Across Britain, burnt toast will be served to mothers in bed this morning as older sons and daughters rush to deliver their supermarket bunches of flowers. But, according to a new study, we should be placing a higher value on motherhood all year.
Mothers have long known that their home workload was just as heavy as paid work. Now, the new study has shown that if they were paid for their parental labours, they would earn as much as￡172,000 a year.
The study looked at the range of jobs mothers do, as well as the hours they are working, to determine the figure. This would make their yearly income ￡30,000 more than the Prime Minister earns.
By analysing the numbers, it found the average mother works 119 hours a week, 40 of which would usually be paid at a standard rate and 79 hours as overtime. After questioning 1,000 mothers with children under 18, it found that, on most days, mums started their routine work at 7 am and finished at around 11 pm.
To calculate just how much mothers would earn from that labour, it suggested some of the roles that mums could take on, including housekeeper, part-time lawyer, personal trainer and entertainer. Being a part-time lawyer, at ￡48.98 an hour, would prove to be the most profitable of the “mum jibs”, with psychologist(心理学家) a close second.
It also asked mothers about the challenges they face, with 80 percent making emotional(情感的) demand as the hardest thing about motherhood.
Over a third of mums felt they needed more training and around half said they missed going out with friends.
The study shows mothers matter all year long and not just on Mother’s Day. The emotional, physical and mental energy mothers devote to their children can be never-ending, but children are also sources of great joy and happiness. Investing(投入) in time for parenting and raising relationships is money well spent.
How much would a mother earn a year if working as the Prime Minister?
| A．￡30,000. | B．￡142,000. |
| C．￡172,000. | D．￡202,000. |
The biggest challenge for most mothers is from .
| A．emotional demand | B．low pay for work |
| C．heavy workload | D．lack of training |
What is stressed in the last paragraph?
| A．Mothers’ importance shows in family all year long. |
| B．The sacrifices mothers make are huge but worthwhile. |
| C．Mothers’ devotion to children can hardly be calculated. |
| D．Investing time in parenting would bring a financial return. |
What can we conclude from the study?
| A．Mothers’ working hours should be largely reduced. |
| B．Mothers should balance their time for work and rest. |
| C．Mothers’ labour is of a higher value than it is realized. |
| D．Mothers should be freed from housework for social life. |
根据短文内容，从短文后的选项中选出能填入空白处的最佳选项。选项中有两项为多余选项。
Are you truly happy? Do you ever know what it means to be happy and what it takes to achieve happiness? 1. The following are a few tips that I follow to create happiness in my life.
◆Make a plan for attaining goals that you believe will make you happy. Your moods will very likely increase if you are going after something you value.
◆Surround yourself with happy people. It is easy to begin to think negatively when you are surrounded by people who think that way. 2.
◆When something goes wrong, try to figure out a solution instead of being absorbed in self pity. Truly happy people don’t allow setbacks to affect their mood because they know that with a little thought they can turn the circumstances back to their favor.
◆3. These few minutes will give you the opportunity to focus on the positive things in your life and will lead you to continuous happiness.
◆4. Whether you treat yourself to lunch, take a long relaxing bath or simply spend a few extra minutes on your appearance, you will be subconsciously(下意识)putting yourself in a better mood.
◆Finding the humor in situations can also lead to happiness. Find a way to make light of a situation that would otherwise make you happy.
◆Keeping healthy is another way to achieve happiness. 5
| A．What makes one person happy may be very different from what makes someone else happy. |
| B．On the contrary, if you are around people who are happy, their emotional state will be infectious. |
| C．Being overweight or not eating nutritious foods can have a negative effect on your mood. |
| D．These are important questions for anyone who is seeking happiness to ask themselves. |
E. Spend a few minutes each day thinking about the things that make you happy.
F. There are some tips in life that lead to happiness.
G. It’s also important to take some time each day to do something nice for yourself.
There are several ways you can find out about the countries and places you wish to visit. You can talk to friends who have travelled to the places. Or you can go and see a color film. Or you can read travel books.
