The days of elderly women doing nothing but cooking huge meals on holidays are gone．Enter the Red Hat Society －a group holding the belief that old ladies should have fun．
“My grandmothers didn’t do anything but keep house and serve everybody．They were programmed to do that,” said Emily Cornette, head of a chapter of the 7-year-old Red Hat Society．
While men have long spent their time fishing and playing golf, women have sometimes seemed to become unnoticed as they age．But the generation now turning 50 is the baby boomers(生育高峰期出生的人), and the same people who refused their parents’ way of being young are now trying a new way of growing old．
If you take into consideration feminism(女权主义), a bit of spare money, and better health for most elderly, the Red Hat Society looks almost inevitable(必然的)．In this society, women over 50 wear red hats and purple(紫色的) clothes, while the women under 50 wear pink hats and light purple clothing．
“The organization took the idea from a poem by Jenny Joseph that begins: “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple．With a red hat which doesn’t go,” said Ellen Cooper, who founded the Red Hat Society in 1998．When the ladies started to wear the red hats, they attracted lots of attention．
“The point of this is that we need a rest from always doing something for someone else,” Cooper saiD．“Women feel so ashamed and sorry when they do something for themselves．” This is why chapters are discouraged from raising money or doing anything useful．“We’re a ladies’ play group．It couldn’t be more simple,” added Cooper’s assistant Joe Heywood．
56．The underlined word “chapter” in paragraph 2 means __________．
A．one branch of an organization B．a written agreement of a club
C．one part of a collection of poems D．a period in a society’s history
57．From the text , we know that the “baby boomers” are a group of people who ．
A．have gradually become more noticeable
B．are worried about getting old too quickly
C．are enjoying a good life with plenty of money to spend
D．tried living a different life from their parents when they were young
58．It could be inferred from the text that members of the Red Hat Society are ．
A．interested in raising money for social work
B．programmers who can plan well for their future
C．believers in equality between men and women
D．good at cooking big meals and taking care of others
59．Who set up the Red Hat Society ?
A．Emily Cornette． B．Ellen Cooper．
C．Jenny Joseph． D．Joe Heywood．
A Festival for the Dead is held once a year in Japan. This festival is a cheerful occasion, for on this day, the dead are said to return to their homes and they are welcomed by the living. As they are expected to be hungry after their long journey, food is laid out for them. Speciallymade lanterns(灯笼) are hung outside each house to help the dead to find their way. All night long, people dance and sing. In the early morning, the food that had been laid out for the dead is thrown into a river or into the sea as it is considered unlucky for anyone living to eat it. In towns that are near the sea, the tiny lanterns which had been hung in the streets the night before, are placed into the water when the festival is over. Thousands of lanterns slowly drift out to sea guiding the dead on their return journey to the other world. This is a moving spectacle(景象，场面), for crowds of people stand on the shore watching the lanterns drifting away until they can be seen no more.The festival is a cheerful one，because________.
| A．people specially make some lanterns |
| B．all night long, people dance and sing |
| C．people make much delicious food |
| D．the dead are said to return to their homes and are welcomed by the living |
Speciallymade lanterns(灯笼) are hung outside each house to________.
| A．help the dead to find their way |
| B．add the cheerful atmosphere |
| C．welcome the dead to go home |
| D．help the dead to find the food |
What happens to the lanterns at the end of the festival?
| A．The lanterns are put away to be used next year. |
| B．They are thrown away. |
| C．They are placed into the water. |
| D．They are hung outside all the way. |
Saturday, October 7th, was a marathon of sad tasks for Anna Politkovskaya. Two weeks earlier, her father, a retired official in the department of foreign affairs, had died of a heart attack as he emerged from the Moscow Metro while on his way to visit Politkovskaya's mother, Raisa Mazepa, in the hospital. She had just been diagnosed(诊断) with cancer and was too weak even to attend her husband's funeral. “Your father will forgive me, because he knows that I have always loved him，” she told Anna and her sister, Elena Kudimova, the day he was buried. A week later, she had an operation and since then Anna and Elena had been taking turns helping her deal with her grief.
