Are you nervous about climbing because you think it's too dangerous? Do you feel you're not fit enough to climb? Do you know how to start climbing?
Let's consider the idea that climbing is dangerous．Being afraid is natural, but if you use suitable ropes and other climbing equipments you will feel completely safe．Climbers are usually very careful because they know what they are doing is dangerous．Accidents happen, but when they do, they tend to attract a lot of publicity．As a result, people think there are many more accidents than there are in reality．
You cannot expect to start climbing straight away．Climbing is a challenge and challenges take time．It is necessary first of all that you achieve a good level of fitness．Begin as soon as you become interested in climbing ?go to the gym, go swimming, take up jogging and continue to do so throughout your training period．
Discover as much as you can about climbing．Visit the library and find book, especially for beginners or buy climbing magazines and look for articles which describe your situation．Look up information on the Internet．Find out about equipment, methods and places to go．
Next, take a course on a climbing wall．There are plenty of climbing walls all over the country which have trained and qualified people as instructors．Call your local leisure centre to find out if there is one in your area. These training sessions are a quick way to get experience and you are likely to meet other beginners. After this, you can do an outside course of join a club where you can meet climbers of all abilities and eventually join in group-climbing events.
At first you may not understand the importance of a good training period, but after you have completed your first climb and you are standing safely at the top of a rock feeling thrilled, then you will know it was the right thing to do.
62．The article is written by .
A．a doctor B．an experienced climber
C．a beginner D．a fitne3ss instruetor
63．The writer thinks a new climber should .
A．begin by becoming fit
B．have the courage to meet the challenges
C．be aware of the causes of the accidents
D．do enough sports to get interested in climbing
64．By climbing walls you can .
A．join a club y ou like
B．gain contorlled experience
C．become qualified instructors
D．take part in group-climbing events
65．The underlined word “it” in the last paragraph probably means .
A．the climb B．the training C．the equipment D．the achievenment
James Cleveland Owens was the son of a farmer and the grandson of black slaves. His family moved to Cleveland when he was 9. There, a school teacher asked the youth his name.
“J.C.”, he replied.
She thought he had said “Jesse”, and he had a new name.
Owens ran his first race at age 13. After high school, he went to Ohio State University. He had to work part time so as to pay for his education. As a second-year student, in the Big Ten games in 1935, he set even more records than he would in the Olympic Games a year later.
A week before the Big Ten meet, Owens accidentally fell down a flight of stairs. His back hurt so much that he could not exercise all week, and he had to be helped in and out of the car that drove him to the meet. He refused to listen to the suggestions that he give up and said he would try, event by event. He did try, and the results are in the record book.
The stage was set for Owens' victory at the Olympic Games in Berlin the next year, and his success would come to be regarded as not only athletic (体育的) but also political. Hitler did not congratulate any of the African-American winners.
“It was all right with me,” he said years later. “I didn't go to Berlin to shake hands with him, anyway.”
Having returned from Berlin, he received no telephone call from the president of his own country, either. In fact, he was not honored by the United States until 1976, four years before his death.
Owens' Olympic victories made little difference to him. He earned his living by looking after a school playground, and accepted money to race against cars, trucks, motorcycles, and dogs.
“Sure, it bothered(烦扰) me,” he said later. “But at least it was an honest living. I had to eat.”
In time, however, his gold medals changed his life. “They have kept me alive over the years,” he once said. “Time has stood still for me. That golden moment dies hard.”In the Big Ten meet, Owens __________.
| A．hurt himself in the back |
| B．succeeded in setting many records |
| C．tried every sports event but failed |
| D．had to give up some events |
We can infer from the text that Owens was treated unfairly in the US at that time because __________.
| A．he was not of the right race |
| B．he was the son of a poor farmer |
| C．he didn't shake hands with Hitler |
| D．he didn't talk to the US president on the phone |
When Owens says “They have kept me alive over the years,” he means that the medals __________.
| A．have been changed for money to help him live on |
| B．have made him famous in the US |
| C．have encouraged him to overcome difficulties in life |
| D．have kept him busy with all kinds of jobs |
Which of the following is a suitable title for the text?
| A．How to Be a Successful Athlete? |
| B．Golden Moment—a Life-time Struggle |
| C．Making a Living as a Sportsman |
| D．Jesse Owens, a Great American Athlete |
If you ask people to name the one person who had the greatest effect on the English language, you will get answers like “Shakespeare,” “Samuel Johnson,” and “Webster,” but none of these men had any effect at all compared to a man who didn’t even speak English—William the Conqueror(征服者).