It would seem that there are three kinds of travel books. The first are those that give a personal, subjective(主观的)account of travels which the author has actually made himself. If they are informative and have a good index(索引), then they can be useful to you when you are planning your travels. The second kind are those books whose purpose is to give a purely objective(客观的)description of things to be done and seen. If a well-read, cultured person has written such a book, then it is even more useful. It can be sorted as a selected guide book. The third kind are those books which are called “a guide” to some place or other. If they are good, they will, in addition to their factual information, give an analysis or an explanation. Like the first kind they can be inspiring and interesting. But their basic purpose is to help the reader who wishes to plan in the most practical way.
Whatever kind of travel book you choose you must make sure that it does not describe everything as “wonderful”, “excellent” or “magical”. You must also note its date of publication because travel is a very practical affair and many things change quickly in the twenty-first century. Finally, you should make sure that the contents are well presented and easy to find.This passage is about.
| A．how to travel | B．how to buy travel books |
| C．how to read a travel book | D．travel books |
The following travel books may be of use when you plan your travels except.
| A．the book written by some people who have had the same travel experience themselves |
| B．the book which tells you what is worth doing and seeing based on the facts |
| C．the book in which a lot of big adjectives are used to draw your attention |
| D．the book which offers you a lot of useful information like a tour guide |
The date of the publication must be noticed because.
| A．the world is changing and so are the places you are going to visit |
| B．the price of the book is always changing |
| C．the author of the book may be different |
| D．the contents of the book are always the same |
Plants are very important living things. Life could not go if there were no plants. This is because plants can make food from air, water and sunlight. Animals and man cannot make food from air, water and sunlight. Animals get their food by eating plants and other animals. So animals and man need plants in order to live. This is why we find that there are so many plants around us.
If you look carefully at the plants around you, you will find that there are two kinds of plants: flowering plants and non-flowering plants.
Flowering plants can make seeds. The seeds are protected by the fruits. Some fruits have one seed, some have two, three or four, and some have many seeds. But a few fruits have no seeds at all. An example of a fruit without seeds is the banana fruit.
Most non-flowering plants don’t grow from seeds. They grow from spores. Spores are so small and light that they can float in the air. We may say that spores are quite the same as he seeds. When these spores fall on wet and shady places, they usually grow into new plants.The main idea of the passage is that.
| A．plants are important for life | B．plants cannot grow without air |
| C．there are many plants around us | D．we cannot live without water |
Which of the following is NOT TRUE?
| A．Plants can be divided into main types: flowering plants and non-flowering plants. |
| B．All fruits have seeds in them. |
| C．Seeds are protected by the fruits. |
| D．Some plants grow from spores. |
The underlined word "non-flowering" means .
| A．开花的 | B．有花的 | C．多花的 | D．不开花的 |
In “shady places” there is .
| A．a lot of sunshine | B．a lot of water | C．no water | D．little sunshine |
If I were writing a history of my family, some of the darkest moments recorded would be those surrounding Christmas trees. One would certainly think otherwise; selecting and putting up our trees have always been filled with risk.
For example, one afternoon dangerously close to Christmas Eve my mother bought what she thought to be a bargain, a glorious tree that was so full and tall that we could hardly get it into the house. Once we did, my father immediately realized that we would have to hire a carpenter to build a stand for it.
Another December, perhaps the very next one, we bought a tree earlier than we ever had before. We were happy with its shape and delighted that its size was manageable. We easily placed it in a stand, decorated it from top to bottom, and then self-satisfiedly sat back by the fire in its soft light.
Two or three days passed and the truth could not be hidden; we had bought a tree cut so long ago that its needles were coming off. There was nothing to do but undecorated it, take it down, and begin tree shopping again.
