I live in Hollywood. You may think people in such an attractive, fun-filled place are happier than others. If so, you have some mistaken ideas about the nature of happiness.
Many intelligent people still equate happiness with fun. The truth is that fun and happiness have little or nothing in common. Fun is what we experience during an act. Happiness is what we experience after an act. It is a deeper, more long-lasting emotion. Going to an amusement park or ball game, watching a movie or television, are fun activities that help us relax, temporarily forget our problems and maybe even laugh. But they do not bring happiness, because their positive effects end when the fun ends.
I have often thought that if Hollywood stars have a role to play, it is to teach us that happiness has nothing to do with fun. These rich, beautiful individuals have constant access to exciting parties, fancy cars, expensive homes, everything that spells “happiness”. But in memoir(回忆录) after memoir, celebrities reveal the unhappiness hidden beneath all their fun: depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, broken marriages, troubled children, and long-time loneliness.
The way people hold on to the belief that a fun-filled, pain-free life equates happiness actually decreases their chances of ever attaining real happiness. If fun and pleasure are equated with happiness, then pain must be equated with unhappiness. But, in fact, the opposite is true: More times than not, things that lead to happiness involve some pain.
As a result, many people avoid the very efforts that are the source of true happiness. They fear the pain inevitably brought by such things as marriage, raising children, professional achievement, religious commitment, charitable work and self-improvement.According to the passage, “fun activities” ____________.
| A．are the things we do before we find happiness |
| B．may help us relax and forget our problems sometimes |
| C．will lead us to the true happiness |
| D．could provide long-last positive effects |
In the author’s opinion, those Hollywood stars ____________.
| A．possess happiness because they are rich and famous |
| B．experience almost all kinds of happy things |
| C．tell us happiness isn’t equal to fun using their own stories |
| D．have to suffer a lot before they become successful |
It is difficult for people to find real happiness because ____________.
| A．they believe happiness is the fun life without pain |
| B．they find pain equals unhappiness |
| C．they fear to lose what they already have in life |
| D．They are afraid all their efforts were in vain |
The main purpose of the text is to ____________.
| A．describe the difference between happiness and fun |
| B．show the true meaning of happiness |
| C．encourage people to pursue fun activities |
| D．advise people to find their real life |
Throughout the history of the arts, the nature of creativity has remained constant to artists. No matter what objects they select, artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change-to find poetry where no one has ever seen or experienced it before.
Landscape(风景) is another unchanging element of art. It can be found from ancient times through the 17th-century Dutch painters to the 19th-century romanticists and impressionists. In the 1970s Alfred Leslie, one of the new American realists, continued this practice. Leslie sought out the same place where Thomas Cole, a romanticist, had produced paintings of the same scene a century and a half before. Unlike Cole who insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature, Leslie paints what he actually sees. In his paintings, there is no particular change in emotion, and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the background. He also takes advantage of the latest developments of color photography(摄影术) to help both the eye and the memory when he improves his painting back in his workroom.
Besides, all art begs the age-old question: What is real? Each generation of artists has shown their understanding of reality in one form or another. The impressionists saw reality in brief emotional effects, the realists in everyday subjects and in forest scenes, and the Cro-Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of the animals in the ancient forests. To sum up, understanding reality is a necessary struggle for artists of all periods.
Over thousands of years the function of the arts has remained relatively constant. Past or present, Eastern or Western, the arts are a basic part of our immediate experience. Many and different are the faces of art, and together they express the basic need and hope of human beings.
46. The underlined word “poetry” most probably means __________.
A. an object for artistic creation B. a collection of poems
C. an unusual quality D. a natural scene
47. Leslie's paintings are extraordinary because _________.
A. they are close in style to works in ancient times
B. they look like works by 19th-century painters
C. they draw attention to common things in life
D. they depend heavily on color photography
48. What is the author's opinion of artistic reality?
A. It will not be found in future works of art.
B. It does not have a long-lasting standard.
C. It is expressed in a fixed artistic form.
D. It is lacking in modern works of art.
49. What does the author suggest about the arts in the last paragraph?
A. They express people's curiosity about the past.
B. They make people interested in everyday experience.
C. They are considered important for variety in form.
D. They are regarded as a mirror of the human situation.
50. Which of the following is the main topic of the passage?
A. History of the arts. B. Basic questions of the arts.
C. New developments in the arts. D. Use of modern technology in the arts.
After the Summer Olympics are over, when all the athletes and viewers have gone home and the television audience has switched off, another group of athletes and fans will arrive at the host city, and another competition will begin. These are the Paralympics, the games for athletes with a disability. But in Beijing in 2008, for the first time, one of the greatest paralympians will not be taking part.
She is a British athlete by the name of Tanni Grey-Thompson. Born with spina bifida （脊椎裂） which left her paralysed（瘫痪的） from the waist down, Tanni used a wheelchair from the age of 7. At first, she was not keen on sport, apart from horse-riding, which gave her a sense of freedom. But in her teens, she started taking sports more seriously. She tried swimming, basketball and tennis. Eventually she found athletics, and never looked back.
