阅读理解OntonagonBy Kristin KingIndustry blasted the ore out of the earth and Ontonagon developed under the settling dirt. The ore held out for ten years, then the blasting stopped. Production closed and big industry moved on， leaving behind a loading platform and four empty Northern Iron freight cars. The townspeople stayed on; they had nowhere to go or couldn’t summon up the interest to leave. They opened five-and-dime stores, hardware, and live bait shops. Some worked in the paper mill by the tracks, others joined the logging crews.Ontonagon was an ugly, weather-beaten town. It pushed into the southern tip of Lake Superior and suffered for having hacked away all the trees. In winter the wind blew snow off the ice-chuncked lake into the sealed-up town. In summer, it blew smut from the pulp factory into the screen doors of the diners.There were two dinners in town. People recommended Cliff’s for Tuesday Fish Special, but Macey’s for everything else. We stopped in at Macey’s once for pizza. A girl with an apron over sweatshirt and jeans took our order, then bent over a chest freezer, pulled out a pizza, and slapped it in the oven. She opened our warm Cokes behind the counter and carried them over to us with straws in them. We took the straws out and drank from the bottles and looked at the drab oils crowded on the wall. While we waited, the screen door slammed shut on a pair of thick-soled boots. A man in a red plaid lumber jacket and stubbled-chin clumped in. He eased himself onto a stool.“Got any homefires ‘n ham, Peg?”“Coming up…Do you want onions ‘long side?”“Not today. Heard about the washed out timber line north of sixty-one?”“Caught it on the news this morning’. Tom’s working in that area. Some big order down Chicago way.”“Well with the rain ‘n all, it, it’ll set ‘em back some fer sure.” The girl handed him his ham and potatoes. He mixed them together, choked them in ketchup, and started shoveling. He didn’t look up until he’d gulped the last from his thick coffee mug. Then he left some change on the counter and nodded at Peg on the way out.The people in town never gave more than a nod. They’d pass each other on the street and look up when there was just enough time to nod and nothing more. There really wasn’t much to say and conversations ended awkwardly so people didn’t bother. The town had one theater, a Christian Science reading center, a clothing and hardware store, two diners, and five bars. All the stores had wood floors and last year’s stock on the shelves. We never came into town except to buy food or do laundry.The Laundromat was at the end of the town where sand and grass had started to take over between the sidewalk slabs. We came here twice during the week to do wash. After I’d pulled every one of the ten-cent laundry soap knobs, checked the pay phone for money, and read the labels of all twelve brands of cigarettes, there was nothing left to do. I’d sit and watch the women in their tight knit pants and sleeveless blouses folding loads of diapers and more knit pants and more sleeveless blouses. They’d move slowly form washer to dryer to folding table, counting out dimes and adjusting temperatures. Between loads they would sit and smoke and stare at the dead files on the windowsill. Questions:

