阅读理解Passage 4 The train began to slow down among the fields

阅读理解Text 4 A pure virus (病毒) could be kept in a bottle, just like hundreds of other chemicals

阅读理解 'The ancient Hawaiians were astronomers,' wrote Queen Liliuokalani, Hawaii's last reigning monarch, in 1897. Star watchers were among the most esteemed members of Hawaiian society. Sadly, all is not well with astronomy in Hawaii today. Protests have erupted over construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a giant observatory that promises to revolutionize humanity's view of the cosmos. At issue is the TMT's planned location on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano worshiped by some Hawaiians as the piko, that connects the Hawaiian Islands to the heavens. But Mauna Kea is also home to some of the world's most powerful telescopes. Rested in the Pacific Ocean, Mauna Kea's peak rises above the bulk of our planet's dense atmosphere, where conditions allow telescopes to obtain images of unsurpassed clarity. Opposition to telescopes on Mauna Kea is nothing new. A small but vocal group of Hawaiians and environmentalists have long viewed their presence as disrespect for sacred land and a painful reminder of the occupation of what was once a sovereign nation. Some blame for the current controversy belongs to astronomers. In their eagerness to build bigger telescopes, they forgot that science is not the only way of understanding the world. They did not always prioritize the protection of Mauna Kea's fragile ecosystems or its holiness to the islands' inhabitants. Hawaiian culture is not a relic of the past; it is a living culture undergoing a renaissance today. Yet science has a cultural history, too, with roots going back to the dawn of civilization. The same curiosity to find what lies beyond the horizon that first brought early Polynesians to Hawaii's shores inspires astronomers today to explore the heavens. Calls to disassemble all telescopes on Mauna Kea or to ban future development there ignore the reality that astronomy and Hawaiian culture both seek to answer big questions about who we are, where we come from and where we are going. Perhaps that is why we explore the starry skies, as if answering a primal calling to know ourselves and our true ancestral homes. The astronomy community is making compromises to change its use of Mauna Kea. The TMT site was chosen to minimize the telescope's visibility around the island and to avoid archaeological and environmental impact. To limit the number of telescopes on Mauna Kea, old ones will be removed at the end of their lifetimes and their sites returned to a natural state. There is no reason why everyone cannot be welcomed on Mauna Kea to embrace their cultural heritage and to study the stars.

阅读理解What does the underlined word "drive" mean in the second paragraph?

阅读理解告中最令人吃惊的建议可能是,减少塑料的使用可能会使事情变得更糟。Which of the following could be banned worldwide by 2040?

阅读理解The author's visit to her son in New York made her realize

阅读理解The way people hold to the belief that a fun-filled, painfree life equals happiness actually reduces their chances of ever attaining real happiness. If fun and pleasure are equal to happiness, then pain must be equal to unhappiness. But in fact, the opposite is true: more often than not things that lead to happiness involve some pain. As a result, many people avoid the very attempts that are the source of true happiness. They fear the pain inevitably brought by such things as marriage, raising children, professional achievement, religious commitment (承担的义务), self improvement. Ask a bachelor (单身汉) why he resists marriage even though he finds dating to be less and less satisfying. If he is honest he will tell you that he is afraid of making a commitment. For commitment is in fact quite painful. The single life is filled with fun, adventure, excitement. Marriage has such moments, but they are not its most distinguishing features. Couples with infant children are lucky to get a whole night''s sleep or a three-day vacation. I don''t know any parent who would choose the word "fun" to describe raising children. But couples who decide not to have children never know the joys of watching a child grow up or of playing with a grandchild. Understanding and accepting that true happiness has nothing to do with fun is one of the most liberating realizations. It liberates time: now we can devote more hours to activities that can genuinely increase our happiness. It liberates money: buying that new car or those fancy clothes that will do nothing to increase our happiness now seems pointless. And it liberates us from envy: we now understand that all those who are always having so much fun actually may not be happy at all.

