第二部分： 阅读理解(共20小题;每小题2.5分，满分50分)
阅读下列短文，从每题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中，选出最佳选项。
A
From the very beginning of school we make books and reading a constant source of possible failure and public humiliation. When children are little we make them read aloud, before the teacher and other children, so that we can be sure they "know" all the words they are reading. This means that when they don't know a word, they are going to make a mistake, right in front of everyone. After having taught fifth-grade classes for four years, I decided to try at all costs to rid them of their fear and dislike of books, and to get them to read oftener and more adventurously.
One day soon after school had started, I said to them, "Now I'm going to say something about reading that you have probably never heard a teacher say before. I would like you to read a lot of books this year, but I want you to read them only for pleasure. I am not going to ask you questions to find out whether you understand the books or not. If you understand enough of a book to enjoy it and want to go on reading it, that's enough for me. Also I’m not going to ask you what words mean."
The children sat stunned and silent. Was this a teacher talking? One girl, who had just come to us from a school where she had had a very hard time, looked at me steadily for a long time after I had finished. Then, still looking at me, she said slowly and seriously, Mr. Holt, do you really mean that?" I said just as seriously, "I mean every word of it.
During the spring she really astonished me. One day, she was reading at her desk, From a glimpse of the illustrations I thought I knew what the book was. I said to myself, "It can't be," and went to take a closer look. Sure enough, she was reading Moby Dick, in edition with woodcuts. I said, "Don't you find parts of it rather heavy going?" She answered, Oh, sure, but I just skip over those parts and go on to the next good part. "
This is exactly what reading should be and in school so seldom is —— an exciting, joyous adventure. Find something, dive into it, take the good parts, skip the bad parts, get what you can out of it, go on to something else. How different is our mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of "understanding" that can be dug out of a book.
41. According to the passage, children's fear and dislike of books may result from ______.
A. reading little and thinking little B. reading often and adventurously
C. being made to read too much D. being made to read aloud before others
42. The teacher told his students to read ______.
A. for enjoyment B. for knowledge
C. for a larger vocabulary D. for higher scores in exams
43. Upon hearing the teacher's talk, the children probably felt that ______.
A. it sounded stupid B. it was not surprising at all
C. it sounded too good to be true D. it was no different from other teachers' talk
44. Which of the following statements about the girl is TRUE according to the passage?
A. She skipped over those easy parts while reading.
B. She had a hard time finishing the required reading tasks.
C. She learned to appreciate some parts of the difficult books.
D. She turned out to be a top student after coming to this school.
45. From the teacher's point of view, ______.
A. children cannot tell good parts from bad parts while reading
B. children should be left to decide what to read and how to read
C. reading is never a pleasant and inspiring experience in school
D. reading involves understanding every little piece of information
B
Graphs can be a very useful tool for conveying information, especially numbers, percentage, and other data. A graph gives the reader a picture to interpret. That can be a lot more efficient than pages and pages explaining the data.
Graphs can seem frightening, but reading a graph is a lot like reading a story. The graph has a title, a main idea, and supporting details. You can use your active reading skills to analyze and understand graphs just like any other text.
Most graphs have a few basic parts: a caption or introduction paragraph, a title, a legend or key, and labeled axes. An active reader looks at each part of the graph before trying to interpret the data. Captions will usually tell you where the data came from (for example, a scientific study of 400 African elephants from 1980 to 2005). Captions usually summarize the author's main point as well. The title is very important. It tells you the main idea of the graph by stating what kind of information is being shown. A legend, also called a key, is a guide to the symbols and colors used ... the graph. Many graphs, including bar graphs and line graphs, have two axes that form a comer. Usually these axes are the left side and the bottom of the graph. Each axis will always have a label. The label tells you what each axis measures.
A bar graph has two axes and uses bars to show amounts. In Graph 1, we see that the x-axis shows grades that students earned, and the y-axis shows how many students earned each grade. You can see that 6 students earned an A because the bar for A stretches up to 6 on the vertical measurement. There is a lot of information we can get from a simple graph like this (See Graph 1).
Line Graphs
The unit of measurement for the x-axis is days, the unit of measurement for the y-axis is kilometers. Thus we can see that, on the first day, the pipit flew 20 kilometers. The line segment goes up between Day 1 and Day 2, which means that the bird flew farther on Day 2. If the line segment angled down, as between Day 4 and Day 5, it would mean that the bird flew fewer kilometers than the day before. This line graph is a quick, visual way to tell the reader about the bird's migration.
Pie Graphs
A typical pie graph looks like a circular pie. The circle is divided into sections, and each section represents a fraction of the data. The graph is commonly used to show percentages; the whole pie represents 100 percent, so each piece is a fraction of the whole.
Food $25
Movies $ 12
Clothing $36
Savings $20
Books $7
46. When used in a graph, a legend is .
A. a guide to the symbols and colors B. an introduction paragraph
C. the main idea D. the data
47. What is the total number of students who earned a C or better?
A. 4. B. 6. C. 10. D. 20.
48. The bird covered the longest distance on .
A. Day B. Day 2 C. Day 3 D. Day 4
49. Which of the following cost Amy most?
A. Food. B. Books. C. Movies. D. Clothing.
C
If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal (夜间活动的) species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun's light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don't think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it's the only way to explain what we've done to the night: We've engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.
