单选题 The old woman would have been drowned ______ a passer-by dragged her out of the water.

单选题 Which of the following italicized phrases indicates purpose?

单选题 SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE Rates of depression and anxiety are rising in the modern world. Proposed remedies are numerous. And one that is reaping growing attention is meditation, and mindfulness meditation in particular. The aim is simple: to pay attention—be 'mindful'. Typically, a teacher will ask you to sit upright, in an alert position. Then, they will encourage you to focus on something straightforward, like the in-and out-flow of breath. The aim is to nurture a curiosity about these sensations—not to explain them, but to know them. It's a way of concentrating on the here and now, thereby becoming more aware of how the here and now is affecting you. It doesn't aim directly at the removal of stresses and strains. In fact, it is very hard to develop the concentration necessary to follow your breath, even for a few seconds. What you see is your mind racing from this memory to that moment. But that's the trick: to observe, and to learn to change the way you relate to the inner sufferings. Therein lies the route to better mental health. Mindfulness, then, is not about ecstatic (入迷的) states. It's mostly pretty boring and dull. Moreover, it is not a fast track to delightful happiness. It can, in fact, be quite unsettling, as works with painful experiences, to understand them better and thereby get to the root of problems. Research into the benefits of mindfulness seems to support its claims. People prone to depression, say, are less likely to have depressive episodes if they practice meditation. Stress goes down. But it's more like going on a journey than taking a pill. Though meditation techniques can be learned quickly, it's no instant remedy and requires discipline. Mindfulness is a practice aimed at caring for yourself. Then, it's about knowing yourself better, something recognized as a crucial part of living well. It's striking that today we often don't take the time to do so. Hence, perhaps, many of the ills of the western world. But mindfulness says: make the time to step back, and here's a way to do it. It encourages you to be more aware of life, and promises that mindfulness is a source of insight and hope. PASSAGE TWO For thousands of years men have been wandering around—for pleasure, for profit, or to satisfy their curiosity. When the only means of transportation were horses, camels and small boats, travelers were already crossing seas and deserts to acquire rare goods or to visit famous places. For the pure joy of learning, scholars ventured into distant kingdoms and observed their customs. They tasted the foods; they questioned the wise men about their gods and their history, they sat in fearful admiration on the banks of newly discovered rivers. Then they went back home reflecting upon what they had seen, and perhaps they wrote a book or two about their discoveries. Slowly, nations learned about each other, men met and ideas spread—for better or worse. There was a time, close to ours, when artists and writers traveled all over Europe and sometimes further to study ancient works of art and to exchange ideas and methods with their foreign colleagues. Poor adventurers traveled on foot while rich ones in comfort. Two centuries ago, it became fashionable for wealthy families to send their grown children to foreign countries where they would complete their education. A young man was expected to acquire good manners and a taste for literature in France, an appreciation of music in Germany, and some feeling of history in Roman Forum. Thus all kinds of travelers learned and dreamed through the centuries. But their number was always limited, for they were only a privileged minority—the rich, the free, the talented and the adventurous—who could enjoy a pleasure unknown by the great masses. This is not true any more. Railroads, ships, buses, and airplanes have made travel easier, faster and cheaper, and the number of people who can spare the time and the money to take trips has grown enormously. It is not reserved to a lucky few, nowadays, to admire Inca temples, giant Buddhas, French castles and Australian kangaroos. Millions of people do each year. But instead of being called travelers, they are known as tourists and they are seen all over the world—floating down the Amazon, taking a pleasure trip by boat to Alaska, flying from Timbuktu to Easter Island, and taking picture of Norwegian churches and Pakistani costumes. PASSAGE THREE It was 1961 and I was in the fifth grade. My marks in school were miserable and, the thing was, I didn't know enough to really care. My older brother and I lived with Morn in a dingy multi-family house in Detroit. We watched TV every night. The background noise of our lives was gunfire and horses' hoofs from 'Wagon Train' or 'Cheyenne', and laughter from 'I Love Lucy' or 'Mister Ed'. After supper, we'd sprawl on Mom's bed and stare for hours at the tube. But one day Morn changed our world forever. She turned off the TV. Our mother had only been able to get through third grade. But she was much brighter and smarter than we boys knew at the time. She had noticed something in the suburban houses she cleaned—books. So she came home one day, snapped off the TV, sat us down and explained that her sons were going to make something of themselves. 