We grew up with the familiar toy bricks (积木) that gave us the imagination to build towers and castles. Generations have been attracted by this toy that lets children and adults alike create anything and everything. But with over 200 millions sets being sold a year in over 100 countries, the question remains — where did Lego actually come from?
Lego was born from the creative mind of Danish carpenter (木匠), Ole Kirk Christiansen, back in the early 1930s. He established a small business in Denmark. He and his team built a variety of household goods like ironing boards along with wooden toys. The Lego name was adopted in 1934, formed from the Danish words “Leg Godt” or “play well”, which means “I study” or “I put together” in Latin.
Christiansen’s company continued to make wooden toys until 1942 when fire struck — the entire Lego factory burned to the ground. Unwilling to give in, the factory was rebuilt and the production line restarted soon after. By 1954, Christiansen’s son, Godtfred, had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group. It was during his conversation with an overseas buyer that he was struck by the idea of a toy system.
For over 30 years, the Lego Company made only toys and related goods. Then, in 1968, the company opened its first Legoland in Denmark. Combining the Lego building bricks with a computer, the Robotics Invention System 1.5 is now the most advanced toy in the Lego Company, which is targeted at users aged twelve and above, and that includes any parents or grandparents that want to join in.
Now the Lego Company is expanding its production lines to include lights, cameras and so on. Lego Company has done a lot to entertain many children around the world. The author presents the text by ________.
| A．telling an interesting story |
| B．showing the process in different stages |
| C．introducing a practical method |
| D．describing many different activities |
Which of the following is NOT true about the Robotics Invention System 1.5?
| A．It is the most advanced toy in the Lego Company. |
| B．It combines the Lego building bricks with a computer. |
| C．It is intended for users aged twelve and above. |
| D．It is the most expensive toy invented since 1968. |
What is the correct order of the following events in the development of Lego?
a. The entire Lego factory burned to the ground.
b. The company and its products adopted the name Lego.
c. The company opened its first Legoland in Denmark.
d. Godtfred had become the junior managing director of the Lego Group.
| A．cadb | B．cbad | C．abcd | D．badc |
What can we learn from the text?
| A．The Lego Company expands its production lines with computers. |
| B．The author thinks highly of Lego, which entertains many children. |
| C．The name Lego means “I put together” in the Danish language. |
| D．Lego enjoys the greatest popularity among children of 12. |
“Father, do you see Mother in your dreams?” the young girl asks. “You know sometimes I do.”
“Mother comes to see me a lot, you know. We sit and talk.” The father smiles. “How is your homework coming along?”
“Why do I have to study so hard?”
“It is what your mother would have wanted!”
She regrets speaking her mind. “I’m sorry, Father, I shouldn’t have said that.” She looks up and sees his eyes well up with tears.
“It’s okay, love,” he gets up and pours himself a drink. “I’ll just sit outside for a while. You finish up your work, okay?”
“I’m sorry, Father; Mother did love you very much. She told me all the time.”
“Homework, first, eh? Then we can chat about your mother.”
He heads off outside and sits in his usual chair, looking around the courtyard. The whole area relaxes the mind and somehow soothes the soul.
“All finished, Father. May I get a drink and sit with you? I have some questions.”
She comes with two drinks one for him and one for herself. He looks surprised. She never really liked him having a drink. Although he had cut back a lot from before he brought her here, it still seemed strange.
“Mother told me all about you. That is before she passed away. We would laugh together at your love stories.”
He listens without uttering a single sound.
“Why didn’t you come and take her away with you? She really wanted that. Did you know that?”
Her father looks at his daughter lovingly. “Circumstances were difficult back then. It was just the way things were. When it came time to…” He sighs. “To visit her it was too late.”
The girl smiles. “I hope I will have the same kind of love you and mother had.”
“Without all the heartache,” her father adds.
“She always knew you loved her. She told me every day,” the child mentions cheerfully. “I saw her crying sometimes when she read your letters.”
“Did she make you promise to look after me?” She inquires.
“She asked me to take care of you.”
“You promised her, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“It is nice out here, isn't it? Mother would have been very happy here.”
She talks with some authority. Her father remains silent. A smile comes to his weary brow. He nods his head.
“Mother wanted me to give you something. I think now the time is right.” She runs to her room. Upon returning she hands her father a book. “It’s mother’s diary! She wanted me to give it to you.”
He takes the book and holds it in his trembling hands, “Thank you.”
“Mother said you would understand things better.”
“Wise woman, your mother.”
He places the book on the table as he gets up. The girl gets up and wraps herself around her father.
“I love you.” she looks up at his face.
He picks her up and hugs her. “I love you, too.” His voice trembles.
