Until recently, women in advertisements wore ...

Until recently, women in advertisements wore one of three things — an apron, an attractive dress or a frown. Although that is now changing, many women still feel angry about offending advertisements. “This ad degrades women.” they protested（抗议）.Why does this sort of advertising exist? How can advertisers and ad agencies still produce, sometimes, after months of research, advertising that offends the consumer?

The ASA, the body which deals with complaints about print media, is carrying out research into how women feel about the way they are pictured in advertisements. Its conclusions are likely to be what the advertising industry already knows: although women are often annoyed by the ads, few feel strong enough to complain.

Women are not the only victims of poor and boring stereotypes（老套）— in many TV commercials men are seen either as useless, childish fools who are unable to perform the simplest household tasks, or as inconsiderate fellows, always on the lookout for an escape to the pub. But it is women who seem to suffer more from the industry’s inability to put people into an authentic present-day situation. Yet according to Emma Bennett, director of a London advertising agency, women are not aggressive or extremely angry about those stereotypes and sexist （歧视妇女）advertising. “They just find it annoying or tiresome.”

She says that it is not advertising’s use of the housewife role that bothers women, but the way in which it is handled. “The most important thing is the advertisement’s tone of voice. Women hate being insincerely praised or given desperately down-to-earth common-sense advice.”

In the end, the responsibility for good advertising must be shared between the advertiser, the advertising agency and the consumer. Advertising does not set trends but it reflects them. It is up to the consumer to tell advertisers where they fail, and the process of change will remain slow until people on the receiving end take the business seriously and make their –feelings known.

1.Despite recent changes in attitudes, some advertisements still fail to________.

2.According to the writer, the commonest fault of present-day advertising is to________.

3.Emma Bennett suggests that advertisement ought to________.

4.We can learn from the passage that advertising industry should________.

高二英语阅读理解困难题查看答案及解析

Until recently, women in advertisements wore one of three things — an apron, an attractive dress or a frown. Although that is now changing, many women still feel angry about offending advertisements. “This ad degrades women.” they protested（抗议）.Why does this sort of advertising exist? How can advertisers and ad agencies still produce, sometimes, after months of research, advertising that offends the consumer?

The ASA, the body which deals with complaints about print media, is carrying out research into how women feel about the way they are pictured in advertisements. Its conclusions are likely to be what the advertising industry already knows: although women are often annoyed by the ads, few feel strong enough to complain.

Women are not the only victims of poor and boring stereotypes（老套）— in many TV commercials men are seen either as useless, childish fools who are unable to perform the simplest household tasks, or as inconsiderate fellows, always on the lookout for an escape to the pub. But it is women who seem to suffer more from the industry’s inability to put people into an authentic present-day situation. Yet according to Emma Bennett, director of a London advertising agency, women are not aggressive or extremely angry about those stereotypes and sexist （歧视妇女）advertising. “They just find it annoying or tiresome.”

She says that it is not advertising’s use of the housewife role that bothers women, but the way in which it is handled. “The most important thing is the advertisement’s tone of voice. Women hate being insincerely praised or given desperately down-to-earth common-sense advice.”

In the end, the responsibility for good advertising must be shared between the advertiser, the advertising agency and the consumer. Advertising does not set trends but it reflects them. It is up to the consumer to tell advertisers where they fail, and the process of change will remain slow until people on the receiving end take the business seriously and make their –feelings known.

1.Despite recent changes in attitudes, some advertisements still fail to________.

2.According to the writer, the commonest fault of present-day advertising is to________.

3.Emma Bennett suggests that advertisement ought to________.

4.We can learn from the passage that advertising industry should________.

高二英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

Vingo sat in front of three men and three women. One of the women sat beside him and introduced herself. “We’re going to Florida,” she said brightly. “What some wine?” He smiled and thanked her.

“Are you married”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” She said.

“Well, when I was in prison I wrote to my wife,” he said. “I told her that I was going to be away for a long time, and that if she couldn’t stand it, if the kids kept asking questions, or if it hurt her too much, well, she could forget me. Get a new guy, I said—she’s a wonderful woman. I told her she didn’t have to write to me. And she didn’t. Not for three and a half years.”

“And you’re going home now?”

“Yeah,” he said shyly. “Well, last week, I wrote to her again. We used to live in Brunswick, and there’s an oak tree(橡树) just as you come into town. I told her that if she didn’t have a new guy and if she’d take me back, she should put a yellow handkerchief on the tree, and I ‘d get off and come home. If she didn’t want me, forget it ---no handkerchief, and I’d go on through.”

