Gossip moves so quickly that few people have time to cover their ears, even if they want to.
“I hate it when others gossip about me,” said Mandy Miraglia, 16, a high school student from California, “but to be honest, gossip about my friends makes me feel I am trusted and belong to the group.” Miraglia is not the only person feeling like that.
Gossip has long been looked down on as little more than nonsense and bad manners. But recent research has shown that gossip has many positive effects on your social life.
“There has been a trend among people to dislike gossip,” said David Sloan Wilson, Professor from the State University of New York in Binghamton, US, “but gossip appears to be a very important form of behavior in a group of friends, defining their group membership.”
For 18 months, Kevin Kniffin, from the University of Wisconsin, US, researched the behavior of 50 people. He found that gossip levels peaked when a sports team included a slacker, someone who regularly missed practices or showed up late. Other members of the team would soon start to joke about the slacker’s shortcomings behind his back, because they thought they were bad for the whole team.
Gossip about the mistakes of senior members helps newcomers rebuild their confidence after a failure.
It also helps relieve social and professional anxiety. Long-term studies show that people around the world devote from a fifth to two-thirds or more of their daily conversation to gossip, and men appear to be just as eager for gossip as women.
It is hard to judge gossip, but it is more powerful than you think. The author would probably agree that______________.
| A．gossip is bad manners |
| B．gossip has many good effects |
| C．gossip is somewhat like nonsense |
| D．gossip is more powerful than advice |
What does the underlined word “slacker” mean according to the context?
| A．Someone who values the team benefit much. |
| B．Someone who does not do what they should well. |
| C．Someone who is active in sports. |
| D．Someone who shows no much interest in sports. |
Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?
| A．Gossip is a useful way of building group membership. |
| B．Gossip can possibly make someone confident. |
| C．Generally, women are fonder of gossip than men. |
| D．Actually, everyone gossips to some degree in their daily conversation. |
In the last few years, some researchers have decided to study why kids lie(撒谎)，So they made up a special team of 12 students, all under the age of 21.
Each student was given 36 cards, and each card listed a topic that teens sometimes lie about to their parents, The researchers worked through the cards with the teens, learning what things the kid was lying to his parents about, and why.
By the end of the interviews, the kids saw for the first time how much they were lying and how many of family’s rules they had broken. It was reported that 98% of the teens had lied to their parents.
Out of the 36 topics, the average(平均) teen was lying to his parents about 12 of them. The teens lied about what movie they went to, and whom they went with .They lied about how they spent their afternoons while their parents were at work, and something like that.
Most parents hear their child lie and think he’s too young to understand what lies are or that lying is wrong. They believe their child will stop when he gets older. Many books also advise parents to just let lies go — they’ll grow out of it. But the truth is that kids grow into it. In studies where children are observed(观察) in their natural environment, a 4-year-old child will lie once every two hours, while a 6-year-old child will lie about once every hour and a half.The researchers started the project by .
| A．playing cards | B．free talking | C．doing a survey | D．discussion |
The topics on 36 cards are mostly between kids and .
| A．parents | B．teachers | C．researchers | D．friends |
From this passage, the teens lied on about of the 36 topics as an average.
| A．12% | B．33% | C．98% | D．25% |
On this topic, the advice from many books for the parents is that they .
| A．needn’t worry about it too much |
| B．should take it serious enough |
| C．had better do something to stop it |
| D．should regard it as a great problem |
“You'll have to take care of the baby today,” a woman told her husband. "I'm not feeling well."
"Then you must stay in bed and rest, dear" her husband said. "I'll be pleased to look after our baby." "By the way, shall I do the shopping for you as well?” her husband asked.
The woman was very glad and said, "That will help me very much. I'll give you a list of things to buy"
She wrote out the list and gave it to him.
The man took the baby to the supermarket and put him in the shopping cart. Then he pushed the shopping cart along the rows of things and looked for those that were on his list.
At first everything was OK, but then the baby began to cry.
Then he started to scream.
And scream!
And SCREAM!
“Keep calm, George,” the man said. “Don’t get excited. Don’t shout, George. Don’t lose your temper, George.”
A woman in the supermarket heard him saying so. She walked up to him.
“I think you are wonderful,” she said. “You are so patient with your little George.”
“Madam,” the man said, “I’m George. He’s Edward.”The man took care of the baby instead because his wife was .
| A．ill | B．busy doing housework |
| C．angry | D．going to buy things |
The baby cried so hard .
| A．at home | B．in the supermarket | C．in the street | D．in the car |
When the baby was crying, the father kept taking to for relaxing.
| A．his baby | B．the woman | C．himself | D．George |
The underlined sentence “Don’t lose your temper.” in this passage means“ ”.
| A．become angry | B．shut up | C．walk on | D．calm down |
A mouse looked through a hole in the wall to see the farmer and his wife opening a package. What food might it contain? He was astonished to discover that it was a mouse trap!
Running to the farmyard, the mouse shouted, warning, “There is a mouse trap in the house; there is a mouse trap in the house.” The chicken with her head high, said, “Shut up, Little Ugly. This is a great concern to you, but it has nothing to do with me; I cannot be bothered by it.”
The mouse turned to the pig and told him, “There is a mouse trap in the house.” “I am so very sorry, Mr. Mouse,” said the pig, “but there is nothing I can do about it but pray; you are always in my prayers.”
