1 . My husband and I used to live in the city, but we often faced a lot of problems there. There was a lot of late-night noise. It was difficult to find parking. And the rent of the apartment was high. Finally, my husband and I decided to move to the suburbs (郊区) outside Boston.
We started looking for our new home. It turned out that many other people were also moving to the suburbs and it wasn’t easy to find a nice house there. Finally, we went to see a small and dark house. It needed a lot of work. But it was well built and it was on a street where we could walk to Starbucks, restaurants and bus stops. Well, before I knew it, we had made an offer and the house became ours.
On our first night in the house, I cried for five hours. I thought we had made the wrong choice and I wanted to go back to the city. The house was smelly and old. And many families and old people lived around it. But after thinking of the problems we had when we were living in the city, I calmed down. Besides, our new home wasn’t that bad, after all. I had a driveway of my own. There were three big bedrooms and a backyard for my dog. Oh, how lovely the sound of nothing was. I changed the house inch by inch and it became a very comfortable home.
We have been in our house for over two years until now and it’s the best move we have ever made. While I’m glad I can drive into the city in 15 minutes and enjoy all it has offered, I’m always happy to return home.
1. Why did the writer and her husband moved to the suburbs?2. How did the writer feel on the first night in the house?
3. Explain the underlined sentence in Paragraph 3 in English.
4. What do you think of their choice? (不多于50字)
2 . It all started this morning just before noon, Mrs. White was returning from the supermarket with her daughter and a friend, their neighbor. They stopped on the stairway of their building at their fifth-floor apartment. The neighbor opened her door first, and little Lily ran past her. She knew the apartment well, since she had visited it many times. The friend put down her keys and shopping bags, and turned back a moment to Mrs. White.
At that moment, there was a sudden gust of wind and the door to the apartment was closed. Lily was inside, alone.
Then the friend remembered that she had left her kitchen window open. She and Mrs. White rushed to Mrs. White’s apartment and telephoned the police. But there was no time to get help in opening the neighboring apartment. They could see that Lily was already leaning out of the kitchen window. She had climbed onto a chair, and soon she was climbing out onto the window sill (窗台).
Mrs. White called to Lily to go back inside. But the little girl did not understand the danger and did not want to go back. She only waved to her mother,
Then she lost her balance and her feet slipped off the window sill. She managed to hold on for a while with her hands, but then she became weak and she began to be afraid. Her mother screamed for help, and now Lily was crying loudly.
And then she could hold on no longer, Fortunately, several people had run out into the street on hearing all the screaming. They saw the child hanging onto the window sill and got ready to catch her. Down she fell, five long stories and landed safe and sound in the arms of three strong men. They were Luis, Augusto, and Alfonso Nunes, father and sons, who live in the next building in her community. When they heard the screams, they rushed out of their home.
“I never thought we’d do it,” said Alfonso afterwards, “But I kept thinking: if we don’t catch her, she’ll die and I’ll feel sad and guilty all my life.”
Lily’s parents cannot believe how close they came to losing their daughter. And how lucky they are to live in such a good community.
1. Who saved Lily eventually?| A．Neighbors in her community. | B．The nearby policemen. |
| C．Mrs. White’s friends. | D．Lily’s parents. |
| A．Lily waved to her mother because her mother smiled at her. |
| B．Lily couldn’t hold on the window sill because she was frightened and weak. |
| C．1ily was left alone in the apartment due to her father’s mistake. |
| D．Lily was rescued before she was falling from the window sill. |
| A．intelligent | B．humorous |
| C．responsible | D．strong-willed |
| A．A Naughty Girl | B．An Unexpected Danger |
| C．A careless Mother | D．An Amazing Rescue |
3 . After years of observing human nature, I have decided that two qualities make the difference between men of great achievement and men of average performance curiosity and discontent. I have never known an outstanding man who lacked either. And I have never known an average man who had both. The two belong together.