Indeed, Tanni's athletic career took off. In 1984, when she was 15, she pulled off a surprise victory in the 100 meters at the Junior National Wheelchair Games.
In 1988, Tanni went to her first Paralympic Games in Seoul. She won bronze in the 400 meters. Even greater success followed at the 1992 Barcelona Paralympics. Tanni won gold in the100, 200, 400 and 800 meters relay, setting two world records in the process. In the same year she achieved the first of her six London Wheelchair Marathon victories.
Tanni's enduring success has been part motivation, part preparation. “The training I do that enables me to be a good sprinter （短跑运动员） enables me to be good at a marathon too. I train 50 weeks of the year and that keep me prepared for whatever distance I want to race... I am still competing at a very high level, but as 1 get older things get harder and 1 want to retire before 1
fall apart."
Indeed Tanni retired finally after the Visa Paralympic World Cup in 2007. Her wish is to coach young athletes for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
In spite of ups and downs, she never takes her fate lying down. In her splendid life, she has won an amazing eleven gold medals, four silvers and one bronze in a series of Paralympics— a top level athletic career covering two decades. She has won the London Wheelchair Marathon six times, more than any other competitor, and she has set over thirty world records.
What advice does she have for young athletes? "Work hard at your studies, and then train, train and train again."
41. Which of the following sports did Tanni like before thirteen?
A. Basketball. B. Swimming. C. Tennis. D. Horse-riding.
42. When did Tanni win her first Olympic gold medal?
A. In 1984. B. In 1988. C. In 1992. D. In 2007.
43. The underlined word "that" in the 5th paragraph refers to____.
A. fifty weeks' training B. being a good sprinter
C. training almost every day D. part motivation and part preparation
44. What's the right order of the events related to Tanni?
a. She works as a coach.
b. She took up athletics.
c. She won four gold medals in Barcelona.
d. She competed in her first Paralympic Games.
e. She achieved a victory in her first London Wheelchair Marathon.
A. b, d, c, e, a B. a, d, b, c, e C. a, d, c, e, b D. b, d, a, e, c
45. What can we learn from Tanni's success?
A. Union is strength. B. Never too late to learn.
C. Well begun is half done. D. No pains, no gains.
IV. Reading(30)
A
Mathematical ability and musical ability may not seem on the surface to be connected, but people who have researched the subject -- and studied the brain—say that they are. Three quarters of the bright but speech-delayed children in the group I studied had a close relative who was an engineer, mathematician or scientist, and four fifths had a close relative who played a musical instrument. The children themselves usually took readily to math and other analytical subjects and to music.
Black, white and Asian children in this group show the same patterns. However, it is clear that blacks have been greatly overrepresented in the development of American popular music and greatly underrepresented in such fields as mathematics, science and engineering.
If the abilities required in analytical fields and in music are so closely related, how can there be this great discrepancy? One reason is that the development of mathematical and other such abilities requires years of formal schooling, while certain musical talents can be developed with little or no formal training, as has happened with a number of well-known black musicians.
It is precisely in those kinds of music where one can acquire great skill without formal training that blacks have excelled popular music rather than classical music, piano rather than violin, blues rather than opera. This is readily understandable, given that most blacks, for most of American history, have not had either the money or the leisure for long years of formal study in music.
Blacks have not merely held their own in American popular music. They have played a large role in the development of jazz, both traditional and modern. A long string of names comes to mind—W.C. Handy, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker…and so on.
None of this presupposes(假设，意味着) any special innate（先天的）ability of blacks in music. On the contrary, it is perfectly consistent with blacks having no more such inborn ability than anyone else, but being limited to being able to express such ability in narrower channels than others who have had the money, the time and the formal education to spread out over a wider range of music, as well as into mathematics, science and engineering.
36. what is the main idea of the first paragraph?
A. Mathematical ability and musical ability are connected.
B. Mathematical ability has more to do with the brain than musical ability.
C. More people are good at music than math.
D. More research should be done into the relationship between mathematical ability and math ability.
37. The word “discrepancy” (Para. 3) most probably means ____.
A. difference B. excellence C. inborn ability D. inability
(38. What can be inferred about opera?
A. It requires formal training.
B. It is often enjoyed by those with strong analytical ability.
C. It is disliked by blacks.
D. It is more difficult to learn than classical music.
39. Which of the following statements is true according to the last paragraph?
A. Blacks have special innate ability in music.
B. Unlike others, blacks do not have innate ability in music.
C. Jazz is one of the narrow channels through which blacks express their ability in music.
D. Those who have money and time choose mathematics over music.
40. which of the following questions does the passage mainly concern?
A. Are musical ability and mathematical ability connected?
B. Why have blacks been greatly over represented in the development of American popular misic?
C. What kinds of music require formal training?
D. What are the contributions made by black musicians?
When the six very best students from different cities in Guangdong Province all together chose universities in Hong Kong; when the very best students of Beijing picked up HK University while giving up the nearby Beijing or Qinghua University; when the highest enrollment(录取) rate of Hong Kong Science and Industry University reached 48:1, it’s the high time to ask where the real education heaven for students in China is.
