TourABath&Stonehengeincludinge-优题课

In the fall of 1985，I was a brighteyed girl heading off to Howard University, aiming at a legal career and dreaming of sitting on a Supreme Court bench somewhere. Twentyone years later I am later I am still a brighteyed dreamer and one with quite a different tale to tell.
My grandma, an amazing woman, graduated from college at the age of 65. She was the first in our family to reach that goal. But one year after I started college, she developed cancer. I made the choice to withdraw from college to care for her. It meant that school and my personal dream would have to wait.
Then I got married with another dream: building my family with a combination of adopt and biological children. In 1999, we adopted our first son. To lay eyes on him was fantastic...and very emotional. A year later came our second adopted boy. Then followed son No. 3. In 2003, I gave birth to another boy.
You can imagine how fully occupied I became, raising four boys under the age of 8！Our home was a complete zoo...a joyous zoo. Not surprising, I never did make it back to college fulltime. But I never gave up on the dream either. I had only one choice: to find a way. That meant talking as few as one class each semester.
The hardest part was feeling guilty about the time I spent away from the boys. They often wanted me to stay home with them. There certainly were times I wanted to quit.But I knew I should set an example for them to follow through the rest of their lives.
In 2007, I graduated from the University of North Carolina. It took me over 21 years to get my college degree!
I am not special, just singleminded. It always struck me that when you're looking at a big challenge from the outside it looks huge, but when you're in the midst of it, it just seems normal. Everything you want won't arrive in your life on one day. It's a process. Remember；little steps add up to big dreams.
When the author went to Howard University, her dream was to be ________.

A．a writer

B．a teacher

C．a judge

D．a doctor

Why did the author quit school in her second year of college?

A．She wanted to study by herself.

B．She fell in love and got married.

C．She suffered from a serious illness.

D．She decided to look after her grandma.

What can we learn about the author from Paragraphs 4 and 5?

A．She was busy yet happy with her family life.

B．She ignored her guilty feeling for her sons.

C．She wanted to remain a fulltime housewife.

D．She was too confused to make a correct choice.

What does the author mostly want to tell us in the last paragraph?

A．Failure is the mother of success.

B．Little by little，one goes far.

C．Every coin has two sides.

D．Well begun, half done.

The famous director of a big and expensive movie planned to film a beautiful sunset over the ocean , so that the audiences could see his hero and heroine in front of it at the end of the film as they said goodbye to each other for ever. He sent his camera crew (摄制组) out one evening to film the sunset for him.
The next morning he said to the men, “Have you provided me with that sunset？”
“No, sir，”the man answered.
The director was angry. “Why not？”he said.
“Well, sir，” one of the men answered, “We're on the east coast here, and the sun sets in the west. We can get you a sunrise over the sea, if necessary, but not a sunset.”
“But I want a sunset，”the director shouted. “Go to the airport, take the next flight to the west coast, and get one.”
But then a young secretary had an idea. “Why don't you photograph a sunrise, ” she suggested, “and then play it backwards? Then it'll look like a sunset.”
“That's a very good idea！” the director said. Then he turned to the camera crew and said，“Tomorrow morning I want you to get me a beautiful sunrise over the sea.”
The camera crew went out early the next morning and filmed a bright sunrise over the beach in the middle of a beautiful bay. Then at nine o'clock they took it to the director. “Here it is, sir，” they said, and gave it to him. He was very pleased.
They all went into the studio.“All right，”the director explained, “now our hero and heroine are going to say goodbye. Run the film backwards so that we can see the ‘sunset' behind them.”
The “sunset”began, but after a quarter of a minute, the director suddenly put his face in his hands and shouted to the camera crew to stop.
The birds in the film were flying backwards, and the waves on the sea were going away from the beach.
Why did the director want to send his crew to the west coast?

A．Because he changed his mind about getting a sunset.

B．Because he has angry with his crew.

C．Because it was his secretary's suggestion.

D．Because he wanted to get a scene of sunset.

Which of the following is NOT true?

A．The crew had to follow the secretary's advice.

B．If you want to see a sunrise, the east coast is the place to go to.

C．The camera crew wasn't able to film the scene the first day.

D．The director ordered his crew to stop filming the“sunset”．

The director wanted to film a sunset over the ocean because________.

A．it went well with the separation of the hero and the heroine

B．when they arrived at the beach it was already in the evening

C．it was more moving than a sunrise

D．the ocean looked more beautiful at sunset

After the“sunset”began, the director suddenly put his face in his hands________.

A．because he was moved to tears

B．as he saw everything in the film moving backwards

C．as the sunrise did not look as beautiful as he had imagined

D．because he was disappointed (失望的) with the performance of the hero and heroine

A Festival for the Dead is held once a year in Japan. This festival is a cheerful occasion, for on this day, the dead are said to return to their homes and they are welcomed by the living. As they are expected to be hungry after their long journey, food is laid out for them. Speciallymade lanterns(灯笼) are hung outside each house to help the dead to find their way. All night long, people dance and sing. In the early morning, the food that had been laid out for the dead is thrown into a river or into the sea as it is considered unlucky for anyone living to eat it. In towns that are near the sea, the tiny lanterns which had been hung in the streets the night before, are placed into the water when the festival is over. Thousands of lanterns slowly drift out to sea guiding the dead on their return journey to the other world. This is a moving spectacle(景象，场面), for crowds of people stand on the shore watching the lanterns drifting away until they can be seen no more.
The festival is a cheerful one，because________.