Now Brunswick was 20 miles, 10 miles, and then five. Then, suddenly, all of the young people were up out of their seats, screaming and shouting and crying, doing small dances of joy—they saw the oak tree covered with yellow handkerchiefs—20 of them, 30 of them, maybe hundreds, a tree that stood like a flag of welcome billowing (飘扬) in the wind.

1.Where did the conservation between Vingo and the woman probably happen?

A. On a bus   B. In a coffee shop.  C. On a plane.   D. In a prison.

2.How long hadn’t Vingo and his wife live together?

A. Only one year. B. About ten years.  C. About seven years  D. Nearly four years

3.When Vingo was in prison, his wife ___________.

A. often wrote to him        B. married another man

C. still loved him as before    D. taught the kids at home

4.According to the young people, the handkerchiefs on the oak tree were ______.

A. flags of honesty  B. flags of happiness  C. a sign of freedom  D. a sign of wisdom

高二英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

Not until recently _______the development of tourist-related activities in the rural areas.

A. had they encouraged　　 B. they had encouraged

C. they encouraged　　 D. did they encourage

高二英语单项填空中等难度题查看答案及解析

A team of UK researchers recently compared the performances of 120 women and 120 men in a computer test involving switching between tasks of counting and shape recognition.

Men and women were equally capable when tasks were handled one at a time. But when the tasks were mixed up, there was a clear difference. According to the paper published in the journal BMC Psychology, both women and men slowed down and made more mistakes as the switching became more rapid. But the men were slower, taking 77 percent longer to answer, whereas women took 69 percent longer.

To make the experiment more relevant to day-to-day life, researchers tried a second test. A group of women and men were given eight minutes to complete a series of everyday tasks, such as finding restaurants on a map, doing simple math problems, answering a phone call, or deciding how they would search for a lost key in a field. Once again, women outperformed men in the test, particularly in the key-searching task.

“It suggests that in a stressed and complex situation women are more able to stop and think about what’s going on in front of them,” researcher Keith Laws of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, told BBC News. “In contrast, men had a slight impulsiveness（冲动）, answering without giving much thought to their responses.”

So where do women get the ability to keep organized under pressure better than men? Researchers believe that it has its roots in evolution. In early human communities, women had to keep an eye on children while cooking meals. Meanwhile, men only needed to focus on hunting.

1.What did the UK researchers find in the first experiment?

A. Men were better at counting and shape recognition than women.

B. Women made more mistakes than men when multitasking.

C. Women were better at switching between tasks than men.

D. Men and women had equal multitasking abilities.

2.Why did the researchers carry out the second test?

A. To compare the results from different age groups.

B. To check the results with more difficult tasks.

C. To make the results more connected to people’s lives.

D. To check the results over a shorter period of time.

3.What is the main purpose of Paragraph 4 and 5?

A. To show how men and women think differently.

B. To give advice on how to multitask.

C. To compare the roles of men and women in human communities.

D. To explain why men and women perform differently.

4.What can we learn from this passage?

A. Men tend to give more thought to their responses when facing complex situations.

B. Every woman is born to be good at multitasking.

C. Men only need to focus on hunting.

D. Evolution leads to women’s outperforming men in multitasking.

高二英语阅读理解困难题查看答案及解析

Until recently, scientists and authors were in absolute disagreement over the point of crying. In King Henry VI, Shakespeare wrote,”…, to weep is to make less the depth of grief”, and the American writer Lemony Snicket said “unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit”.

Charles Darwin, on the other hand, thought that shedding tears (the act of crying) was merely a useless side effect of the way that the muscles around the eye worked. For him, those muscles had to contract（收缩）from time to time so that they didn’t overflow with blood; the expulsion of tears was simply an unintended consequence of that evolved physiological（生理学的）process. He did acknowledge that crying could help young infants attract the attention of their parents, though.

We now know that crying—at least, the sort that adults do—is a complex physiological response to some kind of emotional stimulus. The most noticeable feature is of course the shedding of tears, but it also includes changes in facial expressions and breathing patterns.

From a scientific perspective, crying is different from shedding the kind of tears like when you accidentally rub your eyes after eating spicy foods. Even the tears themselves are different. In 1981, Minnesota psychiatrist William H Frey II discovered that tears flowing due to sad movies had more protein in them than those that flowed in response to some freshly chopped onions.

