My father had always been an alert observer o...

My father had always been an alert observer of human character. Within seconds of meeting someone, he could sum up their strengths and weaknesses. It was always a challenge to see if any of my boyfriends could pass Dad’s test. None did. Dad was always right---they didn’t pass my test either. After Dad died, I wondered how I’d figure it out on my own.

That’s when Jack arrived on the scene. He was different from any other guy I’d dated. He could sit for hours on the piano bench with my mother, discussing some composers. My brother Rick loudly announced that Jack wasn’t a turkey like the other guys I’d brought home. Jack passed my family’s test. But what about Dad’s?

Then came my mother’s birthday. The day he was supposed to drive, I got a call. “Don’t worry,” he said, “but I’ve been in an accident. I’m fine, but I need you to pick me up.”

When I got there, we rushed to a flower shop for something for Mom. “How about gardenias?” Jack said, pointing at a beautiful white corsage(胸花). The florist put the corsage in a box.

The entire ride, Jack was unusually quiet. “Are you all right?” I asked. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he said. “I might be moving.” Moving? Then he added, “Moving in with you.” I nearly put the car on the sidewalk. “What?” I asked. “I think we should get married,” he said. He told me he’d planned his proposal in a fancy restaurant, but after the accident, he decided to do it right away. “Yes,” I whispered. We both sat dumbfounded, tears running down our cheeks. I’d never known such a tender moment. If only Dad were here to give his final approval.

“Oh, let’s just go inside.” Jack laughed. My mother opened the door. “Happy Birthday!” we shouted. Jack handed the box to her. She opened it up. Suddenly, her eyes were filled with tears. “Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked. “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “This is only the second gardenia corsage I’ve ever received. I was given some years ago, long before you kids were born.” “From who?” I asked. “Your father,” Mom said. “He gave me one right before we were engaged.” My eyes locked on Jack’s as I blinked away(眨掉) tears. Dad’s test? I knew Jack had passed.

1.According to the text, we know the writer’s father was __________.

A. interested in observing things around

B. good at judging one’s character

C. strict with her boyfriend

D. fond of challenges

2.What is the main idea of Paragraph 2?

A. Jack knew a lot about piano.

B. Jack was different from any other boy.

C. Jack was getting on well with Mother.

D. Jack got the family’s approval except Dad’s.

3. The underlined word “proposal” in Paragraph 5 means __________.

A. offer of marriage　　　　　 B. wedding ceremony

C. celebration of birthday　 D. piece of advice

高三英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

My father, together with some of his old friends,                there already.

高三英语单项填空中等难度题查看答案及解析

I was ten when my father first sent me flowers. I had been taking ballet lessons for four months, and the school was giving its yearly performance. As a member of the beginners’ chorus group, I was surprised to hear my name called out at the end of the show along with the leading dancers and to find my arms full of red roses. I can still feel myself standing on that stage, seeing my father’s big smiles.

Those roses were the first of many bunches accompanying all the milestones in my life. Getting all those roses was wonderful, but they brought a sense of embarrassment. I enjoyed them, but I also felt they were too much for my small achievements.

Not for my father. He did everything in a big way. Once, when mother told him I needed a new party dress, he brought home a dozen. His behavior often left us without money for other more important things. Sometimes I would be angry with him.

Then came my 16th birthday. It was not a happy occasion. I was fat and had no boyfriend. And my well-meaning father furthered my suffering by giving me a party. As I entered the dining room, there on the table next to my cake was a huge bunch of flowers, bigger than any before.

I wanted to hide. Now everyone would think my father had sent flowers because I had no boyfriend to do it. Sweet 16, and I felt like crying. But my best friend, Jenny, whispered, “Boy, you’re lucky to have a father like that.”

As the years passed, other occasions—birthdays, awards, graduations—were marked with Dad’s flowers. Those flowers symbolized his pride, and my success. As my fortunes grew, my father’s health became worse, but his gifts of flowers continued until he died. I covered his coffin with the largest, reddest roses I could find.

Often during the dozen years since, I felt an urge to buy a big bunch to fill the living room, but I never did. I knew it would not be the same.

Then one birthday, the doorbell rang. I was feeling blue because I was alone. My husband and my two daughters were away. My 10-year-old son, Tommy, had run out earlier with a “see you later”. So I was surprised to see Tommy at the door. “Forgot my key,” he said. “Forgot your birthday too.” He pulled a bunch of roses from behind his back.

“Oh, Tommy,” I cried. “I love flowers!”

1.The writer felt embarrassed getting her first roses because 　　　　 .

A.she wasn’t a member of leading dancers.

B.she thought her success wasn’t big enough.

C.she regarded the flowers as a milestone in her life.

D.she found herself standing on the center of the stage.

