1 . New parents often spend a long time debating what to call their newborn. Should they name them after a relative, a famous person, or just pick a name at random?
Names usually stay with us for a lifetime, unless we decide to change them. They become part of our identity. Quite often we hear stories of celebrities giving their children unusual names, while other people give their children names which have special meanings, for example,
So, what if you don’t like your given name? A study led by psychologist Jean Twenge found that a person who hates the nickname given to them is more likely to have greater psychological adjustment issues — possibly due to low self-esteem. This is because our title becomes a symbol of our self.
And what if your name is no longer popular? While names like Ethel and Gladys were once in fashion, they now sound a bit out of date, which can be embarrassing.
However, if you choose an unusual name, it’s not all bad news. According to a study conducted by Professor David Zhu, people with uncommon names can develop a sense of uniqueness.
So, when choosing your successor’s name, there are a fair few things to consider — but going for something too common or too old-fashioned may not be a great choice.
| A．the name Sarah comes from a Hebrew word meaning “princess”. |
| B．They can often become more creative and open-minded. |
| C．A person who likes his name will be more self-confident. |
| D．For many of us it can be quite the tiring task, |
| E．And when it comes to unpopular names which aren’t fashionable, they may even affect our lives. |
| F．If we hate our name, our confidence may be affected. |
| G．Unpopular names also has many advantages. |
2 . What’s your baby doing right now? I hope he or she is not rolling on the floor. Such behaviour might seem natural and age-appropriate but this laid-back environment could come back to haunt you at a later date.
Eventually you may be forced to reflect upon those wasted opportunities. In allowing your baby to unproductively behave just like, well, a baby, you may be failing to foster his or her personal growth. Are you denying your child the chance to achieve his or her full potential as a well-rounded baby?
You see, some parents are hot-housing their infants as we speak. While your baby’s programme revolves around the traditional routines of sleeping, eating and playing, other people’s offspring are on the fast-track to certain giftedness. And Baby Einstein DVDs, which were all the rage when I was a new mother, are really the least of your problems.
Ever eager to exploit our perceived inadequacies, smart marketers have found something else for parents to feel guilty about. There’s a manufactured fear that we’re squandering those valuable moments when a baby’s brain is said to be like a sponge, ready and willing to soak up new information at an alarming rate.
I’ve never seen the point of deliberately setting up your little one to be more advanced than his or her peers. I like the idea of babies just being babies and children just being children. Anyway, if they can read at the age of three then what will they learn in their first year of school?
One thing’s for sure: for some people parenting has taken on the proportions of a competitive sport. Some children wrestle with after-school activities every day of the week. Others are enrolled in extra tuition — sometimes simply to reach an acceptable standard and other times in order to be top of the class. There are tennis camps, swim academies and dancing schools. Some households even speak English downstairs and French upstairs. What? That’s not how you run your home? Oh dear. I see bilingualism passing your child by, for sure.
1. What does the author imply in paragraph 2?| A．The author likes raising baby at home. |
| B．Many parents don’t realize their babies’ potentials. |
| C．We don’t have enough time or money to raise babies. |
| D．Many parents foster their children’s personal growth by any chance. |
| A．They were good enough for mothers. |
| B．They were effective in teaching babies. |
| C．They were cheaper than other products. |
| D．They were popular with many mothers. |
| A．It’s a good way to build up potentials. |
| B．It’s not helpful to baby’s development. |
| C．It’s vital to develop baby’s brain. |
| D．It’s not so cheap to be invested by all parents. |
| A．Give children more sports. |
| B．Develop children more. |
| C．Let babies grow as they are. |
| D．Develop children’s bilingualism. |
注意：
1.词数100左右；
2.可以适当增加细节，使行文连贯。
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It’s odd — we’re always talking about the healthy work-life balance and know that working long hours can lead to stress, anxiety, and
People believe long hours on the job to be proof of their work ethic (职业道德). And no matter how much we’d like
A study
Clearly, doing overtime
5 . Doctors in the U. K. are warning children born in the age of tablets(平板)and touch screens are missing the fine motor skills needed to operate the simpler tools in life: pens and pencils.
After all, it’s easier to give a child an iPad than encouraging them to do muscle-building play such as building blocks.
Certainly penmanship(书法)has been on the decline since the appearance of keyboard. Some Arizona educators are even considering dropping cursive(草书)writing entirely from classes. They think teaching a kid to use soon-to-be ancient tools like pens and pencils is a waste of time and money.
The thing is, there’s more than one point to penmanship. A pencil is what develops hand strength and dexterity(灵巧)that children will need throughout their lives. It’s a lifelong learning tool that helps the world produce its surgeons and pilots.
And the bad cursive writing opens the door for an all-important lesson on the virtues of practice. A keyboard, on the other hand, ticks off each letter with perfect precision from the very start. But it robs a kid not only of the joys of getting something right, but also developing a written identity.
