1 . On today’s blog post, I’ll be talking about my favorite magazines. I love reading books & magazines, and I’m learning so many useful tips about healthy living, daily life, etc.

Women’s Health

Women’s Health has a unique content. You can find various interesting information about healthy living or exercises you can do at home. I also love their writers because they explain every topic so simple that you can even understand biological articles.

Healthy Food Guide

I totally recommend it to everyone because it has lots of useful information about being healthy during your daily life. In this magazine, you can find articles about foods you often eat but don’t have much idea what it contains or if they’re healthy. If you are searching for new diets, this magazine gives you all the information.

Time Out

Time Out is a well-known magazine and it’s free in my city. Every time I see a Time Out magazine, I get it because it has lots of useful tips. I got Time Out London when I was in London, and I discovered new restaurants, galleries, museums, and events. This magazine has various information about the city life. For example, it gives you the events that are happening near you. It gives you tips for the railway stations and other transportation choices.

La Cucina Italiana

If you love cooking Italian food, this magazine is for you! It has lots of recipes and also restaurant reviews. You can also find popular restaurants near you in this magazine. I’ve also read articles by famous chefs from my city.

1. What can we find in Healthy Food Guide?

A．Ways to keep fit.	B．Tips on cooking.
C．Different eating habits.	D．Information of new restaurants.

2. What can we read to find comments on restaurants?

A．Time Out.

B．Women’s Health.

C．Healthy Food Guide.

D．La Cucina Italiana.

3. What can we learn about the author?

A．He lives in London.	B．He loves and enjoys life.
C．He often goes travelling.	D．He likes collecting recipes.

2 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

Cao Zhi, a prince of the state of Cao Wei,     1    (fall) in love with an official’s daughter. However, she married his brother, Cao Pi, and the prince became disappointed. Later, he composed an     2    (emotion) poem about the love between the goddess and mortal. In the poem, he praises the nymph (女神)     3     her beauty.

“Gazing at her from afar,

She shines like the sun     4    (rise) above the rosy mists (迷雾) of dawn;

Observing her close by,

She is as bright as a lotus emerging from clear ripples (涟漪).”

In the 4th century, Gu Kaizhi, a Chinese artist,     5    (move) by the story. He illustrated the poem and created     6     we call the Nymph of the Luo River.   Unfortunately, the original 4th painting was lost. However, artists made several copies of it,     7    (probable) during the Song dynasty. The painting is in     8     form of a long scroll (卷轴), which describes the plot in sections. Let's unfold the scroll and find out about this beautiful story.

In the beginning, Cao Zhi travels with a group of attendants and has to cross the Luo River. Here, Gu Kaizhi gives full play to his artistic     9    (imagine). Through clever composition and application of vivid colors, he describes the meeting between Cao Zhi and the nymph, Fu Fei. She flows lightly and stops when she wants to go.     10    (attract) by her charm, Cao loses his heart to Fu Fei.

3 . This Mother’s Day we asked a handful of children’s book experts and writers which stories and characters come to mind when they think about motherhood.

Runaway Bunny

by Margaret Wise Brown

Since it was first published in 1942, Brown’s Runaway Bunny has never gone out of print. It is pretty much a work of genius! Brown opened the door for parents to feel like they’re reading a story about love and caring about their children while the children are exploring their own individual identity and how close they are or separated they are from the adults in their lives.

Brown Angels: An Album of Pictures and Verse

by Walter Dean Myers

It is a collection of photographs Myers collected over the years. Myers writes, “Seeing their faces scrubbed and beaming and them dressed in their Sunday best makes me think about the hardworking parents and grandparents who have taken time to take care of their children.”

Mommy’s Hometown

by Hope Lim

This story is about a boy and his mother’s trip to her childhood home in Korea. The boy discovers the town is not how he imagined it would be. Mommy’s Hometown starts from the specific lens (镜头) of Korean culture, but has the universal feature of memory and perception.

