阅读理解My Writing Teacher English writing was always easy for me, but that changed on the first day Iwalked into Mrs

阅读理解As America''s air becomes steadily more contaminated, activities across the nation to cope with smog appear to be lagging further and further behind actual needs despite a rising public clamor for improvement. 　　 There has been a considerable progress in the last couple of years. But the over-all picture is that so many localities haven''t really come to grips with the air pollution problem that people might be dismayed if they knew how their welfare was being trifled with. 　　Air pollution sources are now hurling more than 140 million tons of contaminants into the atmosphere every year, by Federal estimates. Two years ago it was only 130 million tons. 　　The increase has been caused by many things--more people, more automobiles, more industry, more space heating, little if any reduction that more often than not are inadequate. 　　The adverse health effects of air pollution are becoming more widely recognized, although specific medical evidence is still fragmentary. As a psychological annoyance, often called an "esthetic" factor, it translates into decreased property values. In damage to crops and other plants, its cost is reckoned in millions of dollars; in damage to structures and materials, in billions. 　　Federal and state pollution control officials report the following highlight of the current situation. 　　States and localities generally still have penalties for air pollution that are little more than a wrist slap (with fines as low as ＄10). Enforcement is generally sketchy and weak. And the remedial procedures are so cumbersome that more and more they are being bypassed by simple lawsuits brought by public officials or citizens. 　　Although Federal law has required auto makers to provide vehicles with fume control equipment, few states have done anything to assure its effectiveness, after a car has left the factory, by providing for regular inspection of the equipment. 　　Public officials in many places still seem to consider bursts of complaints from citizens preferable to complaints they might get from instituting effective air quality programs. Industries and other polluters, such as municipalities, still exert great influence, opposing or weakening regulatory laws and "packing" regulatory boards with their own spokesmen. 　　Public resentment over air pollution is growing, as is shown by recurring incidents of picketing (设置纠察员) and increasing number of legal actions. 　　The big Federal program to combat air pollution, under way for several years, is proceeding fairly close to schedule. But Federal auto-fume regulations will not be very productive for nearly a decade until around 100 million unregulated, older-generation cars have been replaced on the highways. 　　The part of the Federal effort that deals with stationary pollution sources, like factories, is still largely in an organizational phase, yielding little immediate reduction in fumes.

阅读理解We were shocked to find that the man (come) ______ towards us was carrying a gun.

阅读理解Passage 3 Chokwe Selassie is on a mission to help drivers avoid potholes( 路面坑洼)

阅读理解Texting has long been bemoaned (哀叹) as the downfall of the written word, “penmanship forilliterates,” as one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL. Texting properly isn’twriting at all. It’s a “spoken” language that is getting richer and more complex by the year.First, some historical perspective. Writing was only invented 5,500 years ago, whereas languageprobably traces back at least 80,000 years. Thus talking came first; wring is just a craft that camealong later. As such, the first writing was based on the way people talk, with short sentences.However, while talking is largely subconscious and rapid, writing is deliberate and slow. Over time,writers took advantage of this and started crafting long-winded sentences such as this one: “Thewhole engagement lasted above 12 hours, till the gradual retreat of the Persians was changed into adisorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and…”No one talks like that casually—or should. But it is natural to desire to do so for special occasions. Inthe old days, we didn’t much write like talking because there was no mechanism to reproduce thespeed of conversation. But texting and instant messaging do—and a revolution has begun. It involvesthe crude mechanics of writing, but in its economy, spontaneity and even vulgarity, texting isactually a new kind of talking, with its own kind of grammar and conventions.Take LOL. It doesn’t actually mean “laughing out loud” in a literal sense anymore. LOL has evolvedinto something much subtler and sophisticated and is used even when nothing is remotely amusing.Joeelyn texts “Where have you been?” and Annabelle texts back “LOL at the library studying fortwo hours.” LOL signal basic empathy (同感) between texters, easing tension and creating a sense ofequality. Instead of having a literal meaning, it does something—conveying an attitude—just like the-ed ending conveys past tense rather than “meaning” anything. LOL, of all things, is grammar.Of course no one thinks about that consciously. But then most of communication operates withoutbeing noticed. Over time, the meaning of a word or an expression drifts—meat used to mean anykind of food, silly used to mean, believe it or not, blessed.Civilization, then, is fine—people banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a codeseparate from the one they use in actual writing, and there is no evidence that texting is ruiningcomposition skills. Worldwide people speak differently from the way they write, and texting—quick,casual and only intended to be read once—is actually a way of talking with your fingers.

