Mr. Briggs got a job with an insurance company(保险公司) after he left school and went around visiting people in their homes to sell them life insurance. One day, after he had been working for the company for about a year, the insurance manager sent for him and said, “Mr. Briggs, I have been looking at your record as a salesman with our company, and there is one thing that surprises me about it. Why have you been selling insurance only to people over 95 years old, and why have you been giving them such generous（宽厚的）conditions? You’ll ruin our company if you go on like that.”
“Oh, no, sir,” answered Mr. Briggs at once, “Before I started work, I looked at the figures(数字) for deaths in this country during the past ten years, and I can tell you that few people die at the age of 95.”Before he worked in an insurance company, what was Mr.
Briggs?
| A．He was a worker. | B．He was an official. |
| C．He was a student. | D．He was a businessman. |
The word “ruin” in the first paragraph means .
| A．lose | B．break | C．leave | D．destroy |
As a salesman with the company, Mr. Brigs .
| A．visited people to ask them to work with him |
| B．called on people to make them join the company |
| C．saw old people in order to help them |
| D．visited many people so as to offer insurance |
What was it that surprised the manager?
| A．Mr. Briggs sold life insurance only to 95 people. |
| B．Mr. Briggs sold insurance only to people of more than 95. |
| C．Mr. Briggs had ruined the insurance company. |
| D．Mr. Briggs gave people generous conditions. |
Which of the following is true according to the passage?
| A．Mr. Briggs had studied the figures for deaths for several years. |
| B．Mr. Briggs began to look at the figures after he started work. |
| C．A great number of very old people die every year. |
| D．The number of the very old people who died every year is |
small.
Forget hard work and perseverance. Getting ahead is as simple as tidying your desk.
According to a leading expert, having a cluttered environment reflects a cluttered mind, but the act of tidying up can help you be more successful. The advice comes from Jayne Morris, the resident "life coach" for NHS Online, who said it is no good just moving the mess around. In order to clear the mind, unwanted items must be thrown away to free your "inner world", she said.
Ms Morris, who claims to have coached celebrities(名流) to major business figures, said: “Clearing clutter from your desk has the power to transform your business. Why? Because clutter in your outer environment is the physical sign of all the clutter going on inside of you." Clearing clutter has a chain effect across your entire life, including your work. Having an untidy desk covered in clutter could be stopping you achieving the business success you want." She is sure cleaning up will be helpful even though some of history's biggest achievers lived and worked in messy conditions.
Churchill was considered untidy from a boy throughout his life, from his office to his artist's studio, and the lab where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin was famously untidy.
Among the recommendations is that simply tidying a desk at work and an overflowing filing cabinet (陈列柜) will instantly have a positive impact on "your inner world. " Anything that is no longer used should not be put into storage but thrown away completely.
Keeping something in the loft, garage or other part of the house, does not help because it is still connected to the person "by tiny energetic lines", Ms Morris claims.
She said, "The things in your life that are useful to you, that add value to your life, that serve a current purpose are charged with positive energy that refreshes you and enriches your life. But the things that you don't ever use and don't need anymore have the opposite effect on your energy. Things that no longer fit or serve you use up your energy. "The underlined word "cluttered" (in Para.2) is closest in meaning to _____________.
| A．messy | B．brief | C．complex | D．aggressive |
Which of the following statements does Ms Morris agree to?
| A．Changing the position of staff frequently will help to build up a clear mind. |
| B．A tidy office will lead to a success in your business affairs in no time. |
| C．To have a free mind, we need to throw away unneeded items at times. |
| D．You can pack up your things in garage or loft to cheer you up. |
According to Ms Morris, an untidy desk probably means that .
| A．you are quite a failure |
| B．you are in a messy mind |
| C．you are very tired to deal with it |
| D．you have achieved the business success |
Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?
| A．Less untidy, more successful. |
| B．How to improve your inner world. |
| C．Cleaning up makes you less intelligent. |
| D．Being bigger achiever needs more effort. |
Dave Bruno works as an online marketing manager. Several years ago, one weekend Bruno and his family did a major house cleanup and then donated several bags of unneeded items to the local Goodwill store. “After all were done, I looked around and realized that I still had too much stuff”, says Bruno, “It occurred to me that maybe I wanted to lead a simple life but in reality I behaved differently.” That realization prompted the 39-year-old father of three to try an experiment, “The 100Thing Challenge”.
With the goal of breaking free of what he calls a “bad habit of consumerism（消费主义）, Bruno was determined to live for one year with just 100 personal items. He cut down his possessions to 94 items, including a Bible, laptop, guitar, wedding ring, car and clothes. He created some guidelines for the experiment since his wife and daughters did not participate, familyshared and household items did not count as personal items. He also grouped together some basic things such as underwear and socks. Bruno began blogging about his new lifestyle and eventually wrote a book, The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul.
Since completing the experiment, Bruno has continued to live by the motto: reduce, refuse, and rearrange and maintains just 110 personal things. “ Nearly three years of living with a minimal amount of personal possessions, I’m no longer in the habit of consuming for the sake of consumption (消费),” he wrote in his blog last week, “That has freed me up for all sorts of better endeavors (活动) than shopping—like spending time with family and writing a book and planning for business opportunities.”
