besides the distraction problem, mobile phones can also be used to look up answers on the Internet.    5    . The possibility of children having access to these during exams could be too attractive for pupils not to take advantage of.

A．Mobile phones can be turned off or on to silent.

B．Children use ordinary phones instead of smartphones.

C．This allows you to feel they are safe and easy to reach.

D．Without mobile phones, campus life would be less colourful.

E．They have some other functions—a calculator and the ability to save notes.

F．This not only annoys other pupils but also prevent them from learning well.

G．Nowadays, children can not only text and make calls with their mobiles, they can also play games, surf the Internet and listen to music.