阅读理解A recent campus serial murder, hyped up by the media into an event in China, has aroused concern about psychological pressure on college students in the country.The top three causes of psychological problems were failure in examinations, difficulty in paying tuition and disappointment in love. Psychological pressures also came from job hunting, acute competition for post-graduate education and love affairs, the sociologists note.The growing number of college graduates is aggravating competition in the domestic labor market. This summer the number will reach about 2.8 million, as against 2.1 million last year, when only 7% of them found jobs, according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.“It seems that I would flare up and be driven to violence as soon as I saw a person wearing a smile,” said a student sumamed Zhang at the prestigious Hebei University of Science and Technology based in Shijiazhuang, capital city of north China’s Hebei province. He said he had attended 4 interviews at a human resources exchange fair in the city but failed to find an appropriate job opportunity.Zhang was far from unique among his schoolmates. The ridiculous hostile mentality stemmed from the anxious or depressive illness of the job hunters who had just finished a dozen years of hard learning, according to a counselor with the Psychiatry Department of the No. 1 Hospital affiliated to the Hebei Medical University.At present, most of the institutions of higher learning on the Chinese mainland concentrate on providing employment information for graduating students, says a counselor from a mental healthcare center for college students in Shijiazhuang. She believes that it is imperative to help the students to build a proper, healthy mindset before they step into society.As more jobs require higher academic degrees in China, more college students are thronging into the competition for master’s degrees.The acute competition imposed high pressure on the college students, and some of them depicted their feelings waiting for the outcome of the entry exams for higher education as “being tormented mentally”.The psychological vulnerability has prompted an increasing number of college students to turn to mental healthcare services for help.In 2001, a group of psychologists good at college student problems sponsored a psychological counseling committee to train campus counselors in Hebei province.One year later, a research council of college mental healthcare was jointly founded by 40 college and universities in the province at Hebei University, with the provincial education bureau as the major sponsor. With the help of the council, a well-equipped psychological counseling center has been set up at the same university, and opened two service hotlines, helping more than 200 students every year.Identical services were launched earlier in some southern cities. The municipal education authority of Shanghai has worked out a detailed plan for the development of psychological counseling in the city, aiming to provide at least one counselor for every 1000 college students by the year 2005.Meanwhile, the Provincial Education Bureau of Yunnan has recently arranged a survey of psychological health care for college students and demanded every institution of higher learning in the province set up mental healthcare files for their freshmen.

阅读理解The issue of online privacy in the Internet age found new urgency following the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks, sparking debate over the correct balance between protecting civil liberties and attempting to prevent another tragic terrorist act. While preventing terrorism certainly is of paramount importance, privacy rights should not be deemed irrelevant.In response to the attacks, Congress quickly passed legislation that included provisions expanding rights of investigators to intercept wire, oral and electronic communications of alleged hackers and terrorists. Civil liberties groups expressed concerns over the provisions and urged caution in ensuring that efforts to protect our nation do not result in broad government authority to erode privacy rights of U.S. citizens. Nevertheless, causing further concern to civil liberties groups, the Department of Justice proposed exceptions to the attorney-client privilege. On Oct. 30, Attorney General John Ashcroft approved an interim agency rule that would permit federal authorities to monitor wire and electronic communications between lawyers and their clients in federal custody, including those who have been detained but not charged with any crime, whenever surveillance is deemed necessary to prevent violence or terrorism.In light of this broadening effort to reach into communications that were previously believed to be “off-limits”, the issue of online privacy is now an even more pressing concern. Congress had taken some legislative steps toward ensuring online privacy, including the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and provided privacy protections for certain sectors through legislation such as the Financial Modernization Act. The legislation passed to date does not, however, provide a statutory scheme more protecting general online consumer privacy. Lacking definitive federal law, some states passed their own measures. But much of this legislation is incomplete or not enforced. Moreover, it becomes unworkable when states create different privacy standards; the internet does not know geographic boundaries, and companies and individuals cannot be expected to comply with differing, and at times conflicting, privacy rules.An analysis earlier this year of 751 U.S. and international Web sites conducted by Consumers International found that most sites collect personal information but fail to tell consumers how that data will be used, how security is maintained and what rights consumers have over their own information.At a minimum, Congress should pass legislation requiring Web sites to display privacy policies prominently, inform consumers of the methods employed to collect client data, allow customers to opt out of such data collection, and provide customer access to their own data that has already been collected. Although various Internet privacy bills were introduced in the 107 th Congress, the focus shifted to expanding government surveillance in the wake of the terrorist’s attacks. Plainly, government efforts to prevent terrorism are appropriate. Exactly how these exigent circumstances change the nature of the online privacy debate is still to be seen.

