One of the greatest contributions to the first Oxford English Dictionary was also one of its most unusual. In 1879, Oxford University in England asked Prof. James Murray to serve as editor for what was to be the most ambitious dictionary in the history of the English language. It would include every English word possible and would give not only the definition but also the history of the word and quotations (引文) showing how it was used.
This was a huge task, so Murray had to find volunteers from Britain, the United States, and the British colonies to search every newspaper, magazine, and book ever written in English. Hundreds of volunteers responded, including William Chester Minor. Dr. Minor was an American surgeon who had served in the Civil War and was now living in England. He gave his address as “Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire,” 50 miles from Oxford.
Minor joined the army of volunteers sending words and quotations to Murray. Over the next 17 years, he became one of the staff’s most valued contributors.
But he was also a mystery. In spite of many invitations, he would always decline to visit Oxford. So in 1897, Murray finally decided to travel to Crowthorne himself. When he arrived, he found Minor locked in a book-lined cell at the Broadmoor Asylum (精神病院) for the Criminally Insane.
Murray and Minor became friends, sharing their love of words. Minor continued contributing to the dictionary, sending in more than 10,000 submissions in 20 years. Murray continued to visit Minor regularly, sometimes taking walks with him around the asylum grounds.
In 1910, Minor left Broadmoor for an asylum in his native America. Murray was at the port to wave
goodbye to his remarkable friend.
Minor died in 1920, seven years before the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was completed. The 12 volumes defined 414,825 words, and thousands of them were contributions from a very scholarly and devoted asylum patient.
According to the text, the first Oxford English Dictionary _________.
| A．came out before minor died |
| B．was edited by an American volunteer |
| C．was intended to be the most ambitious English dictionary Murray |
| D．included the English words invented by Murray |
How did Dr. Minor contributed to the dictionary?
| A．He helped Murray to find hundreds of volunteers. |
| B．He sent newspapers, magazines and books to Murray. |
| C．He went to England to work with Murray. |
| D．He provided a great number of words and quotations |
Why did Dr. Minor refuse to visit Oxford?
| A．He lived far from Oxford |
| B．He was shut in an asylum |
| C．He was busy writing a book |
| D．He disliked traveling |
Prof. Murray and Dr. Minor became friends mainly because __________.
| A．They had a common interest in words |
| B．They both served in the Civil War |
| C．Minor recovered with the help of Murray |
| D．Murray went to America regularly to visit Minor |
C
Andreea,18,from Romania, sent a photograph of the view from her window and included a brief apology, “Sorry, this picture is plain and boring. No one would like it.”
At home in New Jersey, US, Coreen Burke,16, clicked on the same image on the internet. She saw a village with its
rooftops and walls painted in reds and yellows, a distant chimney(烟囱) giving off smoke. “Isn’t this amazingly different from my country?” She thought to herself.
Burke, a teenager with a skill for computers, saw beauty in that photo. She posted it to her blog, Outside My Window, which features a daily snap
shot(快照) of someone’s window view around the world.
The concept is simple: We can all relate to the act of staring through a piece of glass, onto the scene on the other side. “Maybe if we understood the way people from all over the world live,” she explained, “we would all get along better than we have been lately.”
With a click of a mouse, you can see Frederic’s window in the south of France, looking out on sailboats anchored (抛锚) in a peaceful harbor. Or Virginia’s view in Canada, a winter scene with trees laced in white.
Like most high school students, Burke has traveled the world. But she says someday she hopes to collect stamps in her passport, starting with Greece and India. Her recent break was devoted to launching the site with a blogger account and recruiting(招募) contributors from deviant ART, an online art community. She
posted the first window view from Switzerland, a sunset photographed by an 18-year-old. Then others came flowing in by email, up to seven a day, from as far as Kazakhstan and Indonesia.
Contributors are marked on maps pinned on her bedroom wall: a blue dot indicates their country and a pink dot shows their city, if they provide it. The most responses have come from Europe – Estonia, P
oland, Italy
, Germany and Sweden, to name a few. She is crossing her fingers, thinking that she’ll receive a photo from Africa or Antarctica, which are unrepresented so far.
While she’s become a cyber crusader(网络革新者) for appreciating the beauty outside our own windows, get this: She has no windows in her bedroom. She has a nice skylight（天窗）, though.
