LastAugust,JoeandMaryMahoneybe-优题课

Most recently, it's very common in students that they need a parent present for job interviews．
Naturally, it's easy to blame the students in these situations, but the bigger problem is us．We—as parents—are so eager to shelter our kids that we fail to realize that this in itself is harming them．As the mother of two young sons, I have to remind myself constantly that the biggest responsibility I have as a parent is to help them develop the skills needed to live without me．So, I'll let them fail．
I'll let them fail because as long as they are safe and warm inside their comfort zones, they will never grow．Although failure comes along with loss, heartbreak, disappointment, etc, these will be part of growth for them．And leaving them alone is my way of helping them become equipped to fit in this world as we know it today．From terrorism and seemingly endless natural disasters, to our national debt and beyond, if we expect the next generation to stand up to the very real problems of our time, we need to stop feeding them and start teaching them how to fish．
My children now are becoming little masters of compromise(妥协），but they try to negotiate （协商） everything now．It's a small price to help them learn a skill they'll use for the rest of their lives, including when I don't accompany them on job interviews．
Why do parents accompany their kids on job interviews?

A．Because they want to protect their kids from difficulties．

B．Because they think they can help them on the questions．

C．Because their kids are too shy to attend interviews．

D．Because their kids strongly request them to do so．

According to the author, what is beneficial to kids' development?
A．Sheltering them． B．Keeping them safe．
C．Leaving them alone． C．Blaming them．
Why does the author stress failure in kids' life?

A．To make them stronger than other kids．

B．To help them grow in this tough world．

C．To help them develop all social skills．

D．To make them learn to compromise．

Which of the following might be the best title for the text?

A．Never Shelter Your Kids	B．Let Your Kids Fail
C．Be Eager to Grow Up	D．Live Without Parents

If you have a chance to go to Finland, you will probably be surprised to find how “foolish” the Finnish people are.
Take the taxi drivers for example. Taxis in Finland are mostly high-class Benz with a fare of two US dollars a kilometer. You can go anywhere in one, tell the driver to drop you at any place, say that you have some business to attend to, and then walk off without paying your fare. The driver would not show the least sign of anxiety.
The dining rooms in all big hotels not only serve their guests, but also serve outside diners. Hotel guests have their meals free, so they naturally go to the free dining rooms to have their meals. The most they would do to show their good faith is to wave their registration（登记）card to the waiter. With such a loose check, you can easily use any old registration card to take a couple of friends to dine free of charge.
The Finnish workers are paid by the hour. They are very much on their own as soon as they have agreed with the boss on the rate. From then on they just say how many hours they have worked and they will be paid accordingly.
With so many loopholes （漏洞） in everyday life, surely Finland must be a heaven to those who love to take “petty advantages”. But the strange thing is, all the taxi passengers would always come back to pay their fare after they have attended to their business; not a single outsider has ever been found in the free hotel dining rooms. And workers always give an honest account of the exact hours they put in. As the Finns always act on good faith in everything they do, living in such a society has turned everyone into a real “gentleman”.
The underlined words in this passage means to “______”.

A．be ready to help others	B．make good use of one’s friends
C．be a little ahead of others	D．gain something at other’s expense

Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?

A．While taking a taxi in Finland, you can get off without first paying your fare.

B．In a big hotel in Finland, you can enjoy free meals if you’re living in the hotel.

C．The bosses in Finland pay the employees according to registration of their working hours.

D．The workers are always honest with their working hours.

We can learn from the passage that ______.

A．the Finnish society is of very high moral （道德） level

B．there are many loopholes in everyday life in Finland

C．in Finland, most taxi drivers will not charge you anything

D．everyone in Finland is like a gentleman, for they have faith in themselves

Which of the following is the best title of the passage ?

A．Life in Finland	B．A Society with “Foolish” People
C．What a Life	D．Honest accounts of the Finns

A new study suggests that the more teenagers watch television, the more likely they are to develop depression as young adults .
The researchers used a national long-term survey of adolescent（青少年的）health to investigate （调查）the relationship between media use and depression. They based their findings on more than four thousand adolescents who were not depressed when the survey began in 2000.
As part of the survey, the young people were asked how many hours of television or videos they watched daily. They were also asked how often they played computer games and listened to the radio. Media use totaled an average of five and one-half hours a day. More than two hours of that was spent watching TV.
Seven years later, in 2007, more than seven percent of the young people had signs of depression. The average age at that time was twenty-one.
The researchers say they did not find any such relationship with the use of other media such as movies, video games or radio, etc. But the study did find that every extra hour of television meant an eight percent increase in the chances of developing signs of depression. Young men were more likely than young women to develop depression given the same amount of media use.
The study didn't explore if watching TV causes depression. But one possibility is that it was taking time away from activities that could help prevent depression.
Last December, the journal Social Indicators Research published a study of activities that help lead to happy lives. Sociologists from the University of Maryland found that people who describe themselves as happy spend less time watching television than unhappy people. The study found that happy people are more likely to be socially active, to read, to attend religious services and to vote.
The best title for this passage should be____________.

A．Teens, Television and Depression

B．Men Develop Depression Ea

sier than Women

C．Media Use is Harmful to Adolescents

D．Take Great Care of Teenager's Depression

The result of the research seems to prove______________.