阅读理解Personality is to a large extent inherent―A-type parents usually bring about A-type offspring. But the environment must also have a profound effect, since if competition is important to the parents, it is likely to become a major factor in the lives of their children. 　　One place where children soak up A characteristics is school, which is, by its very nature, a highly competitive institution. Too many schools adopt the "win at all costs" moral standard and measure their success by sporting achievements. The current passion for making children compete against their classmates or against the clock produces a two-layer system, in which competitive A types seem in some way better than their B type fellows. Being too keen to win can have dangerous consequences: remember that Pheidippides, the first marathon runner, dropped dead seconds after saying: "Rejoice, we conquer!" 　　By far the worst form of competition in schools is the disproportionate emphasis on examinations. It is a rare school that allows pupils to concentrate on those things they do well. The merits of competition by examination are somewhat questionable, but competition in the certain knowledge of failure is positively harmful. 　　Obviously, it is neither practical nor desirable that all A youngsters change into B''s. The world needs types, and schools have an important duty to try to fit a child''s personality to his possible future employment. It is top management. 　　If the preoccupation of schools with academic work was lessened, more time might be spent teaching children surer values. Perhaps selection for the caring professions, especially medicine, could be made less by good grades in chemistry and more by such considerations as sensitivity and sympathy. It is surely a mistake to choose our doctors exclusively from A type stock. B''s are important and should be encouraged.

阅读理解Some battles in the war between England and America could have been avoided if ________.

阅读理解Passage 4 The concept of environment is certainly difficult and may even be misunderstood; but we have no handy substitute

阅读理解Questions 21 to 25 are based on the following passage

阅读理解The text gives us some advice on______.

阅读理解Passage 1 When you think of the tremendous technological progress we have made, its amazing how little we have developed in other respects

阅读理解 People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behaviors are formed, h is not easy to explain why one person is intelligent and another is not, or why one is cooperative and another is competitive. Social scientists are, of course, extremely interested in these types of questions. They want to explain why we possess certain characteristics and exhibit certain behaviors. There are no clear answers yet, but two distinct schools of thought on the matter have developed. As one might expect, the two approaches are very different from one another, and there is a great deal of debate between proponents of each theory. The controversy is often referred to as 'nature/nurture'. Those who support the 'nature' side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behavior patterns are largely determined by biological and genetic factors. That our environment has little, if anything, to do with our abilities, characteristics, and behavior is central to this theory. Taken to an extreme, this theory maintains that our behavior is predetermined to such a degree that we are almost completely governed by our instincts. Proponents of the 'nurture 'theory, or, as they are often called, behaviorists, claimed that our environment is more important than our biologically based instincts in determining how we will act. A behaviorist, B. F. Skinner sees humans as beings whose behavior is almost completely shaped by their surroundings. The behaviorists' view of the human being is quite mechanistic; they maintain that, like machines, humans respond to environmental stimuli as the basis of their behavior. Either of these theories cannot yet fully explain human behavior. In fact, it is quite likely that the key to our behavior lies somewhere between these two extremes. That the controversy will continue for a long time is certain.

阅读理解Paris is like pornography

阅读理解Passage Three If we take a close look at successful language learners, we may discover a few techniques which make language learning easier for them

阅读理解Since the dawn of human ingenuity

阅读理解The Chinese of 3500 years ago believed that the earth was a chariot, and the sky was a curved canopy(天空)stretched above it

阅读理解 Optical illusions are like magic, thrilling us because of their capacity to reveal the fallibility of our senses. But there's more to them than that, according to Dr. Beau Lotto, who is wowing the scientific world with work that crosses the boundaries of art, neurology, natural history and philosophy. What they reveal, he says, is that the whole world is the creation of our brain. What we see, what we hear, feel and what we think we know is not a photographic reflection of the world, but an instantaneous unthinking calculation as to what is the most useful way of seeing the world. It's a best guess based on the past experience of the individual, a long evolutionary past that has shaped the structure of our brains. The world is literally shaped by our pasts. Dr. Lotto, 40, an American who is a reader in neuroscience at University College London, has set out to prove it in stunning visual illusions, sculptures and installations, which have been included in art-science exhibitions. He explains his complex ideas from the starting point of visual illusions, which far from revealing how fragile our senses are show how remarkably robust they are at providing a picture of the world that serves a purpose to us. For centuries, artists and scientists have noted that a grey dot looks lighter against a dark background than being against a light background. The conventional belief was that it was because of some way the brain and eye is intrinsically wired. But Dr. Lotto believes it's a learnt response; in other words, we see the world not as it is but as it is useful to us. 'Context is everything, because our brains have evolved to constantly re-define normality,' says Dr. Lotto. 'What we see is defined by our own experiences of the past, but also by what the human race has experienced through its history.' This is illustrated by the fact that different cultures and communities have different viewpoints of the world, conditioned over generations. For example, Japanese people have a famous inability to distinguish between the 'R' and the 'L' sound. This arises because in Japanese the sounds are totally interchangeable. 'Differentiating between them has never been useful, so the brain has never learnt to do it. It's not just that Japanese people find it hard to tell the difference. They literally cannot hear the difference.' Dr. Lotto's experiments are grounding more and more hypotheses in hard science. 'Yes, my work is idea-driven,' he says. 'But lots of research, such as MRI brain scanning, is technique-driven. I don't believe you can understand the brain by taking it out of its natural environment and looking at it in a laboratory. You have to look at what it evolved to do, and look at it in relationship to its ecology.'