'You boys are going to read two books every week,' she said. 'And you're going to write me a report on what you read.' We moaned and complained about how unfair it was. Besides, we didn't have any books in the house other than Mom's Bible. But she explained that we would go where the books were: 'I'd drive you to the library.' So pretty soon, there were these two peevish boys sitting in her white 1959 Oldsmobile on their way to Detroit Public Library. I wandered reluctantly among the children's books. I loved animals, so when I saw some books that seemed to be about animals, I started leafing through them. The first book I read clear through was Chip the Dam Builder. It was about beavers. For the first time in my life I was lost in another world. No television program had ever taken me so far away from my surroundings as did this verbal visit to a cold stream in a forest and these animals building a home. It didn't dawn on me at the time, but the experience was quite different from watching TV. There were images forming in my mind instead of before my eyes. And I could return to them again and again with the flip of a page. Soon I began to look forward to visiting this hushed sanctuary from my other world. I moved from animals to plants, and then to rocks. Between the covers of all those books were whole worlds, and I was free to go anywhere in them. Along the way a funny thing happened I started to know things. Teachers started to notice it too. I got to the point where I couldn't wait to get home to my books. Now my older brother is an engineer and I am chief of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore. Sometimes I still can't believe my life's journey, from a failing and indifferent student in a Detroit public school to this position, which takes me all over the world to teach and perform critical surgery. But I know when the journey began: the day Morn snapped off the TV set and put us in her Oldsmobile for that drive to the library. PASSAGE FOUR My heart sank when the man at the immigration counter gestured to the back room. I'm an American born and raised, and this was Miami, where I live, but they weren't quite ready to let me in yet. 'Please wait in here, Ms Abujaber,' the immigration officer said. My husband, with his very American last name, accompanied me. He was getting used to this. The same thing had happened recently in Canada when I'd flown to Montreal to speak at a book event. That time they held me for 45 minutes. Today we were returning from a literary festival in Jamaica, and I was startled that I was being sent 'in back' once again. The officer behind the counter called me up and said, 'Miss, your name looks like the name of someone who's on our wanted list. We're going to have to check you out with Washington.' 'How long will it take?' 'Hard to say.., a few minutes,' he said. 'We'll call you when we're ready for you.' After an hour, Washington still hadn't decided anything about me. 'Isn't this computerized?' I asked at the counter. 'Can't you just look me up?' Just a few more minutes, they assured me. After an hour and a half, I pulled my cell phone out to call the friends I was supposed to meet that evening. An officer rushed over. 'No phones!' he said. 'For all we know you could be calling a terrorist cell and giving them information.' 'I'm just a university professor,' I said. My voice came out in a squeak. 'Of course you are. And we take people like you out of here in leg irons every day.' I put my phone away. My husband and I were getting hungry and tired. Whole families had been brought into the waiting room, and the place was packed with excitable children, exhausted parents, even a flight attendant. I wanted to scream, to jump on a chair and shout: 'I'm an American citizen; a novelist; I probably teach English literature to your children.' Or would that all be counted against me? After two hours in detention, I was approached by one of the officers. 'You're free to go,' he said. No explanation or apologies. For a moment, neither of us moved, we were still in shock. Then we leaped to our feet. 'Oh, one more thing.' He handed me a tattered photocopy with an address on it. 'If you weren't happy with your treatment, you can write to this agency.' 'Will they respond?' I asked. 'I don't know—I don't know of anyone who's ever written to them before.' Then he added, 'By the way, this will probably keep happening each time you travel internationally.' 'What can I do to keep it from happening again?' He smiled the empty smile we'd seen all day. 'Absolutely nothing.' After telling several friends about our ordeal, probably the most frequent advice I've heard in response is to change my name. Twenty years ago, my own graduate school writing professor advised me to write under a pen name so that publishers wouldn't stick me in what he called 'the ethnic ghetto'—a separate, secondary shelf in the bookstore. But a name is an integral part of anyone's personal and professional identity—just like the town you're born in and the place where you're raised. Like my father, I'll keep the name, but my airport experience has given me a whole new perspective on what diversity and tolerance are supposed to mean. I had no idea that being an American would ever be this hard.

