In Vietnam, two members of a family of street vendors are finding a way to help the poorest students in Hanoi. Pham Minh Dap and his brother are providing the students with mostly free English and Japanese lessons at a learning center they created. The men want to help people who would not normally have a chance to learn a foreign language.
Some education experts in Vietnam say such knowledge may help college graduates get jobs. The country’s economy has improved. But many graduates continue to have a hard time finding employment. Local media reported ten percent of university graduates do not have a job.
Earlier this year, 24-year-old Pham Minh Dap and his brother established a school they call “Stand By You”. Volunteers teach poor students English and Japanese. Many classes are free. Students with some language knowledge pay 25 to 50 cents per class. Mr. Dap pays about $ 500 to rent the language center space and for other costs. He gives about $ 150 from his earnings as a street Vendor and private language teaching. His brother gives the same amount from the money he earns as a secretary. Friends provide the rest. Mr. Dap and many of his family members have sold things outside HoaBinh Park in the center of Vietnam’s capital for five years. They come from a village of rice farmers in Thanh Hoa Province.
Twenty-four-year-old Pham THi Trang is one of 600 students at the language school. She is finishing her university studies. Her parents work in a market in a village in Ha Nam Province. She says life is hard in the city. She earns about $50 a month from a part-time job, and her parents give her $ 75. But this is not enough to live on. She has said she has to be very careful with money so she can pay her bills.
Demand for the school is growing. About 1,000 people are on a waiting list to enter. Ten people have offered to teach for free. And Mr. Dap says he is hoping to raise money to pay for a bigger place. He wants to open more classes.“Stand By You” is established____________.
| A.by the Vietnam government | B.by a family |
| C.by a non-profit organization | D.by two brothers |
What can we infer from the passage?
| A.All the courses provided by “ Stand By You” are free. |
| B.Farmers in Vietnam are very rich. |
| C.“Stand By You” is especially welcomed by the poor students in Vietnam. |
| D.Only ten percent of university graduates in Vietnam are employed. |
Mr. Dap wants to pay for a bigger place because___________.
| A.he wants to make more money. |
| B.he wants to open more classes for poor students. |
| C.he wants to change his job. |
| D.he wants to provide a wider space for students to play. |
The main idea of the passage is ____________.
| A.street vendors help the poor to learn English and Japanese. |
| B.the demand for school is growing in Vietnam. |
| C.free learning of English and Japanese are provided in Vietnam. |
| D.students in Vietnam are very poor. |
IV 阅读理解(每小题2分,共24分)
I travel a lot in my work, and what I dislike about my job is eating alone. It always makes me feel lonely to see others laughing and talking. So, room service for several nights was a better choice for me.
After having room service three nights at a hotel in Houston, however, I needed to get out of my room. Although the restaurant opened at 6:30, I arrived at 6:25. The waiter at the front desk made a comment about my “being there really early”. I explained my dislike of eating alone in restaurants. He then seated me at a lovely table and asked me whether I would mind if he sat down with me for a while.
I was glad! He sat and talked with me about his career goals and the difficulty of being at work on nights, weekends and holidays. He said he hadn’t enough time to be with his family. After 15 minutes, he saw some customers at the front desk and excused himself. I noticed that before he went to the front desk, he stopped in the kitchen for a moment.
Then another waiter came out of the kitchen and had a wonderful chat with me. Before I left that night, some other waiters, even the cook, had come out of the kitchen and sat with me!
When I asked for my bill about one hour later, all the people who had sat down with me came over in a big group to my table, and presented me with a red rose. And I cried! What had begun as a lonely night ended as a beautiful experience.
57. The reason why the author hated to eat in the hotel restaurant is that the author didn’t like ______.
A. meeting strangers in the restaurant
B. being disturbed by the noises around
C. the discomfort caused by eating alone
D. being pointed at or laughed at
58. How did the waiter feel when he saw the author come in at 6:25?
A. Dissatisfied. B. Pleased. C. Surprised. D. Angry.
59. From the third paragraph, we can learn that the waiter at the front desk ______.
A. knew how to attract more customers to his restaurant
B. found it hard to balance his work and his family
C. was getting tired of his present job
D. had never had such a chance to talk about his worries
60. The author wants to tell us that ______.
A. people can get help for their loneliness
B. restaurants should put the need of customers first
C. the kindness of strangers can make you less lonely
D. restaurants are full of surprises
Before the earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province, 38-year-old Sarah Bexell was working to develop a new environmental consciousness(意识) among Chinese people and to encourage them to protect wildlife and habitat-in particular, that of the giant panda.