Happy Dreams, Little Bunny

written and illustrated by Leah Hong

Happy Dreams, Little Bunny is ”a next-generation Runaway Bunny.“ Through a gentle dialogue, it guides us to find peace in our imagination and to grow in autonomy and independence.

1. Which statement of Runaway Bunny is NOT correct?

A．It has been published for 80 years.

B．It is appreciated widely.

C．It will separate adults and children.

D．It can help kids to find their individuality.

2. Whose book is the best choice for a photograph fan?

A．Margaret Wise Brown.	B．Walter Dean Myers.
C．Leah Hong.	D．Hope Lim.

3. What do these books have in common?

A．They all have no pictures.

B．They are all about Korean culture.

C．They all have gentle dialogues.

D．They are all suitable for moms and kids.

4 . 语法填空

The poem Dream     1     Langston Hughes is very short with only 8 lines. When I read the poem aloud I can hear that the ends of the second and fourth sentences rhyme—“die” and “fly”. The last word from the sixth and     2    (eight) sentences also rhyme—“go” and “snow”. These     3    (rhyme) words sound nice and make the poem pleasing to read.

When I close my eyes, I can see different     4    (image) from the poem. For example, I can see two hands being held. I can see a bird flying in the sky. I can see a field and I can imagine     5     it looks like with lots of snow. I start to feel cold when I read these lines!

I learnt     6     new phrase, “hold fast”, which     7    (mean) to hold onto something. “Barren” is also a new word to me, which means empty.

I think the poet is giving us     8    (advise). He wants us to keep dreaming, because life is much     9    (good) when we dream and have something     10    (look) forward to.

5 . “The Road Not Taken” appears as a preface to Frost’s Mountain Interval, which was published in 1916 when Europe was engulfed in World War I; the United States would enter the war a year later. Frost wrote this poem at a time when many men doubted they would ever go back to what they had left.

Actually, Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas. When they went walking together. Thomas was habitually indecisive about which road they ought to take and when looking back often regretted that they should, in fact, have taken the other one. Soon after writing the poem in 1915. Frost complained to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been “taken pretty seriously... despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. ... It is my fault.” However, Frost liked to make jokes, “I’m never more serious than when joking.”

Indeed, shortly after receiving this poem in a letter, Edward Thomas’s Army was sent to Arras, France, where he was killed two months later. When Frost sent the poem to Thomas, Thomas initially failed to realize that the poem was about him. Instead, he believed it was a serious reflection on the need for decisive action.

Frost was disappointed that the joke fell flat and wrote back insisting that the sigh at the end of the poem was “a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of the thing.” The joke made Thomas angry; Thomas was hurt by this characterization of what he saw as a personal weakness — his indecisiveness, which partly sprang from his paralyzing depression. Thomas warned Frost that most readers would not understand the poem’s playfulness and wrote, “I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them and advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.” Edward Thomas was right, and the critic David Orr has referred to “The Road Not Taken” as a poem that “at least in its first few decades came close to being reader-proof.”

1. What did the college students think of the poem?

A．It fooled them.	B．It deserved high praise.
C．It confused them in a manner.	D．It concerned something serious.

2. How did Edward Thomas react to the poem when receiving it?

A．He felt so hurt by it as to go to Arras.	B．He wrote back to criticize its mock sigh.
C．He doubted if anybody could see its fun.	D．He thought it relevant to the situation then.

3. What does the critic David Orr mean by saying “The Road Not Taken ... came close to being reader-proof”?

A．Readers were forbidden from reading the poem.

B．Readers didn’t know who to laugh at in the poem.

C．Readers might fail to appreciate the teasing in the poem.

D．Readers couldn’t appreciate the beauty described in the poem.

4. What can be the best title for the text?

A．A Poem Over-interpreted	B．Friendship revealed by a Poem
C．Fun of Rereading a Classic Poem	D．The Secret to Understanding a Poem

6 . How might you drag a good writer’s work down to a bad one? Try the spell-check button. A study at the University of Pittsburgh indicates spell-check software may shorten the gap between people with different levels of language skills, hampering (妨碍) the work of writers and editors who place too much trust in the software.

