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Fannie Cratty wasn’t really my aunt. I only referred to her as “My Aunt Fannie” because the name always made my father laugh and gave my mother cause to look angrily at both of us---at me for being disrespectful of my elder and at my father for encouraging my bad behavior.
As a young woman, my mother had worked in the kitchen of a large Victorian farmhouse owned by Fannie Cratty. During those years my mother helped Aunt Fannie make the best blueberry jam ever tasted by anyone in Glenfield. Aunt Fannie was well known for her jam and for never sharing the recipe with another living soul. Even though my mother knew the recipe by heart, as long as Aunt Fannie was alive (and she lived to be ninety-six!), she never made the jam without Ms. Cratty in our kitchen to direct the process and preserve the secret.
Each August, when blueberry season would roll around, my mother would prepare me for Aunt Fannie’s visit. It was vital that I should be on my best behavior. After all, the woman was old, wealthy, very strict with children. Whenever she was at the house, I didn’t need to be reminded to guard my thoughts and watch my tongue.
One year, after I had been particularly helpful with the jam process, Aunt Fannie gave me a quarter(25分硬币) and then made me promise that I would never spend it. “Hold onto this quarter,” she said, “and someday you will be rich. I still have my very first quarter, given to me by my grandfather.” It had obviously worked for her. So, I kept the 1938-quarter into a small box, put it in my dresser drawer, and waited to become rich.
I now have the blueberry jam recipe and the quarter from Aunt Fannie. In people’s eye Aunt Fannie’s success was due to that secret recipe. But to me, it was just a common recipe. Neither has significantly contributed to my wealth, but I keep them as reminders to hold onto the valuable things in life. Money can make you feel rich for a while, but it is the relationships and the memories of time spent with friends and family that truly leave you wealthy. And that is a fortune that anyone can build.
1.Paragraph 2 implies that my mother________.
A. used to forget the secret blueberry jam recipe
B. wanted to show off her excellent cooking skills
C. was unable to make the jam without Aunt Fannie’s direction
D. tried to convince Aunt Fannie that she would keep the secret
2.According to Paragraph 4, the author believed that Aunt Fanni was rich because________.
A. she had kept her first quarter
B. she had never wasted money
C. she had worked very hard
D. she had kept her promise
3.The author thinks that we can feel wealthy if we________.
A. share our wealth with others
B. have good fortune and money
C. know the secret of a jam recipe
D. own lasting love and friendship
4.Which would be the best title for this passage？
A. An old quarter B. Valuable Things
C. Blueberry Jam Recipe D. Memories of old time
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When Marilynne Robinson published her first novel, Housekeeping, in 1980, she was unknown in the literary world. But an early review in The New York Times ensured that the book would be noticed. “It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions, and achieved a kind of transfiguration（美化）,” wrote Anatole Broyard, with an enthusiasm and amazement that was shared by many critics and readers. The book became a classic, and Robinson was recognized as one of the outstanding American writers of our time. Yet it would be more than twenty years before she wrote another novel.
During the period, Robinson devoted herself to writing nonfiction. Her essays and book reviews appeared in Harper’s and The New York Times Book Review, and in 1989 she published Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, criticizing severely the environmental and public health dangers caused by the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in England—and the political and moral corruption(腐败). In 1998, Robinson published a collection of her critical and theological writings, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, which featured reassessments of such figures as Charles Darwin, John Calvin, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Aside from a single short story—“Connie Bronson,” published in The Paris Review in 1986—it wasn’t until 2004 that she returned to fiction with the novel Gilead, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, Home, came out this fall.
Her novels could be described as celebrations of the human—the characters in them are unforgettable creations. Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her sister Lucille, who are cared for by their eccentric（古怪的）Aunt Sylvie after their mother commits suicide. Robinson writes a lot about how each of the three is changed by their new life together. Gilead is an even more close exploration of personality: the book centres on John Ames, a seventy-seven-year-old pastor(牧师) who is writing an account of his life and his family history to leave to his young son after he dies. Home borrows characters from Gilead but centers on Ames’s friend Reverend Robert Boughton and his troubled son Jack. Robinson returned to the same territory as Gilead because, she said, “after I write a novel or a story, I miss the characters—I feel like losing some close friends.”