单选题A. attempt B. charged C. crucial D. delicate E. essentially F. eventually G. expended H. fraction I. individual J. maintain K. minority L. negligible M. scrapping N. slashing O. upsurging Space X launched a cheaper, partially-used rocket into orbit. That's a stride toward 42 the price tag of sending payload to space. Successfully flying reusable rockets is a 43 step toward the dream of sending people to Mars. Until now, rockets have almost all been single-use. Once the fuel is 44 , a rocket stage plummets to Earth, resulting in the destruction of extremely expensive equipment that costs tens of millions of dollars to build. Its founder has likened that to 45 a 747 jet after one flight, which would make air travel impossibly expensive. He has suggested that rocket launches could 46 be much cheaper since the cost of the rocket propellants are less than 1 percent of the full-price ticket for a launch. So, if a rocket could be simply refueled like a jetliner for another flight, the cost of space travel could drop to a 47 of what it is now. The stresses of spaceflight on reused boosters, however, are much greater than those on jetliners. The economics will depend on how many times a booster can be flown, and how much the 48 expense will be to repair the booster each time. Reusable spaceships are not a new idea. NASA's space shuttles were the first real 49 at a reusable spaceship, but the shuttles proved more 50 than hoped, requiring an army of technicians to 51 them between flights. As a result, they ended up being more expensive than expendable rockets.

单选题 Sadly, while the academic industry thrives, the practice of translation continues to ______.

单选题 Your plan, ______, seems impractical.

单选题 Listen to the following passage. Altogether the passage will be read to you four times. During the first reading, which will be done at normal speed, listen and try to understand the meaning. For the second and third readings, the passage will be read sentence by sentence, or phrase by phrase, with intervals of 15 seconds. The last reading will be done at normal speed again and during this time you should check your work. You will then be given 2 minutes to check through your work once more. Touching Tactile communication is the use of touch in communication.

