My school stood in a big square playground in southeastern South Dakota. One teacher taught all grades, first through eighth. Most grades had only two or three students.

Our school day started with the flag pledge(宣誓). Then the teacher called one grade at a time to the recitation bench beside her desk. She’d check our work, explain the new lesson, and dismiss us to go back to our own desks and do our new work, all in less than ten minutes per grade.

At noon we ate lunches we had brought. Our lunches consisted of homemade sandwiches and if we were lucky, dessert. My favorite dessert was a fresh pear, and a piece of Mom’s delicious sour cream chocolate cake.

The annual Christmas program was the most exciting part of the year. We hurried through our lessons during December to allow time to practise poems, songs, and plays.

A few days before the performance, the school board members borrowed equipment from the town and set up a stage across one side of the classroom. We hung bed sheets for curtains.

On the evening of the performance, petrol lanterns hanging along the walls cast a warm, though not very bright, light over the gathering crowd. We could hardly contain our excitement as we looked from behind the curtains to wave at our parents.

On a spring Sunday in a new term, just before the last day of the school term, everyone in the neighborhood gathered for a picnic. Our moms set fried chicken, bowls of salads, and desserts on the teacher’s desk and the library table. After the dinner, we played games. One of the school board members brought big buckets of ice cream in the afternoon to top off the picnic. How we looked forward to that treat!

I was just nineteen years old when I started my first teaching position in a country school with thirteen students. I felt excited, nervous and happy as I prepared my lunch bucket the first morning of the term. I can’t remember what kind of sandwiches I packed, but I do remember I put in a fresh pear and a piece of chocolate cake for dessert!

1.According to the text, the school the author once attended ________.

A. had a small number of students

B. had no celebrations

C. had advanced teaching equipment

D. had a small playground

2.What can we infer from the description of the picnic?

A. The teacher performed many jobs.

B. The students liked hanging lanterns.

C. The local people supported the school.

D. School board members were not expected to attend it.

3.Why does the author mention a pear and a piece of chocolate cake in the last paragraph?

A. These were easy items to pack in a lunch bucket.

B. Fruits and cakes were always good choices for dessert.

C. They reminded her of her golden days as a student.

D. They were the only desert she ate with her lunch or dinner.

4.It can be concluded from the text that the author ________.

A. was fond of cooking

B. was very independent

C. earned little from her job

D. was happy though life was hard sometimes

Bad news sells. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news. Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers. But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By tracking people’s e-mails and online posts, scientists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media,” says Jonah Berger, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.”

Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication—e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations—found that it tended to be more positive than negative, but that didn’t necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things? To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times’ website. He and a Penn colleague analyzed the “most e-mailed” list for six months. One of his first findings was that articles in the science section were much more likely to make the list than non-science articles. He found that science amazed Times’ readers and made them want to share this positive feeling with others.

Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that inspired negative feelings like anger or anxiety, but not articles that left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused (激发) one way or the other, and they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared, as Dr. Berger explains in his new book, “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.”

1.What do the classic rules mentioned in the text apply to?

A. Private e-mails.

B. Research papers.

C. News reports.

D. Daily conversations.

2.What can we infer about people like Debbie Downer?

A. They’re socially inactive.

B. They’re good at telling stories.

C. They’re careful with their words.

D. They’re inconsiderate of others.

3.Which tended to be the most e-mailed according to Dr. Berger’s research?

A. Science articles.

B. Sports news.

C. Personal accounts.

D. Financial reviews.

4.What can be a suitable title for the text?

A. Sad Stories Travel Far and Wide

B. Online News Attracts More People

C. Reading Habits Change with the Times

D. Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks

Why I’ve taken a break from holidays

It is now close to four years since I last took a holiday. This is because I have come to the conclusion, over the course of my adult life, that I am not very good at it. You might think this sounds like saying you’re not very good at drinking tea or listening to music. What could possibly be difficult about the natural act of putting your working life on hold for a couple of weeks and going somewhere warm to do nothing?