51. What does Burke think of the picture she received from Andreea?
A. Boring B. Charming C. Strange D. Plain
52. Outside My Window is a blog intended to show_______.
A. the view from Burke’s window
B. pictures of rural New Jersey
C. photos of window views taken by people all over the world
D. beautiful scenes of famous places of interest
53. We can conclude from the article that Burke _______.
A. believes we should reach out to people of different cultures
B. has traveled around the world and taken many pictures
C. is a member of an online art community
D. has made a lot of money by selling beautiful pictures
54. Which of the following is not true?
A. Burke is likely to receive a photo from Africa or Antarctica.
B. Burke is a junior middle school student.
C. Burke has photos from many countries in the world, including Kazakhstan.
D. Burke wants a photo of window view from Africa or Antarctica.
55．What is the best title of this passage?
A. World Windows
B. Beautiful Pictures
C. Pictures on the Internet
D. Windows in Bedrooms
B
You are watching a film in which two men are having a fight. They hit one another hard. At the start they only fight with their fists. But soon they begin hitting one another over the heads with chairs. And so it goes on until one of the men crashes through a window and falls thirty feet to the ground below. He is dead！Of course he isn't really dead. With any luck he isn't even hurt. Why? Because the men who fall out of high windows or jump from fast moving trains are professionals. They do this for a living. These men are called stuntmen. That is to say, they perform tricks. There are two sides to their work. They actually do most of the things you see on the screen. For example, they fall from a high building. However, they do not fall on to hard ground but on to empty cardboard boxes covered with a mattress (床垫). Again, when they hit one another with chairs, the chairs are made of soft wood and when they crash through windows, the glass is made of sugar! But although their work depends on trick of this sort, it also requires a high degree of skill and training. Often a stuntman' s success depends on careful timing. For example, when he is "blown up" in a battle scene, he has to jump out of the way of the explosion just at the right moment.
Naturally stuntmen are well paid for their work, but they lead dangerous lives. They often get seriously injured, and sometimes killed. A Norwegian stuntman, for example, skied over the edge of a cliff (悬崖) a thousand feet high. 
His parachute (降落伞) failed to open, and he was killed. In spite of all the risks, this is no longer a profession for men only. Men no longer dress up as women when actresses have to perform some dangerous action. For nowadays there are stuntgirls tool.
46. Stuntmen are those who ______.
A. often dress up as actors
B. prefer to lead dangerous lives
C. often perform seemingly dangerous actions
D. often fight each other for their lives
47. Stuntmen earn their living by ______.
A. playing their dirty tricks
B. selling their special skills
C. jumping out of high windows
D. jumping from fast moving trains
48. When a stuntman falls from a high building, ______.
A. he needs little protection
B. he will be covered with a mattress
C. his life is unprotected
D. his safety is generally all right
49. Which of the following is the main factor (因素) of a successful performance?
A. Strength. B. Exactness. C. Speed. D. Carefulness.
50. What can be inferred from the author' s example of the Norwegian stuntman?
A. Sometimes an accident can occur to a stuntman.
B. The percentage of serious accidents is high.
C. Parachutes must be of good quality.
D. The cliff is too high.
III. Reading Comprehension 40%
Section A 30%
Directions：Read the following four passages. Each passage is followed by several questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the one that fits best according to the information given in the passage you have just read.
A
Mr. Peter Johnson, aged twenty-three, battled for half an hour to escape from his trapped car yesterday when it landed upside down in three feet of water. Mr. Johnson took the only escape route—through the boot(行李箱).
Mr. Johnson’s car had finished up in a ditch(沟渠) at Romney Marsin, Kent after skidding on ice and hitting a bank. “Fortunately, the water began to come in only slowly,” Mr. Johnson said. “I couldn’t force the doors because they were jammed against the walls of the ditch and dared not open the windows because I knew water would come flooding in.”
Mr. Johnson, a sweet salesman of Sitting Home, Kent, first tried to attract the attention of other motorists by sounding the horn and hammering on the roof and boot. Then he began 
his struggle to escape. Later he said, “It was really a half penny that saved my life. It was the only coin I had in my pocket and I used it to unscrew the back seat to get into the boot.
It took ten minutes to unscrew the seat, and a further five minutes to clear the sweet samples from the boot. Then Mr. Johnson found a wrench and began to work on the boot lock.
Fifteen minutes passed by. “It was the only chance I had. Finally it gave, but as soon as I moved the boot lid, the water and mud poured in. I forced the lid down into the mud and jumped out of the ditch.”
His hands and arms cut and bruised(擦伤), Mr. Johnson got to Beckett Farm nearby, where he was looked after by the farmer’s wife, Mrs. Lucy Bates. Huddled in a blanket, he said, “That thirty minutes seemed like hours.” Only the tips of the car wheels were visible, police said last night. The vehicle had sunk into two feet of mud at the bottom of the ditch.