2.Which of the following statements is true according to the passage?

A.The father made the writer happy by giving her a party.

B.The father was proud of the writer in her growth stages.

C.The father didn’t leave the family money for important things.

D.The father bought the writer flowers when she got angry with him.

3.Tommy came back again, mainly to 　　　　 .

A.take back his keys. B.show his love for flowers.

C.encourage his mother. D.bring his mother birthday gift.

4.Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?

A.Love in Bloom. B.Father and Me.

C.Pleasure and Embarrassment. D.Father’s Flowers.

高三英语阅读理解简单题查看答案及解析

The tornado came without any sign—the sky was blue and the sun had been out. The first alert my husband, Jimmy, 67, and I, 65, got came around 9 p.m., from some scrolling text on the TV Jimmy was watching. He ran upstairs to find me in our third-floor bedroom, and we changed the channel to our local Pensacola, Florida, station.

No sooner had we found coverage of the tornado than it was on top of us. The bones of the house shook, and the power went out. Pink insulation（绝缘材料） flew into the room from a trapdoor to the attic, and the wind began to roar through the house. We had three flights of steps to navigate to get to the relative safety of the first floor. Because the closet down there is wedged （塞进） underneath a brick staircase, it seemed like the sturdiest(坚固的) place in our town house to wait things out.

I didn’t know how or if we would make it down the steps. It felt as if there were no floor underneath me as the wind lifted me off my feet. I gripped the banister(楼梯扶手) and tried to move forward, but this intense pressure held me in place. In those seconds of stillness, I could hear everything around me rattling.

As we reached the last flight of steps, our front door blew out. Shards of glass that looked like broken ice flew everywhere. Suddenly, a three-foot-long tree branch whipped through the doorframe. It flew over our heads, missing us by inches. Had we been one step up, it would have impaled us. The back wall of the house followed suit and tore off into the darkness outside.

Instantly I reached the closet, Jimmy pushed me down to the closet floor, but he couldn’t get inside himself because of the wind. I gripped Jimmy’s arm as the tornado sucked the door open and tried to bring Jimmy with it. My knees and scalp were full of glass, but in that moment, I felt no pain. If I had let go, Jimmy would have flown right out and into the bay. “Hold on! Hold on!” he yelled. But there was nothing in this closet to hold on to.

All of a sudden, Jimmy lifted off his feet like people in tornadoes do in the movies. I thought he was gone. And then everything stopped. He landed on his feet. In those first quiet moments, I couldn’t believe it was over. Jimmy said he’d go outside to check. “No,” I said. “Don’t leave me.”

Our neighbor says the storm lasted four minutes. In that time, four of the twelve town houses in our unit were completely destroyed. Of the houses left standing, ours suffered the most damage. Amazingly, none of us were severely injured.

1.Paragraph 2—4 mainly tell us______.

A. the tornado was on top of us

B. the tornado caused great damage

C. the coverage of the tornado became a reality

D. the tornado was so strong that it lifted the author off her feet

2.The underlined words “this intense pressure” in Paragraph 3 refer to______.

A. the author’s nervousness about the tornado

B. the force from the tornado on the author

C. the stress the author felt from her life

D. the pressure the banister gave the author

3.From the passage we can know that ______.

A. Neither the author nor her husband was injured.

B. the author’s house was completely destroyed.

C. they were aware of the tornado before it came.

D. it became dark outside when the tornado hit the town

4.The author wrote the passage to _______.

A. share with us her experience of surviving a tornado

B. warn us of the danger caused by tornados

C. show us how to fight against a tornado

D. tell us tornados are dangerous and how to protect us from them

高三英语阅读理解困难题查看答案及解析

(2013·安徽名校联盟模拟)What made my father satisfied was　　over 50% of the students in his class had been admitted to key universities.

A. because                B. that

C. what                D. why

高三英语单项填空中等难度题查看答案及解析

Singing had always been an important part of Gloria Estefan’s life. “Since I was three years old, I sang. I sang everything,” Gloria said. “Cubans,” she added, “are a musical people”.

Gloria was born in Cuba in 1957. Her family left the country just before Fidel Castro came to power. In Miami, where the family settled, many people did not accept Cuban immigrants. In first grade, she spoke little English, but she worked hard to learn the language. Six months after she entered school, she won an award for reading in English!

When Gloria was ten, her father returned from the Vietnam War. Soon, the family realized he wasn’t well. They soon found out that he was badly ill. Her mother went back to teaching at school to support the family. Gloria cared for her father and her younger sister.

She still made the honor roll, and she still had her music, but Gloria was lonely. However, when the band leader Emilio Estefan came to speak at her high school, Gloria sang for him. He asked her to join his band. It was the beginning of the Miami Sound Machine.

