( )1.A. challenged ( )2.A. take on ( )3.A. joined ( )4.A. Promoted ( )5.A. range ( )6.A. available ( )7.A. as well as ( )8.A. declares ( )9.A. accidentally ( )10.A. exploration | B. struggled B. take up B. participated B. Inspired B. group B. unique B. other than B. means B. surely B. perseverance | C. abandoned C. take off C. took part in C. Advocated C. attempt C. visible C. but for C. reflects C. barely C. creativity | D. observed D. take in D. attended D. Blamed D. way D. responsible D. instead of D. causes D. simply D. determination |
阅读理解。 | |||
In this age of Internet chat, videogames and reality television, there is no shortage of mindless activities to keep a child occupied. Yet, despite the competition, my 8-year-old daughter Rebecca wants to spend her leisure time writing short stories. She wants to enter one of her stories into a writing contest, a competition she won last year. As a writer I know about winning contests, and about losing them. I know what it is like to work hard on a story only to receive a rejection slip from the publisher. I also know the pressure of trying to live up to a reputation created by previous victories. What if she doesn"t win the contest again? That"s the strange thing about being a parent. So many of our own past scars and dashed hopes can surface. A revelation (启示) came last week when I asked her, "Don"t you want to win again?" "No," she replied, "I just want to tell the story of an angel going to first grade." I had just spent weeks correcting her stories as she spontaneously (自发地) told them. Telling myself that I was merely an experienced writer guiding the young writer across the hall, I offered suggestions for characters, conflicts and endings for her tales. The story about a fearful angel starting first grade was quickly "guided" by me into the tale of a little girl with a wild imagination taking her first music lesson. I had turned her contest into my contest without even realizing it. Staying back and giving kids space to grow is not as easy as it looks. Because I know very little about farm animals who use tools or angels who go to first grade, I had to accept the fact that I was co-opting (借用) my daughter"s experience. While stepping back was difficult for me, it was certainly a good first step that I will quickly follow with more steps, putting myself far enough a way to give her room but close enough to help if asked. All the while I will be reminding myself that children need room to experiment, grow and find their own voices. | |||
1. What do we learn from the first paragraph? | |||
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A. A lot of entertainments compete for children"s time nowadays. B. Rebecca is much too occupied to enjoy her leisure time. C. Children do find lots of fun in many mindless activities. D. Rebecca draws on a lot of online materials for her writing. | |||
2. What did the author say about her own writing experience? | |||
[ ] | |||
A. She did not quite live up to her reputation as a writer. B. Her way to success was full of pains and frustrations. C. She was constantly under pressure of writing more. D. Most of her stories had been rejected by publishers. | |||
3. The author took great pains to correct her daughter"s stories because _____. | |||
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A. she wanted to help Rebecca realize her dreams of becoming a writer B. she was afraid Rebecca"s imagination might run wild while writing C. she did not want to disappoint Rebecca who needed her help so much D. she believed she had the knowledge and experience to offer guidance | |||
4. What"s the author"s advice for parents? | |||
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A. Children should be given every chance to voice their opinions. B. Parents should keep an eye on the activities their kids engage in. C. Children should be allowed freedom to grow through experience. D. A writing career, though attractive, is not for every child to pursue. | |||
阅读理解。 | |||
We may all have had the embarrassing moment: Getting half-way through a story only to realize that we"ve told this exact tale before, to the same person. Why do we make such memory mistakes? According to research published in Psychological Science, it may have to do with the way our brains process different types of memory. Researchers Nigel Gopie, of the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, and Colin Macleod, of the University of Waterloo, divided memory into two kinds. The first was source memory, or the ability to keep track of where information is coming from. The second was destination memory, or the ability to recall who we have given information to. They found that source memory functions better than destination memory, in part because of the direction in which that information is travelling. To study the differences between source and destination memory, the researchers did an experiment on 60 university students, according to a New York Times report. The students were asked to associate (联想) 50 random (随意的) facts with the faces of 50 famous people. Half of the students "told" each fact to one of the faces, reading it aloud when the celebrity"s (名人的) picture appeared on a computer screen. The other half read each fact silently and saw a different celebrity picture afterward. When later asked to recall which facts went with which faces, the students who were giving information out (destination memory) scored about 16 percent lower on memory performance compared with the students receiving information (source memory). The researchers concluded that out-going information was less associated with its environmental context (背景) that is, the person-than was incoming information. This makes sense given what is known about attention. A person who is giving information, even little facts, will devote some mental resources to thinking about what is being said. Because our attention is limited, we give less attention to the person we are giving information to. After a second experiment with another group of 40 students, the researchers concluded that self-focus is another factor that undermines destination memory. They asked half the students to continue giving out random information, while the other told things about themselves. This time around, those who were talking about themselves did 15 percent worse than those giving random information. "When you start telling these personal facts compared with non-self facts, suddenly destination memory goes down more, suggesting that it is the self-focus component (成分) that"s reducing the memory," Gopie told Live Science. | |||
1. The point of this article is to _____. | |||
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A. give advice on how to improve memory B. say what causes the memory to worsen C. explain why we repeat stories to those we"ve already told them to D. discuss the differences between source and destination memory | |||
2. What can we learn from the article? | |||
[ ] | |||
A. Source memory helps us remember who we have told the information to. B. One"s limited attention is one of the reasons why those reading aloud to the celebrity"s pictures perform worse on the memory test. C. Silent reading is a better way to remember information than reading aloud. D. It tends to be more difficult for people to link incoming information with its environmental context than outgoing information. | |||
3. The underlined word "undermines" probably means _____. | |||
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A. weakens B. benefits C. explains D. supports | |||
4. What did the scientists conclude from the second experiment? | |||
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A. Destination memory is weaker than source memory. B. Focusing attention on oneself leads to relatively poor source memory performance. C. Associating personal experience with information helps people memorize better. D. Self-focus is responsible for giving information twice or more to the same person. | |||
任务型读写。 请认真阅读下列短文,并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入最恰当的单词。 注意:每空格1个单词。 | |||
President Barack Obama shouldn"t be surprised if his approval rating among students has plummeted (陡然变差). In a recent speech about US education, he called for extending the school day and year. "The challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom. Why more time? Because US students are falling behind students in other countries," he said. More school US schools need to lengthen school days and the school year. If we intend to stay competitive with the rest of the world on test scores and in the job market, we need to add classroom hours and get rid of summer break almost entirely. As President Obama said, South Korean students spend more than a month longer in school-and achieve better results than us. The current two-term school year and the school days that form it were developed based on an old system of agriculture. The long summer break allowed children to be home to help tend the fields. It is not necessary anymore. It may not be popular to cut summer break or extend school days, but that"s the only way to improve US education and get back the American jobs lost to foreign countries. Home Time Adding school hours won"t solve the problems with our school system. The USA is different from other countries. US families have full schedules, with participation in sports, community groups, and other interests. In places such as South Korea, where only several hours of a day aren"t spent on school work, children don"t have time to participate in many of those activities. Giving kids time outside of school allows them to grow in other areas. That"s just as important as learning fractions (分数). Fingers shouldn"t be pointed at the school year for being too short, but at teachers and schools that don"t challenge their students and just pass kids along to the next grade. We do need to hold ourselves accountable for an education system falling behind other countries, but we also need a solution that actually works. | |||
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