A mouse looked through a crack(缝隙) in the wall to see the farmer and his wife opening a package; what food might it contain? He was astonished to discover that it was a mouse trap!
Running to the farmyard, the mouse shouted, warning everyone, “There is a mouse trap in the house, there is a mouse trap in the house.”
The chicken, with her head high, glared at the mouse and said, “Shut up. Little Ugly. This is a great concern to you, but it has nothing to do with me; I can’t be troubled by it.
The mouse turned to the pig and told him, “There is a mouse trap in the house.” “I am so sorry, Mr. Mouse,” said the pig sympathetically, “but there is nothing I can do about it but pray; you are always in my prayers.”
The mouse turned to the cow, who relied, “ A mouse trap, am I in great danger, huh?”
Now the mouse had to face the farmer’s mouse trap alone.
The very night a sound was heard through the house, like that of a mouse trap catching its prey. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught. In the darkness, she did not see it was a big poisonous snake whose tail the trap had caught. The snake bit the farmer’s wife. The farmer rushed her to the hospital. She returned home with a fever. It is said that drinking fresh chicken soup will help treat fever, so the farmer took his sharp knife to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient. His wife’s sickness continued, so friends and neighbors came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer killed the pig. The farmer’s wife did not get well, in fact, she died, and so many people came for her funeral. The farmer had the cow killed to provide for all of them to eat.
So next time when someone is facing a problem, don’t say that it has nothing to do with you. Remember: when the least of us is threatened, we all might be at risk.We could see from the passage that the mouse was _____.
| A．good at cheating others | B．honest |
| C．kind and warm-hearted | D．foolish |
Which of the following is False according to the passage?
| A．The others help the farmer kill the cow. |
| B．The mouse trap was very practical |
| C．The pig is more friendly than the other animals. |
| D．The farmer’s family was very poor and they had no friends |
What can we learn from the story?
| A．Better safe than sorry |
| B．Traps can always cause chain reactions |
| C．To keep the balance of nature is the duty of us all |
| D．What you think impossible to happen to you might come at you unexpectedly |
Funny English Errors and Insights
Laugh... And Learn!
Welcome tothe website for Funny English Errors and Insights (2010), a new book of unconscious humour published by the National Library of Australia.
Funny English Errors and Insights will be launched at the National Library in Canberra on 29th, October 2010.
In the meantime, explore this website for other collections of real-life English language mistakes,including funny answers to exam questions, media misprints, and silly signs.
See Funny English Errors: The B List for more than a hundred examples of funny English gaffes（失言）. For more funny English errors, read author Troy Simpson's blog. For still more examples,, join this website to download a free PDF version of English As She Is Taught, which lists our top 250 funny English language mistakes from that classic howlers book.
Join this website FREE, and you can also:
oEnter member-only competitions
oContribute your comments
oDownload free e-Cards
oBe the first to know about our much-anticipated book, Funny English Errors and Insights (2010) ...
Features
Follows in the tradition of the runaway best-seller Howler
s books of the 1920s and 1930s
oIncludes quotes(引文) that have never been published before in this way
oIncludes more than 30 carefully selected funny photos
oTopics include English, science, history, geography, religion, mathematics, and more
oA perfect gift for students, teachers, parents, grandparents, public speakers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, clergy and religious, and anyone with a sense of humour! The word launched in the second paragraph is closest to the meaning:
| A．sent up for the first time. | B．written for the first time. |
| C．for sale for the first time. | D．printed for the first time. |
On the website ,you can do the following things except.
| A．read some funny news |
| B．know something about this book previously |
| C．find a lot of examples about English errors |
| D．express your opinions freely |
About this book, you know that .
| A．it only includesEnglish, science, history |
B．it is quite different from Howlers books |
| C．all the quotes in it are familiar with us | |
| D．it is intended for people all walks of life |
The text is aimed at introducing .
| A．a popular website | B．some selected funny photos |
| C．a new book | D．some funny English errors |
Maggiano is an award-w
inning teacher in the Social Studies Department at West Springfield High School in Virginia. He has taught in public and private schools for 25 years .In a piece on his blog called “The Classroom Post,” he calls for more males to enter the profession(职业).