In the study, 33 undergraduate students were asked to correct a one-page business letter, half of them using Microsoft Word with red and green lines underlining potential errors. The other half did it the old-fashioned way, using only their heads. Without grammar or spelling software, students with higher SAT verbal scores made, on average, five errors, compared with 12.3 errors for students with lower scores. Using the software, students with higher verbal scores reading the same page made, on average, 16 errors, compared with 17 errors for students with lower scores.

Dennis Galletta, a professor of information systems at the Katz Business School, said spell-checking software is so sophisticated that some have come to trust it too thoroughly. “It’s not a software problem, it’s a person behavior problem,” he said. Microsoft technical specialist Tim Pash said grammar and spelling technology is meant to help writers and editors, not to solve all their problems. The study found the software helped students find and correct errors in the letter, but in some cases they also changed phrases or sentences underlined by the software as grammatically suspicious, even though they were correct.

1. On whom might spell-check software have a bad influence?

A．Authors who have age gaps.	B．People with lower language levels.
C．Writers having too much faith in it.	D．Editors seldom taking advantage of it.

2. What can we learn from Paragraph 2?

A．Using spell-check software helps reduce the mistakes.

B．Spell-check software causes students to make more mistakes.

C．There is no obvious difference after using spell-check software.

D．Spell-check software has advantages over the old-fashioned way.

3. What does the underlined word “sophisticated” in paragraph 3 mean?

A．Advanced.

B．Complicated.

C．Difficult.

D．Cheap.

4. What does the passage mainly talk about?

A．Spell-check restricts writers’ creativity.

B．Spell-check software can make writing worse.

C．The advantages and disadvantages of softwares.

D．The reasons for people’s abandoning spell-check software.

7 . Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler

Saint Maybe is an example of how one small mistake can result in tragedy (悲剧) for a family with lives changed forever. The true strength of the novel lies in the author’s ability to write with sincerity and understanding. I’ve read this book many times over and always find it inspirational when it comes to writing my own novels about the complexities of family life.

— Eric James

Silly Verse For Kids by Spike Milligan

This book is so tiny and thin, but I loved all these funny poems inside-and it made me want to write rhymes. After reading this, I started writing my own poetry. I like including silly poems and lyrics in my books, which is definitely down to the influence of this book. It’s a book that you would read as a kid and it would really stimulate your imagination.

— Liz Pichon

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

A book read at my father’s knee and one that inspired my imagination and shaped my writing life. My desire to fall down a rabbit hole that might take me to Wonderland surpassed (胜过) my other childhood wishes. Wonderland with its Cheshire Cat and never-ending tea parties, which were reflected in a life-long love of cats and cakes, suited me best.

— Menna van Praag

Bambi by Felix Salten

My mum read this to me before I could read, and later I read it to myself again and again. In the Suffolk countryside where I grew up, I would often spot deer in the fields. This book made me stop and study the animal tracks on the ground and made me think about the world around me in a different way, setting me on the path to being a writer.

— Polly Crosby

1. What is the advantage of Saint Maybe?

A．The content of the book.	B．The example in this novel.
C．The complexities of life.	D．The author’s writing abilities.

2. Which book would you choose if you want to read poems?

A．Saint Maybe

B．Silly Verse For Kids

C．Alice in Wonderland

D．Bambi

3. What do the four books have in common?

A．They influence the four readers greatly.	B．They are mainly recommended for kids.
C．They can stimulate readers’ imagination.	D．They allow readers to see the world differently.

8 . I never saw daffodils (水仙花) in Gaza.     1     When I was walking in the gardens, a line from Wordsworth’s poem came to mind: And then my heart with pleasure fills,/And dances with the daffodils.

My father used to say, “English is a window looking over the world.” He specialised in English Language and Literature. At home lively debates would erupt about literature or philosophy.     2     I was born into a refugee (难民) family as my father and grandmother had to leave their motherland for Kuwait because of war decades ago. When I was 13, my family travelled to Gaza but we had to stay there as a war broke out in Kuwait. I became a refugee for the second time. However, my parents were determined that my education was of the greatest importance.     3    

In the following years, I studied hard and finally worked as a research fellow to investigate the impact of conflict on health in the Middle East and North Africa. During this time, I attended an artistic workshop, which offered the skills to share my research findings through artistic media like poetry.     4     I didn’t find it difficult to write — I’d be walking along, and the lines just seemed to flow out of me.