“It’s okay, Father. We have each other now and mother is in both of us.”
He kisses her head.
“Time you went to bed,” her father softly says.
He puts her down and she scampers off to get washed and ready for bed.
Clearing up everything he checks on his daughter. She is in bed waiting for her good night kiss. He tucks her in and bids her goodnight.
Just as he is to leave she tells him. “Mother told me she adopted me when I was a baby.”
He stands at her bedroom door. Words fail him. Yes, he knew she was adopted.
“I am really lucky for being loved by my parents, even if I am not really theirs.”
“You trying to bring on the water works?” he tells her.
She giggles, “Goodnight, Father. I love you.”
“Love you, too.”
His face lights up as he wipes his dampened eyes.
The door closes and the child falls asleep dreaming of her mother.
Sitting outside he picks up the diary and opens it and reads the first line: “I love you, my dearest, if only things could have been different…”Why isn’t the mother with her family?
| A．She has already died. | B．She is ill in hospital. |
| C．The couple is divorced. | D．She lives in another city. |
What can we know about the couple’s relationship?
| A．They understood each other very well. |
| B．They quarreled a lot and are separated. |
| C．They used to have misunderstandings. |
| D．They were quite sure of each other’s love. |
What can we learn from the story?
| A．The girl was adopted because the couple couldn’t give birth. |
| B．Father looks after the girl just because the girl is alone. |
| C．The girl feels unfortunate that she was adopted. |
| D．Father was not very close to the girl before she moved in with him. |
Why didn’t father bring mother home when she was ill?
| A．Because he was too busy with his work |
| B．Because he didn’t know he was wanted |
| C．Because he was too poor to afford the medical fees |
| D．Because he didn’t know she was in hospital |
What does the sentence “You trying to bring on the water works?” mean?
| A．You want another cup of water? |
| B．Are you kidding me? |
| C．Are you trying to make me cry? |
| D．Are you thinking about the water factory? |
Which word best describes father’s feeling at the end of the story?
| A．Regretful | B．Satisfied | C．Confused | D．Doubtful |
LONDON, Feb. 18，2014 （Xinhua News agency） —Britain will send experts to East China's Shanghai to learn from the city's experience in maths teaching in an attempt to raise the teaching standards.
British Education Minister Elizabeth Truss is to lead a delegation of experts on a fact-finding mission to Shanghai's schools next week to see how children there have become the best in the world at maths, to get a first-hand look at maths classes and teaching methods there, and particularly to investigate why the performance of almost all children in Shanghai is high, regardless of gender or income.
Britain was last year placed 50th out of 148 countries and regions in the World Economic Forum's competitiveness ranking in quality of maths and science education. Two years ago, Shanghai topped the 2012 international PISA tables for maths, while England was ranked in 26th place. The top five were all in Southeast Asia, with 15-year-olds in Shanghai judged to be three years ahead of their peers in maths.
The education department said: "England's performance in maths has lagged behind while other countries have improved and overtaken us, including Poland and Germany." Actually, it is the latest step in the government's drive to raise standards in maths, looking at what has made schools in the far East the most successful in the world in teaching the subject.
"Shanghai is the top-performing part of the world for maths—their children are streets ahead. Shanghai and Singapore have teaching practices and a positive mind that make the difference. They have a belief that diligence makes up for lack of ability," Truss said. "Our new curriculum has borrowed from theirs because we know it works—early learning of key arithmetic, and a focus on times tables and long division（长除法）, for instance."
She was determined to change the situation as performance in maths is weakening the country's skills base and threatening the productivity and growth. The government is emphasizing maths because of the importance of good grades in the subject to young people competing for good jobs in a global labor market and to the economy more generally.
An education and skills survey released by the Confederation of British Industry last year showed that 30 percent of employers reported dissatisfaction with the standard of school and college leavers' numeracy. More than two-thirds of employers said they wanted both maths and science promoted more in schools.Why does the British government send a delegation of experts to Shanghai?
| A．To see how children from rich families have become the best at maths. |
| B．To investigate why the performance of almost all children in China is high. |
| C．To get a first-hand look at science classes and teaching methods there. |
| D．To raise the teaching standards in maths in Britain. |
Which of the following statements is true according to the two international competition results?
| A．British students performed better in 2013 than in 2012. |
| B．British students did better than the students from Poland in 2013. |
| C．The students from Singapore did better than the students from Germany. |
| D．The students from Germany did better than the students from Poland. |
What has made schools in Shanghai the most successful in teaching maths in the eye of Truss?
| A．Curriculum and teaching methods. |
| B．Teaching practices and a positive mind. |
| C．Early learning of key arithmetic and times tables. |
| D．A focus on times tables and long division. |
How will students’ poor performance in maths affect the country eventually?
| A．By threatening the country's competitiveness of economy. |
| B．By weakening the country's political system. |
| C．By losing international competitions in education. |
| D．By failing to find jobs in a global labor market. |
What can we infer from the news?
| A．The students in Britain don’t work hard at Maths. |
| B．The students in shanghai are the smartest in the world. |
| C．The education of science in Britain is no better than that of maths. |
| D．Most British citizens are dissatisfied with teachers’ work. |
Can software bring dead tongues back to life? Probably yes.