Bruno’s project has also inspired others to live minimally, many of whom post their own 100 Thing Challenge updates on YouTube. “The reality is that the 100 Thing Challenge is surprisinglyeasy”, says Bruno, “I’m not saying there were no challenges or disappointments. I miss some things, but not that much. Frankly, it’s far easier to live with less stuff than with excessive trash.”What does the underlined sentence mean in Paragraph 1?
| A．Bruno regretted to have an easy life. |
| B．Bruno had a special behavior in reality, |
| C．Bruno and his family led a happy life. |
| D．Bruno would have liked a life with fewer items. |
The things were included in Bruno’s 94 items EXCEPT____________.
| A．socks | B．a Bible | C．cookers | D．a wedding ring |
What is the best title for the passage?
| A．Live with 100 Things |
| B．Defeat 100 Challenges in Life |
| C．Survive by Your Motto |
| D．Consume for Consumption’s Sake |
Love and Friendship
They are both so much related to each other. And both are so dissimilar! What are the differences between friendship and love? Is platonic(柏拉图式的) friendship possible between persons of the opposite sex? _______
What is friendship? Why do we call a person our friend? When do we call someone a very good friend? If we care for a person, if we are always ready to help that person and if we share most of our thoughts with a person, they are our good friends. We can always count upon our good friends in an emergency. We are always sure that our friends will understand why we acted in a certain way. ___ ___ The friendship is so deep and the relationship is so intimate, that most of the things are automatically understood by our friends.
______ In a relationship of deep love, all the sharing that we discussed above is taken for granted. But love transcends(超出) all this. During love, we are attached with a particular person, while in friendship, one may have many friends. A loving relationship makes one so much attached to the other that one gets pained if his/her beloved is hurt! Love also involves a physical element. ____
____ This is a vital difference. Nature gives us love so that the species can go forward. Nature does not give us friendship.
Your heart beats will never increase in anticipation of meeting your friend. ________ You will not feel totally lost, if you don’t meet your friend for a few days. You will not have dreams in your eyes thinking about your friend. But in love, you will do all this and much more. Indeed, there is no comparison between love and friendship.
| A．What about love? |
| B．My answer is “Yes”. |
| C．Let us try and understand. |
| D．Friendship does not have that. |
E.We need not explain anything to our very good friends.
F.You will not lie awake at night thinking about your friend.
G.The physical element may include hand in hand while walking.
For years we have been told that encouraging a child’s self-respect is important to his or her success in life. But child experts are now learning that too much praise can lead to the opposite effect. Praise-aholic kids who expect it at every turn may become teens who seek the same kind of approval from their friends when asked if they want to go in the backseat of the car.
The implication(含义) of saying “You are the prettiest girl in class,” or talking about the goals she scored but not her overall effort, is that you love her only when she looks the best, scores the highest, achieves the most. And this carries over to the classroom.
Social psychologist Carol Dweck, PHD, tested the effects of over-praise on 400 fifth graders while she was at Columbia University. She found that kids praised for “trying hard” did better on tests and were more likely to take on difficult assignments than those praised for being “smart”.
“Praising attributes(品质) or abilities makes a false promise that success will come to you because you have that quality, and it devalues effort, so children are afraid to take on challenges,” says Dweck, now at Stanford University, “They figure they’d better quit while they’re ahead.”The underlined words “Praise-aholic kids” refer to kids who are ______.
| A．tired of being praised | B．worthy of being praised |
| C．very proud of being praised | D．extremely fond of being praised |
The author quoted Dr.Dweck’s words in the last paragraph in order to make the article ______.
| A．better-known | B．better-organized |
| C．more persuasive | D．more interesting |
We can infer from the passage that _______.
| A．praise for efforts should be more encouraged |
| B．praise for results works better than praise for efforts |
| C．praising a child’s achievements benefits his or her success in life |
| D．praising a child’s abilities encourages him or her to take on challenges |
Teachers and parents usually call attention to the pictures when they read storybooks to pre-school children. But a new study suggests that calling attention to the words and letters on the page may lead to better readers.
The two-year study compared children who were read in this way in class with children who were not. Those whose teachers most often discussed the print showed clearly higher skills in reading, spelling and understanding. These results were found one year and even two years later.
Shayne Piasta, an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Ohio State University, was an author of the study. She says most pre-school teachers would find this method manageable and would need only a small change in the way they teach. They already read story-books in class. The only difference would be increased attention to the printed text. “If you get children to pay attention to letters and words, it makes sense that they will do better at word recognition and spelling.” But she says research suggests that very few parents and teachers do this in a systematic way.
More than 300 children aged four and five were observed in classrooms. They came from poor families and were below average in their language skills. For thirty weeks, the children took part in a program called Project STAR--- Sit Together and Read. The project is based at Ohio State. It tests the short-term and long-term results of reading regularly to pre-school children in their classrooms.
There are different ways that adults can talk to children about print. They can point to a letter and discuss it, and even trace the shape with a finger. They can point out a word and discuss the meaning of the print or how the words tell the story. And they can talk about the organization of the print--- for instance, showing how words are written left to right in English.What do we know about the ways pre-school children are usually taught?
| A．More attention is paid to the pictures ,with words and letters being ignored. |
| B．Preference is given to the shape of letters and the organization of the print. |
| C．The focus of the teaching is on bringing them up to be good readers. |
| D．Equal attention is paid to the texts and the pictures. |
What does Shayne Piasta suggest pre-school teachers should do in class?
| A．Teach children how to draw pictures to get an idea of what they mean. |
| B．Change the way they teach and pay more attention to words and letters. |
| C．Adopt different methods according to the students’ difference in reading skills. |
| D．Read storybooks to children rather than explain the meaning of the pictures. |
Which of the following is TRUE about the study on language skills of pre-school children?
| A．Many teachers want to change their way of teaching pre-school children. |
| B．Attention on the pictures has made the children uninterested in reading. |
| C．Project STAR aims to research into the results of reading books to pre-school children in the classroom. |
| D．Teachers are often prevented from taking different approaches to language teaching. |
Which section of a magazine does the passage probably come from?
| A．Fashion. | B．Economy . | C．Entertainment. | D．Education. |
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