1.Robinson’s second novel came out ____.
A. in 1980 B. in 1986 C. in 1998 D. in 2004
2.What is Paragraph 2 mainly about?
A. Robinson’s achievements in fiction.
B. Robinson’s achievements in nonfiction.
C. Robinson’s influence on the literary world.
D. Robinson’s contributions to the environment.
3.According to Paragraph 3, who is John Ames?
A. He is Robinson’s close friend.
B. He is a character in Gilead.
C. He is a figure in The Death of Adam.
D. He is a historian writing family stories.
4.From which section of a newspaper can you read this passage?
A. Career. B. Lifestyle. C. Music. D. Culture.
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A towering South American plant that is believed to kill animals with its spikes(尖刺) and use their rotting bodies as fertilizer is about to bloom(开花) in England. A rare Puya chilensis was planted at a greenhouse in Surrey, a county in the southeast of England about 15 years ago. However, despite its frightening description, the tall, spiked plant is considered a threatened species.
The Royal Horticultural Society has been feeding the plant a diet of liquid fertilizer. “In its natural habitat in the Andes it uses its razor sharp spikes to snare and trap sheep and other animals, which slowly starve to death and rot at the base of the plant, providing it with a bag of fertilizer,” reads a description on the RHS website, which adds that the plant gives off a “gruesome scent.”
But does the plant actually trap and eat sheep? Other sources have simply said it is “believed” that the plant traps small animals with its spikes. After the animals die of starvation, the plant is "believed" to then use their rotting bodies as fertilizer to feed itself.
"I'm really pleased that we've finally persuaded our Puya chilensis into producing flower," horticulturalist Cara Smith said in a press release on the RHS site. Regardless of whether it actually traps sheep, the plant does have sharp spikes that can grow up to 12 feet high and 5 feet wide. However, it’s not all death and danger for this plant. Its flowery blooms reportedly provide nectar(花蜜) for bees and birds.
The Puya chilensis blooms annually in its native land of Chile, but this is the first time it has done so after more than a decade of cultivation efforts from the RHS. "We keep it well fed with liquid fertilizer as feeding it on its natural diet might prove a bit problematic,” Smith said. "It's growing in the dry section of our glasshouse with its deadly spines well out of reach of both children and sheep alike."
1.From the passage we learn that in England the Puya chilensis _____.
A. feeds on man-made liquid fertilizer
B. often kills sheep and other animals
C. has once bloomed 15 years before
D. uses animals' rotting bodies as fertilizer
2.The underlined word “snare” in the second paragraph probably means“_________”.
A. catch B. stop C. fight D. kill
3.We can infer from the passage that _____.
A. it's dangerous to feed the plant
B. it's certain that the plant kills sheep
C. it's difficult for the plant to bloom in England
D. it's rare for the plant to bloom in South American
4.What does the writer mainly tell us?
A. A new plant is discovered in Chile.
B. How a rare plant is fed in England.
C. A rare plant is going to bloom in England.
D. How a plant traps animals in South America.
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Do people ever consider the possibility that, if they’re exposed to increased reports about a social problem, it’s the reporting that has increased rather than the problem? It’s increasingly clear that this is the case with school bullying（欺凌）：Only news reports about it have increased, not the behavior itself. In fact, both bullying and fear of it are down among US middle school students
The rate of students who reported fearing an attack or harm at school at all has dropped dramatically, from nearly 12% in 1995 to less than 4% in 2011. For black and Hispanic students, it’s an even more encouraging shift—from more than 20% of both groups of students worried about being attacked at school to less than 5% in 2011.
The decline in actual physical violence in schools is even more dramatic: It was down 74% between 1992 and 2010, according to the latest US Department of Justice data.