单选题 SECTION A MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS In this section there are several passages followed by ten multiple-choice questions. For each question, there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that you think is the best answer and mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET TWO. PASSAGE ONE 'There is very little in my life that is more personal and more important to me than comets.' The amateur astronomer David H. Levy told Terence Dickinson in an interview. 'Not just discovering them but watching them, learning about them, writing about them, understanding what they do. It makes observing the sky intensely personal. I feel when I find a new comet that a door has been opened and I have seen a slightly new aspect of nature. There is this object in the solar system that—for a few minutes or a few hours—only I know about. It is like trying to pry a secret out of nature. It is a very special feeling.' Ever since he was a child, David Levy has been fascinated by the night sky and the wonders it reveals to devoted watchman. He developed a special feeling for comets before he reached his teens, though it was not until 1984—after nineteen years and more than nine hundred hours of combing the sky in search of them—that he discovered his first one, from a small observatory that he had built in his backyard. Since then, he has discovered or co-discovered twenty more, making him one of the world's most important comet hunters. His most celebrated find is periodic comet Shoemaker Levy 9, which he made with the husband-and-wife comet and asteroid hunting team Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker. The comet's dramatic collision with Jupiter in July 1994, which constituted 'the greatest planetary show in recorded history', to quote Malcolm W. Browne of the New York Times, captivated not only professional astronomers, but many amateurs. Although he is 'only' an amateur astronomer, he earns his living by lecturing and writing books and by working with project artists. They're projects devoted to introducing astronomy to elementary school children. He has won tremendous respect from his professional colleagues for his success in tracking comets. 'David Levy is one of those rare individuals blessed with the gift of discovery,' David Hartsel, who serves on the board of directors of the Richland Astronomical Society, in Ohio, has said. 'Even rarer is his ability to let others share in the excitement and wonder of those discoveries through his writing and lectures.' PASSAGE TWO 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-olds 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 percent 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. PASSAGE THREE By far the most common difficulty in study is simple failure to get down to regular concentrated work. This difficulty is much greater for those who do not work for a plan and have no regular routine of study. Many students muddle along, doing a bit of this subject or that, as the mood takes them, or letting their set work pile up until the last possible moment. Few students work to a set timetable. They say that if they did construct a timetable for themselves they would not keep to it, or would have to alter it constantly, since they can never predict from one day to the next what their activities will be. No doubt some temperaments take much more kindly to a regular routine than others. There are many who shy away from the self-regimentation of a weekly timetable, and dislike being tied down to a definite program of work. Many able students claim that they work in cycles. When they become interested in a topic they work on it intensively for three or four days at a time. On other days, they avoid work completely. It has to be confessed that we do not fully understand the complexities of the motivation to work. Most people over 25 years of age have become conditioned to a work routine, and the majority of really productive workers set aside regular hours for the more important aspects of their work. The 'tough-minded' school of workers is usually very contemptuous of the idea that good work can only be done spontaneously, under the influence of inspiration. Those who believe that they need only work and study as the fit takes them have a mistaken belief either in their own talent or in the value of 'freedom'. Freedom from restraint and discipline leads to unhappiness rather than to 'self-expression' or 'personality development'. Our society insists on regular habits, time keeping and punctuality, and whether we like it or not, if we mean to make our way in society we have to comply with its demands. PASSAGE FOUR Even just a degree or two of greenhouse warming will have a dramatic impact on water resources across western North America. Teams who have modeled the climate in the area are warning of greatly reduced snow packs and more intense flooding as temperatures inch up during the 21st century. It's the first time that global climate modelers have worked so closely with teams running detailed regional models of snowfall, rain and stream flows to predict exactly what warming will do to the area. The researchers, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and elsewhere, were surprised by the size of the effect generated by only a small rise in temperature. Assuming business as usual emissions, greenhouse gases will warm the west coast of North America by just one or two degrees Celsius over the next century, and average precipitation won't change much. But in the model, warmer winters raised the snowline, drastically reducing the crucial mountain snow pack, the researchers told the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. 'We realized that huge areas of the snow pack in the Sierra went down to 15 percent of today's values,' says Michael Dettinger, a research hydrologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. That caught everyone's attention. The researchers also predict that by the middle of the century, melting snow will cause streams to reach their annual peak flow up to a month earlier. And with warm rains melting snow or drenching already saturated ground, the risk of extreme floods will rise dramatically. We have to believe in these very warm, very wet storms, says Andrew Wood, a water resources modeler at the University of Washington, Seattle. 'Since dams can't be filled until the risk of flooding is past, the models predict they will trap just 70 to 85 percent as much run-off as they do now. This is a particular problem for California, where agriculture, industry, a burgeoning population and environmental needs already clash over limited water supplies. We are taking this extremely seriously,' says Jonas Minton, deputy director of the California Department of Water Resources. And observations certainly back up the models. Minton points out that an increasing percentage of California's precipitation over recent decades is falling as rain rather than snow. And Iris Stewart, a climate researcher at the University of California, San Diego, has found that in the last 50 years, run-off peaks in the western US and Canada have been happening earlier and earlier. The cause seems to be a region-wide trend towards warmer winters and springs. Dettinger has little doubt that the models point to a real and immediate problem. 'It's upon us,' he says, 'and it's not clear what the fix is.'

单选题 Some children display an ______ curiosity about every new thing they encounter.

单选题 Their happiness was very ______.

单选题 The city government is building more roads to ______ the increasing number of cars.

单选题 'It seems that Joan arrived late for the conference.' The sentence means that

单选题 It is necessary that something urgent ______ to combat smuggling.

单选题 Though ______ rich, he was better off than at any other period in his life.

单选题 There was a teapot fashioned like a china duck, out of ______ open mouth the tea was supposed to come.

单选题 In 1840, both Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton resented ______ proper seating at the World's anti-slavery convention in London because of their sex.

单选题 People have no trust ______ his words.

单选题 I have had enough cake. Would you like ______?

单选题 A: Mother, you promised to take me out. B: Well, ______