Together, these deep human urges（驱策力）count for much more than ambition. Galileo was not merely ambitious when he dropped objects of varying weights from the Leaning Tower at Pisa and timed their fall to the ground. Like Galileo, all the great names in history were curious and asked in discontent, "Why? Why? Why?"
Fortunately, curiosity and discontent don't have to be learned. We are born with them and need only recapture them.
"The great man," said Mencius（孟子）, "is he who does not lose his child's heart. " Yet most of us do lose it. We stop asking questions. We stop challenging custom. We just follow the crowd. And the crowd desires restful average. It encourages us to occupy our own little corner, to avoid foolish leaps into the dark, to be satisfied.
Most of us meet new people, and new ideas, with hesitation. But once having met and liked them, we think how terrible it would have been, had we missed the chance. We will probably have to force ourselves to waken our curiosity and discontent and keep them awake.
How should you start? Modestly, so as not to become discouraged. I think of one friend who couldn't arrange flowers to satisfy herself. She was curious about how the experts did it. How she is one of the experts, writing books on flower arrangement.
One way to begin is to answer your own excuses. You haven't any special ability? Most people don't; there are only a few geniuses. You haven't any time? That's good, because it's always the people with no time who get things done. Harriet Stowe, mother of six, wrote parts of Uncle Tom's Cabin while cooking. You're too old? Remember that Thomas Costain was 57 when he published his first novel, and that Grandma Moses showed her first pictures when she was 78.
However you start, remember there is no better time to start than right now, for you'll never be more alive than you are at this moment.
1. In writing Paragraph 1, the author aims to ________.| A．propose a definition | B．make a comparison |
| C．reach a conclusion | D．present an argument |
| A．Trial and error leads to the finding of truth. |
| B．Scientists tend to be curious and ambitious. |
| C．Creativity results from challenging authority. |
| D．Greatness comes from a lasting desire to explore. |
| A．Observe the unknown around you. |
| B．Develop a questioning mind. |
| C．Lead a life of adventure. |
| D．Follow the fashion. |
| A．Curious Minds Never Feel Contented |
| B．Reflections on Human Nature |
| C．The Keys to Achievement |
| D．Never Too Late to Learn |
| rather than count necessity set a goal according to |
Joe is a digital native. He does a wide range of things online. For example. He prefers to chat with friends online
5 . Are morning people born or made? In my case it was definitely made. In my early 20s, I rarely went to bed before midnight, and I would almost always get up late the next morning.
But after a while I couldn’t ignore the high relationship between success and rising early. On those rare occasions where I did get up early, I noticed that my productivity was almost always higher. So I set out to become a habitual early riser. But whenever my alarm went off, my first thought was always to stop that noise and go back to sleep. Eventually some sleep research showed me that I was using the wrong strategy.
The most common wrong strategy is this:You assume that if you’re going to get up earlier, you’d better go to bed earlier. It sounds very reasonable, but will usually fail.
There are two main schools (流派) of thought on sleep patterns. The first is that you should go to bed and get up at the same time every day. The second school says you should go to bed when you’re tired and get up when you naturally wake up. However, I have found both of them are wrong if you care about productivity. If you sleep at set hours, you’ll sometimes go to bed when you aren’t sleepy enough. You’re wasting time lying in bed awake and not being asleep.
If your sleep is based on what your body tells you, you’ll probably be sleeping more than you need. Also, your mornings may be less predictable if you’re getting up at different times.
The solution for me has been to combine both methods. I go to bed when I’m sleepy and get up with an alarm clock at a fixed time. So I always get up at the same time (in my case 5 am), but I go to bed at different times every night — sometimes at 9:30pm, and other times at midnight. Most of the time I go to bed between 10-11 pm.
However, going to bed only when I’m sleepy, and getting up at a fixed time every morning is my way. If you want to become an early riser, you can try your own.