阅读理解It was late in the afternoon， and I was putting the final touch on a piece of writing that I was feeling pretty good about. I wanted to save it, but my cursor had frozen. I tried to shut the computer down, and it seized up altogether. Unsure of what else to do, I yanked the battery out.Unfortunately, Windows had been in the midst of a delicate and crucial undertaking. The next morning, when I turned my computer back on, it informed me that a file had been corrupted and Windows would not load. Then it offered to repair itself by using the Windows Setup CD.I opened the special drawer where I keep CDs, but no Windows CD in there. I was forced to call the computer company’s Global Support Centre. My call was answered by a woman in some unnamed, far-off land. I find it annoying to make small talk with someone when I don’t know what continent they’re standing on. Suppose I were to comment on the beautiful weather we’ve been having when there was a monsoon at the other end of the phone? So I got right to the point.“My computer is telling me a file is corrupted and it wants to fix itself, but I don’t have the Windows Setup CD.”“So you’re having a problem with your Windows Setup CD.” She has apparently been dozing and, having come to just as the sentence ended, was attempting to cover for her inattention.It quickly became dear that the woman was not a computer technician. Her job was to serve as a gatekeeper a human shield for the technicians. Her sole duty, as far as I could tell, was to raise global stress levels.To make me disappear, the woman gave me the phone number for Windows’ creator, Microsoft. This is like giving someone the phone number for, I don’t know, North America. Besides, the CD worked; I just didn’t have it. No matter how many times I repeated my story, we came back to the same place. She was calm and resolutely polite.When my voice hit a certain decibel (分贝), I was passes along, like a hot, irritable potato, to a technician.“You don’t have the Windows Setup CD, ma’am, because you don’t need it,” he explained cheerfully.“Windows came preinstalled on our computer!”“But I do need it.”“Yes, but you don’t have it.” We went on like this for a while. Finally, he offered to walk me through the use of a different CD, one that would erase my entire system. “Of course, you’d lose all your e-mail, your documents, your photos.” It was like offering to drop a safe on my head to cue my headache. “You might be able to recover them, but it would be expensive.” He sounded delighted. “And it’s not covered by the warranty(产品保证书)!’’ The safe began to seem like a good idea, provided it was full.I hang up the phone and drove my computer to a small, friendly repair place I’d heard about. A smart, helpful man dug out a Windows CD and told me it wouldn’t be a problem. An hour later, he called to let me know it was ready. I thanked him, and we chatted about the weather, which was the same outside my window as it was outside his.

阅读理解There are two realities about the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa—one from inside the infected zone, and another from outside of it.Outside the zone, a miracle drug—ZMapp, or some iteration of it—is just around the corner, to sweep the problem away. The Western narrative of scientific progress demands no less. Inside the zone, fearful villagers and city dwellers continue to hide sick relatives, cross borders carrying the infection and touch infected corpses at funerals. More become infected, and more die. The epidemic, not science, advances.Outside the zone, somebody else must be to blame for the worst Ebola epidemic in history: the United States or Europe, for not providing enough help or money, or international health agencies, for not committing enough resources or for not having stamped it out already. Inside the zone, attention is focused on staying alive and coping, not blaming. Inside the zone, Doctors Without Borders, a largely European organization, is stretched to the breaking point and is forced to turn away Ebola patients, the United States government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has committed scientists to the anti-Ebola fight — dozens have been deployed to the region, according to the C.D.C. — and even the maligned World Health Organization has sent in doctors, epidemiologists and health workers who are putting themselves at risk.Outside the zone, hysteria over Ebola has led to the collective stigmatization of a big chunk of the African continent. Anybody coming from West Africa is suspected of carrying the disease. Inside the zone, life goes on, and people shop in markets — if not quite as normal, then at least as much so as human survival mechanisms will allow. Near the gates of the Ebola treatment center in Guéckédou, Guinea, for instance, where the epidemic started, a licentious-looking bar called the “Deuxième Bureau” — “Second Office,” a local reference to the house of a kept woman or mistress — was still welcoming customers in mid-July, even as dying Ebola patients were being ferried past.The clash of these two realities is to be expected, given the extreme circumstances. It is like this when one disadvantaged corner of the world is beset by a calamity, and the rest of the world peers in, anxiously and imperfectly, from a vantage point in which no one worries about relative order, a constant supply of electricity and running water, and air-conditioning. But the contrast is particularly striking this time because there is no risk in simply stepping off the few remaining planes flying in to Freetown, Conakry or Monrovia — contrary to what some in the West appear to believe.Yet here is where the two narratives join up: because there is real fear, inside and outside the zone. Inside the Ebola zone, the fear is based on a potent reality. Ebola kills about half its victims, the epidemic is so far unchecked, and the medical resources on the ground, largely sent in from elsewhere, are not keeping pace. In fact they are losing ground.That truth is difficult for people in the West to grasp. The misapprehension is comprehensible, because one of the world’s deadliest viruses is afflicting the weakest, least-prepared societies in the world. The consequences of such a confrontation cannot be anything other than fearsome. Nothing now stands in the way of the disease except the overstretched foreign aid agencies.It is difficult for people in the West to imagine the extent of disorganization in these countries. There is a near-total absence of effectively functioning institutions of any sort, let alone those devoted to health care. Years of exploitation by thieving elites — followed by brutal civil wars that were in some ways the inevitable consequence—substituted for institution- and nation-building in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the two hardest-hit countries. In Guinea, a sinister, ideologically motivated dictator ruled his country with an iron hand for a quarter century. The lesson for the country’s beleaguered inhabitants was the same as in its neighbors, a lesson now playing out with awful consequences: The state and institutions were always sources of suffering, not succor.