A computer algorithm（计算程序）works almost as well as a trained linguist（语言学家） in reconstructing how dead "protolanguages" would have sounded, says a new study.
"Our computer system is doing a basic job right now," says Alex Bouchard-Côté, an assistant professor in the department of statistics at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the paper describing the algorithm. But the program does a good enough job that it may be able to give linguists a head start, the statistician added.
For centuries, scholars have reconstructed languages by hand: looking at the same word in two or more languages and making educated guesses about what that word's "ancestor" may havesounded like. For example, the Spanish word for man （"hombre"） and the French word for man （"homme"） developed from the Latin word "homo." The way linguists compare words from descendant（后代）languages to reconstruct the parent language is called, appropriately, the comparative method.
The early 19th-century linguist Franz Bopp was the first to compare Greek, Latin and Sanskrit using this method. Jacob Grimm, one of the Brothers Grimm of fairy tale fame, used the comparative method to show how Germanic languages developed from a common ancestor.
The difference between that and Bouchard-Côté's program, the statistician says, "is we do it on a larger scale." As a proof of concept, Bouchard-Côté fed words from 637 Austronesian languages （spoken in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and more） into the new algorithm, and the system came up with a list of what the ancestor words of all those languages would have sounded like. In more than 85 percent of cases, the automated reconstruction came within one character of the ancestor word commonly accepted as true by linguists.
The algorithm won't replace trained human linguists, but could speed uplanguage analysis.
Using a computer to do large-scale reconstruction offers another advantage. Bouchard-Côté says, “With big data sets, you can really start finding regularities … You might find that certain sounds are more likely to change than others."
So Bouchard-Côté's team tested the "functional load hypothesis（假设）," which says that sounds that are more important for two clearly different words are less likely to change over time. A formal test of this hypothesis in 1967 looked at four languages; Bouchard-Côté's algorithm looked at 637.
"The revealed pattern would not be obvious if we had not been able to reconstruct large numbers of protolanguages," Bouchard-Côté and his coauthors write in the new study.
In addition to simply helping linguists understand how people spoke in the past, studying ancient languages can perhaps answer historical questions. For example, Bouchard-Côté says, "Say people are interested in finding out when Europe was settled. If you can figure out if the language of the settling population had a word for wheel, then you can get some idea of the order in which things occurred, because you would have some records that show you when the wheel was invented.”The underline word “protolanguages” in the first paragraph probably refers to __________.
| A．the languages that couldn’t be reconstructed by hand |
| B．parent languages that existed in the past |
| C．languages developed from a common ancestor |
| D．languages used to explain things that occurred in the past |
We can learn from the fourth and fifth paragraphs that the reconstruction of “protolanguage” by scholars __________.
| A．is commonly accepted as false |
| B．dates back to the 19th century |
| C．focuses on European languages |
| D．is conducted using the comparative method |
According to Bouchard-Côté, reconstructing the dead "protolanguages" might _______.
| A．arouse people’s interest in when Europe was settled |
| B．allow us to find answers to some historical questions |
| C．enable us to picture the way linguists communicated |
| D．help figure out how the wheel was invented |
The author probably wants to prove the computer algorithm program led by Bouchard-Côté ___________.
| A．will bring every dead language back to life |
| B．can take the place of linguists in language analysis |
| C．is of great help to promote language analysis with big data sets |
| D．can merely reconstruct Asian-Pacific “protolanguages” |
My six-year-old came home from school this week with two envelopes. One was for a donation to help people in the Philippines. The other was to help hungry families have a Thanksgiving meal.
“I’ll put a check in each of these. Then you can add your own money from your piggy bank, okay?” I said, thinking he’d be so excited to put his own stamp on things.
“That’s okay, mom. You put money in. I don’t want to waste mine,” he sweetly sang as he colored. “I want to fill my bank all the way up.”
Ack! I guess I know what our dinnertime discussion will be about tonight, I thought.
I had figured that through watching his parents donate items, helping us take toys from time to time to needy kids and putting money in the basket at church, he would just understand why it was important to help people in need — and even want to do it himself.
