英语 热门试卷

阅读下列材料，从每题所给的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中，选出最佳选项，并在答题纸上将该选项标号涂黑。

（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.

（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一to a point. The truth is, after years of balking, I've come to enjoy my walks with Misty. As I 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.

（B）

Graph can be a very useful tool for conveying information, especially numbers, percentages, 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 in the graph. Many graphs, including bar graphs and line graphs, have two axes that form a corner. 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.

Bar Graphs

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

A line graph looks similar to a bar graph, but instead of bars, it plots points and connects them with a line. It has the same parts as a bar graph – two labeled axes –and can be read the same way. To read a line graph, it’s important to focus on the points of intersection rather than the line segments between the points. This type of graph is most commonly used to show how something changes over time. Here is a graph that charts how far a bird flies during the first five days of its spring migration (See Graph 2).

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 l00 percent, so each piece is a fraction of the whole. A pie graph might include a legend，or it might use icons or labels within each slice. This pie graph shows one month’s expenses (See Graph 3 ).

Food $ 25

Movies $ 12 Clothing $ 36

Savings $ 20 Books $ 7