What about cyberbullying? Online harassment increased from 6% in 2000 to 9% in 2005 to 11% in 2010 between, and it’s interesting to note that it increased less between 2005 and ’10 than in the first 5 years tracked. Because social media is very much a reflection of school social life for young people, the peer aggression seen in social media is a lot like the peer aggression seen on school bathroom walls. So once it finds its “dead level,” it will probably decline in the same way verbal and written aggression have.
Besides education and crime prevention at the social level, medicine treatment and better access to mental healthcare also contribute to this downward trend in victimization of self and others.
The rise of social media is what people don’t typically think of as a positive force in society. But Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire says, “These technologies might have prevented crime and bullying by providing more ways of help, more forms of social supervision, and interesting activities that destroy forms of alienation(异化) that lead to crime”.
1.From the first paragraph we learn that __________.
A. school bullying has increased because of increased reports
B. school bullying has decreased because of increased reports
C. the number of reports on school bullying has increased
D. the number of reports on school bullying has decreased
2.The underlined word is closest in meaning to "_________".
A. crime B. aggression C. surfing D. communication
3.The cyberbullying is still increasing probably because ________.
A. it isn't as easy to control as the other school bullying
B. it hasn't been concerned by the governments
C. it isn't part of school social life
D. it hasn't come to its top level
4.Finkelhor believes that social media have a ________ influence on the falling trend of school bullying.
A. positive B. negative C. major D. slight
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The environmental group 350.org has launched a new campaign called Climate Name Change that proposes to revise to how hurricanes are named: call them after policymakers who say that humans are not to blame for global warming.
This will save the Katrinas and Sandys of the world from the injustice of having their names attached to major disaster, the group says. And, as a bonus, it will produce some peculiar weather reports.
“Rick Perry leaves trail of death,” appears under a broadcast titled “Rick Perry: The Tragedy.”
“Michelle Bachman is incredibly dangerous. If you value your life, please seek shelter from Michelle Bachman,” says an official while addressing a news conference.
The campaign is unlikely to influence the World Meteorological Organization, which has since 1954 named Atlantic tropical storms from an official list.
But the campaign’s goal seems less to actually name a hurricane after the speaker of the house, and more to call attention to an issue that this month has reached an alarming level of seriousness. The campaign comes just a month before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its most recent report on the state of global warming and a week after a draft（草稿）of the report was given away to Reuters.
In the draft, scientists concluded with near certainty – about 95 percent sure – that humans are to blame for the worldwide temperature hikes over the last few decades. That was a revision from the 2007 report, which put scientific certainty that human activities were driving global climate change at about 90 percent.
And global warming, the report said, is not slowing down – it, actually, is accelerating. That means that sea levels could balloon upward as much as three feet by the end of the century, if emissions(排放量) continue at their current pace.
Still, as the Washington Post Climate notes, hurricanes are not the best sign of global warming. Though current data suggests that global warming will in the future stir up terrible super storms, there is still not enough evidence to support the idea that climate change strengthens the recent hurricanes that have torn at the US’s eastern coastline.
1.It can be inferred that__________ is one of the policymakers who believe that humans are not to blame for global warming.
A. Katrina B. Rick Perry C. Flossie D. Sandy
2.350.org has launched the campaign with the real purpose of _________________.
A. changing the ways of naming hurricanes
B. introducing the methods of naming hurricanes
C. reminding policymakers to change their attitudes
D. calling attention to the coming report on global warming
3.The draft of the global warming report tells us that _____________.
A. global warming is speeding up at the same rate
B. it is human beings that have caused global warming
C. the new report has a more accurate data than the one in 2007
D. human beings are not the only one to blame for global warming
4.The writer of the passage seems to believe that______________.
A. policymakers should be blamed for the global warming
B. the campaign will cause the change of naming hurricanes
C. global warming has no necessary relation to terrible hurricanes
D. global warming will surely cause terrible super storms in the future
B. intelligent C. modest D. responsible
B. intelligent C. modest D. responsible