But of course he doesn’t really understand yet. “There’s a big disconnect between the people ‘over there’ and my piggy bank,” said parenting educator Vicki Hoefle.
“There’s nothing wrong with the child. There’s just no connection.”
As for having that conversation immediately, or forcing my son to put money into the envelopes: “Try not to do it now,” Hoefle said. Teaching a child about donating their own money or toys or time to people in need “should be a gentle introduction into what we hope will be a way of life for our kids.”
She suggested these things to help children understand the importance of giving:
* Just talk about it. Then explore the issue from a perspective he can understand.
* Use the course of a year to introduce kids to opportunities. That way, they won’t be shocked when you ask them to stuff their own money into an envelope （like this writer just did）.
* Pick a family charity for the year and have a conversation about how you all can help throughout the year.
* Think of this not as something you must teach, but as something to expose them to.
At her house, Hoefle said, “When you got something new, you gave something up.” Each birthday, her children would pick what toys they had outgrown and give them away. “There was a comfort in it. It just became a natural part of the kids’ lives.”
So I will fill those envelopes alone this time. But I’ll make sure he understands why they should be filled—gradually.When the writer asked her son to give money to help the poor, he __________.
| A．declined to donate |
| B．sang a sweet song |
| C．put all his money in a bank |
| D．seemed very surprised |
Hoefle’s attitude towards children’s unwillingness to donate money can be best described as “_______”.
| A．critical | B．tolerant | C．positive | D．worried |
Which of the following is Hoefle’s approach to educating kids about charity?
| A．Giving courses about charity. |
| B．Setting a rule for children to give. |
| C．Inviting a lot of poor people home. |
| D．Giving children enough real life chances. |
What can we learn about the writer from the passage?
| A．She often makes donations for people in need. |
| B．She taught her son a lesson over dinner that evening. |
| C．She is at a loss as for what she should do next. |
| D．She invited a parenting educator home for advice. |
What is the best title of the passage?
| A．Kids, please help those in need. |
| B．Why are kids unwilling to donate? |
| C．Kindness is lost in the young generation. |
| D．How can we help kids learn generosity? |
Interactive Home-security Systems
Tarik Celebi, who lives in San Francisco suburb, takes his home-security system with him to work, to dinner, just about anywhere．By his cell phone, he "arms" his home-security alarm from his car before he leaves for work．During his workday, he gets e-mail alerts every time his front door opens, even though he's miles away．If the door opens at an unusual time -say midday when no one should be coming or going - he can order a 30-second video clip（片段） from the camera that watches the door．If it's just his mother-in-law getting a package delivery, no worries．
Celebi is one of the first users of the latest interactive home-security systems．In addition to sounding alarms when the house is broken into and notifying homeowners or police, as traditional systems do, the interactive systems give users new ways to remotely control their systems and their home environment．Different from traditional home-security alarms, which homeowners typically have to press buttons on a keypad to turn on before they leave their homes, the interactive systems enable consumers to arm and disarm systems from smart phones, iPads and PCs, no matter where they are．
Most traditional systems are set up to sound an alarm if doors or windows are opened． The interactive systems give homeowners more options．For example, users can elect when they want to be notified．They might want an e-mail or a text every time a door is opened, or only during the hours of 3 to 4 p．m．, when kids come home from school．Like Celebi, they can add cameras and get video clips when doors open．That could be helpful in making sure kids aren't bringing friends home when they're not supposed to．
Nationwide, about 20% of homes have．traditional home-security systems．About half stop using them because they tire of the trouble．Being able to arm systems even while dashing to the subway or while at work will increase their usage of the new interactive systems．Although the new functions add costs to home security, the interactive-systems are believed to push home-security systems' usage rates closer to 30%, which would be a big movement for an industry that's been largely stuck at 20% for the past decade．"We all know it's going to get bigger, though we don't know how long it's going to take," Eric Taylor, an officer from San Francisco Security Department says．What may Celebi first do if his front door opens at a wrong time when he is away?
| A．Inform the police． | B．Call his mother-in-law． |
| C．Arm the security alarm． | D．Observe through video． |
The interactive systems enable the user to ______．
| A．improve his home environment remotely |
| B．lock his house's door while he is miles away |
| C．operate the home-security systems at any place |
| D．sound the alarm and inform the police at the same time |
What's the advantage of the interactive systems over the traditional ones?
| A．They are cheaper． |
| B．They are easier to set up． |
| C．They can give quicker reaction． |
| D．They have more ways to inform the users． |
What is the last paragraph mainly about?
| A．The importance of security industry． |
| B．The functions of the interactive alarms． |
| C．The popularity of home-security systems． |
| D．The market potential of the interactive systems． |