阅读理解The author wrote this article mainly to

阅读理解Passage Four: Questions are based on the following passage

阅读理解 Patients whose eyes have suffered heat or chemical burns typically experience severe damage to the cornea—the thin, transparent front of the eye that refracts light and contributes most of the eye's focusing ability. In a long-term study, Italian researchers use stem cells taken from the limbus, the border between the cornea and the white of the eye, to cultivate a graft of healthy cells in a lab to help restore vision in eyes. During the 10-years study, the researchers implanted the healthy stem cells into the damaged cornea in 113 eyes of 112 patients. The treatment was fully successful in more than 75 percent of the patients, and partially successful in 13 percent. Moreover, the restored vision remained stable over 10 years. Success was defined as an absence of all symptoms and permanent restoration of the cornea. Treatment outcome was initially assessed at one year, with up to 10 years of follow-up evaluations. The procedure was even successful in several patients whose burn injuries had occurred years earlier and who had already undergone surgery. Current treatment for burned eyes involves taking stem cells from a patient's healthy eye, or from the eyes of another person, and transferring them to the burned eye. The new procedure, however, stimulates the limbal stem cells from the patient's own eye to reproduce in a lab culture. Several types of treatments using stem cells have proven successful in restoring blindness, but the long-term effectiveness shown here is significant. The treatment is only for blindness caused by damage to the cornea; it is not effective for repairing damaged retinas or optic nerves. Chemical eye burns often occur in the workplace, but can also happen due to mishaps involving household cleaning products and automobile batteries. The results of the study, based at Italy's University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, were published in the June 23 online issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

阅读理解The author's OIC project group would help ten Iraqi children to__________．.

阅读理解Directions: In this section there are 2 passages followed by questions, each with four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer. Write your answers on your Answer Sheet.Passage ⅠWhen I was 11, I read the Bible cover to cover. I was not precocious, or particularly religious; there were lots of us bored, bookish children in the 1970s. Television was largely rubbish, and our parents’ bookshelves were what were left. I thought of this when I heard author Claire Tomalin complains that children are growing up without the skills to read Charles Dickens. As the country celebrates the 200 th anniversary of his birth, Tomalin claims that children are not being taught to have the prolonged attention spans necessary for his texts. And she blames this attention deficit on the fact that children are “reared on dreadful television programmes.”It is true that children have never had more distraction or entertainment to choose from than today. And it is probably true that this generation’s attention span is shorter; my children have dismissed as “too slow” or “boring” most of the childhood books I saved for them. I was quite offended by this, until I reread some.Because it is not just entertainment that moves at a faster rate. The world does, too. And, frankly, Dickens is dense, and hard work, as are many writers of that era. I read Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone recently. It was like wading through treacle.It isn’t surprising that Tomalin stresses Dickens’s relevance—she is his biographer, after all. But I’d put money on it that not many children of my generation read Dickens for pleasure either. It took me years to come to Great Expectations and The Pickwick Papers, and then it was only post- university, when I became independently hungry for knowledge.The bald truth is that the travails of Pip have little resonance for today’s children, and until they are old enough to understand Miss Havisham’s tragedy, or the poignancy of the rotting hulls of the prison ships in the Thames Estuary, why would they?Dickens might be one of the greatest creators of characters in English, as Tomalin claims, but I suspect she hasn’t read many of the newer creations in children’s literature. Today’s children see the pathos in Greg Heffley, the Wimpy Kid of Jeff Kinney’s novels. They are fascinated by the pitfalls of the resourceful Baudelaire children in Lemony Snicket’s gothic A Series of Unfortunate Events. They can recognise the adolescent dilemmas of Harry Potter.You can’t insist that childhood tastes be set in aspic, and the idea that they should mimic some Academic Francaise of literature is dangerous. My mother encouraged me to read anything—my pocket money—on the basis that all reading was valuable, and would act as a gateway to more challenging stuff later on.In turn, I believe that my children will come to the classics when they’re ready probably when they download them as free e-books, like the rest of us.Until then, I’ll take comfort from the fact that the 1969 classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar is still the most-read children’s book in Britain, with the average family reading it some nine times last year. It has underdeveloped characterisation, yes, and the vocabulary is limited. But as a prompt to an appetite for reading, it is priceless.