Men Teach, a non-profit organization that encourages men to enter teaching, reports that in 2008, 18.8% of all elementary and middle school teachers were men. At the high school level during the same year, men comprised（构成） 44% of the work force.
Why are there so few men in teaching? Men Teach says low pay and lack of prestige（声望）, as well as a perception in our culture that teaching is for women. As a result, there is no organized effort across the country to attract men into the teaching profession.
A study in 2008 by the National Education Association showed that the number of male teachers hit a record 40-year low. Males comprised 24.5 percent of public schoolteachers. States with high percentages: Kansas (33.6 percent), Oregon (31.6 percent), Alaska (30.9 percent) and Indiana (30.5percent).States with the lowest percentage : Arkansas (16.2 percent), Virginia (17.4 percent), Mississippi (17.5 percent), Louisiana (18 percent), South Carolina (18.5 percent) and Georgia (19.7 percent).
There is no definitive(确定) research that male students--or female students, for that matter-- learn better from a particular sex.
But as Maggiano put it, “Kids today, both boys and girls, must have the same opportunity to learn from outstanding, devoted men that I did. However, I have heard little discussion about this problem coming from our national leaders. What w
orries Maggiano is that_______.
| A．nobody will take his place when he retires |
| B．male teachers are not so excellent |
| C．men are not interested in teaching |
| D．there is not enough teachers in the schools |
According to the text , we can infer that______.
| A．the number of male teachers hit a record 40-year low in 2008 |
| B．it is not sure students will learn better from male teachers |
| C．male teachers get a higher pay |
| D．organized efforts have been made to call on men into the teaching profession |
In which state are male teachers most badly needed?
| A．Alaska | B．Virginia | C．Georgia | D．Arkansas |
What does the last paragraph suggest?
| A．The government doesn’t pay much attention to the shortage. of male teachers in the school. |
| B．Students find it easy to learn from male teachers. |
| C．I’m glad to hear the discussion about the shortage of male teachers in the school. |
| D．The shortage of male teachers in the school has no effect on students. |
After more than a year of bitter political debate, President Obama sat down in the White House East Room on March 23 and signed the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act into law with a pen，and then another pen，and another. Obama used 22 pens to sign the 
$938 billion health care bill.
The practice of using different pens to sign important legislation（法规）dates at least as far back as Franklin Roosevelt. The reason is fairly simple. The pen used to sign historic legislation itself becomes a historical artifact. The more pens a President uses, the more thank-you gifts he can offer to those who helped create that piece of history. The White House often give pens to supporters of the newly signed legislation. When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, he reportedly used more than 75 pens and gave one of the first ones to Martin Luther King Jr. And in 1996, President Clinton gave the four pens he used to sign the Line-Item Veto bill to those most likely to appreciate the bill's consequence.
Once they're given away, some pens end up in museums; others are displayed proudly in recipients'(接受者) offices or homes. But they sometimes appear again, like in the 2008 presidential campaign（竞选活动）, when John Macain promised to use the same pen given to him by President Reagan to 
cut pork from the federal budget.
Not
every President goes for the multipen signature, however. President George W. Bush preferred signing bills with only one pen and then offering several unuse
d "gift" pens as souvenirs. .We can learn from paragraph 1 that the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act .
| A．has been passed easily |
| B．was put forward one year ago |
| C．becomes law in the USA |
| D．is unimportant |
How are the pens dealt with after being used by President Obama?
| A．Supporters of the newly signed legislation are likely to get some of them. |
| B．Obama will keep them. |
| C．They will be just set aside |
| D．They will be sold to the public at a high price. |
What can we learn about John Macain?
A. He was ever President in the USA.
B. He took part in the 2008 presidential campaign.
C. He never used the pen given by Reagan.
D. He was only concerned about his own business.What does this passage mainly tell us ?
A. Obama signed the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
B. It is a practice to use multiple pens to sign important legislation in the USA.
C. Pens are necessary in the signature.
D. All the presidents like the multipen signature.
Habits are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting creatures,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative meaning.
