Try reading the following sentences as fast as you can. “She sells seashells by the seashore. The shells she sells are surely seashells. So if she sells shells on the seashore, I’m sure she sells seashore shells.”

Not very easy, was it? What you’ve just read is called a tongue twister (绕口令). It is an exercise made up of sounds that are hard to pronounce(发音,读) in order to help people pronounce words faster and more correctly. Try the next example.

“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper. Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled peppers? If Pete Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?”

Tongue twisters usually do not have much meaning. They are just designed to improve people’s ability  to pronounce words. Although they may be very difficult, these exercises are very important to people who are trying to speak English correctly. This is because tongue twisters help people to tell the differences between similar sounds.

So if you wish to pronounce words more smoothly, you’d better try picking out some tongue twisters and practicing them.

1.Tongue twisters are helpful in improving ___________ skills.

A. listening        B. writing      C. pronunciation     D. communication

2.The first tongue twister is hard because ___________.

A. it is very boring to read            B. it teaches us a lot of knowledge

C. we don’t know who “she” is        D. the sounds of “s” and “sh” are similar

3.The passage is probably taken from _________ in a school newspaper.

A. Story Time          B. Study Garden

C. Latest News          D. Lost and Found

 

There are about 80,000,000 mines*  under the ground in more . than 60 countries. It is difficult and dangerous to clear these rnines, About 50  people including many children were’ killed ‘or htirt each iay.  In 2003,  APOPO,  a Dutch research com pan y that uains the an imals, came up with the-idea of s\ng rats to search for the mines.

The animal trainers ‘found that a kind of rats from Africa were clever and had.a sharp*  sense of smell.  The rats were about 75 cm long and.weighed about l.35 kg, light enough to run across a minefield without setting off the mines.

  In January 2004, the APOPO started this project. First, the trainers let the 4-week-old baby rats get familiar with humans. A few weeks later, the rats were no Ionger afraid of people and ‘the things around them. Then they were trained to connect a click* sound with food. After the rats had leamed that, the trainers then taught them to tell the difference between the smell of mines and other smells. When the rats could do it, the click was sounded and they were given a bit of banana.  The method was called clicker training. “The training isn’t easy, said trainer Abdullah Mchomvu.  “You have to be patient. Sometimes I get angry, but then again, I tell myself these are animals.”

  After nine months’  training, the rats were taken to a minefiel山  They’ran across the minefield, stopped, sat and scratched the ground to tell the deminers*  that they smelt out’a mine.  Then the mine was cleared. It had  taken two ‘deminers  a day to clear a 200㎡ . minefield,  but with the help of two rats ‘they could finish it in two hours.

  The rats and ~he deminers saved thousands of lives,  “The rats did this job much better than we expected. So far they have helped to make almost 2,000,000㎡ of land safe. They are heroes,” said Bart Weeqens, the head of the APOPO.

1. The APOPO trained the rats to search for     .

A. children    B. animals      C. mines     D. bananas

2. While training the rats, the trainers have to be

A. patient     B. clever        C. brave         D. serious

3. How long did the training last?

A. Two hours.    B. One day.    C. Four weeks.    D. Nine months.

4.Which of the following is NOT TRUE according to the passage?

A. Each day about 200 people were killed or hurt by mines,

B.The APOPO started to train the rats in January 2004.

C. The trainers gave the rats food after they smelt out a mine.

D.The rats and the deminers saved thousands of lives.

 

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