阅读理解 I came across an old country guide the other day. It listed all the tradesmen in each village in my part of the country, and it was impressive to see the great variety of services which were available on one's own doorstep in the late Victorian countryside. Nowadays a superficial traveler in rural England might conclude that the only village tradesmen still flourishing were either selling frozen food to the inhabitants or selling antiques to visitors. Nevertheless, this would really be a false impression. Admittedly there has been a contraction of village commerce, but its vigor is still remarkable. Our local grocer's shop, for example, is actually expanding in spite of the competition from supermarkets in the nearest town. Women sensibly prefer to go there and exchange the local news while doing their shopping, instead of queuing up anonymously at a supermarket: And the proprietor knows well that personal service has a substantial cash value. His prices may be a bit higher than those in the town, but he will deliver anything at any time. His assistants think nothing of bicycling down the village street in their lunch hour to take a piece of cheese to an old-age pensioner who sent her order by word of mouth with a friend who happened to be passing. The more affluent customers telephone their shopping lists and the goods are on their doorsteps within an hour. They have only to hint at a fancy for some commodity outside the usual stock and the grocer, a red-faced figure, instantly obtains it for them. The village gains from this sort of enterprise, of course. But I also find it satisfactory because a village shop offers one of the few ways in which a modest individualist can still get along in the world without attaching himself to the big battalions of industry or commerce. Most of the village shopkeepers I know, at any rate, are decidedly individualist in their ways. For example, our shoemaker is a formidable figure: a thick-set, irritable man whom children treat with marked respect, knowing that an ill-judged word can provoke an angry eruption at any time. He stares with contempt at the pairs of cheap, mass-produced shoes taken to him for repair: has it come to this, he seems to be saying, that he, a craftsman, should have to waste his skills upon such trash? But we all know he will in fact do excellent work upon them. And he makes beautiful shoes for those who can afford such luxury.

阅读理解Being a man has always been dangerous. There are about 105 males born for every 100 females, but this ratio drops to near balance at the age of maturity, and among 70-year-old there are twice as many women as men. But the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, boy babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means that, for the first time, there will be an excess of boys in those crucial years when they are searching for a mate. More important, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby (particularly a boy baby) surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today it makes almost no difference. Since much of the variation is due to genes, one more agent of evolution has gone. 　　There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive, but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Except in some religious communities, very few women have 15 children. Nowadays the number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring. Again, differences between people and the opportunity for natural selection to take advantage of it have diminished. India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today--everyone being the same in survival and number of offspring--means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to the tribes. 　　For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years--even the past 100 years--our lives have been transformed but our bodies have not. We did not evolve, because machines and society did it for us. Darwin had a phrase to describe those ignorant of evolution: they" look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension. "No doubt we will remember a 20th century way of life beyond comprehension for its ugliness. But however amazed our descendants may be at how far from Utopia we were, they will look just like us.