Consider that if society stops teaching children how to push a pen, how long before we won’t be able to read it? Maybe the pen will someday be history. But we all need to know how to read history.
As blogger Starre Vartan puts it, “As an art lover, I visit as many museums as I can, and a major part of many exhibitions, original written documents are included, all of which requires the reader to be able to decipher(破译)handwriting from times past.”
And, in an age when people turn increasingly to the same old emoji(表情符号)to express themselves, those lines on paper may be one of the few remaining bastions(堡垒)of identity.
1. Which of the following may belong to hand muscle-building play according to the text?| A．Hide-and-seek. | B．High jumping. |
| C．Role playing. | D．Cutting and sticking. |
| A．It is a traditional art. | B．It is out of date. |
| C．It brings people joy. | D．It does harm to kids. |
| A．Penmanship is beneficial. | B．Penmanship needs practice. |
| C．The keyboard is also important. | D．Every kid needs a written identity. |
| A．Learning cursive is necessary. |
| B．Written documents are treasures. |
| C．Readers need to write much more. |
| D．Cursive writing can hide messages. |
1. What was Henry doing when the accident happened?
| A．Playing with toys. | B．Calling his friend. | C．Playing the guitar. |
| A．Mike was crying. | B．Mike was turning purple. | C．Mike was fighting for breath. |
| A．Perform first aid on him. | B．Go to find his father. | C．Take him to hospital. |
7 . It’s cool to be a fool in school, obviously. Research from Florida Atlantic University shows that aggressive, troublesome adolescents often end up becoming quite
Importantly, researchers explain that being popular and having friends aren’t one in the same. Popularity
Being popular is thought a major status symbol for an
The team at FAU performed a study to test their
Aggression,
While researchers don’t think
| A．delicate | B．mature | C．tough | D．popular |
| A．requires | B．realizes | C．means | D．reminds |
| A．consider | B．feel | C．make | D．describe |
| A．limit | B．prefer | C．apply | D．compare |
| A．adult | B．adolescent | C．audience | D．acquaintance |
| A．hard | B．true | C．wise | D．wrong |
| A．crazy | B．hardworking | C．cruel | D．outgoing |
| A．result | B．plots | C．theory | D．characters |
| A．tolerate | B．strengthen | C．contradict | D．design |
| A．aggression | B．conservation | C．alternative | D．sensitivity |
| A．experiment | B．increase | C．appointment | D．assessment |
| A．treatments | B．development | C．arguments | D．punishment |
| A．on the contrary | B．in most cases | C．by the way | D．in my opinion |
| A．physical | B．mental | C．facial | D．official |
| A．set off | B．put about | C．back down | D．stick up |
| A．attacks | B．awards | C．helps | D．actions |
| A．receives | B．promotes | C．evaluates | D．distinguishes |
| A．doubt | B．forget | C．inspect | D．explain |
| A．conflict | B．warn | C．peace | D．effort |
| A．wonder | B．advertise | C．ignore | D．believe |
8 . In its early history, Chicago had floods frequently, especially in the spring, making the streets so muddy that people, horses, and carts got stuck. An old joke that was popular at the time went something like this: A man is stuck up to his waist in a muddy Chicago street. Asked if he needs help, he replies, “No, thanks. I’ve got a good horse under me.”
The city planner decided to build an underground drainage(排水) system, but there simply wasn’t enough difference between the height of the ground level and the water level. The only two options were to lower the Chicago River or raise the city.
An engineer named Ellis Chesbrough convinced me the city that it had no choice but to build the pipes above ground and then cover them with dirt. This raised the level of the city’s streets by as much as 12 feet.
This of course created a new problem: dirt practically buried the first floors of every building in Chicago. Building owners were faced with a choice: either change the first floors of their buildings into basements, and the second stories into main floors, or hoist the entire buildings to meet the new street level. Small wood-frame buildings could be lifted fairly easily. But what about large, heavy structures like Tremont Hotel, which was a six-story brick building?
That’s where George Pullman came in. He had developed some house-moving skills successfully. To lift a big structure like the Tremont Hotel, Pullman would place thousands of jackscrews(螺旋千斤顶) beneath the building’s foundation. One man was assigned to operate each section of roughly 10 jackscrews. At Pullman’s signal each man turned his jackscrew the same amount at the same time, thereby raising the building slowly and evenly. Astonishingly the Tremont Hotel stay open during the entire operation, and many of its guests didn’t even notice anything was happening. Some people like to say that every problem has a solution. But in Chicago’s early history, every engineering solution seemed to create a new problem. Now that Chicago’s waste water was draining efficiently into the Chicago River, the city’s next step was to clean the polluted river.
