Which comes first, happiness or money? Are richer people happier? And if so, how do people get much richer? A recent study could tell you the answer.
The study looked into thousands of teenagers and found that those who felt better about life as young adults tended to have higher incomes by the time they turned 29. Those who were happiest earned an average of $8,000 more than those who were the most depressed.
The researchers, from University College London and the University of Warwick, say that very gloomy teens, no matter how tall or smart they were, earned 10% less than their peers, while the happier ones earned up to 30% more.
Happier teenagers have an easier time getting through school, college and a job interview, chiefly because they always feel better about life. It may also be true that happier people find it easier to make friends, who are often the key to homework help or networking.
A report in June suggested that professional respect was more important than dollars in terms of workplace happiness. In August scientists announced that they had found the gene for happiness in women, Alas （the same gene doesn’t appear to have the same effect on men）. And in October researchers in the UK and in the US announced that people who eat seven portions of fruit and vegetables a day report being the happiest.
The big question is: if it really is true that happier kids end up being wealthier kids, is it necessary for parents to get their kids to do the homework? The fact is that no homework will make kids happy but surely hurt their grades. Studies do show, after all, that more education leads to better-paid jobs, which may give us a deep thought.
“These findings show that the teenagers’ happiness is important to their future success,” one of the report’s authors writes. “But what is the most important is that we should find a way to help children gain more satisfaction from doing schoolwork.”What conclusion can the researchers draw from the recent study?
| A．Happy teenagers grow up to be wealthier. |
| B．Money can make people become happier. |
| C．Wealth has nothing to do with happiness at all. |
| D．Schoolwork can help teens achieve success. |
The main reason why happier people have more chances to succeed is that ________.
| A．they are easy to communicate with others |
| B．they are good at doing their schoolwork |
| C．they are hopeful and optimistic about their life |
| D．they eat much more fruit and vegetables a day |
The underlined word “gloomy” in Paragraph 3 probably means “________”.
| A．upset | B．glorious | C．happy | D．wealthy |
What can be the best title for the text?
| A．The way to educate kids. | B．The source of happiness. |
| C．How to achieve your goal. | D．The secret of being wealthier. |
Do you like chocolate? Maybe most people do. A box of it can be a great gift. Buy one for a friend and give it as a surprise. See how happy that person gets.
Say you just got a box of chocolate. Which piece do you pick first? A man has studied people’s choices. He says they tell something about the person. Did you choose a round piece? You are a person who likes to party. Did youchoosean ovalshape? You area person who likes to make things. Picking a square shape shows something else. The person is honest and truthful. You can depend on him or her.
What kind of chocolate do you pick? Maybe you like milk chocolate. This shows you have warm feelings about the past. Dark chocolate means something else. A person who chooses it looks toward the future. What about white chocolate? Would you choose it? If so, you may find it hard to make up your mind. Some people like chocolate with nuts. These are people who like to help others.
Do you believe these ideas? Can candy tell all these things? It doesn’t really matter. There is one sure thing about eaters of chocolate. They eat it because they like it.This passage mainly tells us ______.
| A．why people like chocolate |
| B．almost everyone likes chocolate |
| C．about different kinds of chocolate |
| D．different choices may show different characters |
Picking a round shape of chocolate shows that a person ______.
| A．likes singing, dancing and drinking |
| B．likes to do something for others |
| C．is good at making things |
| D．can be depended on |
From this passage we can see that a helpful man may choose chocolate ______.
| A．in oval shape | B．in square shape |
| C．with nuts | D．with coffee |
The last paragraph suggests that the writer ______.
| A．believes all the information about chocolate |
| B．does not believe the information about candy |
| C．is trying to get you to believe false information |
| D．doesn’t think it important whether you believe the ideas |
After 20 years as a full-time wife and mother, I decided to be a school bus driver for I loved kids. After hard practice, by the time school started that year I’d gotten the hang of it. I was happy in my new work. I became a combination of chauffeur, nurse and friend. And if the kids needed it, I’d put on my “Tough Big Sister” act. It was a lot like my previous job---being a mom.
