I am a 21-year-old boy, and this is my story.
One month after I graduated from high school in 2009, I was coming home from swim practice and was involved in a car accident. I was so seriously injured that I was in a coma（昏迷）for over two months at Prince Georges Hospital.
I died eight times during my coma and I couldn’t talk or communicate when I woke up. Walking was never going to happen again due to all the extreme injuries. Just like my body, my dreams were almost shattered. But I was not going to let my injuries prevent me from living my dreams.
After 14 operations and blood transfusions, I had to learn how to talk, eat, walk, shower and live independently again. When I was out of hospital, I still had to go to outpatient therapy in Waldorf, Maryland. After spending a few months in a wheelchair, I took baby steps to walk on my own. It was a miracle that I could walk again, but I wanted to prove that I could not only walk, but run. When it came true, I wanted to get back in the pool again. After a few lung tests, I was able to go in the pool a little bit each week. After a few months of swim training, I began my freshman year at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and became a proud member of the swim team.
By telling my story, I want to make a positive influence on the world. I am just trying to live each day to the fullest and inspire other people never to give up their dreams no matter how bad a situation is. I remember when I was still in my hospital bed, I would have my mom and dad push me around in my wheelchair to the other rooms to see the other patients and talk to them and their families. I wanted to let them know that everything was going to be okay. Somehow, things would work out for the best.When the car accident happened, the author ________.
| A．was a high school student |
| B．had finished his high school education |
| C．was a college student |
| D．was returning home from a swim competition |
What does the underlined word “shattered” in Paragraph 3 mean?
| A．begun | B．destroyed |
| C．shared | D．taken |
It can be inferred that the author ________ after he woke up from his coma.
| A．was out of hospital |
| B．was in surprise |
| C．faced physical and mental challenges |
| D．was worried about his lung |
What does the author mainly want to show in the last paragraph?
| A．His purpose of sharing his story. |
| B．His painful experiences. |
| C．His influence on students. |
| D．His great achievements. |
The best title for this passage would be ______.
| A．Attitude Is Everything. |
| B．Actions Speak Louder than Words. |
| C．Everything Happens for a Reason |
| D．A Good Beginning Is Half Done. |
Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain's novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain's most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel "trash and suitable only for the slums (贫民窟)." More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)
But the attacks were and are silly-and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim's search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction-a recognition that the slave had two personalities, "the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man."
There is much more. Twain's mystery novel Pudd'nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior (低等的) to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain's tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master's baby and, for fear that the child should be sold South, switched him for the master's baby by his wife. The slave's lightskinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master's wife's baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
The point was difficult to miss: nurture (养育), not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice-manner of speech, for example- were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
Twain's racial tone was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography (自传) about how much he loved what were called "nigger shows" in his youth-mostly with white men performing in black-face-and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
Was Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.
| 1． |
How do Twain's novels on slavery differ from Stowe's?
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| 2． |
Recent criticism of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn arose partly from its.
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| 3． |
What best proves Twain's anti-slavery stand according to the author?
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| 4． |
The story of two babies switched mainly indicates that.
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| 5． |
What does the underlined word "they" in Paragraph 7 refer to?
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| 6． |
What does the author mainly argue for?
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If a diver surfaces too quickly, he may suffer the bends. Nitrogen (氮) dissolved (溶解) in his blood is suddenly liberated by the reduction of pressure. The consequence, if the bubbles (气泡) accumulate in a joint, is sharp pain and a bent body—thus the name. If the bubbles form in his lungs or his brain, the consequence can be death.
Other air-breathing animals also suffer this decompression (减压) sickness if they surface too fast: whales, for example. And so, long ago, did ichthyosaurs. That these ancient sea animals got the bends can be seen from their bones. If bubbles of nitrogen form inside the bone they can cut off its blood supply. This kills the cells in the bone, and consequently weakens it, sometimes to the point of collapse. Fossil (化石) bones that have caved in on themselves are thus a sign that the animal once had the bends.