Within a few months, the Miami Sound Machine was the top band in Miami. In 1978 Gloria and Emilio married.

At first, the Miami Sound Machine was known only in Miami. Then the band signed with CBS Records. Estefan and his band became stars.

Since then, the Miami Sound Machine has sold millions of records. Gloria has done more than just singing when Hurricane Andrew hit central Florida in 1992. She used only two weeks to organize an all-star concert that raised $2 million for the people who suffered in the hurricane. “We needed a party after that disaster,” she said.

Gloria said, “You have to stay true to the music you really love to do. There will always be people who will tell you, ‘that won’t work.’ You’ve got to be firm in spite of difficulties. Stick to it—that’s the main thing.”

1.Gloria’s father was ill ________.

A. when they settled down in Miami.

B. before they left their home country

C. after he returned from Vietnam War

D. as soon as she finished high school

2.According to the passage, probably Gloria did the following except ________.

A. organizing an all-star concert for Hurricane victims

B. winning an award for reading in English

C. teaching at school to support the family

D. taking care of her father and sister

3.The underlined word “disaster” in this passage refers to ________.

A. the concert          B. the celebration     C. the victims        D. the hurricane

4.This passage mainly tells about Gloria Estefan’s ________.

A. life story   B. happy marriage   C. music style    D. Cuban background

高三英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

Singing had always been an important part of Gloria Estefan’s life. “ Since I was three years old, I sang. I sang everything,” Gloria said. “Gubans,” she added, “are a musical people.”

Gloria was born in Cuba in 1957. Her family left the country just before Fidel Castro came to power. In Miami, where the family settled, many people did not accept Cuban immigrants. In first grade, she spoke little English, but she worked hard to learn the language. Six months after she entered school, she won an award for reading in English!

When Gloria was ten , her father returned from the Vietnam War. Soon, the family realized he wasn’t well. They soon found out that he was badly ill. Her mother went back to teaching at school to support the family. Gloria cared for her father and her younger sister.

She still made the honor roll, and she still had her music, but Gloria was lonely. However, when the band leader Emilio Estefan came to speak at her high school, Gloria sang for him. He asked her to join his band. It was the beginning of the Miami Sound Machine. Within a few months, the Miami Sound Machine was the top band in Miami. In 1978, Gloria and Emilio married.

At first, the Miami Sound Machine was known only in Miami. Then the band signed with CBS Records. Estefan and his band became stars.

Since then, the Miami Sound Machine has sold millions of records. Estefan has done more than just singing when Hurricane Andrew hit central Florida in 1992. She used only two weeks to organize an all-star concert that raised $ 2 million for the people who suffered in the hurricane. “We needed a party after that disaster,” she said.

Estefan said, “You have to stay true to the music you really love to do. There will always be people who will tell you, ‘that won’t work.’ You’ve got to be firm in spite of difficulties. Stick to it——that’s the main thing.”

1.Estefan’s father was ill ______.

2.According to the passage, probably Estefan did the following except________.

3.The underlined word “disaster” in this passage refers to _______.

4.This passage mainly tells about Estefan’s ______.

高三英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

My mom is an environmentalist. We've always composted (制堆肥） and she's always had some sort of garden. She also never threw anything away because she could see the second __ in it.

I grew into a __ lifestyle. And I started __ my carbon footprint and consumption.

I decided to __ my car for one month in May of 2017. If I needed a car, I was going to borrow someone's to prove that I had the community to __ this decision. I only ended up __ a car once, and I realized it didn't make sense to own a car, __ it and pay for gas. So in September, I fully __ and sold my car.

I also fly a lot for work, and on my __ from the travel agency, it will include how many tons of __ you're emitting (排放） from just your single __, which is like a punch in the gut.

As a result, it has become a __ for me to offset (抵消） my carbon emissions. I __ my carbon emissions, and go onto carbon footprint. com and purchase an offset in the __ of a donation. If we're going to __ the environment this much, we have to be doing something that's going to offset the carbon __ until there's a carbon tax, which I truly hope is __ we will go next.

It’s also really important to talk about what we could see the __ as, because it gets so dark so fast when people talk about __ change.

I don't know what the __ is of me not having a car, but I hope it's something positive that I can't necessarily see.