Bexell, an American who is the director of conservation education at the Chengdu Research Base for Giant Panda Breeding. Bexell has spent a lot of time teaching young people the value of protecting the environment.
“The younger generation in China can afford to care,” Bexell said before the earthquake. “They’re not starving. Thay have food, good jobs, and access to education.”
Now, Bexell worries about the people she has been working with and who are up in the mountains. She doesn’t know whether they and their families are safe. And she knows the work to which she is devoted has become more urgent during the immediate crisis.
Bexell and her Chinese colleagues have been trying to spread the message that the tourist boom, population growth, and pillaging (掠夺) of resources form terrible threats to the environment.
There are stories of pandas wandering out of the forest and into villages. This is a troubling sign for what should be a rare species.
To make matters worse, there are fears that with the earthquake and landslides ,bamboo could massively die off. That’s the main food source for the giant pandas, whose habitat was already damaged.
In April, Bexell took Block way up a twisting mountain road into the Longxi-Hongkou National Nature Reserve. The reserve was set up in 1997 to protect the giant panda and its habitat. It was very near the epicenter(震中) of the earthquake, so this area suffered severe damage.
58.Bexell is devoted to________ in Sichuan Province.
A.protecting giant pandas B.environment-protection education
C.research on people’s lives D.research on the environment after earthquakes
59.The main threats to the wildlife and the environment are the following EXCEPT ________.
A.population growth B.tourist development
C.bamboo’s massive death because of bad weather D.the overuse of resources
60.According to what Bexell says, ________.
A.we should care for animals since we have enough food and clothing
B.many young people in China are usually selfish
C.rich people should spend more on young people’s education
D.animal and environmental protection needs a lot of money and time
Have you ever dreamed of visiting a planet in the Milk Way (银河系)?While the trip sounds exciting, it would take years and years to reach your destination. So in the future, bedtime for astronauts may be more than a few hours of regular shut-eye. They would have to sleep for years.
European researchers are now conducting hibernation(冬眠) experiments. The study may help them understand whether humans could ever sleep through the years it would take for a spaceflight to distant planets. “If there was an effective technology, it could make deep-space travel a reality,” said Mark Ayre of the European Space Agency last month.
What seems like science fiction is not completely unlikely. Researchers have been able to use chemicals to put living cells into a sleep-like state. They have now moved on to small, non-hibernating mammals like rats.
A major challenge is the fact that cells can be very simple systems, whereas body organs are far more complex. “It’s like moving from a simple Apple computer to a supercomputer,” said Marco Biggiogera, a hibernation researcher at Italy’s University of Pavia. Just like bears and frogs, the hibernation of human beings would cause a person’s metabolism (新陈代谢) to lower so they would need less energy.
Medical research, however, is just half of a spaceflight hibernation system. There is the challenge of designing a suitable protective shelter(栖身所). Such a shelter would provide the proper environment for hibernation, such as the proper temperature It would also have to monitor (监控) life functions and serve the physiological needs of the hibernator.
According to Ayre, the six-person human Outer Planets Exploration Mission to jupiter’s moon (木星的卫星) Callisto, could be an opportunity to use human hibernation. The mission aims to send six humans on a five-year flight to Callisto, where they will spend 30 days, in 2045.
54.According to the article, the hibernation research ________.
A.is just an idea B.is always a science fiction
C.has already finished successfully D.has made some progress
55.There are ________ major challenges facing scientists who study hibernation.
A.two B.three C.four D.five
56.The first use of the hibernation technology ________ the six-person human Outer Planets Exploration Mission to jupiter’s moon Callisto.
A.must he B.has been planned for C.is certain to be D.may be
57.What is the best title for the article?
A.Hibernation Study for Space Travel B.Welcome to Our Space Travel
C.To Hibernate, to Live Longer D.Welcome to Milk Way
Space is a dangerous place, not only because of meteors(流星), but also because of rays from the sun and other stars. The atmosphere again acts as our protective blanket on the earth. Light gets through, and this is necessary for plants to make the food which we eat. Heat, too, makes our environment suitable to live. Various kinds of rays come through the air from outer space, but enormous quantities of radiation from the sun are screened off. As soon as men leave the atmosphere they are exposed to this radiation but their spacesuits or the walls of their spacecraft, if they are inside, do prevent a lot of radiation damage.