I was a model holidaymaker as a kid. However, the problems started during my twenties. A trip to the south of France was ended after just two days, mainly because I had an urge to check my e-mails. Similarly, my honeymoon was cut short by 48 hours—not because my wife and I weren’t enjoying ourselves, but because we were missing our cats.

So what is my problem? On the surface, I’m probably a bit of a homebody. And I just find the pressure of being on holiday too severe: it always feels like having a gun held to my head and being forced to have fun. Somehow, packing a list of possessions and meeting a scheduled flight has none of the excitement of suddenly deciding to take a day off and driving somewhere for the fun of it.

Thankfully, I’m not alone. This summer, most of my friends have decided not to have a break. And a recent survey (调查) proved the downside of holidays, with the results showing that nearly two thirds of people found that the calming effects of a holiday wore off within 24 hours, as stress levels returned to normal. And this year The Idler magazine published its Book of Awful Holidays. Here you will find a list of the five most ecologically-damaging vacations it’s possible to take, along with 50 painful holiday experiences voted for on The Idler website.

What interests me is what the concept of a “holiday” says about our lives. For me, the point of living is to have a life you enjoy for 52 weeks a year. The more I like my life and the better I structure it, the less I want to go away. Maybe I’m an unusual person for not liking holidays, but I just feel the time when I’m not working is too valuable to waste on them.

1.The events the author describes in the second paragraph show ________.

A. how hard he has tried to enjoy holidays

B. how badly he behaves when he is on holiday

C. his lack of enthusiasm for being on holiday

D. his fear of something bad when he is on holiday

2.What does the author think of holidays?

A. They are often well organized in order to please other people.

B. He feels embarrassed when other people are having fun but he isn’t.

C. He tends to be made responsible for too much of the organization of them.

D. They are less enjoyable than breaks that have not been planned in advance.

3.The underlined word “downside” in the fourth paragraph probably means ________.

A. absenceB. damageC. disadvantageD. conflict

4.What is the author’s attitude towards “taking a holiday”?

A. Disapproving.B. Supportive.C. Neutral.D. Unconcerned.

Dear Mr. Rupp,

The day I met you was the first day of high school. We liked each other immediately. You gave me a lot of advice over the next four years, like how I should get my ass to Berkeley where I belonged. I’m still there, by the way. I wish you were still around, too.

I remember your laugh, which would start with a rough guffaw(狂笑) and end with a hacking smoker’s cough that would make even the most rebellious (叛逆的) teenager decide to lay off the cigarettes. I remember the way you didn’t lower your standards, yet still refused to give up on us. You were tough on us, and we were tough on you. Love is tough sometimes.

The last time I wrote you a letter, it was 2005—four years after I graduated. I had just become a teacher, like you, and it had given me a new appreciation for the work you did with countless high school students over the years.

It’s hard to say what I’ll miss the most about you. There are simply too many memories to sort through those four years, and it hurts to think you’ll never read this letter. I want to believe that you knew how much you meant to your family, your students, your community, and your colleagues, but that would be a lot of realization to handle, even for you.

You changed the lives of everyone around you. Even now, you are reminding me to cherish life and its brevity and beauty, and to tell the people I love how much they mean to me before it is too late.

Dear teacher, dear mentor, and dear friend—I miss you and all that is about you. God bless you in Heaven.

To infinity and beyond,

Teresea

1.What does the underlined phrase “lay off” in Paragraph 2 most probably mean?

A. likeB. get intoC. give outD. throw away

2.When did the author meet her teacher—Mr. Rupp?

A. In 1997.B. In 2001.C. In 2005.D. In 2009.

3.Why did the author write a letter to her teacher in 2005?

A. She wanted to tell her teacher that she had become a teacher.

B. She had some difficulties in study and needed her teacher’s help.

C. She wanted to be a teacher and needed her teacher’s instruction.

D. She wanted to borrow some books from her teacher.

4.When the author wrote this letter, her teacher—Mr. Rupp was_______.

A. about to dieB. seriously ill

C. deadD. in good shape

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