So it seems contradictory to talk about habits in the same context as innovation （创新）. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.
Rather than dismissing ourselves as unch
angeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try, the more creative we become.
But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the brain, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately press into ourselves create parallel path
ways that can bypass those old roads.
“The first thing needed for innovation is attraction to wonder,”says Dawna Markova, author of The Open Mind.“But we are taught instead to ‘decide’, just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider’．”She adds, however, that“to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”
“All of us work through problems in ways of which we’re unaware,”she says. Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the ability to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, collaboratively （合作地） and innovatively. At the end of adolescence, however, the brain shuts down half of that ability, preserving only those ways of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.
The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us use our innovative and collaborative ways of thought. “This breaks the major rule in the American belief system—that anyone can do anything,” explains M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book This Year I Will…and Ms. Markova’s business partner. “That’s a lie that we have preserved, and it fosters commonness. Knowing what you’re good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”This is where developing new habits comes in.Brain researchers have discovered that .
| A．the forming of new habits can be guided |
| B．the development of habits can be predicted |
| C．the regulation of old habits can be transformed |
| D．the track of new habits can be created unconsciously |
The underlined word“ruts”in Paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to.
| A．zones | B．connections | C．situations | D．tracks |
Which of the following statements most probably agrees with Dawna Markova’s view?
| A．Decision makes no sense in choices. |
| B．Curiosity makes creative minds active. |
| C．Creative ideas are born of a relaxing mind. |
| D．Formation of innovation comes from fantastic ideas. |
The purpose of the author writing this article is to persuade us.
| A．to give up our traditional habits deliberately |
| B．to create and develop new habits consciously |
| C．to resist the application of standardized testing |
| D．to believe that old habits conflict with new habits |
Apparently，we are safe neither at home nor in the business office．We use water in both places，but the research shows that chemicals added to our local water supply to kill harmful bacteria can have unwanted side effects．These chemicals can cause po
tential harm through drinking and in seemingly harmless activities as cleaning one’s house．They are released（set free）from water by daily actions like water running out of tap，spraying from garden pipes，or splashing in dishwashers and washing machines．As the water is moving, these chemicals are released into the air and then breathed in. Once inside our bodies, they start to affect our health.
Does this mean we should stop bathing? No, say the scientists, but we should put all pollution into perspective. Activities at home such as the burning of coal, cooking oil, or even candles release carbon monoxide and particulates such as cigarette ashes which have been proven as harmful to health as working or living near heavy traffic. New tugs, bedding, and even clothing give off that “new smell, ”which is a sure sign of chemicals. In the office, newly applied paint, newly purchased telephones and other telecommunications equipment, and computers release polluting chemicals, too. As offices and homes often have inadequate ventilation （通风）, these chemicals can build up to become health problems. Their poisonous effects are only now being slowly recogn
ized.
These facts suggest that, at a minimum, proper airing of newly purchased goods with an obvious chemical smell is a wise warning. Home and office windows should be opened during good weather. Even one’s car needs to be ventilated as well while in the garage.
We need further research to understand better other potential health dangers, too. For example, the effects of overcrowding of schools （carbon dioxide build-up ）, the factory work environment （ an endless list of potentially dangerous substances ）, and even home heating and cooling （the air conditioner may be our enemies, not our friends） have only recently started to come to light. Until we understand the effects of our new technological environment better, we can only hope that “there is no place like home.”What is the main idea of the first paragraph?
| A．The air we breathe in is harmful. |
| B．The water in everyday use is unsafe. |
| C．Chemicals are added to the drinking water. |
| D．Chemicals are released in the running water. |
In Paragraph 2, the underlined sentence means that.
| A．bathing should be done with caution |
| B．homes and offices should be aired often |
| C．any pollution should be taken into consideration |
| D．we should prevent any pollution from doing harm to us |
What is the purpose of the passage?
| A．To call on us to guard our water. |
| B．To show us that no place is like home. |
| C．To make us aware of the pollution around us. |
| D．To argue that neither homes nor offices are safe. |