1 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. progressively             B. permanent             C. acquired             D. applications             E. separate F. proposed                  G. extends                    H. claimed            I. reach                         J. currently K. supports

Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence. Piaget believed that one’s childhood plays a vital and active role in a person’s development. Piaget     1    that cognitive development is at the centre of the human organism, and language is contingent on (取决于) knowledge and understanding     2    through cognitive development.

Through a series of stages, Piaget     3    four stages of cognitive development: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational period. The sensorimotor stage is the first of the four stages in cognitive development which “     4    from birth to the acquisition of language”. In this stage, infants     5     construct knowledge and understanding of the world by coordinating experiences with physical interactions with objects. Infants gain knowledge of the world from the physical actions they perform within it. They progress from reflexive, instinctual action at birth to the beginning of symbolic thought toward the end of the stage.

Children learn that they are     6    from the environment. They can think about aspects of the environment, even though these may be outside the     7    of the child’s senses. In this stage, according to Piaget, the development of object permanence is one of the most important accomplishments. Object permanence is a child’s understanding that objects continue to exist even though he or she cannot see or hear them. By the end of the sensorimotor period, children develop a     8    sense of self and object.

Piaget’s earlier work received the greatest attention. Child-centered classrooms and “open education” are direct     9    of Piaget’s views. Despite its huge success, Piaget’s theory has some limitations that Piaget recognized himself: for example, the theory     10    sharp stages rather than continuous development.

2 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. referring             B. refresh             C. pin                    D. occurred             E. acknowledging F. identify             G. drain                    H. discouraged       I. specific             J. negative K. specifically

Make a Wish List

Most of us know of New Year’s Resolutions, where one sets intentions for the year ahead. But too often, people make their resolutions     1     — “I will no longer eat biscuits left at my desk”— and then feel unhappy. In the cold month of January, the last thing you need is to     2     your energy further by setting up a series of battles with yourself. And if you break a resolution, you feel     3    , which is a rubbish way to start the year. What you need instead are things to look forward to.

So instead, try a wish list. This involves writing down 100 things you would like to do in the year ahead. The items can be enormous or tiny, ranging from “Climb Everest” to “buy a new pencil sharper”. The main thing is that at some point it has     4     to you as something that you would like to do.

The key here is — write it down.

Do you feel any resistance to the ideas? If so, ask yourself why. What is wrong with     5     what you would like to do? Try not to say to yourself: “I can’t I don’t have the money/time/energy/skills.” Just write it down.

It helps to be     6    , so rather than “Get outdoors”,     7     a place you would like to visit. And take your time when creating it — a wish list is not built in a day. Think about it, polish it and     8     it.

Finally, you have your list. And what a work of beauty it is. Here are all the things that you would like to do. Remember to     9     them up where you can see them; let yourself consider how they can be accomplished. You’ll be amazed that so many of your dreams can be realized though the simple trick of writing them down and     10     to them.

3 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. individuals        B. affected        C. discouraging       D. occupation       E. strive       F. obstacles     G. figure             H. legendary       I. conquer               J. biased             K. character

Growing up, we often get asked the question: “What do you want to be in the future?” Our answers usually start off as: “police officer, scientist, astronaut. . . ” As we get a bit older, it becomes “doctor, lawyer, engineer, the next Steve Jobs . . . ” While these are great goals to     1     towards, we must remember that a(n)     2     does not define who we are. What is arguably more important than wealth is one’s strength of     3     .

We always admire the most successful Internet entrepreneurs of the 21st century, the     4     who took an idea and built it into an empire. However, few of us really look at the price they paid to get there. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, one of the youngest and richest tech billionaires in the world, pushed out one of his best friends and co-founders(with good reason) in order to receive funding for Facebook. Steve Jobs, another beloved     5     in the technology industry, refused to recognize his young daughter until she was nine years old, and even after Jobs later reconciled(和解) with her, the two had a shaky(不稳固的) relationship to the end of his days. We cannot say how much these decisions     6     their respective paths towards success, but they do represent many of the difficult choices that may lay ahead.