Bruce Rothschild of the University of Kansas knew all this when he began a study of ichthyosaur bones to find out how widespread the problem was in the past. What he particularly wanted to investigate was how ichthyosaurs adapted to the problem of decompression over the 150 million years. To this end, he and his colleagues traveled the world’s natural-history museums, looking at hundreds of ichthyosaurs from the Triassic period and from the later Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.
When he started, he assumed that signs of the bends would be rarer in younger fossils, reflecting their gradual evolution of measures to deal with decompression. Instead, he was astonished to discover the opposite. More than 15% of Jurassic and Cretaceous ichthyosaurs had suffered the bends before they died, but not a single Triassic specimen (标本) showed evidence of that sort of injury.
If ichthyosaurs did evolve an anti-decompression means, they clearly did so quickly—and, most strangely, they lost it afterwards. But that is not what Dr Rothschild thinks happened. He suspects it was evolution in other animals that caused the change.
Whales that suffer the bends often do so because they have surfaced to escape a predator (捕食动物) such as a large shark. One of the features of Jurassic oceans was an abundance of large sharks and crocodiles, both of which were fond of ichthyosaur lunches. Triassic oceans, by contrast, were mercifully shark- and crocodile-free. In the Triassic, then, ichthyosaurs were top of the food chain. In the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they were prey (猎物) as well as predator—and often had to make a speedy exit as a result.Which of the following is a typical symptom of the bends?
| A．A twisted body. |
| B．A gradual decrease in blood supply. |
| C．A sudden release of nitrogen in blood. |
| D．A drop in blood pressure. |
The purpose of Rothschild’s study is to see ______.
| A．how often ichthyosaurs caught the bends |
| B．how ichthyosaurs adapted to decompression |
| C．why ichthyosaurs bent their bodies |
| D．when ichthyosaurs broke their bones |
Rothschild’s finding stated in Paragraph 4 ______.
| A．confirmed his assumption | B．speeded up his research process |
| C．disagreed with his assumption | D．changed his research objectives |
Rothschild might have concluded that ichthyosaurs ______.
| A．failed to evolve an anti-decompression means |
| B．gradually developed measures against the bends |
| C．died out because of large sharks and crocodiles |
| D．evolved an anti-decompression means but soon lost it |
We’ve considered several ways of paying to cut in line: hiring line standers, buying tickets from scalpers (票贩子), or purchasing line-cutting privileges directly from, say, an airline or an amusement park. Each of these deals replaces the morals of the queue (waiting your turn) with the morals of the market (paying a price for faster service).
Markets and queues—paying and waiting—are two different ways of allocating things, and each is appropriate to different activities. The morals of the queue, “First come, first served, have an egalitarian (平等主义的) appeal. They tell us to ignore privilege, power, and deep pockets.
The principle seems right on playgrounds and at bus stops. But the morals of the queue do not govern all occasions. If I put my house up for sale, I have no duty to accept the first offer that comes along, simply because it’s the first. Selling my house and waiting for a bus are different activities, properly governed by different standards.
Sometimes standards change, and it is unclear which principle should apply. Think of the recorded message you hear, played over and over, as you wait on hold when calling your bank: “Your call will be answered in the order in which it was received.” This is essential for the morals of the queue. It’s as if the company is trying to ease our impatience with fairness.
But don’t take the recorded message too seriously. Today, some people’s calls are answered faster than others. Call center technology enables companies to “score” incoming calls and to give faster service to those that come from rich places. You might call this telephonic queue jumping.