Radiation is the greatest known danger to explorers in space. The unit of radiation is called “rem”. Scientists have reason to think that a man can put up with far more radiation than 0.1 rem without being damaged; the figure of 60 rems has been agreed on. The trouble is that it is extremely difficult to be sure about radiation damage a person may feel perfectly well, but the cells of his or her sex organs may be damaged, and this will not be discovered until the birth of deformed(畸形的)children or even grandchildren. Missions of the Apollo flights have had to cross belts of high radiation and, during the outward and return journeys, the Apollo crew accumulated a large amount of rems. So far, no dangerous amounts of radiation have been reported, but the Apollo missions have been quite short. We simply do not know yet how men are going to get on when they spend weeks and months outside the protection of the atmosphere, working in a space laboratory. Drugs might help to decrease the damage done by radiation, but no really effective ones have been found so far.
49.According to the first paragraph, the atmosphere is necessary to man because of the following reason EXCEPT________
A.protecting him against the harmful rays from space
B.providing sufficient light for plant growth
C.suppling the heat necessary for human survival
D.screening off the falling meteors
50.We learn from the passage that ________
A.exposure to even tiny amounts of radiation is fatal
B.the effect of exposure to radiation is slow in coming
C.radiation is avoidable in space exploration
D.astronauts in spacesuits needn’t worry about radiation damage
51.The harm radiation that has been done to the Apollo crew members ________
A.is insignificant B.is enormous C.seems overestimated D.remains unknown
52.It can be inferred from the passage that________
A.the Apollo mission was very successful
B.the protection from space radiation is no easy job
C.astronauts may possibly have deformed children or grandchildren
D.radiation is not a threat to well-protected space explorers
53.Which of the following is TRUE?
A.Space is dangerous only because of meteors.
B.Explorers in space have to avoid the damage from radiation
C.We have got effective ways to treat illnesses caused by radiation.
D.The atmosphere doesn’t screen off radiation
第二部分 阅读理解
第一节从A、B、C、D中选出最佳选项:(共20小题,每小题2分,满分40分)
Robert Spring, a 19th century forger (伪造者), was so good at his profession that hs was able to make his living for 15 years by selling false signatures of famous Americans. Spring was born in England in 1838 and arrived in Philadelphia in 1858 to open a bookstore. At first he prospered(繁荣)by selling his small but genuine collection of early US autographs (亲笔签名). Discovering his ability at copying handwriting he began imitating the signatures of George Washington and Benjimin Franklin and writing them on the title pages of old books. To lessen the chance of detection (被发现). He sent his forgeries to England and Canada for sale, Forgers have a hard time selling products. A forger cannot approach a respectable buyer but must deal with people who don’t have much knowledge in the field. Forgers have many ways of making their works look real. For example, they buy old books and use the aged paper of the title page, and they can treat paper and ink with chemicals.
In Spring’s time, right after the Civil War, Britain was still fond of the southern states, so Spring invented a respectable young lady known as Miss Fanny Jackson, the only daughter of General “Stonewall” Jackson. For several years Miss Fanny’s financial problems forced her to sell a great number of letters and manuscripts (手稿) belonging to her famous father. Spring had to work very hard to satisfy the demand. However, all this activity did not prevent Spring from dying in poverty, leaving sharp-eyed experts the difficult task of separating his forgeries from the originals.
41.Robert Spring spent 15 years ________.
A.running a bookstore in Philadelphia B.as owners of old books
C.selling real signatures of famous Americans D.as a forger
42.Why did Spring sell his false autographs in England and Canada?
A.There was less chance that his forgeries would be discovered there.
B.The prices were much higher in England and Canada.
C.There was a greater demand there than in America.
D.Britan was Spring’s birthplace.
43.After the Civil War there was a great demand in Britain for ________
A.Civil War battle plans B.southern manuscripts and letters
C.the signatures of George Washington and Ben Franklin D.southern money
44.Which of the following about Miss Fanny Jackson is TRUE?
A.She was Robert Spring’s customer.
B.She was an imaginary person created by Spring.
C.She was a little-known girl who sold her father’s papers to make money.
D.She was the only daughter of General Stonewall Jackson.