Recently, a poem inspired by my research will be featured in the Creative Encounters exhibition, which forms part of the Cambridge Festival.     5     They bring a lightness and beauty, and within this lightness and beauty lies hope.

A．In this way, I rediscovered my love of poetry.

B．I specifically focused on the health of people in Gaza.

C．So they enrolled at the English Department of a top University in Gaza.

D．Despite the happy atmosphere in our home, a shadow lay across our lives.

E．They knew from experience that even if everything was lost education remained.

F．It was only when I came to University of Cambridge that I saw them for the first time.

G．While my research can’t express Gazans’ sufferings, my words can be a voice for them.

9 . 阅读下面材料, 在空白处填入适当的内容 (一个单词)或括号内单词的正确形式.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth is an 1864 science fiction novel by rules verge. The scientific knowledge in the book is old, but this has nothing to do with the     1     (popular) of the book.

There are three main     2     (character) in the book: axes, the narrator of the story; his uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, the scientist of geology, and Hans, their     3     (faith) Iceland guide.

The Professor was     4     impatient person, but he insisted on continuing the journey, and finally     5     (manage) it. Hans was silent and incredibly calm. As long as the Professor was hiring him and paid his wage     6     (regular), he could do anything for him, despite the seemingly hopeless situation. His faith, courage and excellent skills saved the other two companions for several times.

One day, the Professor found a book,     7     described the way down to the center of the Earth. He and his companions got equipped immediately,     8     (start) their adventurous journey. What was waiting for them? Well, we can only figure this out by reading the book.

The book is a short one. Some words in it may be difficult     9     (understand). But don't worry! Not knowing these words will not stop us understanding the plot. And the rest are easy. Therefore, it should be a suitable book     10     high school students and the fans of science fiction.

10 . If you want to improve your English through reading original English works, here are some recommendations.

Charlotte’s Web

By E. B White

This is a lovely novel that all age groups can understand. Aimed at native English speaking children, there are many adults who still say this famous book is their favorite. This is part of the national curriculum in many schools around the world, so it’s quite possible this book will also come up in conversation. You can almost guarantee that the majority of native English speakers have read this book at least once.

The Outsiders

By S. E. Hinton

This short novel is perfect for EFI learners. It has modern themes and typical teenage issues that people around the world have experienced. There are very few cultural notes in this, which means you don’t need much background information. The sentences are short and easy to understand. The vocabulary is also very easy. You should be able to read this book without difficulty.

Number the Stars

By Lois Lowry

This is a realistic novel. It is based on history. Unlike other historical literature, it’s easy to understand. If you already know a lot of information about World War II, this might be an interesting book for you. It’s not recommended if you don’t know too much about the World Wars. In this case, you will be focusing on trying to understand the facts too much so you will not enjoy the book as much.

Thirteen Reasons Why

By Jay Asher

This story take place in the present, which means the writer writes using simple grammar. ”All sentences are short and the vocabulary is relatively easy. The interesting grammar and short paragraphs make this a quick and easy book for ESI learners. This is an award-winning book and on New York Times best book list, so it is worth a read.

1. Which book had you better avoid reading if you don’t know too much about history?

A．Charlotte’s Web.

B．The Outsiders.

C．Number the Stars.

D．Thirteen Reasons Why.

2. Which books are perfect for a foreigner to learn English?

A．Charlotte’s Web and The Outsiders.	B．The Outsiders and Thirteen Reasons Why.
C．Thirteen Reasons Why and Number the Stars.	D．Charlotte’s Web and Number the Stars.

3. What do the four novels have in common?

A．All of them are designed for children.	B．All of them are easy to understand.
C．All of them are award-winning books.	D．All of them have modern themes.