If you shed tears of laughter when seeing a funny comedy show or you're moved to tears when listening to a bridegroom’s wedding vows to his bride, you may know that emotional tears aren't limited to feelings of deep sadness. While all of us are familiar with the feelings that are associated with crying, whether for joy or sorrow, we know little about why we do it as adults-but there are plenty of ideas.

One idea is that adult crying isn't actually all that different from the sort that babies do, at least when it comes to its social nature. In other words, perhaps weeping is a literal cry for attention, a means of soliciting support and help from our friends when we need it the most. It’s a way of communicating our inner emotional state at a time when we may not be able to express it clearly.

While this may explain some forms of crying, many researchers have found that adults often cry when they’re completely alone. Another possibility is that crying might serve as a means of “secondary appraisal,” helping people to realize just how upset they are, a way of just how upset they are and helping them understand their own feelings.

Another idea is that crying provides relief from stressful situations. The idea is consistent not only with the words of Shakespeare, but also with the words of Roman Poet Ovid, who wrote, “It is some relief to weep; grief is satisfied and carried off by tears.” The Greek Philosopher Aristotle also wrote that crying “cleanses the mind”. In a 1986 study of popular US magazines and newspapers, one psychologist found that 94% of articles about crying suggested that it helped to relieve psychological tension.

Indeed, a 2008 study of nearly 4,300 young adults from 30 countries found that most reported improvements in both their mental and physical well-being after a short period of crying, but not all. Some reported no change after a crying session, and some even said that they felt worse afterwards.

The difference seems to lie in the social context: if a person felt embarrassed about crying in public, for example, they might feel less resolved than if they cried alone or with a friend. The study also found that when people tried to suppress or hide their crying, they ended up feeling less relieved afterwards.

So the notion of having “a good cry” is not without merit. In the end, adults might just cry for the same reason as human infants: to seek help from their friends and family.

1.According to Darwin, shedding tears was ________.

A. the same thing as crying

B. aimed at attracting other’s attention

C. nothing but a physiological process

D. an effective way to get rid of negative emotions

2.What can we learn from the passage about crying?

A. It can benefit people’s eye muscles.

B. It is a response to the stimulus to eyes.

C. It is usually caused by painful emotions.

D. It can cause changes in people's outward features.

3.The underlined word “soliciting” in Paragraph 6 can be best replaced by “________”.

A. refusing　　 B. seeking

C. providing　　 D. receiving

4.Who doesn’t share the same idea with Shakespeare about crying?

A. Lemony Snicket.　　 B. Ovid.

C. Aristotle.　　 D. Charles Darwin.

5.What is the best title of the passage?

A. Why do people cry　　 B. Experiments on crying

C. Different types of crying　　 D. Is having a cry good for us

高二英语阅读理解困难题查看答案及解析

As late as the middle of the 19th century women voting was _____ common. But women in Europe and North America believed that they should have a____ in their government’s leaders.

A.less than, word B.far from, say C.rather than, words D.other than, saying

高二英语单项填空困难题查看答案及解析

In the United States 84 colleges now accept just women. Most of them were established in the 19th century; they were designed to offer women the education they could not receive anywhere else. At that time major universities and colleges accepted only men. In the past 20 years many young women have chosen to study at colleges that accept both men and women. As a result some women’s colleges decided to accept men students too. Others, however, refused to change. Now these schools are popular again

The president of Trinity College in Washington, D. C. said that by the end of the 1980s women began to recognize that studying at the same school with men did not mean women were having an equal chance to learn. The president of Smith College in Massachusetts says a women’s college permits women to choose classes and activities freely. For example, she says that in a women’s college a higher percentage of students studies mathematics than in a college with both men and women.

Educational experts say men students in the United States usually speak in class more than women students do. In a women’s college, women feel free to say what they think. Women’s schools also bring out leadership capabilities in many women. Women are represented everywhere. For example, at a women’s college every governing office is held by a woman. Recent studies reportedly show this leadership continues after college. The studies show that American women who went to women’s colleges are more likely to hold successful jobs later in life.

1.Some women’s colleges decided to accept men students because_______.

A. teaching women is more difficult than teaching men

B. many young women chose to study at colleges with both men and women

C. study with men is more challenged.

D. women and men can have equal chances of competition.

2.From the passage we know that_______.