Our most recent Christmas tree offered still another difficult task. When we brought it home, once again it seemed larger than it was in the great outdoors. To complicate matters, we had bought a new stand, one whose nuts(螺帽)and bolts(闩子)worked more mysteriously than those of our old stands. I persuaded two young neighbors to stop playing basketball and to help us get the tree into the house and set it correctly in the stand. Unfortunately, no one noticed the mud on our helpers’ shoes, so only after removing several reddish brown sports from the carpet were we able to discuss the question of where the lights and ornaments(装饰)were stored. Perhaps those who cut their own trees have tales more painful than these. I don’t care to hear them, as my family’s experiences are enough to cause me to make the following suggestion: “Let’s forget the tree next Christmas. Let’s simply hang some flowers on the front door and over the mirror in the hall.”The darkest moments in the writer’s family were with the fact that .
| A．the family bought big Christmas trees |
| B．they had problems decorating their Christmas trees |
| C．they had problems picking suitable Christmas trees |
| D．they had problems finding carpenters for putting up Christmas trees |
We can learn from the passage that the writer would like to .
| A．forget about Christmas stories |
| B．get the neighbors to put up their trees |
| C．buy a better tree to celebrate Christmas |
| D．make other decorations rather than Christmas trees |
When the writer said “my mother bought what she thought to be a bargain”, he means.
| A．she bought the tree at a cheap price | B．she didn’t really want to buy it |
| C．she had to bargain hard with the salesman | D．she couldn’t afford a more expensive one |
Which of the following can be the best title for the passage?
| A．How to Select a Christmas Tree | B．No More Christmas Tree for Us |
| C．Dark Moments of Life | D．Christmas Without Trees |
Some students get so nervous before a test, they do poorly even if they know the material. Sian Beilock, a psychology professor at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has studied these highly anxious test-takers.
Sian Beilock says: “They start worrying about the consequences. They might even start worrying about whether this exam is going to prevent them from getting into the college they want. And when they worry, it actually uses up attention and memory resources. I talk about them as their cognitive(认知的)horsepower that they could otherwise be using to focus on the exam.”
Professor Beilock and another researcher, Gerardo Ramirez, have developed a possible solution. Just before an exam, highly anxious test-takers spend ten minutes writing about their worries about the test. The researchers tested the idea on a group of 20 anxious college students. They gave them two short math tests. After the first one, they asked the students to either sit quietly or write about their feelings about the upcoming second test. The researchers added to the pressure. They told the students that those who did well on the second test would get money. They also told them that their performance would affect other students as part of a team effort.
Professor Beilock says those who sat quietly scored an average of 12 percent worse on the second test. But the students who had written about their fears improved their performance by an average of five percent.
Next, the researchers used younger students in a biology class. They told them before final exams either to write about their feelings or to think about things unrelated to the test.
Professor Beilock says highly anxious students who did the writing got an average grade of B+, compared to a B-for those who did not.
The research shows that for students who are highly test-anxious, who’d done the writing intervention(介入), all of a sudden there was no relationship between test anxiety and performance. Those students most likely to worry were performing just as well as their classmates who don’t normally get nervous in these testing situations.
But what if students do not have a chance to write about their fears immediately before an exam or presentation? Professor Beilock says students can try it themselves at home or in the library and still improve their performance.The purpose of the passage is .
| A．to build the confidence of the highly anxious test-takers |
| B．to introduce a research about the anxious test-takers |
| C．to improve the performance of the test-takers |
| D．to tell something about the highly anxious test-takers |
The underlined word “them” in paragraph 2 refers to.
| A．attention and memory resources |
| B．worries about the consequences |
| C．concerns about the exam |
| D．cognitive horsepower |
According to the research, the solution to the test anxiety is to.
| A．sit quietly before the exam |
| B．prepare well before the test |
| C．set their mind on happy memories |
| D．write about their feelings before the test |
The result of the research suggests that .
| A．proper amount of burden may turn out to be a good thing |
| B．avoiding facing the problem may contribute to relaxation |
| C．facing the fears bravely may help one to achieve more |
| D．taking no action before difficulty may result in success |