The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequences -- called light pollution -- whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the levels and light rhythms to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.
In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze (霾) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We've grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit nigh, -- dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadow on Earth — is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.
We've lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being "captured" by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.
Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.
Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage — the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way the edge of our galaxy — arching overhead.
50. According to the passage, human beings ______.
A. prefer to live in the darkness
B. are used to living in the day light
C. were curious about the midnight world
D. had to stay at home with the light of the moon
51 What does "it" (Paragraph 1) most probably refer to?
A. The night. B. The moon. C. The sky. D. The planet.
52. The writer mentions birds and frogs to ______.
A. provide examples of animal protection
B. show how light pollution affects animals
C. compare the living habits of both species
D. explain why the number of certain species has declined
53. It is implied in the last paragraph that ______.
A. light pollution does harm to the eyesight of animals
B. light pollution has destroyed some of the world heritages
C. human beings cannot go to the outer space
D. human beings should reflect on their position in the universe
54. What might be the best title for the passage?
A. The Magic Light. B- The 0range Haze-
C. The Disappearing Night. D. The Rhythms of Nature.
D
In 2004, when my daughter Becky was ten, she and my husband Joe, were united in their desire for a dog. As for me, I shared none of their canine lust.
But why, they pleaded. "Because I don't have time to take care of a dog.” But we'll do it. "Really? You're going to walk the dog? Feed the dog? Bathe the dog? Yes, yes and yes. "I don't believe you.” We will. We promise.
They didn’t. From day two ( everyone wanted to walk the cute puppy that first day ), neither thought to walk the dog. While I was slow to accept that I would be the one to keep track of her shots, to schedule her vet appointments, to feed and clean her, Misty knew this on day one. As she looked up at the three new humans in her life ( small , medium , and large ), she calculated, “The medium one is the sucker in the pack .”
Quickly, she and I developed something very similar to a Vulcan mind meld (心灵融合). She’d look at me with those sad brown eyes of hers, beam her need, and then wait, trusting I would understand — which, strangely, I almost always did. In no time, she became my fifth appendage(附肢), snoring on my home-office couch as I worked, cradling against my feet as I read, and splaying across my stomach as I watched television.
Even so, part of me continued to resent walking duty. Joe and Becky had promised. Not fair, I'd balk (不心甘情愿地做) silently as she and I walked. "Not fair," I'd loudly remind anyone within earshot upon our return home.
Then one day — January 1, 2007, to be exact — my husband's doctor uttered an unthinkable word; leukemia ( 白血病). With that, I spent eight to ten hours a day with Joe in the hospital, doing anything and everything I could to ease his discomfort. During those six months of hospitalizations, Becky, 12 at the time, adjusted to other adults being in the house when she returned from school. My work colleagues adjusted to my taking off at a moment's notice for medical emergencies. Every part of my life changed; no part of my old routine remained.
Save one: Misty still needed walking. At the beginning, when friends offered to take her through her paces, I declined because I knew they had their own households to deal with.
As the months went by, I began to realize that I actually wanted to walk Misty. The walk in the morning before I headed to the hospital was a quiet, peaceful time to gather my thoughts or to just be before the day's medical drama unfolded. The evening walk was a time to shake off the day's upsets and let the worry tracks in my head go to white noise.
When serious illness visits your household, it's not just your daily routine and your assumptions about the future that are no longer familiar. Pretty much everyone you know acts differently.
Not Misty. Take her for a walk, and she had no interest in Joe’s blood counts or bone marrow test results. On the street or in the park, she had only one thing on her mind: squirrels! She was so joyous that even on the worst days, she could make me smile. On a daily basis, she reminded me that life goes on.
After Joe died in 2009, Misty slept on his pillow.
I’m grateful — to a point. The trust is, after years of balking, I’ve come to enjoy my walks with Misty. As 1 watch her chase after a squirrel, throwing her whole being into the here-and-now of an exercise that has never once ended in victory, she reminds me, too, that no matter how harsh the present or unpredictable the future, there's almost always some measure of joy to be extracted from the moment.
55. Why didn't the writer agree to raise a dog at the beginning of the story?
A. She was afraid the dog would get the family into trouble.
B. It would be her business to take care of the dog.
C. Her husband and daughter were united as one.
D. She didn't want to spoil her daughter.
56. Which of the following is the closest in meaning to "The medium one is the sucker in the pack.”( Paragraph 3 ) ?
A. "The middle-aged person loves me most."
B. "The medium-sized woman is the hostess."
C. "The man in the middle is the one who has the final say.'
D. "The woman is the kind and trustworthy one in the family.
57. It can be inferred from Paragraph 3 that ______.
A. Misty was quite clever B. Misty could solve math problems
C. the writer was a slow learner D. no one walked Misty the first day
58. The story came to its turning point when ______.
A. Joe died in 2009 B. Joe fell ill in 2007
C. the writer began to walk the dog D. the dog tried to please the writer
59. Why did the writer continue to walk Misty while Joe was in hospital?
A. Misty couldn't live without her.
B. Her friends didn't offer any help.
C. The walk provided her with spiritual comfort.
D. She didn't want Misty to be others' companion.
60. What is the message the writer wants to convey in the passage?
A. One should learn to enjoy hard limes.
B. A disaster can change everything in life.
C. Moments of joy suggest that there is still hope ahead.
D. People will change their attitude toward you when you are in difficulty.