On May 4, Chinese video site Bilibili released a video containing 955 different statements made by middle school students from across China. The students stated the types of person they did not wish to become when they grew up. “I don’t want to be an unfaithful person. I don’t want to be a     7     person. I don’t want to be a person who gives up halfway . . . ” A large part of me wishes that all of these hopeful statements would come true, but as many great success stories have shown us, life’s     8     will change the way we think and act from the time we are students to whoever it is we later become as adults. These statements indicate a very idealistic, but naive(天真的) way of looking at the process of growing up.

I do not mean to suggest that I am     9     anyone from thinking along the lines of the above student statements, as they ultimately provide a great starting point for how we would hope every person would think and act. However, I would encourage a different way of thinking. As the     10     author Maya Angelou once said: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. ” Life does not stand still while you run along its course, so you must learn as you go.

5 . Fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word that you do not need.

A. safe        B. robbery        C. expressions        D. replied        E. open        F. amazing G. employee        H. positive        I. concentration        J. curious        K. recovered

Jerry is a popular manager of a restaurant. The reason why the waiters followed Jerry was because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator(鼓舞人心者). If a(n)    1     was having a bad day, Jerry was always there, telling him how to look on the bright side of the situation.

This attitude really made me       2     , so one day I asked him, “I don’t get it! No one can be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it? ”

“Each time something bad happens, I can choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I always accept their complaining and point out the     3     side of life,” Jerry replied.

Several years later, I heard that one day Jerry left the back door of his restaurant    4     and was robbed by three armed men. While trying to open the       5     , his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination(密码). The robbers panicked and shot him.

Luckily, Jerry was found quickly and rushed to hospital. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry       6     with fragments(碎片)of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. I did ask him what had gone through his mind as the    7     took place. “Weren’t you scared? Did you lose consciousness?” I asked.

“No,” Jerry said. “But when I saw the     8     on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, ‘He is a dead man.’ ”

“A nurse asked if I was allergic(过敏的) to anything,” Jerry continued. “ ‘Yes,’ I     9    . The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my answer. I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets! ‘ Over their laughter, I told them, ‘Please operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.’ ”

Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his       10     attitude. Attitude, after all, is everything.

6 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one more word than you need.

A. Answer   B. luxury   C. challenging   D. aimless   E. grabbing   F. visualize G. cracked   H. smooth   I. stuck   J. eager     K. undergoing

Answer this truthfully... are you really living your life? Or are you pretty good at existing, flowing with, and reacting to things as they happen? Better yet, are you steering at the helm, taking personal responsibility, or are you sitting in the passenger seat, letting others decide for you?

You have the     1     of deciding who you want to be every single day you wake up. It is the people who have mastered the art of living happily and peacefully that have    2     this code, the ones who wake up content and taking responsibility for their actions.

If you feel     3     or lost at sea, whatever it is, you have to accept a portion of responsibility for where you are. You are not responsible for the beliefs you hold based on things people have told you, but you     4     for dealing with them.

The road to learning how to take personal responsibility can be a difficult one, but start simple, and then begin to tackle the more difficult aspects.

Open Your Sails and Be Willing to Fail

When was the last time you took the courage to really open your sails? To be vulnerable and willing to fail?

Opening your sails means that you seek out new,     5     and uncertain events to develop yourself. Wouldn’t it be nice to raise the tide for the other boats and seize amazing opportunities? Imagine if you could just forget all about what’s negative and just focus on being in the moment.

Move Forward with Intention

As you sail through life, are you making intentional goals and plans, or are you simply letting things happen and watching life pass by without    6     hold of the moments?

To start taking personal responsibility, work on goal setting. When possible, set SMART goals so that you can     7     your progress as you move through them. When you know when and how you should be completing goals, it will be easier to     8     away the difficulty and take responsibility for all you have and haven’t done to achieve them.