阅读理解About the time that schools and others quite reasonably became interested in seeing to it that all children, whatever their background, were fairly treated, intelligence testing became unpopular.Some thought it was unfair to minority children. Through the past few decades such testing has gone out of fashion and many communities have indeed forbidden it.However, paradoxically, just recently a group of black parents filed a lawsuit in California claiming that the state’s ban on IQ testing discriminates their children by denying them the opportunity to take the test. (They believed, correctly that IQ test are a valid method of evaluating children for special education classes.) The judge, therefore, reversed, at least partially, his original decision.And so the argument goes on and on. Does it benefit or harm children from minority groups to have their intelligence tested? We have always been on the side of permitting, even facilitating, such testing. If a child of any color or group is doing poorly in school it seems to us very important to know whether it is because he or she is of low intelligence, or whether some other factor is the cause.What school and family can do to improve poor performance is influenced by its cause. It is not discriminative to evaluate either a child’s physical condition or his intellectual level.Unfortunately, intellectual level seems to be a sensitive subject, and what the law allows us to do varies from time to time. The same fluctuation back and forth occurs in areas other than intelligence. Thirty years or so ago, for instance, white families were encouraged to adopt black children. It was considered discriminative not to do so.And then the style changed and this cross-racial adopting became generally unpopular, and social agencies felt that black children should go to black families only. It is hard to say what are the best procedures. But surely good will on the part of all of us is needed.As to intelligence, in our opinion, the more we know about any child’s intellectual level, the better for the child in question.

阅读理解A Haunted HouseBy Virginia WoolfWhatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. Form room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.“Here we left it”, she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,’’ she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered. “Quietly”, they said, “or we shall wake them.”But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,” one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. “What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Perhaps it’s upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The windowpanes reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat softly. “The treasure buried; the room …” the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burned behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. “Safe, safe, safe,” the pulse of the house beat gladly. “The Treasure yours.”The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend his way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight form the window. The candle bums stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy.“Here we slept,” she says. And he adds, “Kisses without number.” “Waking in the morning—”“Silver between the trees—’’ “Upstairs—” “In the garden—’’ “When summer came—” “In winter snow-time—”. The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken; we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. “Look,” he breathes. “Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.”Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy. “Safe, safe, safe,” the heart of the house beats proudly. “Long years” he sighs. “Again you found me.” “Here,” she murmurs, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure-”. Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. “Safe, safe, safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry, “Oh, it this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

