1 . It did take me quite a while to start noticing Dr. Yuval Noah Harari’s well-received book: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (人类简史). I bought the book after I heard Dou Wentao (a renowned TV host) mention it on his podcast, and to be frank, I read the first chapter with little _________. But it turned out to be the best book I read in 2017.

While I was immediately ___________ the book kept evolving as I read it. The book began with a brief introduction of the lives and activities of the earliest proto-humans (原始人)---Neanderthals (尼安德特人), Homoerectus (直立人) and early Homo Sapiens (智人)---and then _________ an examination of why it was the Homo sapiens, after hundreds of thousands of years of surviving but pretty much existing in the middle of the food chain, _________ rocketed to the top of it without any significant genetic changes, conquered multiple climates, and eventually domesticated the world around them from farm animals to crops. And Harari includes an interesting but fairly _________ argument about the true nature of our relationship to our most necessary crop---wheat.

Think for a moment about the _________ Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. All of a sudden, within just a few short millennia, it was growing everywhere.

So how did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous (到处存在的)? Wheat did it by manipulating (操纵) Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape had been living a fairly comfortable life _________ and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to _________ more and more effort in cultivating wheat. Then, humans in many parts of the world were doing little from dawn to dusk _________ taking care of wheat plants.

However, the body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for cultivating wheat. Therefore human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle __________ next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not __________ wheat. It’s the other way around. One of the most important and sustained ideas running through the book is that what ultimately __________ Homo sapiens from all other creatures---other mammals, other apes, and even other “humans” like Neanderthals---was not our opposable thumbs or some other __________ standards, but instead it was our ability to generate (生成), believe in and act upon what Yuval Noah Narari calls “myths” or “__________” (essentially ideas and cultural institutions), particularly on a large scale and collective basis, which eventually transformed us from creatures that lived in small, loosely-organized groups (the typical feature of most apes) to our modern status.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a fascinating ambitious and difficult-to-summarize book that is also just highly __________. So as senior high school students, you won’t experience too much difficulty following the author’s train of thoughts. And I strongly recommend you to indulge (纵情于) yourself in this well-written book.

Inspired by Yuval Noah Harari’s mind-blowing book:

Sapiens: A brief history of Humankind

1.

A．attention

B．evaluation

C．illustration

D．expectation

2.

A．fascinated

B．confused

C．distracted

D．uninterested

3.

A．turned to

B．gave away

C．prepared for

D．went after

4.

A．naturally

B．randomly

C．suddenly

D．hardly

5.

A．annoying

B．touching

C．embarrassing

D．depressing

6.

A．Industrial

B．Agricultural

C．Cultural

D．Political

7.

A．planting

B．hunting

C．trading

D．wondering

8.

A．spare

B．resist

C．invest

D．demand

9.

A．regardless of

B．contrary to

C．together with

D．other than

10.

A．permanently

B．delightfully

C．temporarily

D．instantly

11.

A．consume

B．grow

C．domesticate

D．harvest

12.

A．distinguished

B．disqualified

C．discouraged

D．dissatisfied

13.

A．intellectual

B．physical

C．psychological

D．moral

14.

A．poems

B．reports

C．documents

D．fictions

15.

A．complex

B．overrated

C．readable

D．appreciated

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

A. engaged　　B. charms　　C. regret　　D. exactly　　AB. specialize　　AC. shadow AD. quickly　　BC. address　　BD. divided　　CD. collection　　ABC. persuasive

What’s the point of reading if we all forget what we read sooner or later? Being a liberal arts (文科) teacher, more often than not, I will find myself confronted with this sort of question. And knowing that I am not in a good position to     1     this question which can be simple and hard at the same time, I always quote what William Johnson Cory has written in a letter in which he articulates (清晰表达) the purpose of education. From my perspective, his words can also be taken as a     2     argument for reading. The full quotation goes:

“At school you are     3     not so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism. A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you     4     the hours you spent on much that is forgotten, for the     5     of lost knowledge at least protects you from many illusions. But you go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits: for the habit of attention, for the art of entering     6     into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure (批判) and refutation (反驳), for the art if indicating assent (附议) or dissent (异议) in gradated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness (清醒).”

Besides, even though we eventually forget most of what we read, there can still be     7     in the moments of reading a particular book in a particular place. What I remember most about Hemingway’s short-story     8     Men Without Women is the persistent cough I had due to a heavy cold, which at that time did give me a strong feeling that I would also like to die for my beloved.

So the purpose of reading is not to memorize     9     everything we read but to keep reading. After all, if there are no     10     opinions on the idea that we are what we eat then we are also what we read.

3 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in he blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blanks with the proper form of the given word; for the blanks,use one word that best fits each blank.

When I worked part-time in a local bookstore at my early age -- so easily - pictured, if you do not work in one, as a kind of paradise where not only     1     one read his own favorite books but also encounter charming young ladies (one of my personal fantasies) who browse eternally among Toni Morrison or Ernest Hemingwast thing that chiefly struck me was that really bookish people are a rarity,     2     there are vast numbers of those who consider themselves to be such. Often they will introduce themselves when they enter the bookshop     3     ‘book people’ and insist on telling you that ‘we love books’. They will wear T-shirts or carry bags with slogans explaining exactly how much they think they adore books. It is clear that the was they dress themselves is quite similar to that of us bookish people, but that is     4     the similarities between them and us begin and end. And     5     (sure) means of identifying them is that they never, ever buy books.

These days it is so rare that I find time to read that, when I do, it feels like indulgence, more so than any, other sensory experience. When an important relationship in my twenties     6     (break) up the only thing I could do was to read, and I amassed a pile of books     7     I sank and escaped from the world around me and inside me. The landscapes of Yu Hua, Wang Shou, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Harper Lee and others protected me from my own thoughts, which were pushed into the background, where     8     could silently process without bothering me. I created a physical wall on my desk,     9     (make) from the books, and as I read them the wall slowly came down until it was gone.

In a more real sense, books are the best way in which one enriches his own life and the enormous numbers of them out there in the world excite me, especially when I visit second-hand bookstores with no intention     10     (search) for a certain book. It is like casting a net and never knowing what you will find when you gather it in. As Goglo put in it in Dead Souls: “Once, long ago, in the years of my youth, in the years of my childhood, which have flashed irretrievably（不能挽回地）by, it was a joy for me to drive for the very first time to a place unknown.”