Live in the Moment

As you’re    9     the ups and downs on the ocean of your life, are you really honing in on each present moment, or are your thoughts focused on the past and future? Are you    10     in the mistakes others made that forced you into a difficult position?

Stop blaming other people or situations if you really want to relish each moment in your life. Start taking personal responsibility for each thought and emotion that passes through you. Stop reacting and start analyzing.

7 . After reading the passage below, fill in each blank with a proper word given in the box. Each word can be used only once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. collapsed     B. inspected     C. exceptionally     D. edge     E. grateful     F. permission G. laborious     H. dawned     I. exhaustion     J. delicately     K. calculated

Climb

Just take a minute or two to marvel at your fingers. The way they can grip onto any surface and how they move and adapt to anything. Suspended halfway up a rocky cliff face, I am painfully     1     for this, as my life is dependent on the endurance and strength in my fingertips.

I started the morning with a quiet stroll along the     2     of the cliff. I wasn’t afraid as I had done this many a time to clear my mind. As I looked out at the crashing sea below I started to shiver; it was late November and it was predicted to be a(n)     3     cold winter. As I reached the furthest point of my walk, turned around and started on my way back home, my foot slipped as the ground beneath my leather boots     4    . Clutching wildly, I plummeted towards a near certain death in the cold and uninviting sea. “Grab something quickly” said an urgent voice inside my head.

As a child, I had had climbing lessons, and I managed to grab hold of a small ledge on the side of the cliff face. My other hand and feet just slipped into place and I started to make my way up; a long and     5     process of hand, foot, hand, foot and so on. About fifteen minutes later I got to the first big ledge, I hauled myself up and sat down and     6    my body; my knees were cut up and bleeding from the fall and my hands were raw and sore. I had also wrenched my shoulder which I rubbed tentatively, while I slowly started to relax.

As I was just about to fall asleep, I was jerked back to my senses by the voice, “No, not now, don’t go to sleep now, keep going.”

I responded by getting up and starting again, the voice was so insistent. After about half an hour I had to stop to rest. I found a ledge, and with the     7     of the voice inside my head, fell asleep. In the morning I continued but I no longer felt alone, it was as if somebody else was guiding my hands and feet and encouraging me. With the seagulls screeching above me and the sea crashing on the rocks below me, the only thing I could do was climb. I     8     that I could get to the top in about an hour and I did exactly that.

On reaching the top, I remembered that when I was small my father had told me the story of Reinhold Messner, a well-known climber all over the world and I admired him so much. The realization     9     on me: it was his power that had guided me to the top.

I whispered a quick thank you and then collapsed in     10    .

8 . Directions: Fill in each blank with a proper word chosen from the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. waste       B. universal       C. emotional       D. endure       E. expose       F. inspired       G. prize       H. reality

The Blooms of the Blood Thorns

The master said You must write what you see.

But what I see does not move me.

The master answered Change what you see.

—Louise Gluck

The rosebush of life is inevitably threaded with far more thorns (荆棘) than it ever is of blooms. In order to grasp one of those blossoms we come upon on occasion in life, we have to     1     the pain of the pricks (刺伤).

Life is full of pricks. From the loss of loved ones, to the pain of one-sided love, to the hopes we held for our lives that ran up against the cold steel walls of     2    , these pricks have the power to draw oozing (慢慢渗出的) blood from our souls. But the story of our lives is actually not the way in which we suffered pain and injury — but rather how we have found strength to rise up stronger.

The newly-crowned Nobel-winning American poet-laureate (桂冠诗人) Louise Gluck realized, when she was young, the redemptive (救赎的) power that     3     pain can bring. She experienced the “absence” of a sister, whose death before Gluck was born     4     theme of grief and loss in much of the poet’s work. Her teenager years were dominated by a struggle with a severe eating disorder. She later suffered the painful loss of her father, and, after her literary success, saw her marriage fall apart.