A．people specially make some lanterns

B．all night long, people dance and sing

C．people make much delicious food

D．the dead are said to return to their homes and are welcomed by the living

Speciallymade lanterns(灯笼) are hung outside each house to________.

A．help the dead to find their way

B．add the cheerful atmosphere

C．welcome the dead to go home

D．help the dead to find the food

What happens to the lanterns at the end of the festival?

A．The lanterns are put away to be used next year.

B．They are thrown away.

C．They are placed into the water.

D．They are hung outside all the way.

Saturday, October 7th, was a marathon of sad tasks for Anna Politkovskaya. Two weeks earlier, her father, a retired official in the department of foreign affairs, had died of a heart attack as he emerged from the Moscow Metro while on his way to visit Politkovskaya's mother, Raisa Mazepa, in the hospital. She had just been diagnosed(诊断) with cancer and was too weak even to attend her husband's funeral. “Your father will forgive me, because he knows that I have always loved him，” she told Anna and her sister, Elena Kudimova, the day he was buried. A week later, she had an operation and since then Anna and Elena had been taking turns helping her deal with her grief.
Politkovskaya was supposed to spend the day at the hospital, but her twentysixyearold daughter, who was pregnant, had just moved into Politkovskaya's apartment, on Lesnaya Street, while her own place was being prepared for the baby. “Anna had so much on her mind，” Elena Kudimova told me when we met in London, before Christmas. “And she was trying to finish her article.” Politkovskaya was a special reporter for the small newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and, like most of her work, the piece focused on the terror that can be seen all over the southern republic of Chechnya. This time, she had been trying to report repeated cruel acts done by people faithful to the Prime Minister, Ramzan Kadyrov, who are in favour of Russia. In the past seven years, Politkovskaya had written dozens of accounts of life during wartime; many had been collected in her book “A Small Corner of Hell: reports from Chechnya.” Politkovskaya was far more likely to spend time in a hospital than on a battlefield, and her writing bore frequent witness to robbery, and the uncontrolled cruelty of life in a place that few other Russiansand almost no other reporterscared to think about.
Politkovskaya's father died of ________.

A．tiredness	B．a heart disease
C．an attack	D．an accident

From the text we know that Raisa Mazepa ________.

A．didn't love her husband

B．didn't attend her husband's funeral

C．was having an operation the day her husband was buried

D．was too sad to attend her husband's funeral

The underlined word “emerged” most likely means ________.

A．came out	B．went into
C．disappeared	D．left for

How many family members of Anna are mentioned in the passage?

A．Three.

B．Four.

C．Five.

D．Six.

For more than two days in September 1974, the people of Honduras shut their windows, locked their doors and covered in their homes. Fifi was outside, and they were frightened.
By the time Fifi had left, 8,000 people were dead, Fifi wasn't a pet dog as the name suggests. It was a hurricane, one of the most destructive natural phenomena in the world.
Why do we give human names to storms and hurricanes?
We didn't always. Two hundred years ago, many hurricanes in the Caribbean were named after the saint's(基督徒的)day on which the storm occurred. Later, storms were known by the name of the city where they came ashore.
Meteorologists (气象学家) then tried naming storms after the latitude (纬度) and longitude (经度) where they occurred.
Finally, in 1953, hurricanes started getting people's names —specifically, female names. Male names were added in 1979.
There are six sets of names for what the experts call “Atlantic tropical cyclones”( 热带风暴)．
Each list is used every six years and consists of 21 names, starting with every letter but Q, U, X, Y ，Z. the names alternate (交替)between male and female.
A storm won't get a name until its winds reach 39 mph or about 62.4 kph, at which point it becomes a tropical storm. At 74 mph or 118.4 kph it's declared a hurricane.
The 126 names on the list are used only for storms that form off the Atlantic coast of the US. There are separate lists for the Pacific.
So what happens if a hurricane should cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific? It's happened before. The storm just gets a new name and sometimes a new sex.
Max Mayfield is the director of the National Hurricane Centre, headquartered in Miami, Florida. He is in charge of picking new names for storms off the Atlantic coast.
He doesn't do it alone, though. His counterparts in two dozen other countries in the Caribbean, Central America and North America vote on what names will replace retired names.
From the first paragraph we can find that ________.

A．Honduras is a country which was destroyed by Fifi

B．Honduras is a country which has no mountains

C．Honduras is a country which faces the ocean

D．Honduras is a country which lies at high latitude

Which of the following is true according to the passage?

A．There were no hurricanes two centuries ago.

B．The Caribbean is a state of the United States.

C．The Caribbean is a place where hurricanes occur often.

D．Fifi was formed off the Pacific.

The names for storms and hurricanes, as this passage shows，________.

A．are set for use.

B．are all from American English

C．are difficult to spell

D．are easy to fix

The underlined word “counterparts” in the last paragraph means ________.

A．citizens holding the same opinion

B．people with a similar position or function

C．passengers traveling by sea

D．assistants working abroad