Politkovskaya was supposed to spend the day at the hospital, but her twentysixyearold daughter, who was pregnant, had just moved into Politkovskaya's apartment, on Lesnaya Street, while her own place was being prepared for the baby. “Anna had so much on her mind，” Elena Kudimova told me when we met in London, before Christmas. “And she was trying to finish her article.” Politkovskaya was a special reporter for the small newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and, like most of her work, the piece focused on the terror that can be seen all over the southern republic of Chechnya. This time, she had been trying to report repeated cruel acts done by people faithful to the Prime Minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, who are in favour of Russia. In the past seven years, Politkovskaya had written dozens of accounts of life during wartime; many had been collected in her book “A Small Corner of Hell: reports from Chechnya.” Politkovskaya was far more likely to spend time in a hospital than on a battlefield, and her writing bore frequent witness to robbery, and the uncontrolled cruelty of life in a place that few other Russiansand almost no other reporterscared to think about. Politkovskaya's father died of ________.
| A．tiredness | B．a heart disease |
| C．an attack | D．an accident |
From the text we know that Raisa Mazepa ________.
| A．didn't love her husband |
| B．didn't attend her husband's funeral |
| C．was having an operation the day her husband was buried |
| D．was too sad to attend her husband's funeral |
The underlined word “emerged” most likely means ________.
| A．came out | B．went into |
| C．disappeared | D．left for |
How many family members of Anna are mentioned in the passage?
| A．Three. | B．Four. | C．Five. | D．Six. |
For more than two days in September 1974, the people of Honduras shut their windows, locked their doors and covered in their homes. Fifi was outside, and they were frightened.
By the time Fifi had left, 8,000 people were dead, Fifi wasn't a pet dog as the name suggests. It was a hurricane, one of the most destructive natural phenomena in the world.
Why do we give human names to storms and hurricanes?
We didn't always. Two hundred years ago, many hurricanes in the Caribbean were named after the saint's(基督徒的)day on which the storm occurred. Later, storms were known by the name of the city where they came ashore.
Meteorologists (气象学家) then tried naming storms after the latitude (纬度) and longitude (经度) where they occurred.
Finally, in 1953, hurricanes started getting people's names —specifically, female names. Male names were added in 1979.
There are six sets of names for what the experts call “Atlantic tropical cyclones”( 热带风暴)．
Each list is used every six years and consists of 21 names, starting with every letter but Q, U, X, Y ，Z. the names alternate (交替)between male and female.
A storm won't get a name until its winds reach 39 mph or about 62.4 kph, at which point it becomes a tropical storm. At 74 mph or 118.4 kph it's declared a hurricane.
The 126 names on the list are used only for storms that form off the Atlantic coast of the US. There are separate lists for the Pacific.
So what happens if a hurricane should cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific? It's happened before. The storm just gets a new name and sometimes a new sex.
Max Mayfield is the director of the National Hurricane Centre, headquartered in Miami, Florida. He is in charge of picking new names for storms off the Atlantic coast.
He doesn't do it alone, though. His counterparts in two dozen other countries in the Caribbean, Central America and North America vote on what names will replace retired names.From the first paragraph we can find that ________.
| A．Honduras is a country which was destroyed by Fifi |
| B．Honduras is a country which has no mountains |
| C．Honduras is a country which faces the ocean |
| D．Honduras is a country which lies at high latitude |
Which of the following is true according to the passage?
| A．There were no hurricanes two centuries ago. |
| B．The Caribbean is a state of the United States. |
| C．The Caribbean is a place where hurricanes occur often. |
| D．Fifi was formed off the Pacific. |
The names for storms and hurricanes, as this passage shows，________.
| A．are set for use. |
| B．are all from American English |
| C．are difficult to spell |
| D．are easy to fix |
The underlined word “counterparts” in the last paragraph means ________.
| A．citizens holding the same opinion |
| B．people with a similar position or function |
| C．passengers traveling by sea |
| D．assistants working abroad |
Diana Jacobs thought her family had a workable plan to pay for college for her 21yearold twin sons: a combination of savings, income, scholarships, and a modest amount of borrowing. Then her husband lost his job, and the plan fell apart.