The poet, however, used these experiences as a(n) base for her poems. She filled books with the painful lessons her traumas (创伤) taught her. She squeezed the blood drawn by these experiences into her inkwell. She exorcized (驱除) the everyday traumas of her life — loss, desire, sadness and isolation — with the steady scratch of her pen on the page.

The themes of loss are     5     to the human condition. They have shaped us, for better or worse, and made us the fully human beings we are today. While her poems     6     readers to the nerves of a traumatized soul, they are also a tribute to the strength of their creator. They reveal that even in the depths of the greatest suffering, she has found a way to rob the rosebush of its     7    . By doing so, she has drawn us a map by which we may plan our own journey through the thorny pricks of life. Let’s learn from her experiences so that her hard-fought life lessons will not be in waste. As she wrote in her famous poetry collection, The Wild Iris, “At the end of my suffering there was a door.”

9 . Use the words in the box to complete the following excerpt from a student’s speech.

commit            bounce around            rather than            come to a conclusion          define in common            radium            had a great influence on

Probably everyone dreams of having a great career, but first let’s     1    what this means. When thinking about what makes a career great, many ideas may    2     in your head, such as the desire for money, power, or fame. Different people might have different opinions about this, but wouldn’t it be kind of greedy to focus on money and fame     3    on something more meaningful? Please close your eyes and think of someone professional and successful. It could be a famous entrepreneur, a great leader, a scientist or an artist, or a teacher who     4    you. My choice would be Marie Curie, who discovered     5    . For me, she is great not just because she was world-famous, but because she made great contributions to mankind. Being a female scientist was much less common in her time, but in spite of this she devoted her life to her career. So I    6     that if you want a great career, you need to     7    yourself to something meaningful. I believe all great careers have this    8    .

10 . Directions: Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A.encouraged	B. excuse	C. featured	D. favor	E. approaches	F. defended
G. access	H. serve	I. regional	J. celebrated	K. lengths

When Coca-Cola was first sold in 1886, nobody thought it could be improved. Nearly a century later, in 1985, New Coke was introduced to replace the original recipe of Coke in order to rebrand the product amidst falling sales——Coke was losing customers to Pepsi, whose sweeter taste was finding     1    . Unfortunately, the Coca-Cola Company saw a significant drop in sales soon after the release of New Coke. Some customers just preferred the “classic” recipe. The old adage(格言), “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” seems to apply here.

Something similar is happening with A Bite of China, a     2     food documentary focusing on the stories, traditions and culture surrounding interesting regional dishes from around China. The first two seasons of the show saw great success. However, when the third season began last month, the reviewers were not so “sweet”. With an entirely new production team, Season Three steers away from(偏离) the show’s core focus on     3     dishes and towards intimate life stories, non-food-related subject matter and even product placement(植入广告).

In the first episode of Season Two, a teenager in the countryside collects honey high up in a tree. The scene is stunningly filmed, telling a moving story about the dangerous     4     to which people go to gather food for their families. In the third season, however, the focus is taken almost completely away from the food. In one of its most infamous episodes, DIY lipstick using questionable ingredients bought online is     5    . Viewer response has been swift and severe, with several commentators wondering whether it is still suitable to call the show a food documentary. The production crew have     6     the changes, claiming that the innovation is meant to keep the show fresh and interesting to an expanding audience. While this may     7     in part, to explain the show’s creative differences from previous seasons, it doesn’t     8     the show’s declining professionalism, which has led to some silly mistakes such as mixing up ingredients or confusing the correct names of regional dishes.

Innovation is generally     9     in industries big and small, but a winning formula that has popular     10     is not necessarily something that requires changes. Innovation is a tool often best used when a new direction is called for. By trying to reinvent the wheel, one might just end up with a flat tire. It’s time that A Bite of China took a page out of Coca-Cola’s playbook and returned to the classic recipe, where success has never tasted so sweet.