A. more and more women’s colleges are being established now

B. more and more women like to study in colleges with both men and women

C. there are more women’s colleges than colleges with both men and women in the USA

D. it is better for American women to study in women’s colleges

3.According to this passage, if a woman wants to hold successful jobs, she’d better_______.

A. study in colleges with both men and women

B. study in Trinity College

C. learn from the president of Smith College

D. study in women’s colleges

4.Most of women’s colleges were established_______.

A. to give women the education they could not receive anywhere else.

B. to separate women from men.

C. to offer women special chances for work.

D. to help women have more study opportunities.

高二英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

“The car of tomorrow” runs one of the most famous businesses in advertising. People used to believe that science would promise a future of endless spare time and very cheap electricity. Nowadays the scientists’ predictions are a great deal less optimistic: a world challenged by climate change and decreasing resources.

In fact, “the car of the future” is just a symbol of hope. Carbon emis-Investment in new technology to maximize efficiency (效率) and minimize environmental damage is not only cleaning up the automobile producers’ act but is also setting an example to other industries.

It’s said that most cars of today run at about 15 per cent efficiency, which does highlight the potential (突显潜力) for improvement. Get it right, and we could continue to enjoy the freedom that comes with owning a car, without the worries.

Of course, many advances have already been made. There’s evidence that the buying public is eager to switch to cleaner, greener cars. And with petrol prices increasing there is no doubt that economical, efficient engines are going to be in ever greater demand.

The good news is that we can all drive “the car of tomorrow” today, without having to worry about the purchase cost. By choosing our holiday hire cars wisely we can cut down on our fuel costs and experience an eco-friendly drive whether or not we have already made the commitment back home. What’s more, we are caring for the beautiful places we love to holiday in. Hire a green car and you make a difference to the environment.

Designers will always enjoy catching our imagination with “concept cars” that look more like miniature spaceships than anything you see on the highway. Whether vehicles as radical (激进的) as these creations will eventually become family cars remains to be seen. But, for the moment, there’s no doubt at all what “the car of tomorrow” will be, and it’s here today: something familiar and friendly that does its job with considerably less trouble and much greater efficiency than the car of yesterday.

1.From the text the author wants to 　　　　 .

A. make a comparison　　 B. introduce a new kind of car

C. make an advertisement　　 D. change an old concept

2.One current worry about developing the car industry is that 　　　　 .

A. it provides less money

B. it’s not environmentally friendly

C. the competition is very fierce

D. the economic situation affects it a lot

3.It can be inferred from the fourth paragraph that 　　　　 .

A. fewer cars will be produced in the future

B. cleaner and greener cars are more expensive

C. cleaner and greener cars are in great need

D. no measures have been taken to improve car efficiency

4.What can we learn about “concept cars”？

A. It is doubtful that they will become family cars.

B. They’re considered as a result of imagination.

C. They’re of high efficiency and make less pollution.

D. They look like traditional cars on the highway.

高二英语阅读理解中等难度题查看答案及解析

Agnes Miller was one of the earliest leaders of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States. She was born on a farm in Missouri in 1892. Strangely enough she had a very happy life as a child. She was the only daughter and the youngest child of five. Her parents and her brothers always treated her as their favorite.

In 1896 the family moved to Chicago. Three years later they moved back to St. Louis where Agnes spent the rest of her childhood. She enjoyed her years in school and was an excellent student of mathematics. She also was quite skillful as a painter.

It was when Agnes went off to college that she first learned that women were not treated as equals. She didn’t like being treated unequally but she tried not to notice it. After graduating from college she tried to get a job in her major field—physics. She soon found it was almost impossible for a woman.

Agnes spent a full year looking for a job. Finally she gave up in anger. She began writing letters of anger to various newspapers. An editor in New York liked her ideas very much. He specially liked her style. He asked her to do a series of stories on the difficulties that women had in finding a job. And there she began her great fight for equal rights for women.

1.

Where did Agnes spend her childhood?

A. Missouri.     B. Chicago.     C. New York.     D. St. Louis and Chicago.

2.

At school, Agnes was good at      .

A. physics and painting      B. maths and painting

C. writing and maths         D. physics and writing

3.

What happened in Agnes’s life when she was in college?

A. She learned to accept the fact that men and women were unequal.

B. She learned that it was impossible for a woman to be a scientist.

C. She came to know of the inequality between men and women.

D. She developed her personal way of writing.

高二英语阅读理解简单题查看答案及解析