CHICAGO ---- For working parents and heavily scheduled school kids, family mealtime is out of fashion. But supermarkets are trying to attract families back to the dinner table.
There is a cost if family members have meals apart: research shows that teenagers who don’t eat with their parents face a greater risk of drug and alcohol problems.
“The more often kids have dinner with their parents, the less likely they are to smoke, drink or use drugs,” said Joseph Califano Jr., head of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, which did the research.
Stores are familiar with the idea and will start telling shoppers about the findings and encouraging them to share meals together at home, instead of separately or at restaurants.
The food marketing Institute will give $25,000 to the center and help stores promote the center’s Family Day in September.
Many stores have grab-and-go dinners and recipe cards. Some have kiosks where people can taste a main dish, then pick out side dishes.
“Our members have worked hard to try to have easily prepared food either ready to eat or ready to take home,” said Tim Hammonds, the institute’s president and chief executive.
Los Angeles-based Contessa Premium Foods makes frozen delicious meals, which a family can heat in 10 minutes to 12 minutes. “That’s nearly as fast as a TV dinner,” said president and chief executive John Z. Blazevich, “but is healthier and makes people feel like they actually cooked.”
“The preparation is the hardest part, so we try to combine a variety of tastes and flavours from around the world and make it fast and easy,” he said.
“Eating at home helps keep meals healthy and teaches kids how to eat right. If we can get people back to having family dinners, parents back to being engaged with their kids, it will have a surprising impact,” he said.The reasons why family mealtime is out of fashion are the following EXCEPT __________.
| A．the parents are busy with work |
| B．the children have a little spare time |
| C．the children are not fond of family meal |
| D．it will take much time to cook and eat at home |
The underlined word “cost” in paragraph 2 can be explained as ___________.
| A．gains | B．a sum of money |
| C．advantage | D．something you lose |
According to the passage, stores are trying to attract families back to the dinner table by the following ways EXCEPT ________.
| A．telling the parents the disadvantages of having dinner separately. |
| B．offering various prepared food to make family cooking fast and easy. |
| C．taking part in Family Day activities in September. |
| D．helping housewives prepare their meals at home. |
What is the passage mainly about?
| A．The efforts that are being made to get people back to having family dinners |
| B．The benefits of having family dinners together. |
| C．The changes in American family dinners. |
| D．A research done by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse. |
What would be the best title for the passage?
| A．Family Mealtime is out of Fashion |
| B．Family Day is Promoted in September |
| C．Parents should Cook Meals for Kids |
| D．Supermarkets Urges Families to Dinner Table |
One day, when I was working as a psychologist in England，an adolescent boy showed up in my office. It was David. He kept walking up and down restlessly, his face pale, and his hands shaking slightly. His head teacher had referred him to me. "This boy has lost his family," he wrote. "He is understandably very sad and refuses to talk to others, and I'm very worried about him. Can you help?”
I looked at David and showed him to a chair. How could I help him? There are problems psychology doesn’t have the answer to, and which no words can describe. Sometimes the best thing one can do is to listen openly and sympathetically.
The first two times we met, David didn't say a word. He sat there, only looking up to look at the children's drawings on the wall behind me. I suggested we play a game of chess. He nodded. After that he played chess with me every Wednesday afternoon——in complete silence and without looking at me. It's not easy to cheat in chess, but I admit I made sure David won once or twice.
Usually, he arrived earlier than agreed， took the chess board and pieces from the shelf and began setting them up before I even got a chance to sit down. It seemed as if he enjoyed my company. But why did he never look at me?
"Perhaps he simply needs someone to share his pain with," I thought. "Perhaps he senses that I respect his suffering.”Some months later, when we were playing chess, he looked up at me suddenly.
"Is your turn," he said.
After that day, David started talking. He got friends in school and joined a bicycle club. He wrote to me a few times about his biking with some friends, and about his plan to get into university. Now he had really started to live his own life.
Maybe I gave David something. But I also learned that one——without any words——can reach out to another person. All it takes is a hug, a shoulder to cry on, a friendly touch, and an ear that listens.When he first met the author, David .
| A．felt a little excited |
| B．looked a little nervous |
| C．walked energetically |
| D．showed up with his teacher |
As a psychologist, the author .
| A．was able to describe David's problem |
| B．was skeptical about psychology |
| C．was ready to listen to David |
| D．was sure of handling David's problem |
David enjoyed being with the author because he________.
| A．wanted to ask the author for advice |
| B．bear the author many times in the chess game |
| C．liked the children’s drawings in the office |
| D．need to share sorrow with the author |
What can be inferred about David?
| A．He recovered after months of treatment. |
| B．He liked biking before he lost his family. |
| C．He went into university soon after starting to talk. |
| D．He got friends in school before he met the author. |
What made David change?
| A．His teacher’s help. |
| B．The author’s friendship. |
| C．The author’s silent communication with him. |
| D．His exchange of letters with the author. |
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For more information , please click here.According to the first paragraph, .