When I think about my years of bus driving, many things crowded in, but mostly, I remember Charlie.
Charlie, eight years old, with blond hair and crystalline gray eyes, began riding my bus in September of my fourth year driving. They all had stories to tell me about their summers. Charlie, though, ignored me. He didn’t even answer when I asked his name.
From that day on, Charlie was a trial. If a fight broke out I didn’t have to turn my head to know who had started it. If someone was throwing spitballs I could guess the culprit’s name. If a girl was crying, chances were Charlie had pulled her hair. No matter how I spoke to him, gently or firmly, he wouldn’t say a word. He’d just stare at me with those big gray eyes of his.
I asked around some, and found out Charlie’s father was dead and he didn’t live with his mother. He deserves my patience, I thought. So I practiced every bit of patience I could muster. To my cheery “Good Morning”, he was silent. When I wished him a happy Halloween, he sneered. Many, many times I asked God how I could reach Charlie. “I’m at my wit’s end.” I’d say. Still I was sure that this child needed to feel some warmth from me. So, when he’d pass by, I’d ruffle his hair or pat him on the arm.
Toward the end of that year, the kids on my bus gave me a small trophy inscribed “To the Best Bus Driver Ever”. I propped it up on the dashboard. On top I hung a small tin heart that a little girl had given me. In red paint she had written, “I love Polly and Polly loves me.”
On the next-to-last day of school I was delayed a few minutes talking to the principal. When I got on the bus I realized that the tin heart was gone. “Does anyone know what happened to the little heart that was up here?” I asked. For once with 39 children, there was silence.
One boy piped up, “Charlie was the first one on the bus. I bet（打赌） he took it.” Other children joined the chorus, “Yeah! Charlie did it! Search him!” I asked Charlie, “Have you seen the heart?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he protested（抗议）. Standing up, he took a few pennies and a small ball out of his pockets. “See, I don’t have it.”
“I bet he does!” insisted the girl who had given me the heart. “Check his pockets.”
Charlie glowered when I asked him to come forward. His gaze burned into mine. I stuck my hand into one pocket. Nothing. I reached into the other pocket. Then I felt it ---the familiar outline of the small tin heart. Charlie stared at me for a long time. There were no tears in those big gray eyes, no plea(乞求) for mercy. He seemed to be waiting for what he’d come to expect from the world. I was about to pull the tin heart out of Charlie’s pocket when I stopped myself. Let him keep it, a voice seemed to whisper.
“It must have fallen off before I got here,” I said to the kids. “I’ll probably find it back at the depot.” Without a word, Charlie returned to his seat. When he got off at his stop, he didn’t so much as glance at me.
That summer Charlie moved away.
Eventually I retired. And there my story as a school bus driver ends, except for one more incident. A dozen years after retirement I was in a department store in Kansas City, when someone said tentatively, “Polly?”
I turned to see a balding（在脱发的） man who was approaching middle age. “Yes?”
His face didn’t look familiar until I noticed his big gray eyes. There was no doubt. It was Charlie.
He told me he was living in Montana and doing well. Then, to my surprise, he hugged me. After he let go, he pulled something from his pocket and held it up for me to see. An old key chain….bent out of shape, the lettering faded. You can probably guess what it was---the little tin heart that said, “I love Polly and Polly loves me.”
“You were the only one who kept trying,” he explained. We hugged again, and went our separate ways. That night I thought over his words. You were the only one who kept trying. Before I fell asleep I thanked the Lord for the reassurance that I’d done a good job and for all the qualifications he’d given me to do it with.From whose point of view is the story told?
| A．a mother’s | B．Polly’s |
| C．Charlie’s | D．Tough Big Sister’s |
From the passage, we learn that Charlie was _______ .
| A．gentle and smart | B．cold and firm |
| C．naughty and lazy | D．tough and lonely |
The sentence “He seemed to be waiting for what he’d come to expect from the world.”
suggests that Charlie __________.