“I have two kids in college, and I want to say ‘come home'，but at the same time I want to provide them with a good education，” says Jacobs.
The Jacobs family did work out a solution: They asked and received more aid from the schools, and each son increased his borrowing to the maximum amount through the federal loan (贷款) program. They will each graduate with $20,000 of debt, but at least they will be able to finish school.
With unemployment rising, financial aid administrators expect to hear more families like the Jacobs. More students are applying for aid, and more families expect to need student loans. College administrators are concerned that they will not have enough aid money to go around.
At the same time, tuition(学费)continues to rise. A report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education found that college tuition and fees increased 439% from 1982 to 2007, while average family income rose just 147%. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade.
“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won't have an affordable system of higher education，” says Patrick M. Callan, president of the center. “The middle class families have been financing it through debt. They will send kids to college whatever it takes, even if that means a huge amount of debt.”
Financial aid administrators have been having a hard time as many companies decide that student loans are not profitable enough and have stopped making them. The good news, however, is that federal loans account for about three quarters of student borrowing, and the government says that money will flow uninterrupted. According to Paragraph 1，why did the plan of Jacobs family fail?
| A．The twins wasted too much money. |
| B．The father was out of work. |
| C．Their saving ran out |
| D．The family fell apart. |
How did the Jacobses manage to solve their problem?
| A．They asked their kids to come home. |
| B．They borrowed $20,000 from the school. |
| C．They encouraged their twin sons to do parttime jobs. |
| D．They got help from the school and the federal government. |
Financial aid administrators believe that ________.
| A．more families will face the same problem as the Jacobses |
| B．the government will receive more letters of complaint |
| C．college tuition fees will double soon |
| D．America's unemployment will fall |
．What can we learn about the middle class families from the text?
| A．They blamed the government for the tuition increase. |
| B．Their income remained steady in the last decade. |
| C．They will try their best to send kids to college. |
| D．Their debts will be paid off within 25 years |
The dollar is becoming weaker and weaker. What effects will it have?
Look at the recordhigh price of oil. Even if the same amount of oil is being pumped out of the ground，since it is traded in dollars and the dollar has weakened，the price of oil has increased to make up for the lost value of the dollar，creating a sort of vicious cycle(恶性循环)．
Oilproducing countries don't want to keep all the dollars they are getting for their oil，since it's declining in value，so they exchange their dollars for euros or other currencies. That pushes more dollars back out into currency markets，which in turn pushes down the dollar's value.
One expert told ABC News that Russia used to have 90 percent of its financial reserves in dollars. It now has 45 percent in dollars,45 percent in euros and 10 percent in British pounds.
In the US itself，the news is mixed. It's good，because it makes what we produce here cheaper to sell in foreign markets，and that in turn spurs(刺激) exports of our products around the world. That translates into more manufacturing and more jobs.
But a weak dollar is bad，because it leads to inflation (通货膨胀) in this country. Imports from foreign countries will become more expensive，and in particular，oil will be more expensive. That puts pressure on businesses to increase prices for anything that uses oil or products that come from overseas. One benefit for American shoppers is that China has largely pegged its currency to ours，so that keeps the price of Chinesemade goods low and therefore，keeps a check on inflation.Which of the following would be the best title for this passage?
| A．Why is the dollar losing value? |
| B．What caused the weak dollar? |
| C．What to do with the weak dollar? |
| D．What effects will the weak dollar have? |
With the dollar losing its value，oilproducing countries will do all of the following EXCEPT ________.
| A．raising the price of oil |
| B．raising their production of oil |
| C．exchanging their dollars for other currencies |
| D．decreasing their financial reserves in dollars |
It can be inferred that ________.
| A．the American economy is having a hard time |
| B．Russia is making the situation worse on purpose |
| C．American export businesses would like a stronger dollar |
| D．Chinesemade goods remain as competitive as before in the USA |