| A．most people have learned a foreign language . |
| B．you can find a job easily if you know a foreign language. |
| C．learning a foreign language can improve brain function. |
| D．it is hard to stay in a foreign country if you do not know its language. |
If you can not speak a foreign language in ten days with the approach, you can
| A．ask your money back . | B．learn it again for free. |
| C．change your teacher . | D．ask Dr.Pimsleur for help. |
We can know from the passage that Dr.Pimsleur
| A．is the owner of the Pimsleur language programs . |
| B．is a language educator who studies children’s languages. |
| C．once worked for the FBI and National Security Agency. |
| D．developed a course helping adults learn a new language easily. |
Where can we most probably find the passage ?
| A．From an educational magazine |
| B．On the Internet |
| C．On a poster |
| D．From the latest newspaper. |
The author writes the passage to .
| A．introduce an effective language -learning environment. |
| B．present a language educator’s experiences. |
| C．appeal to potential customers to use the approach. |
| D．call on more adults to learn foreign languages. |
Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck the mass rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums”. More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurrences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)
But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction — a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”
There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold south, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
The point was difficult to miss: nurture, not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice—manner of speech, for example—were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
Twain’s racial was not perfect . One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth--mostly with white men performing in black-face---and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
Was Twain a racist? Asking the questioning the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowes?
| A．Twain was more willing to deal with racism. |
| B．Twain’s attack on racism was much less open. |
| C．Twain’s themes seemed to agree with plots. |
| D．Twain was openly concerned with racism. |
The story of two babies switched mainly indicates that .
| A．slaves were forced to give up their babies to their masters |
| B．slaves babies could pickup slave holders’ way of speaking |
| C．blacks’ social position was shaped by how they were brought up |
| D．blacks were born with certain features of prejudice |
What does the under lined word “they” in Paragraph 7 refer to?
| A．The attacks. |
| B．Slavery and prejudice. |
| C．White men. |
| D．The shows. |
What does the author mainly argue for?
| A．Twain had done more than his contemporary writers to attack racism. |
| B．Twain was an admirable figure comparable to Abraham Lincoln. |
| C．Twain’s works had been banned on unreasonable grounds. |
| D．Twain s works should be read from a historical point of view. |
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www. NewYorkMint. comWhat is stressed in the ad?
| A．The coin is of high quality and worth collecting. |
| B．The coin can be circulated as a currency. |
| C．Limited supplies guarantee a stable price of the coin. |
| D．Demand for the coin is bound to break records. |
If you buy six 2012 U. S. Mint Silver Eagles by post, you should pay at least ____.
| A．$230.7 | B．$233.7 | C．$240.7 | D．$243.7 |
The ad strongly encourages people to purchase the silver coins by ____.
| A．shopping online | B．making a phone call |
| C．lining up in front of the stores | D．writing to the company |
It’s such a happy-looking library, painted yellow, decorated with palm-tree stickers and sheltered from the Florida sun by its own roof. About the size of a microwave oven, it’s pedestrian-friendly, too, waiting for book lovers next to a sidewalk in Palm Beach country Estates, along the northern boundary of Palm Beach Gardens.
It’s a library built with love.
A year ago, shortly after Janey Henriksen saw a Brian Williams report about the Little Free Library organization, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that aims to promote literacy and build a sense of community in a neighborhood by making books freely available, she announced to her family of four, “That’s what we’re going to do for our spring break!”
Son Austin, now a 10th-grader, didn’t see the point of building a library that resembles a mailbox. But Janey insisted, and husband Peter unwillingly got to work. The 51-year-old owner of a ship supply company modified a small wooden house that he’d built years earlier for daughter Abbie’s toy horses, and made a door of glass.
After adding the library’s final touches, the family hung a signboard on the front, instructing users to “take a book, return a book,” and making the Henriksen library, now one of several hundred like it nationwide and among more than 2,500 in the world, the only Little Free Library in Palm Beach County.
They stocked it with 20 or so books they’d already read, a mix of science fiction, reference titles, novels and kids’ favorites. “I told them, keep in mind that you might not see it again,” said Janey, a stay-at-home mom.
Since then, the collection keeps replenishing itself, thanks to ongoing donations from borrowers. The library now gets an average of five visits a day.
The project’s best payoff, says Peter, are the thank-you notes left behind. “We had no idea in the beginning that it would be so popular.” In what way is the library “pedestrian-friendly”?
| A．It owns a yellow roof. |
| B．It stands near a sidewalk. |
| C．It protects book lovers from the sun. |
| D．It uses palm-tree stickers as decorations. |
The library was built __________.
| A．by a ship supply company |
| B．on the basis of toy horses |
| C．like a mailbox |
| D．with glass |
What can we infer about the signboard?
| A．It was made by a user of the library. |
| B．It marked a final touch to the library. |
| C．It aimed at making the library last long. |
| D．It indicated the library was a family property. |
The passage tells us that the users __________.
| A．donate books to the library |
| B．get paid to collect books for the library |
| C．receive thank-you notes for using the library |
| D．visit the library over 5 times on average daily |
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