阅读理解Many objects in daily use have clearly been influenced by science, but their form and function, theirdimensions and appearance were determined by technologists, artisans, designers, inventors, andengineers — using nonscientific modes of thought. Many features and qualities of the objects that atechnologist thinks about cannot be reduced to unambiguous verbal descriptions; they are dealt within the mind by a visual, nonverbal process. In the development of Western technology, it has beennonverbal thinking, by and large, that has fixed the outlines and filled in the details, and rockets existnot because of geometry or thermodynamics, but because they were first a picture in the minds ofthose who built them.The creative shaping process of a technologist’s mind can be seen in nearly every artifact that exists.For example, in designing a diesel engine, a technologist might impress individual ways of nonverbalthinking on the machine by continually using an intuitive sense of rightness and fitness. What wouldbe the shape of the combustion chamber? Where should be the valves played? Should it have a longor short piston? Such questions have a range of answers that are supplied by experience, by physicalrequirements, by limitations of available space, and not least by a sense of form. Some decisions,such as wall thickness and pin diameter, may depend on scientific calculations, but the nonscientificcomponent of design remains primary.Design courses, then, should be an essential element in engineering curricula. Nonverbal thinking, acentral mechanism in engineering design, involves perceptions, the stock in trade of the artist, not thescientist. Because perceptive processes are not assumed to entail “hard thinking”, nonverbal thoughtis sometimes seen as a primitive stage in the development of cognitive process and inferior to verbalor mathematical thought. But it is paradoxical that when the staff of the Historic AmericanEngineering Record wished to have drawings made of machines and isometric (等距) views ofindustrial processes for its historical record of American engineering, the only college students withthe requisite abilities were not engineering students, but rather students attending architecturalschools.If courses in design, which in a strongly analytical engineering curriculum provide the backgroundrequired for practical problem solving, are not provided, we can expect to encounter silly but costlyerrors occurring in advanced engineering systems. For example, early models of high speed railroadcars loaded with sophisticated controls were unable to operate in a snowstorm because a fan suckedsnow into the electrical system. Absurd random failures that plague automatic control systems arenot merely trivial aberrations, they are a reflection of the chaos that results when design is assumedto be primarily a problem in mathematics.

阅读理解Passage 3 The three biggest lies in America are: (1) The check is in the mail

阅读理解Text 1 Reskilling is something that sounds like a buzzword but is actually a requirement if we plan to have a future where a lot of would-be workers do not get left behind

阅读理解Automation refers to the introduction of electronic control and automatic operation of productive machinery. It reduces the human factors, mental and physical, in production and is designed to make possible the manufacture of more goods with fewer workers. The development of automation in American industry has been called the Second Industrial Revolution.Labors concern over automation arises from uncertainty about the effects on employment, and fears of major changes in jobs. In the main, labor has taken the view that resistance to technical change is unfruitful. Eventually the result of automation may well be an increase in employment, since it is expected that vast industries will grow up around manufacturing, maintaining, and repairing automation equipment. The interest of labor lies in bringing about the transition with a minimum of inconvenience and distress to the workers involved. Also, union spokesmen emphasize that the benefit of the increased production and lower costs made possible by automation should be shared by workers in the form of higher wages, more leisure, and improved living standards.To protect the interests of their members in the era of automation, unions have adopted a number of new policies. One of these is the promotion of supplementary unemployment benefit plans. It is emphasized that since the employer involved in such a plan has a direct financial interest in preventing unemployment, he will have a strong drive for planning new installations so as to cause the least possible problems in jobs and job assignments. Some unions are working for dismissal pay agreements, requiring that permanently dismissed workers be paid a sum of money based on length of service. Another approach is the idea of the improvement factor, which calls for wage increases based on increases in productivity. It is possible, however, that labor will rely mainly on reduction in working hours in order to gain a full share in the fruits of automation.

阅读理解Passage 1When I was growing up in America, I was ashamed of my mother ’s Chinese English. Because of her English, she was often treated unfairly. People in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.My mother has realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she would have me call people on the phone to pretend I was she. I was forced to ask for information or even to yell at people who had been rude to her.One time I had to call her stockbroker(股票经纪人). I said in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing. “This is Mrs. Tan.” And my Mother was standing beside me, whispering loudly, “Why he don’t send me cheek already two week lone.”And then, in perfect English I said: “I’m getting rather concerneD、You agreed to send the check two weeks ago, but it hasn’t arrived.” Then she talked more loudly. “What he want? I come to New York tell him front of his boss.” And so I turned to the stockbroker again, “I can’t tolerate any more excuse. If I don’t receive the check immediately, I am going to have to speak to your manager when I am in New York next week.”The next week we ended up in New York. While I was sitting there red-faced, my mother, the real Mrs. Tan, was shouting to his boss in her broken English. When I was a teenager, my mother ’s broken English embarrassed me. But now, I see it differently. To me, my mother ’s English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It is my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear, it is vivid, direct, and full of observation and wisdom. It was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed ideas, and understood the world.Why was the author’s mother poorly served?

阅读理解Passage Two Stephen Having was born on 8 January