| A．felt ashamed of what he had done |
| B．felt Polly had done wrong to him |
| C．expected to get away with what he had done |
| D．expected to get punished for what he had done |
Charlie kept the tin heart all the time because it reminded him __________.
| A．it was a Christmas gift from Polly |
| B．it once gave him warmth |
| C．someone there cared him |
| D．it was once a shame to him |
What do you think is the best reward to Polly’s love for Charlie?
| A．His doing well in his life. |
| B．People’s appreciation for her kindness. |
| C．His thanks to her love. |
| D．Charlie’s recognition of Polly after many years. |
Which detail from the story best shows Polly’s love for Charlie?
| A．She wished him a happy Halloween. |
| B．She ruffled his hair when he passed her. |
| C．She greeted him with cheery “Good Morning”. |
| D．She lied to the other kids about what happened to the tin heart. |
“OK,”I said to my daughter as she bent over her afternoon bowl of rice. “What’s going on with you and your friend J.?” J. is the leader of a group of third-graders at her camp-- a position Lucy herself occupied the previous summer. Now she’s the one on the outs. and every day at snack time, she tells me all about it, while I offer the unhelpful advice all summer long.
“She’s fond of giving orders, ”Lucy complained. “She’s turning everyone against me. She’s mean. And she’s fat.” “Excuse me,” I said, struggling for calm. “What did you just said?” “She’s fat.” Lucy mumbled(含糊地说).“We’re going upstairs,” I said, my voice cold. “We’re going to discuss this.” And up we went. I’d spent the nine years since her birth getting ready for this day, the day we’d have the conversation about this horrible word. I knew exactly what to say to the girl on the receiving end of the teasing, but in all of my imaginings, it never once occurred to me that my daughter would be the one who used the F word-Fat.
My daughter sat on her bed, and I sat beside her. “How would you feel if someone made fun of you for something that wasn’t your fault?” I began. “She could stop eating so much,” Lucy mumbled, mouthing the simple advice a thousand doctors have given overweight women for years.
“It’s not always that easy,” I said . “Everyone’s different in terms of how they treat food.” Lucy looked at me, waiting for me to go on. I opened my mouth, then closed it. Should I tell her that, in teasing a woman’s weight, she’s joined the long tradition of critics? Should I tell her I didn’t cry when someone posted my picture and commented , “I’m sorry, but aren’t authors who write books marketed to young women supposed to be pretty?”
Does she need to know, now, that life isn’t fair ? I feel her eyes on me, waiting for an answer I don’t have. Words are my tools. Stories are my job. It’s possible she’ll remember what I say forever, and I have no idea what to say.
So I tell her the only thing I can come up with that is absolutely true. I say to my daughter, “I love you, and there is nothing you could ever do to make me not love you. But I’m disappointed in you right now. There are plenty of reasons for not liking someone. What she looks like isn’t one of them. ”
Lucy nods, tears on her cheeks. “I won’t say that again,” she tells me, and I pull her close, pressing my nose against her hair. As we sit there together, I pray for her to be smart and strong. I pray for her to find friends, work she loves, a partner who loves her. And still, always, I pray that she will never struggle as I’ve struggled, that weight will never be her cross to bear. She may not be able to use the word in our home, but I can use in my head. I pray that she will never get fat.
The underlined sentence in Paragraph 1 indicates that Lucy ______.
| A．has turned against her friend J. |
| B．gets along well with her friend J. |
| C．has begun to compete with her friend J. |
| D．often makes fun of her friend J. |
Why does the author want to discuss with Lucy?
| A．Because she decides to tell Lucy a similar story of her own. |
| B．Because she is really shocked at Lucy’s rudeness. |
| C．Because she has prepared the conversation for nine years. |
| D．Because she wants to offer some other helpful advice. |
What does the author want to tell her daughter?
| A．People shouldn’t complain because life is unfair. |
| B．She herself was once laughed at for her appearance. |
| C．People shouldn’t be blamed for their appearance. |
| D．It is not easy to take the doctors’ advice to eat less. |
It can be inferred from the passage that_________.
