题目内容

Cleverness is a gift while kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy – they’re given after all. Choices can be hard.

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that the Internet usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go to do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most start-ups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. MacKenzie told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but finally, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision not to try at all.

After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice. For all of us, in the end, we are our choices.

1.What inspired the author with the idea of building an online bookstore?

A. His dream of being an inventor.

B. The support of his wife.

C. The greatly increasing usage of the Internet.

D. Millions of exciting titles.

2.Which of the following is closest in meaning to the underlined sentence?

A. The idea of not trying would keep coming to his mind and disturb him.

B. He would be very excited if he tried it out.

C. He would be always having a doubt if he didn’t try.

D. The decision not to try the online bookstore would terrify him.

3.We can know from the passage that _______.

A. the boss thought the idea was suitable for the author

B. the author wanted someone else to try the idea

C. the author might not regret if he failed the idea

D. the author might go back to his boss if he failed

4.Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?

A. Cleverness and Kindness B. The Starting of Amazon

C. Following My Passion D. We Are What We Choose

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They are the little sweeties who look pretty cute in a photo,or when sleeping——but a lot less appealing at 30,000 ft,crying loudly in the seat fight next to you.

According to a new survey,almost seven in ten Britons dislike flying with babies so much that they would like to see child-free areas introduced on planes.As for long-distance flights where people want to sleep,almost one in four British travelers believes that no-kid-zones should be fixed as required sections.

The survey was conducted by bookings website LateDeals.co.uk,with 1,108 UK consumers questioned as to what they hate most about air travel.

And our dislike of noisy children and babies on planes runs deep.it seems.

More than a third of us—35 per cent—would pay extra to travel on a childless service.

Long-distance passengers would be prepared to pay an additional £63 to the cost of a return ticket if it meant adults only on board.And on short-distance flights,an extra £28 on the price of a return fare would be considered good value if it guaranteed an absence of angry babies in the middle of the economy-class aisle(走道).

However,screaming babies are not the only source of annoyance for British travellers.In fact,according to the research on the most annoying types of airline passengers,a crying baby ranks as only the fourth.Over half of those surveyed—58 percent—selected ‘drunk travellers’ as their pet peeves.People with‘bad personal hygiene(卫生)’and travellers who kick the back of the seat in front were also near the top of the list,causing anger to 48 and 47 per cent of us respectively(分别地).

Crying babies came in at fourth on the list,a pet peeve for 43 per cent of those surveyed.

1.Britons dislike flying with babies because they_________.

A.make too much noise

B.get angry easily

C.sleep right next to them

D.stay in the economy-class aisle

2.How many British travellers surveyed would like to have no-kid-zones on planes?

A.About 35%. B.About 43%.

C.About 70%. D.About 58%.

3.What kind of passengers is most disliked by British airline travellers?

A.The crying babies on a flight.

B.People with bad personal hygiene.

C.Those who have drunk too much alcohol.

D.Those who kick the back of the seat in front

As more and more people speak the global languages of English, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken around the world today will likely die out by the next century, according to the United Nations Educational , Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars from a number of organizations -----UNESCO and National Geographic among them—have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect.

Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Centre Yale University, who specializes in the languages and oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following in that tradition. His recently published book, A Grammar of Thangmi with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture, grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.

Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India , Nepal, Bhutan, and China . But he is not content to simply record these voices before they disappear without record.

At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials-including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes—which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection.

Now, through the two organizations that he has founded -----the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project -----Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, for the world available not just to scholars but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.

1.Many scholars are making efforts to ______.

A. rescue disappearing languages

B. promote global languages

C. search for language communities

D. set up language research organizations.

2. What does “that tradition’ in Paragraph 3 refer to ?

A. Telling stories about language users

B. Writing books on language teaching.

C. Having full records of the languages

D. Living with the native speaker.

3.What is Turin’s book based on?

A. The cultual studies

B. His personal experience in Nepal.

C. His language research in Bhutan.

D. The documents available at Yale.

4.Which of the following best describe Turin’s work?

A. Write, sell and donate.

B. Collect, protect and reconnect.

C. Record, repair and reward.

D. Design, experiment and report.

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