Before 1066, in the land we now call Great Britain lived people belonging to two major language groups. In the west-central region lived the Welsh, who spoke a Celtic language, and in the north lived the Scots, whose language, though not the same as Welsh, was also Celtic. In the rest of the country lived the Saxons, actually a mixture of Anglos, Saxons, and other Germanic and Nordic peoples, who spoke what we now call Anglo-Saxon (or Old English), a Germanic language. If this state of affairs had lasted, English today would be close to German.
But this state of affairs did not last. In l066 the Normans led by William defeated the Saxons and began their rule over England. For about a century, French became the official language of England while Old English became the language of peasants. As a result, English words of politics and the law come from French rather than German. In some cases, modern English even shows a distinction (区别) between upper-class French and lower-class Anglo-Saxon in its words. We even have different words for some foods, meat in particular, depending on whether it is still out in the fields or at home ready to be cooked, which shows the fact that the Saxon peasants were doing the farming, while the upper-class Normans were doing most of the eating.
When Americans visit Europe for the first time, they usually find Germany more "foreign" than France because the German they see on signs and advertisements seems much more different from English than French does. Few realize that the English language is actually Germanic in its beginning and that the French influences are all the result of one man's ambition（雄心）.The two major languages spoken in what is now called Great Britain before l066 were_.
| A．Welsh and Scottish! | B．Nordic and Germanic |
| C．Celtic and Old English. | D．Anglo-Saxon and Germanic |
Which of the following groups of words are, by inference(根据推断), rooted in French?
| A．president, lawyer, beef | B．president, bread, water |
| C．bread, field, sheep | D．folk, field, cow |
Why does France appear less foreign than Germany to Americans on their first visit to Europe?
| A．Most advertisements in France appear in English. |
| B．They know little of the history of the English language. |
| C．Many French words are similar to English ones. |
| D．They know French better than German. |
What is the subject discussed in the text?
| A．The history of Great Britain. |
| B．The similarity between English and French. |
| C．The rule of England by William the Conqueror. |
| D．The French influences on the English language |
Children have their own rules in playing games. They seldom need a referee(裁判) and rarely trouble to keep scores. They don’t care much about who wins or loses, and it doesn’t seem to worry them if the game is not finished. Yet, they like games that depend a lot on luck, so that their personal abilities cannot be directly compared. They also enjoy games that move in stages, in which each stage, the choosing of leaders, the picking-up of sides, or the determining of which side shall start, is almost a game in itself.
Grown-ups can hardly find children’s games exciting, and they often feel puzzled（迷惑的）at why their kids play such simple games again and again. However, it is found that a child plays games for very important reasons. He can be a good player without having to think whether he is a popular person, and he can find himself being a useful partner to someone of whom he is ordinarily afraid. He becomes a leader when it comes to his turn. He can be confident, too, in particular games, that it is his place to give orders, to pretend to be dead, to throw a ball actually at someone, or to kiss someone he has caught.
It appears to us that when children play a game they imagine a situation under their control. Everyone knows the rules, and more importantly, everyone plays according to the rules. Those rules may be childish, but they make sure that every child has a chance to win. What is true about children when they play games?
| A．They can stop playing any time they like. |
| B．They can test their personal abilities. |
| C．They want to pick a better team. |
| D．They don’t need rules. |
To become a leader in a game the child has to ________.
| A．play well |
| B．wait for his turn |
| C．be confident in himself |
| D．be popular among his playmates |
Why does a child like playing games?
| A．Because he can be someone other than himself. |
| B．Because he can become popular among friends. |
| C．Because he finds he is always lucky in games. |
| D．Because he likes the place where he plays a game. |
The writer believes that _____.
| A．children should make better rules for their games. |
| B．children should invite grown-ups to play with them. |
| C．children’s games can do them a lot of good. |
| D．children play games without reasons. |
As motorways become more and more blocked up with traffic, a new generation on flying cars will be needed to ferry people along skyways. That is the conclusion of engineers from the US space agency and aeronautical firms, who envision future commuters traveling by “skycar”.
These could look much like the concept skycar shown in the picture, designed by Boeing research and development. However, such vehicles could be some 25 years from appearing on the market. Efforts to build flying vehicles in the past have not been very successful. Such vehicles would not only be expensive and require the skills of a trained pilot to fly, but there are significant engineering challenges involved in developing them. “When you try to combine them you get the worst of both worlds: a very heavy, slow, expensive vehicle that’s hard to use,” said Mark Moore, head of the personal air vehicle(PAV) division of the vehicle systems program at Nasa’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, US. But Boeing is also considering how to police the airways and prevent total pandemonium(吵杂狂乱的喧闹)－if thousands of flying cars enter the skies.
“The neat, gee-whiz part is thinking about what the vehicle itself would look like,” said Dick Paul, a vice president with Phantom Works, Boeing’s research and development arm. “But we’re trying to think through all the consequences of what it would take to deploy(散开) a fleet of these.”