1. According to the passage, the underlined phrase refers to ________.| A．people who stay up until the next morning |
| B．people who feel sleepy in the morning |
| C．people who get up early in the morning |
| D．people whose productivity is the highest in the morning |
| A．Because he/she wanted to form the habit of going to bed early and getting up early. |
| B．Because he/she wanted to see which of the two main schools of thought on sleep patterns was right. |
| C．Because he/she had found that his / her productivity was higher when he / she got up early. |
| D．Because he/she was told the high relationship between success and rising early. |
| A．asking scholars for advice on sleeping habits | B．getting up early occasionally |
| C．pressing off the alarm to go on sleeping | D．going to bed after midnight |
| A．how to have good sleep |
| B．how to become an early riser |
| C．wrong strategies for getting up early |
| D．main schools of thought on sleep patterns |
6 . If you think about it, work-life balance is a strange ambition for a fulfilling life. Balance is about stasis: if our lives were ever in balance-parents happy, kids taken care of, work working-then our overriding thought would be to shout “Nobody move!” and pray all would stay perfect forever. This false hope is made worse by the categories themselves. They imply that work is bad, and life is good. And so the challenge, we are told, is to balance the heaviness of work with the lightness of life.
Yet work is not the opposite of life. It is instead a part of life-just as family is, as are friends and community. All of these aspects of living have their share of uplifting moments and moments that drag us down. The same is true of work. Treat work the same way you do life: by maximizing what you love.
We have interviewed several anesthesiologists (麻醉师) about the thrills they feel in their jobs. One said he loved the thrill of holding each patient hovering at that one precise point between life and death. Another said she loved the bedside conversations before the operation aiming to calm the panic that affects many patients. Another was drawn mostly to the anesthetic mechanism and has devoted himself to defining precisely how each drug does what it does.
Think of your life’s many different activities as threads. Some are black and some are white. But some of these activities appear to be made of a different substance. These activities contain all the tell-tale signs of love: before you do them, you find yourself looking forward to them; while you’re doing them, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; and after you’ve done them, you feel energetic. These are your red threads, and research by the Mayo Clinic suggests that doctors who weave the fabric of their life with at least 20% red threads are significantly less likely to experience burnout.
The simplest way for you to do this is to spend a week in love with your job. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love write down exactly what you were doing in the column “Love”. And any time you find yourself feeling the inverse write down what you were doing in the column “Loathe”. By the end of the week you will see a list of activities in your “Love” column, which create in you a positive feeling, one that draws you in and lifts you up.
Our goal should be to, little by little, week by week, intentionally unbalance all aspects of our work toward the former and away from the latter. Not simply to make us feel better, but so that our colleagues, our friends and our family can all benefit from us at our very best.
1. What is the author’s attitude towards work-life balance?| A．Doubtful. | B．Disapproving. |
| C．Supportive. | D．Neutral. |
| A．prove people benefit from work |
| B．indicate doctors take pride in their work |
| C．show people gain joy from different situations |
| D．imply doctors reduce the pressure of work successfully |
| A．arouse your passion | B．satisfy your desires |
| C．improve your motivation | D．require your efforts |
| A．Red threads are necessary for a balanced life. |
| B．Recording activities helps create positive feeling. |
| C．Find love in work instead of keeping work-life balance. |
| D．Maximize what you love to remove the heaviness from work. |
7 . Basically, without the possibility of failure, there is little possibility of success. Education is in danger of becoming a branch of the entertainment industry. Although education should indeed be entertaining where possible, it cannot always be fun. Often, it needs the "hard yards".
Some educationalists feel that if something causes worry it should be avoided at all costs, I would disagree. Facing up to challenges helps develop children. Avoiding challenges can severely limit their potential. Tougher children are able to try and fail. The less tough may simply fail to try anything new.
I’m not advocating putting children under pressure. The real debate is perhaps what pressures are unavoidable. It's not about "throwing children into the deep end", but rather encouraging them to put their foot in the water and giving them the skills to float.
