Some houses are designed to be smart. Others have smart designs. An example of the second type of house won the Award of Excellence from the American Institute of Architects.

Located on the shore of Sullivan’s Island off the coast of South Carolina, the award-winning cube-shaped beach house was built to replace one damaged by Hurricane Hugo years ago. In September 1989, Hugo struck South Carolina, killing 18 people and damaging or destroying 36,000 homes in the state.

Before Hugo, many new houses built along South Carolina’s shoreline were poorly constructed, according to architect Ray Huff, who created the cleverly-designed beach house. Now all new shoreline houses are required to meet stricter, better-enforced codes. The new beach house on Sullivan’s Island should be strong enough not to be damaged by a Category 3 hurricane with peak winds of 179 to 209 kilometres per hour.

At first sight, the house on Sullivan’s Island looks anything but(根本不) hurricane-proof. Its redwood shell makes it look like “a large party lantern” at night. But looks can be deceiving. The house’s wooden frame is strengthened with long steel rods(杆) to give it extra strength.

To further protect the house from hurricane damage, Huff raised it 2.7 meters off the ground on timber pilings(木桩) buried deep in the sand. Pilings might appear insecure, but they are strong enough to support the weight of the house. They also raise the house above storm waves. The pilings allow the waves to run under the house instead of running into it. “The waves of water come ashore at tremendous speeds and cause most of the damage done to beach-front buildings,” said Huff.

Huff designed the timber pilings to be partially concealed(隐藏) by the house’s ground-to-roof shell. “The shell masks the pilings so that the house doesn’t look like it’s standing with its legs pulled up,” said Huff. In the event of storm, the shell should break apart and let the waves rush under the house, the architect explained.

After Hurricane Hugo, new houses built along South Carolina’s shore line are required

to        .

A. be easily pulled down                B. look smarter in design 

C. meet stricter building standards        D. be designed to be cube-shaped

The award-winning beach house is quite strong because     .

A. it is strengthened by steel rods        B. it is made of redwood

C. it is in the shape of a shell         D. it is built with timber and concrete

Huff raised the house 2.7 meters off the ground on timber pilings in order to     .

A. avoid peak winds of about 200 km/h

B. bury stronger pilings deep in the sand

C. break huge sea waves into smaller ones

D. prevent the waves from running into it

It can be inferred from the passage that the house’s shell should be     .

A. smooth     B. waterproof    C. easily broken    D. extremely hard

Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once.  Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. desperation    B. authorities         C. diligently       D. confusion    E. enrolled

F. violently       G. financial          H. conclusion     I. devoted      J. graduation

Seventeen years ago, when I was in military college, I was known as “the worrying wreck from Virginia Tech”. I worried so ____1_____ that I often became ill. In _____2_____, I poured out my troubles to Professor Baird, professor of business administration. The fifteen minutes that I spent with Professor Baird did more for my health and happiness than all the rest of the four years I spent in college. “Jim,” he said, “you ought to sit down and face the facts. If you _____3_____ half as much time and energy to solving your problems as you do to worrying about them, you wouldn’t have any worries. ”

I figured that I had failed physics because I had no interest in the subject. But now I changed my attitude. I said to myself, “If the college _____4_____ demand that I pass my physics examination before I obtain a degree, who am I to question their wisdom?”

So I ______5____   for physics again. This time I passed because instead of wasting my time in worrying about how hard it was, I studied _____6_____.

I solved my ____7_____ worries by taking on some additional jobs, such as selling punch at the college dances, and by borrowing money from my father, which I paid back soon after ____8______.

As I look back at it now, I can see that my problem was one of _____9_____, a lack of willingness to find the causes of my worry and face them realistically.

 

III. 阅读 (共两节,满分40分)

第一节:阅读理解(共15小题;每小题2分,满分30分)

阅读下列短文,从每题所给的四个选项(A、B、C 和D)中,选出最佳选项,并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。

As goods and services improved, people were persuaded to spend their money on changing from old to new, and found the change worth the expense. When an airline equipped itself with jets, for example, its costs (and therefore air fare) would go up, but the new planes meant such an improvement that the higher cost was justified. A new car (or wireless, washing machine, electric kettle) made life so much more comfortable than the old one that the high cost of replacement was fully repaid. Manufacturers still cry their goods as persuasively as ever, but are the improvements really worth paying for? In many fields, things have now reached such a high standard of performance that further progress is very limited and very, very expensive. Airlines, for example, go to enormous expense in buying the latest prestige jets, in which vast research costs have been spent on relatively small improvements. If we abandon these vast costs we might lose the chance of cutting minutes away from flying times; but wouldn’t it be better to see airfares drop dramatically, as capital costs become relatively insignificant? Again, in the context of a 70 m. p. h. Limit, with lines of cars traveling so close as to control each other’s speeds, improvements in performance are actually irrelevant; improvements in handling are unnecessary, as most production cars grip(抓牢) the road perfectly, and comfort has now reached a very high level. Small improvements here are unlikely to be worth the thousands that anybody replacing an ordinary family car every two years may have spent on them. Let us instead have cars — or wireless, electric kettles, washing machines, television sets — which are made to last, and not to be replaced. Significant progress is obviously a good thing, but the insignificant progression from model-change to model-change is not.

1. The author is obviously challenging the social norm (社会规范) that ________________.

A. it is important to improve goods and services

B. development of technology makes our life more comfortable

C. it is reasonable that prices are going up all the time

D. slightly improved new products are worth buying

2. According to this passage, airfares may rise because ______________.

A. the airplane has been improved

B. people tend to travel by new airplanes

C. the change is found to be reasonable

D. the service on the airplane is better than before

3. According to the author, passengers would be happier if they ____________.

A. could fly in the latest model of good planes

B. could get tickets at much lower prices

C. see the airlines make vital changes in their services

D. could spend less time flying in the air

4. When manufactures have improved the performance of their products to a certain level, then it would be _______________.

A. justified for them to cut the price

B. unnecessary for them to make any new changes

C. difficult and costly to further better them

D. insignificant for them to cut down the research costs

5. In the case of cars, the author advises that we _____________.

A. cancel the speed limit                       B. further improve their performance

C. change models every two years          D. improve their durability (耐久性)

 

Complete the following passage by using the words in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

A. restore    B. recall    C. processing    D. previously   E. necessary

F. locating    G. instead     H. fascinating    I. elsewhere    J. composition

As infants, we can recognize our mothers within hours of birth. In fact, we can recognize the __41__ of our mother’s face well before we can recognize her body shape. It’s   42   how the brain can carry out such a function at such a young age, especially since we don’t learn to walk and talk until we are over a year old. By the time we are adults, we have the ability to distinguish around 100,000 faces. How can we remember so many faces when many of us find it difficult to    43   such a simple thing as a phone number? The exact process is not yet fully understood, but research around the world has begun to define the specific areas of the bland and processes   44   for facial recognition.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe that they have succeeded in    45   a specific area of the brain called the fusiform face area (FFA), which is used only for facial recognition. This means that recognition of familiar objects such our clothes or cars, is from   46   in the brain. Researchers also have found the brain needs to see the whole face for recognition to take place. It had been   47   thought that we only needed to see certain facial features. Meanwhile, research at University College London has found that facial recognition is not a single process, but   48   involves three steps. The first step appears to be an analysis of the physical features of a person’s face, which is similar to how we scan the bar codes of our groceries. In the next step, the brain decides whether the face we are looking at is already known or unknown to us. And finally, the brain furnishes the information we have collected about the person whose face we are looking at. This complex   49   is done in a split second so that we can behave quickly when reacting to certain situations.

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