A．teenagers are more likely to develop depression than adults

B．other media uses do no harm to adolescents

C．TV probably causes teenagers to grow up with depression

D．those who watch no TV will not develop depression

We can learn from the survey that of all the media use

A．computer games are teenagers' favourite

B．most teenagers prefer to listen to the radio

C．teenagers enjoy watching TV very much

D．newspaper is not included in the survey

We can conclude that a teenager should _____

A．play more video games instead of watching TV

B．be active in taking part in outdoor activities

C．be more active in watching educational TV programmes

D．attend religious services and care for politics

Ellen and Bill County are both teachers. They met in college and became good friends because of their shared love for children. Two years after the couple got married, Ellen saw a huge change in the life of one of her students, a 9-year-old girl. Three years ago both of the little girl’s parents had died and there was no one to take care of her. She was taken away to live in a government office. But finally she was taken in and adopted by a family and became their daughter. Ellen said that she noticed the difference in the child’s life after she was placed in a permanent home and thought that maybe she and her husband could help a child in a similar way.
They decided to become temporary parents and to take a child into their home on the weekends when the real parents could not take care of him or her. The pair planned to have their own children in a few years, but decided that this would be a way to give to the community in the meantime.
The couple quickly grew to love one of the children they looked after. When he became legally available, Billy became the first child they took in permanently. Six months after adopting Billy, Ellen was told by her doctor that she was unable to have children naturally. Ellen says she knew then that adoption was the way she was meant to have a family.
Since adopting Billy, now 17, Ellen and Bill have adopted five more children --- Rose,16； Albert, 11; Joshua, 5 and in June 2003, they added biological brother and sister Tyler and Rylee to the County family.
The County family has been recognized for their work on adoption, and have received many awards for their efforts. Last June, the family was even interviewed on the television show, “Adoption Stories”.
Ellen says she would like to encourage other families to adopt children. She adds that the best part of being a mother of six is: “Giving Josh a bath, putting a band-aid on a cut knee or just the everyday mom things, that makes motherhood such an honor and a privilege.”
What is the passage mainly about?

A．How a couple first met at college	B．Where you can adopt a child
C．The benefits of adoption to the community	D．How adoption created a happy family

Why did Ellen and Bill first decide to adopt a childe?

A．Because they had always loved children very much

B．Because they saw the benefits of adoption for a child

C．Because they were not able to have children of their own

D．Because they wanted to receive awards for their community work

Which of the children are related to each other by blood?

A．Rylee and Tyler	B．Billy and Tyler
C．Albert and Joshua	D．Rose and Albert

What can be inferred from this passage?

A．Ellen had thought of adopting a child before getting married.

B．Only kids under 16 can be adopted by a family

C．A loving family is important to a child’s happiness

D．Adopting a child always makes the family become famous

The right to pursue happiness is issued to us all with our birth, but no one seems quite sure what it is.
A holy man in India may think that happiness is in himself. It is in needing nothing from outside himself. If wanting nothing, he lacks nothing. We westerners, however, are taught that the more we have from outside ourselves, the happier we will be, and then we are made to want. We are even told it is our duty to want. Advertising, one of our major industries, exists not to satisfy these desires but to create them---and to create them faster than any man’s money in his pocket can satisfy them. Here, obviously someone is trying to buy the dream of happiness and spending millions upon millions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers.
I doubt the holy man’s idea of happiness, and I doubt the dreams of the happiness-market, too. Whatever happiness may be, I believe, it is neither in having nothing nor in having more, but in changing --- in changing the world and mankind into pure states.
To change is to make efforts to deal with difficulties. As Yeats, a great Irish poet once put it, happiness we get for a lifetime depends on how high we choose our difficulties.
It is easy to understand. We even demand difficulty for the fun in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. And a game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are man-made difficulties. When the player ruins the fun, he always does so by refusing to play by the roles. It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to cast away all the rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules.
The same is true to happiness. The buyers and sellers at the happiness-market seem to have lost their sense of the pleasure of difficulty. Heaven knows what they are playing, but it seems a dull game. And the Indian holy man seems dull to us, I suppose, because he seems to be refusing to play anything at all.
The western weakness may be in the dreams that happiness can be bought while eastern weakness may be in the idea that there is such a thing as perfect happiness in man himself. Both of them forget a basic fact: no difficulty, no happiness.
Who shares the same idea of happiness with the author?

A．The Indian holy man	B．The great Irish poet Yeats
C．Advertisers	D．The buyers and sellers at the happiness-market

What does “happiness-market” mean in the second paragraph?

A．It means a place in which people can buy things happily

B．It means a market which lacks happy customers

C．It means a pure state for the world and mankind

D．It means a market where people try to buy happiness with money.

According to the passage, which of the following is Right?

A．The Indian holy man is much happier than westerner.

B．The westerners understand happiness better than the Indian holy man.

C．There is no fun without playing by the rules

D．Both the eastern weakness and western weakness are the same.

A．receive too many visitors	B．mirror the rest of the nation
C．hide the truth of campus crime	D．have too many watchdog groups

A．that are protected by campus security	B．that report campus crimes by law
C．that are free from campus crime	D．that enjoy very good publicity

A．Exact campus crime statistics.	B．Crimes on or around campuses.
C．Effective solutions to campus crime.	D．Concerns about kids’ campus safety.