阅读理解Passage 1 Alan Brooker and Loren Teague are authors who have a book due out soon

阅读理解 It's summer, you'd like to go to the movies, but you don't want to see anything that's a sequel, remake, or that features a superhero. In her chatty new book, Sleepless in Hollywood, part memoir, part 'Hollywood business model for dummies,' longtime producer Lynda Obst (Sleepless in Seattle, The Fisher King) sets out to explain when and why studios stopped making movies for grown-ups, the sort of midpriced original fare that was Obst's specialty. Obst began her career at 20th Century Fox and left to work at Paramount in 1998. There, she had a front-row seat for what she calls the transition from the 'Old Abnormal,' the period from the 1980s to '90s when profits were essentially stable, to the 'New Abnormal,' which arrived at the end of the aughts and saw the studios focus on huge blockbusters that earn money overseas. During this time, Paramount went through eight presidents and transformed itself from a fiscally and creatively conservative studio making small movies with small profits to the Transformers and Star Trek tent-pole factory it is today. Obst's argument, occupying too many chapters, is that the collapse of the DVD market in the late 2000s forced the studios to cut costs and size and look elsewhere for profit. The elsewhere they could rely on was literally elsewhere: Since the '80s, international revenue has gone from 20 percent to 70 percent of the studios' income. The only movies that Hollywood can be sure will sell internationally are films with lots of 'pre-awareness,' those based on a character or property people already know—thus all the superheroes and sequels and less time or interest in taking original pitches. Some of Obst's complaints about the new Hollywood stem from nostalgia. She misses the refined casting sessions of yore and complains about the ubiquity of e-mail and the Internet, which she constantly calls 'the Net.' Worse than her nostalgia is her false hope. Obst has gathered abundant evidence that suggests the New Abnormal is making the studios money, but she keeps insisting that the movies she herself wants to see will come back. 'The smartest studio people are beginning to recognize this sequel fatigue,' she says, even as Iron Man 3 and Fast Furious 6 are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars. Sleepless in Hollywood decries Hollywood's distaste for risk, for grown-up material, for the truly original, but it's as safe and sanded down as the most screen-tested movie.

阅读理解 Finally, the Christmas season is over. We can take a long breath, put up our feet, sip from a cup of good tea and relax. The frenzy, starting from Black Friday right after Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve, of gift shopping, buying, wrapping, giving, receiving, opening, returning... is exhaustive and time-consuming, but it takes place every year. There is considerable difference between the cultures in China and western countries when it comes to gift giving. In China, it is not polite to open a gift in front of the gift giver, and gift is only looked at after the guest has left. Here in America, gift givers always wrap their gifts, large or small, priceless or valueless, carefully and decorate them with colorful ribbons and little pretty paper flowers; and the lucky receiver is expected to open the gift right away in front of the giver, with great eagerness and curiosity, and should always express appreciation with the all time truthful comment, 'this is just exactly what I wanted!' Well, as a matter of fact, most people would take their 'always wanted' gifts back to the store to exchange for something they really wanted. Finding a gift for somebody, even a close family member, you'll have to know what the person likes and shop for days before you can locate the perfect gift. But, still the person may not like the gift from you. Nowadays, stores would provide two copies of the receipts for anything they sell as a gift, one of which is included in the gift package so that the receiver can come back for an exchange. I know, it was unthinkable to cash out gift you get, but, times are different. Another good way to avoid all that shopping hassle is to purchase a gift card from one of the stores and send it to your niece, nephews, or a family member, so that they can get whatever they want or even keep the money.