Past proposals to solve this problem have included artificial intelligence systems to prevent collisions between air traffic. Nasa is working on flying vehicles with the initial goal of transforming small plane travel. Small planes are generally costly, loud, and require months of training and lots of money to operate, making flying to work impractical for most people. But within five years, Nasa researchers hope to develop technology for a small plane that can fly out of regional airports, costs less than $100,000(£55,725), is as quiet as a motorcycle and as simple to operate as a car.
Although it would not have any road-driving capabilities, it would bring this form of travel within the grasp of a wider section of people. The new technology would automate many of the pilot’s functions. This Small Aircraft Transportation System(Sats) would divert pressure away from the “hub-and-spoke(中心辐射型)” model of air travel. Hub-and-spoke refers to the typically US model of passengers being processed through large “hub” airports and then on to secondary flights to “spoke” airports near their final destinations.The best title for this text would be_______ .
| A．Developing Skycars |
| B．The Traffic Jams in the Sky |
| C．How to Guide Flying Cars in the Sky |
| D．What Flying Cars Will Look Like |
The underlined word “envision” in Paragraph 1 most probably means “ “.
| A．imagine | B．expect | C．think | D．announce |
When engineers develop the skycars, they have to deal with the following difficulties except____ .
| A．how to fly out of regional airports |
| B．how to prevent the disorder of the airways |
| C．how to reduce expenses and the vehicle’s weight |
| D．how to fly the skycars to enter skies |
Now Nasa researchers’ aim is to .
| A．make big flying cars |
| B．work out the plan---how to transform small plane travel |
| C．develop a new kind of small plane different from the traditional one |
| D．build a new kind of small plane with road-driving abilities |
Although Zhang Bichen, a 25-year-old songstress with a powerful yet delicate voice, took the crown of this year’s The Voice of China, runner-up Parhat Halik, 32, seems to have impressed more of the audience with his husky(沙哑的), natural and, most of all, distinguished sound.
Despite his unmistakable voice, Parhat Halik’s music is also special. Generally, it’s rock — but influenced and mixed by different styles within the genre. Read on and find out where Halik’s music gets its inspiration.
Blues rock
Representative artists: Guns N’ Roses, The Rolling Stones, John Maye
Blues rock combines improvisation (即兴创作) with rock ’n’ roll style. It began to develop in the mid-1960s in Britain and the US, when rock bands such as the Rolling Stones experimented with music from older African-American blues musicians. It borrows the idea of instrumental combo（小型乐队）from blues but is played at a faster tempo and louder volume, distinguishing it from the blues. The sound is created with the electric guitar, piano, bass and drums.
As the root for several contemporary rock styles, such as heavy metal and hard rock, blues rock had a rebirth in the early 2000s, with artists including John Mayer and The Black Keys.
Folk rock
Representative artists: Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, The Byrds
As the name indicates, folk rock is a genre combining elements of folk music and rock music. Also developed in the mid-1960s, folk rock was pioneered by the US band The Byrds, who began playing traditional folk music and Bob Dylan-penned material with rock instruments, in a style heavily influenced by The Beatles and other British bands.
The genre was most popular among teenagers and college students at the time, because it includes both rock ’n’ roll’s free spirit and the more serious, culturally authentic and socially aware sounds of folk music.
Soft rock
Representative artists: Bryan Adams, Eagles, Elton John, James Blunt
Compared to hard rock’s loud and aggressive nature, soft rock, or light rock, uses the techniques of rock music to compose a softer and less threatening sound. Derived from folk rock, it uses acoustic instruments（原声乐器）and puts more emphasis on melody and harmony.
Although the genre gets quite a bad name among hardcore rock fans, who see it as “wimpy”(软弱无力), it doesn’t mean soft rock is without merit (优点). Soft rock songs often deal with themes like romantic relationships and everyday life in a thoughtful and complex way hard rock simply couldn’t.Which of the artists playing traditional folk music and Bob Dylan-penned material with rock instruments first?
| A．The Beatles. | B．The Byrds |
| C．Eagles. | D．Guns N’ Roses. |
We can learn from the passage that ______________.
| A．the Rolling Stones ignored African-American musicians’ work |
| B．soft rock focus more on melody and culture awareness |
| C．blues rock gained a second birth in the 2000s |
| D．all the three rock styles developed in America |
What is hardcore rock fans’ attitude towards soft rock?
| A．They quite admire it. |
| B．They can hardly tolerate it. |
| C．They are indifferent to it. |
| D．They misunderstand it. |
What’s the main purpose of the text?
| A．To help readers become rock ’n’ roll artists |
| B．To inform the readers of the result of The Voice of China |
| C．To introduce some common rock music to the readers |
| D．To offer the readers some suggestions of composing rock music |