This latter approach is basically the work I and my team do at the University of Hull. We measure mental toughness and then provide interventions to improve this. These interventions include psychological skills such as goal setting, relaxation and thought control. So, for example, many children will say: "What happens if it goes wrong?" We work hard to change this so that the sentence reads: "What happens if it goes right?" One word difference, but a world away when thinking about challenges.
We try to help children deal more effectively with life using a three-step approach. Firstly, it is important to set realistic and achievable goals. Then it is a matter of finding out what factors (因素) are helping children to achieve these goals and what factors are working against this. The final step is to discover which of these factors can be controlled, or at least influenced, and what factors the child is in reality stuck with. Redirecting children's energies to movable obstacles (障碍) can produce huge life changes.
However, I think that for most of us we have become stress averse (反对的) and overreact to it. It has always been there, and it has always been the case that some people enjoy it, some need help to deal with it and some people's lives are ruined by it.
Showing our children that stress can be faced with and beaten offers them a way forward. The more a fear is avoided, the bigger it gets.
1. From the passage, we know the writer believes ____________.| A．education needs challenges |
| B．education should always be fun |
| C．children should avoid facing challenges |
| D．the more challenges, the better for the children |
| A．some children are less tough |
| B．some pressures are avoidable |
| C．some challenges do good to children |
| D．some children are unaware of their potential |
| A．Record what the children do in stressful situations. |
| B．Make the children tougher mentally and physically. |
| C．Put the children under pressure by giving them challenges. |
| D．Give the children challenges and suggest suitable approaches. |
| A．We should try our best to avoid stress. |
| B．We should love stress because stress is unavoidable. |
| C．We should put ourselves to the test in stressful situations. |
| D．We should experience stress and learn skills to deal with it. |
8 . When I was 8 years old, I decided to run away from home after a quarrel with my mother. With my suitcase(行李箱) packed and some sandwiches in a bag, I started for the front door.
My mom asked where I was going. “I’m leaving home,” I said.
“What’s that you’re carrying?” she asked.
“Some clothes and food,” I replied.
“If you want to run away, that’s all right,” she said. “But you came into this home without anything and you can leave the same way.”
I threw my suitcase and sandwiches on the floor and started for the door again.
“Wait a minute,” Mom said. “You didn’t have any clothes on when you arrived, and I want them back.”
This infuriated me. I tore my clothes off — shoes, socks, underwear and all — and shouted, “Can I go now?”
“Yes,” my mom answered, “but once you close that door, don’t expect to come back.”
I was so angry that I shut the door forcefully and stepped out of my home. Then I noticed down the street two neighbor girls walking toward our house. I was so shy that I saw the big spruce (云杉) tree in our yard and jumped under the low-hanging branches (树枝). A pile of dried-up brown needles (针状物) were beneath the tree, and you can’t imagine the pain those sharp needles caused to my body.
After I was sure the girls had passed by, I ran to the front door and knocked at it loudly.
“It’s Billy! Let me in!”
The voice behind the door answered, “Billy doesn’t live here anymore. He ran away from home.”
Looking behind me to see if anyone else was coming down the street, I said, “Mom! I’m sorry. I’m still your son. Let me in!”
The door opened and Mom’s smiling face appeared. “Did you change your mind about running away?” she asked.
“What’s for supper?” I smiled back.
1. When the author was leaving home, his mother ordered him to _____.| A．stay at home | B．take some sandwiches |
| C．leave everything behind | D．check his suitcase carefully |
| A．Selfish and proud. | B．Strict but loving. |
| C．Kind and helpful. | D．Wise but impatient. |
| A．To avoid being seen. | B．To find some needles. |
| C．To play a joke on the two girls. | D．To attract the two girls’ attention. |
| A．felt very hungry at that time | B．changed his plan not to leave home any longer |
| C．wished to eat something before leaving | D．wanted to know what his mother prepared for supper |