1.A.Time B.life C.hand D.way

2.A.different B.healthy C.modern D.similar

3.A.Assessing B.suspecting C.obtaining D.ignoring

4.A.blow up B.speed up C.give up D.break up

5.A.oppose B.support C.announce D.approve

6.A.borrowing B.possessing C.purchasing D.renting

7.A.repair B.wash C.park D.finance

8.A.understood B.quit C.recovered D.agreed

9.A.list B.poster C.trip D.ticket

10.A.smell B.heat C.carbon D.sweat

11.A.seat B.plane C.car D.garden

12.A.pain B.habit C.burden D.reward

13.A.increase B.reduce C.control D.calculate

14.A.form B.name C.course D.middle

15.A.provide B.create C.pollute D.preserve

16.A.in vain B.in return C.in force D.in advance

17.A.when B.why C.how D.where

18.A.future B.globe C.environment D.tax

19.A.cultural B.economic C.climate D.population

20.A.intention B.motivation C.drawback D.effect

高三英语完形填空中等难度题查看答案及解析

I’ve always been an optimist and I suppose that is rooted in my belief that the power of creativity and intelligence can make the world a better place.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved learning new things and solving problems. So when I sat down at a computer for the first time in seventh grade, I was hooked. It was a clunky old Teletype machine and it could barely do anything compared to the computers we have today. But it changed my life.

When my friend Paul Allen and I started Microsoft 30 years ago, we had a vision of “a computer on every desk and in every home,” which probably sounded a little too optimistic at a time when most computers were the size of refrigerators. But we believed that personal computers would change the world. And they have.

And after 30 years, I’m still as inspired by computers as I was back in seventh grade.

I believe that computers are the most incredible tool we can use to feed our curiosity and inventiveness—to help us solve problems that even the smartest people couldn’t solve on their own.

Computers have transformed how we learn, giving kids everywhere a window into all of the world’s knowledge. They’re helping us build communities around the things we care about and to stay close to the people who are important to us, no matter where they are.

Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it “tap-dancing to work.” My job at Microsoft is as challenging as ever, but what makes me “tap-dance to work” is when we show people something new, like a computer that can recognize your handwriting or your speech, or one that can store a lifetime’s worth of photos, and they say, “I didn’t know you could do that with a PC!”

But for all the cool things that a person can do with a PC, there are lots of other ways we can put our creativity and intelligence to work to improve our world. There are still far too many people in the world whose most basic needs go unmet. Every year, for example, millions of people die from diseases that are easy to prevent or treat in the developed world.

I believe that my own good fortune brings with it a responsibility to give back to the world. My wife, Melinda, and I have committed to improving health and education in a way that can help as many people as possible.

As a father, I believe that the death of a child in Africa is no less poignant or tragic than the death of a child anywhere else. And that it doesn’t take much to make an immense difference in these children’s lives.

I’m still very much an optimist, and I believe that progress on even the world’s toughest problems is possible—and it’s happening every day. We’re seeing new drugs for deadly diseases, new diagnostic tools, and new attention paid to the health problems in the developing world.

I’m excited by the possibilities I see for medicine, for education and, of course, for technology. And I believe that through our natural inventiveness, creativity and willingness to solve tough problems, we’re going to make some amazing achievements in all these areas in my lifetime.

Fueling our creativity

高三英语任务型阅读困难题查看答案及解析

Space exploration has always been the province of ________：The human imagination readily soars where human ingenuity (创造力）struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries ________the first manned rockets started to fly.

In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the ________'s end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous ________ speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had yielded concrete results and________American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up ________each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely pragmatic (讲求实用的）and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite. It is figuratively and literally otherworldly in its ________.

When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised space shuttle program has just come to an end, with no ________. The perpetual argument is that ________ are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Amid the current concerns about the federal deficit, reaching toward the stars seems a dispensable luxury—________ saving one-thousandth of a single year’s budget would solve our problems.

But human ingenuity struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic probes that will get the most bang from a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans,________out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are plotting a bottom-up assault on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could lie within ________ of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go mainstream.

The space dreamers end up benefiting all of us—-not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the spin-off _______ they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed off each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans can ________what were once considered inherent limitations. Today we face seeming challenges in energy, the environment, health care. Tomorrow we will transcend these as well, and the dreamers will deserve a lot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is ________greatness, the more we will actually achieve it.

1.A.dreamers B.explorers C.astronomers D.novelists

2.A.after B.before C.until D.while

3.A.year B.quarter C.century D.decade

4.A.inspiring B.public C.dream D.freedom

5.A.attacked B.industrialized C.transformed D.accessed

6.A.in conflict with B.in line with C.in common with D.keeping pace with

7.A.aims B.influence C.concerns D.terms

8.A.ancestor B.successor C.forefather D.advocate

9.A.situations B.securities C.funds D.schedules

10.A.just like B.on condition that C.as if D.so that

11.A.making B.figuring C.sweeping D.mapping

12.A.reach B.range C.control D.knowledge

13.A.productions B.chips C.technologies D.substitutes

14.A.go beyond B.go through C.go after D.go over

15.A.In ignorance of B.capable of C.proud of D.in favor of

高三英语完形填空困难题查看答案及解析