| A．the author earns a living by writing stories. |
| B．the author is a fat but good-looking woman. |
| C．the author will stop loving her daughter for what she said. |
| D．the author’s daughter agreed with her from the very beginning. |
We can learn from the last paragraph that_________.
| A．Lucy was deeply moved by her mother’s prayer. |
| B．a mother’s prayer will shape her daughter’s attitude towards life |
| C．the author allows her daughter to use the F word in her head |
| D．the author hopes her daughter will never have weight trouble |
The author’s attitude towards her daughter can be best described as _________.
| A．unsatisfied and angry | B．loving but strict |
| C．indifferent but patient | D．satisfied and friendly |
I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity can do strange things to people. It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn't been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don't mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.
Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me--a potential to live, you might call it--which I didn't see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.
It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was mocking me and I was hurt. "I can't use this." I said. "Take it with you," he urged me, "and roll it around." The words stuck in my head. "Roll it around! "By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia's Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.
All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.
We can learn from the beginning of the passage that __________________.
| A．the author lost his sight because of a car crash. |
| B．the disaster strengthened the author's desire to see |
| C．the disaster made the author appreciate what he had. |
| D．the author wouldn't love life if the disaster didn't happen. |
What's the most difficult thing for the author?
| A．Building up assurance that he can find his place in life. |
| B．To find a special work that suits the author. |
| C．Learning to manage his life alone. |
| D．How to adjust himself to reality. |
According to the context, "a chair rocker on the front porch" in paragraph 3 means that the author
| A．was paralyzed and stayed in a rocking chair. |
| B．would sit in a rocking chair and enjoy his life. |
| C．would sit in a chair and stay at home. |
| D．would lose his will to struggle against difficulties. |
According to the passage, the baseball and encouragement offered by the man
| A．inspired the author. |
| B．hurt the author's feeling. |
| C．gave the author a deep impression |
| D．directly led to the invention of ground ball. |
According to the passage, which of the following is CORRECT?
| A．The author set goals for himself but only invited failure most of the time. |
| B．The author suggested not trying something beyond one's ability at the beginning. |
| C．Because of his limitations, the author tried to reach one goal at a time. |
| D．The bitterness of failure prevented the author from trying something out of reach. |
A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading. It is remarkable first for what it contains: the range of news from local crime to international politics, from sports to business to fashion to science, and the range of comment and special features as well, from editorial page to feature articles and interviews to criticism of books, art, theatre, and music. A newspaper is even more remarkable for the way one reads it: never completely, never straight through, but always by jumping from here to there, in and out, glancing at one piece, reading another article all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the next. A good modern newspaper offers a variety to attract many different readers, but far more than any one reader is interested in. What brings this variety together in one place is its topicality(时事性) , its immediate relation to what is happening in your world and your locality now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it mean also that much of what appears in a newspaper has no more than transient value. For all these reasons, no two people really read the same paper: what each person does is to put together, out of the pages of that day’s paper, his own selection and sequence, his own newspaper. For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need but without wasting time, demands skill and self-awareness as you modify and apply the techniques of reading.
A modern newspaper is remarkable for all the following except its ________.
| A．popularity | B．uniform style |
| C．wide coverage | D．speed in reporting news |
According to the passage, the reason why no two people really read the “same” newspaper is that __________.
| A．people have different views about what a good newspaper is |
| B．people are rarely interested in the same kind of news |
| C．people scan for the news they are interested in |
| D．different people prefer different newspapers |
It can be concluded from the passage that newspaper readers _________.
| A．apply reading techniques skillfully |
| B．jump from one newspaper to another |
| C．appreciate the variety of a newspaper |
| D．read a newspaper selectively usually |
A good newspaper offers “a variety” to readers because __________.
| A．it has to cover things that happen in a certain locality |
| B．readers like to read different newspapers |
| C．it tries to serve different readers |
| D．readers are difficult to please |
The best title for this passage would be “__________”.
| A．The Characteristics of a Good Newspaper |
| B．The Variety of a Good Newspaper |
| C．The Importance of Newspaper Topicality |
| D．Some Suggestions on How to Read a Newspaper |
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