The mouse turned to the cow, who said, “A mouse trap; am I in great danger, huh?”
So the mouse had to face the farmer’s mouse trap alone.
That very night a sound was heard through the house, like the sound of a mouse trap catching its prey. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see that it was a poisonous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital.
She returned home with a fever. It is said that drinking fresh chicken soup will help treat fever, so the farmer took his sharp knife to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient. His wife’s sickness continued so that friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer killed the pig. The farmer’s wife did not get well, in fact, she died, and so many people came for her funeral. The farmer had the cow killed to provide meat for all of them to eat.
So next time someone is facing a problem, don’t say that has nothing to do with you.We could see from the passage that the mouse was______.
| A．good at cheating others | B．dishonest |
| C．kind and warm-hearted | D．foolish |
Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?
| A．The others helped the farmer kill the cow. |
| B．The mouse trap was very practical. |
| C．The pig is more friendly than the other animals . |
| D．The farmer’s family had no friends at all |
What can we learn from the story?
| A．Traps can always cause chain reactions |
| B．Sometimes when the least of us are threatened, we all might be at risk. |
| C．It is better to be safe than to be sorry. |
| D．To keep the balance of nature is the duty of us all. |
We’ve heard about radiation from the damaged nuclear reactors in Japan reaching American shores. Experts say so far there is no reason to worry, and point out that we meet radiation every day. Where and how? NPR’s Renee Montagne posed that question to Peter Caracappa, a radiation safety officer and professor of nuclear engineering.
MONTAGNE: How many things emit radiation?
Dr CARACAPPA: Well, radiation and radioactive material is a part of nature. So everything that’s living has some amount of radiation coming from it—a very small amout. Plus there’s radiation in the ground and the air.
So the extremes are uranium in the soil to bananas?
Yes.
By the way, why do bananas have radiation?
Bananas have a lot of potassium(钾). And a small amount of potassium naturally is called potassium 40, which is radioactive
What’s the difference between radiation that’s harmful and not harmful?
Well, the term radiation can apply to a lot of different things. But the harmful radiation is ionizing(离子)radiation. It has enough energy that it can make chemical changes in material. We could get ionizing radiation from an X-ray, for example. It’s the kind of radiation that causes cancer.
The broader definition of radiation includes a lot of things that we call non-ionizing radiation. That includes everything like radio waves and visible light and your microwave.
So what then is the largest contributor of ionizing radiation?
For the natural sources of ionizing radiation, actually the biggest chunk of that tends to come from radon(氡), which is a radioactive material that is present in the air. It can become a concern when it builds up in low-lying areas of homes like basements.
Would it be fair to say that most people do not need to worry about the danger of being exposed to radiation?
I would say that the everyday exposure to radioation that we meet contributes an extremely tiny risk to our life or to our health compared to all of the other risks that we meet in our day-to-day life.We can infer from the first paragraph that radiation is______.
| A．rare | B．powerful | C．dangerous | D．common |
The passage may be _______.
| A．an interview | B．an argument | C．a talk show program | D．a science report |
Whether radiation is harmful or not depends on______.
| A．whether it has a small amount of potassium |
| B．whether it changes chemical in materials. |
| C．whether it has energy to change materials |
| D．whether it is visible in life |
The purpose of writing this passage is to _______.
| A．advise on how to protect us from radiation |
| B．analyze what causes radiation in daily life |
| C．warn people of the danger of radiation |
| D．expect people not to fear everyday radiation |
If you are asked to name some national emblems of China, the dragon will probably be one of the famous images that pop into your head. We Chinese often consider ourselves "the descendants（后代）of the dragon." It is not unfamiliar to you that your parents hope that you "may become the dragon".
As a mythical（神秘的）creature, the dragon is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. Traditionally, dragons are considered to govern rainfall. They have the power to decide where and when the rain falls. In addition, the dragon is a symbol of imperial （帝王的）power. The emperors thought they were real dragons and the sons of the heaven.
But the creature is regarded differently in Western countries. In the Bible, dragons represent the devil（恶人）. Western people usually see dragons as cold-blooded reptiles（爬虫）, like snakes and cruel killers. In their eyes, dragons are also dishonest.
Dragons in Western literature are presented as monsters（怪物）. It is a common tale for a mediaeval knight（中世纪的骑士） to kill a dragon and save a princess and her country from its evil. Even the popular boy wizard Harry Potter has to battle against a dragon.
However, dragons are not all bad in the West. "Puff the Magic Dragon" is a well-known song. The lyrics(歌词) tell a bitter-sweet story of the dragon Puff and his playmate Jackie Paper, a little boy. When Jackie grows up, he loses interest in the imaginary adventures of childhood and leaves Puff upset. Puff represents the innocence of a child's imagination, which is very positive for a dragon. The underlined word” emblems” in the first paragraph means “_______”.
| A．symbols | B．names | C．places | D．parks |
What is a dragon presented as according to Western literature?
A wizard B. A mediaeval knight C. A princess D. A monster The writer gave the example of “ Puff the Magic Dragon” to show_____.
| A．dragons can represent the innocence of child’s imagination |
| B．children don’t like to play with dragons |
| C．dragons are not all bad in the West |
| D．not all people in the West like dragons |
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