阅读理解Language diversity has always been part of the national demographic landscape of the United States. At the time of the first census in 1790, about 25% of the population spoke languages other than English. Thus, there was a diverse pool of native speakers of other languages at the time of the founding of the republic. Today, nationwide, school districts have reported more than 400 languages spoken by language-minority students classified as limited English proficient (LEP) students. Between 1991 and 2002, total K-12 student enrollment rose only 12%, whereas LEP student enrollment increased 95% during this same time period. This rapid increase and changing demographics has intensified the long debate over the best way to educate language-minority students.Historically, many groups attempted to maintain their native languages even as they learned English, and for a time, some were able to do so with relatively little resistance until a wave of xenophobia swept the country during World War 1. Other groups, Africans, and Native Americans encountered repressive politics much earlier. During the 1960s, a more tolerant policy climate emerged. However, for the past two decades there has been a steady undertow of resistance to bilingualism and bilingual education. This article provides historical background and analyzes contemporary trends in language- minority education within the context of the recent national push for accountability, which typically takes the form of high-stakes testing.The origins of persistent themes regarding the popular antagonisms toward bilingual education and the prescribed panaceas of “English immersion” and high-stakes testing in English need to be scrutinized. As background to the contemporary context, we briefly discuss the history of language politics in the United States and the ideological underpinnings of the dominant monolingual English ideology. We analyze the recent attacks on bilingual education for what this attack represents for educational policy within a multilingual society such as the United States. We emphasize multilingual because most discussions of language policy are framed as if monolingualism were part of our heritage from which we are now drifting. Framing the language policy issues in this way masks both the historical and contemporary reality and positions non-English language diversity as an abnormality that must be cured. Contrary to the steady flow of disinformation, we begin with the premise that even as English has historically been the dominant language in the United States since the colonial era, language diversity has always been a fact of life. Thus, efforts to deny that reality represent a “malady of mind” that has resulted in either restrictionist or repressive language policies for minorities.As more states ponder imposing restrictions on languages of instruction other than English—as California, Arizona, and Massachusetts have recently don—it is useful to highlight several questions related to the history of language politics and language planning in the United States. Educational language planning is frequently portrayed as an attempt to solve the language problems of the minority. Nevertheless, the historical record indicates that schools have generally failed to meet the needs of language-minority students and that the endeavor to plan language behavior by forcing a rapid shift to English has often been a source of language problems that has resulted in the denial of language rights and hindered linguistic access to educational, social, economic, and political benefits even as the promoters of English immersion claim the opposite.The dominance of English was established under the British during the colonial period, not by official decree but through language status achievement, that is, through “the legitimization of a government’s decisions regarding acceptable language for those who are to carry out the political, economic, and social affairs of the political process”. English achieved dominance as a result of the political and socioeconomic trade between England and colonial administrators, colonists, and traders. Other languages coexisted with English in the colonies with notable exceptions. Enslaved Africans were prohibited from using their native tongues for fear that it would facilitate resistance or rebellion. From the 1740s forward, southern colonies simultaneously institutionalized “compulsory ignorance” laws that prohibited those enslaved from acquiring English literacy for similar reasons. These restrictive slave codes were carried forward as the former southern colonies became states of the newly United States and remained in force until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Thus, the very first formal language policies were restrictive with the explicit purpose of promoting social control.

单选题These were the people who _____ using force to stop violence.

单选题As a boy Mark Twain used to play practical jokes _____ all friends and neighbors.

单选题The tenant left nothing behind except some _____ of paper, cloth, etc.

单选题I hope my teacher will take my recent illness into _____ when judging my examination.

单选题Instead of trying to imitate reality in their works, many artists of the early twentieth century _____ their feelings and ideas in abstract art.

单选题Jean Wagner’s most enduring contribution to the study of Afro American poetry is his insistence that it _____ in a religious, as well as worldly, frame of reference.

单选题Shares on the stock market have _____ as a result of a worldwide economic downturn.

单选题It took him several months to _____ the wild horse.

单选题Whenever possible, Ian _____ how well he speaks Japanese.

单选题This organization brought Western artists together in the hope of making more of an impact on the art community _____ any of them could individually and to promote Western art by women.

单选题By cutting down trees we _____ the natural home of birds and animals.

单选题We went on a(n) _____ to the mountain yesterday.