1. The author mentions the joke to show ________.| A．horses were fairly useful in Chicago |
| B．Chicago’s streets were extremely muddy |
| C．Chicago was very dangerous in the spring |
| D．the Chicago people were particularly humorous |
| A．get rid of the street dirt | B．lower the Chicago River |
| C．fight against heavy floods | D．build the pipes above ground |
| A．change | B．lift | C．repair | D．decorate |
| A．popular life styles and their influences |
| B．environmental disasters and their causes |
| C．engineering problems and their solutions |
| D．successful businessmen and their achievements |
9 . Cyberspace (网络空间) is constantly developing and presenting new opportunities, as the desire of businesses to quickly adopt new technologies, such as using the Internet to open new channels and adopting cloud services, provides vast opportunity. But, it also brings unexpected risks and unintended consequences that can have a potentially negative effect.
Hardly a day goes by without news of a new cyber threat. Unfortunately, businesses tend to misjudge how much risk they face from cyber crimes and how quickly this risk can develop. For them, the commercial, reputational and financial risks that go with cyberspace presence are real and growing every day.
So all businesses need to do now is establish cyber security within their organization, right?
Establishing cyber security alone is not enough. Nowadays, it is not very difficult for attackers to break security and stop the overall business system. Preventive measures are not enough to stop them. With the advancement of technology, hackers (黑客) have been changing and developing. So business risk management should include risk resilience (复原力) so that businesses can respond to any damaging cyberspace activity. Cyber resilience helps businesses successfully recover to their pre-attack business processes and business operations.
Building cyber resilience is not easy. A key finding of an authentic cyber-resilience report is that no organization can respond effectively on its own to the threats from cyberspace. Organisations must work together to share intelligence and resources. In this way the quality, usability and authenticity of intelligence will be greatly improved.
1. What is the purpose of the first paragraph?| A．To make the development of cyberspace known. |
| B．To show the great contributions from business. |
| C．To make the technologies adopted by businesses attractive. |
| D．To make the topic appealing. |
| A．lacking in awareness of cyber safety | B．financially abundant |
| C．managed successfully | D．developed in judgment |
| A．it can prevent attacks | B．threats are always transforming |
| C．cyber security doesn’t work now | D．it keeps all the hackers off the internet |
| A．Effective resilience can be built by an organization alone. |
| B．Joint efforts are required in the formation of true resilience. |
| C．A great amount of difficulty prevented building resilience. |
| D．The cyberspace threat is nothing when cooperation is used. |
10 . Depending on the topic, people’s opinions can change from moment to moment or last a lifetime. The factors that make one opinion long-lasting and another short-lived, however are not always clear.
Past studies have shown that opinions based on hard facts and data can remain constant over time, but new research published in the journal Psychological Science finds that opinions based on feelings and emotions can also stand the test of time.
As part of their study the researchers asked more than 1000 people to what degree they believed opinions based on feelings or emotional reactions were more stable over time than those based on thinking and reasoned analysis. Only 15% expressed any belief that opinions based on emotion would be more stable over time
To test the role that emotion plays in forming long-lasting opinions, the researchers conducted seven independent studies involving more than 20,000 participants in various real-world situations.
The first survey, which was conducted the day after Christmas, measured feelings about recently received gifts. The participants were given a list of adjectives(形容词) to describe their opinions toward their gifts. Adjectives like “worthwhile” were associated with a practical reaction to the gift, while words like “delightful” were more strongly associated with an emotional reaction. One month later, the participants completed a follow-up survey to test the endurance(持久性) of their opinions. The results showed that the stronger the positive emotional reaction, the more likely that opinion remained fixed one month later.
In the final test, participants read one of two messages about an imaginary sea animal. One message contained broad-ranging facts about the animal (low-emotion condition). The other message was about a swimmer’s underwater interaction with the animal (high-emotion condition). The participants in the high-emotion condition showed significantly less change in their opinions across time.
“Emotionality is a predictor(预测因子) of long-lasting opinions which is unrecognized,” said Andrew Luttrell, a researcher at Ball State University. “These findings are important for understanding why some opinions are so difficult to change as well as how to create opinions that stick.”
1. What did the survey of 1000 people show?| A．Creating long-lasting opinions was a long process. |
| B．Opinions based on hard facts could stand the test of time. |
| C．Only a small percentage of people identified the essential part of emotion. |
| D．Only a small percentage of people dared to express their opinions. |
| A．Riding a safe car. | B．Watching an exciting football match. |
| C．Reading a valuable book. | D．Listening to a boring speech. |
| A．The findings have been concluded from emotional facts |
| B．The long last opinions are predicable |
| C．The findings have something to do with creative opinions |
| D．They help understand the endurance of opinions |
| A．Emotion varies based on different facts. | B．Emotion can help clarify the opinions. |
| C．Opinions can last when based on emotion. | D．Opinions once formed are hard to change. |