41. What is the best title for this newspaper article?
A. The Story of Mr. Johnson, A Sweet Salesman
B. Car Boot Can Serve As The Best Escape Route
C. Driver Escapes Through Car Boot
D. The Driver Survived A Terrible Car Accident
42. Which of the following objects is the most important to Mr. Johnson?
A. The hammer. B. The coin. C.The screw. D. The horn.
43. Which statement is true according to the passage?
A. Mr. Johnson’s car stood on its boot as it fell down.
B. Mr. Johnson could not escape from the door because it was full of sweet jam.
C. Mr. Johnson’s car accident was partly due to the slippery road.
D. Mr. Johnson struggled in the pouring mud as he unscrewed the back seat.
44. “Finally it gave” (Paragraph 4) means that _______.
A. Luckily the door was torn away in the end
B. At last the hammer went broken
C. The lock came open after all his efforts
D. The chance was lost at the last minute
45. It may be inferred from the passage that _______.
A. the ditch was along a quiet country road
B. the accident happened on a clear warm day
C. the police helped Mr. Johnson get out of the ditch
D. Mr. Johnson had a tender wife and was well attended
（D）
Sorry to say , our brains naturally start slowing down at the cruelly young age of 30 . It used to be thought that this couldn’t be helped , but new studies show that people of any age can train their brains to work faster . “ Your brain is a learning machine , ” says University of California scientist Dr . Michael Merzenich . Given the right tools , we can train our brains to act like they did when we were younger . All that’s required is the practice designed just for the purpose : a few exercises for the mind .
Merzenich has developed a computer-based training method to speed up the process in which the brain deals with information ( positscience. com ) . Since much of the data we receive comes through speech , the Brain Fitness Program works with language and hearing to better speed and accuracy .
Over the course of training , the program starts asking you to distinguish sounds ( between “ dog ”and “ bog ” , for example ) at an increasingly faster speed . It’s a bit like tennis instructor , says Merzenich , hitting balls at you faster and faster to keep you challenged (受到挑战) . You may start out slow, but before long you’re pretty quick .
The biggest finding in brain research in the last ten years is that the brain at any age is highly plastic. If you ask your brain to learn, it will learn . And it may even speed up while in the process.
To keep you brain young and plastic you can do one of a million new activities that challenge and excite you : playing table tennis or bridge, doing crossword puzzle , learning a language ….“ When it comes to preventing ageing, you really do ‘ use it or lose it ’ , ” says Barbara Sahakian , professor at Cambridge University .
67. Dr . Merzenich’s training method mainly depends on .
A. speech training B. computer languages
C. the activities on joins in D. the information being dealt with
68. By saying “ the brain at any age is highly plastic ”, the writer probably means the brain can be .
A. used B. mastered C. developed D. researched
69. What can we learn from the text?
A. Practice makes a quick mind.
B. Brain research started ten years ago .
C. Dr. Merzenich is a scientist in computer.
D. People believed nothing could stop the brain slowing down.
70. Which of the following agrees with the writer’s idea?
A. The training methods work better for the old.
B. People should use the brain to stop it from ageing.
C. The training of the brain should start at an early age.
D. It’s necessary to take part in as many activities as possible.
(C)
Read the advertisements carefully .Then answer the questions that follow.
| INTERESTED IN CHILDCARE? Qualified person of preschool teacher needed for busy childcare center , south of the river . Full-time work guaranteed .Immediate start necessary . The candidate must be able to work as a co-operative team member. Phone 63452345 for an interview and fax resume to 6345 2311 |
WE NEED OFFICE CLEANERS Three people are required for professional cleaning in the CBD area. Working hours from 5:00 pm on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. Approximately five hours per shift. A good record is necessary. Experience preferred . Phone 6345 7843 now. |
| WANT TO WORK AS A DENTAL NURSE? This is an exciting opportunity for a qualified dental nurse with a confident and cheerful personality to work in the School Dental Health Scheme. You must be able to get along well with children because work involves talking to groups about dental health practices. For further information, visit our website at : schooldentalservices@gov. sg . And fax your resume to 6234 454. |
FLORIST WANTED Are you a creative and trained florist with at least two years of experience? Then this may be just what you are seeking. The city’s leading Florist Artist Studio needs another part-time member on their wedding team. Please phone 6098 7888 now! |
63. You may find the above advertisements
A. in a store window B. in a school magazine
C. in a newspaper D. on a company notice – board
64. The position of a(n) is a part – time job.
A. florist B. artistC. preschool D. dental nurse
65. Which of the following is the most important for the childcare job?
A. Cooking skills B. Childcare experience.
C. The ability to start work in two weeks
D. The ability to work well with other people.
66. The office cleaners will be required to work about hours a week.
A. 5 B. 10 C. 15 D. 20