Years ago, the answer certainly would be “Beijing or Qinghua University”. But now no one could give the exact reaction without hesitation. The only sure thing is that HK universities have gradually showed an unusual attraction to a great many mainland students.
It’s no doubt to call this HK craze (狂热), which is even out of the expectation of those HK universities themselves.
How can HK universities shake the steady foundations of Beijing and Qinghua and attract so many mainland students?
First, Hong Kong universities offer large-amount scholarship, especially for the top students who can receive the sum scholarship as much as 400,000 HK dollars. Since higher education has become a kind of heavy burden of many families, it’s easy to understand why the reaction to the generous offering of HK universities is great.
Second, most HK universities receive professors and students from all over the world and carry out bilingual (双语) education. This kind of excellent language atmosphere is another attraction for mainland students.
Furthermore, university students in Hong Kong have a better chance to study abroad as exchange students.
Can mainland top universities like Beijing or Qinghua University be calm as before when facing the unexpected competition from HK? Will they take relevant measures to win back the top students who once help them set the worldwide reputation? Time will explain it.
The fierce competition brought by HK universities can be a good thing for an entire improvement of education in China. After the awakening and action-taking of mainland universities, they can perform better together with HK universities.
At least, it reminded the mainland universities the tuition fees (学费) are among students’ top concern when they are choosing universities. It’s time to move.What is the passage mainly talking about?
| A．Some thoughts brought by the enrollment of HK universities. |
| B．Higher education in Hong Kong. |
| C．The competition between HK University and Beijing University. |
| D．The fall of mainland universities. |
Top students from mainland apply for HK universities because________.
| A．many students now would love to study abroad to get a better experience |
| B．they concern only about the tuition fees when choosing universities |
| C．HK Universities offer higher scholarship, better environment and more opportunities for their further study |
| D．Beijing University has lost its worldwide reputation |
What is the author’s attitude toward the competition brought by HK universities?
| A．The government should take relevant measures to stop this unfair competition. |
| B．Mainland universities had better lower their tuition fees and win back the top students. |
| C．Universities both in mainland and in HK would get an entire improvement during the competition. |
| D．It may probably cause a complete loss to both sides in the end. |
From the passage we can see HK universities________.
| A．didn’t mean to enroll top students from mainland |
| B．didn’t expect their enrollment of mainland students would be so popular |
| C．have strict enrollment rules and only 1out of 48 students can get the chance to study there |
| D．are proud of their teaching staff and facilities |
The Los Angeles Zoo has many public programs that aim to teach the public about animals and natural protection.
Safari shuttle(旅游电车)
While you’re here, take the Safari shuttle for a quick trip from one end of the Zoo to the other.
All day long, seven days a week (from 10 am to 5 pm), the Safari Shuttle picks up passengers, circles the Zoo, and returns to the main flamingo (火烈鸟) exhibit near the front entrance. You can get on and off the shuttle as often as you like.
Food
Safari Café (at the Zoo entrance) offers Starbucks coffee, fresh-baked cookies, and ice cream. Gorilla Grill is the spot for toasted food, kids’ meals, snacks, and ice cream. La Casita serves a variety of Mexican food and refreshments（甜点）. Silverback’s Cafe offers sandwiches, salads, bread bowls, cold beer, and refreshments.
Hour
The Zoo is open from 10 am to 5 pm every day of the year except Christmas Day. Special summer long hours are until 6 pm. from July 1 to September 7. Please remember, the Zoo starts putting animals in for the night at 4 pm during regular hours, and at 5 pm. during summer hours.
Admission Prices(票价)
Adults (aged 13 and above): $ 9
Seniors (aged 62 and above): $ 6
Children (aged 2 to 12): $ 4
Children (under 2): free
Items Not Allowed on Zoo Grounds
Alcohol, Glass bottles, Pets, Bicycles, Skateboards, and In-line skate.
If you are planning a picnic while visiting the Zoo, please do not bring any glass items or other things that are easy to break. Also for the safety of the animals, no plastic bags are allowed within the Zoo.Which of the following provides kids’ meals?
| A．Safari Café. | B．Gorilla Grill. | C．La Casita. | D．Silverback’s Café. |
People can see all the animals at the Los Angeles Zoo at ______.
| A．11 am. on Christmas Day | B．4:30 pm. on May 5 |
| C．3 pm. on March 5 | D．6 pm. on September 7 |
How much does it cost if a couple with their one-year-old twins visit the Los Angeles Zoo?
| A．$18. | B．$26. | C．$22. | D．$17. |
When visiting the Los Angeles Zoo, people can______.
| A．ride a bike through the Zoo | B．have a picnic on the Zoo grounds |
| C．take food with plastic bags | D．take their pets along |
粤公网安备 44130202000953号