Of course, markets and queues are not the only ways of allocating things. Some goods we distribute by merit, others by need, still others by chance. However, the tendency of markets to replace queues, and other non-market ways of allocating goods is so common in modern life that we scarcely notice it anymore. It is striking that most of the paid queue-jumping schemes we’ve considered—at airports and amusement parks, in call centers, doctors’ offices, and national parks—are recent developments, scarcely imaginable three decades ago. The disappearance of the queues in these places may seem an unusual concern, but these are not the only places that markets have entered.According to the author, which of the following seems governed by the principle “First come, first served”?
| A．Taking buses. | B．Buying houses. |
| C．Flying with an airline. | D．Visiting amusement parks. |
The example of the recorded message in Paragraphs 4 and 5 illustrates ______.
| A．the necessity of patience in queuing |
| B．the advantage of modern technology |
| C．the uncertainty of allocation principle |
| D．the fairness of telephonic services |
The passage is meant to ______.
| A．justify paying for faster services |
| B．discuss the morals of allocating things |
| C．analyze the reason for standing in line |
| D．criticize the behavior of queue jumping |
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 Guest ServicesFront Gate Guest Services can help you with anything from finding out what time your favourite show starts to purchasing tickets. The Guest Services location inside Front Gate also serves as a message centre, lost children's area and lost and found. Canada's Wonderland does not offer personalized public paging (传呼). |
 Food & Drink OptionsShops are located throughout Canada's Wonderland. Picnic baskets and coolers are welcome at the shelter located outside Wonderland on the north side of our Front Gate. Outside food and drinks are not allowed in the park. Bottled water may be brought into the Park. |
 ATMsATMs are located just inside the Park beside Stroller, Locker and Wheelchair Rentals at the Front Gate, as well as KidZville (beside Guest Services), Splash Works (two locations), and outside Thunder Run. |
 Pet CareA pet care facility is located outside our Front Gate on the south side for a daily fee. Water and air-conditioned shelters are provided. Guests are asked to provide food and exercise. |
 First AidIf you need medical assistance, tell any park employee who will call First Aid and have them come to your location. |
 Stroller, Locker and Wheelchair RentalsStroller, locker and wheelchair rentals are available inside the Park at the Front Gate, beside Thrills Are Wonderland. |
 HIQ Smoking PolicySmoking is not permitted while riding or standing in line for rides or in any of the children's areas or the Water Park. Smoking is permitted in designated (指定的) areas only. |
Failure to observe all Park rules could result in being driven out of the Park without refund. |
| 1． |
The leaflet is to inform visitors of the Park's.
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| 2． |
A visitor to the Park can.
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Sparrow is a fast-food chain with 200 restaurants. Some years ago, the group to which Sparrow belonged was taken over by another company. Although Sparrow showed no sign of declining, the chain was generally in an unhealthy state. With more and more fast-food concepts reaching the market, the Sparrow menu had to struggle for attention. And to make matters worse, its new owner had no plans to give it the funds it required.
Sparrow failed to grow for another two years. Until a new CEO, Carl Pearson, decided to build up its market share. He did a survey, which showed that consumers who already used Sparrow restaurants were extremely positive about the chain, while customers of other fast-food chains were unwilling to turn away from them. Sparrow had to develop a new promotional campaign.
Pearson faced a battle over the future of the Sparrow brand. The chain's owner now favored rebranding Sparrow as Marcy's restaurants. Pearson resisted, arguing for an advertising campaign designed to convince customers that visits to Sparrow restaurants were fun. Such an attempt to establish a positive relationship between a company and the general public was unusual for that time. Pearson strongly believed that numbers were the key to success, rather than customers' speeding power. Finally, the owner accepted his idea.
The campaign itself changed the traditional advertising style of the fast-food industry. The TV ads of Sparrow focused on entertainment and featured original songs performed by a variety of stars. Instead of showing the superiority of a specific product, the intention was to put Sparrow in the hearts of potential customers.
Pearson also made other decisions which he believed would contribute to the new Sparrow image. For example, he offered to lower the rent of any restaurants which achieved a certain increase in their turnover (营业额) .
These efforts paid off, and Sparrow soon became one of the most successful fast-food chains in the regions where it operated.
| 1． |
Which was one of the problems Sparrow faced before Pearson became CEO?
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| 2． |
What does the underlined word "them" in Paragraph 2 refer to?
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| 3． |
For what purpose did Pearson start the advertising campaign?
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| 4． |
The TV ads of Sparrow.
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| 5． |
What was Pearson's achievement as a CEO?
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