The young boy and his father sat quietly watching the snow fall on a snowy Saturday afternoon.

“Dad, my friend told me that every snowflake is      . But they look all the same to me. How can we tell?” the child asked.

Dad felt it was his     to give a more satisfying answer. “Son, snowflakes are like people. We are each      in a very special way. We can test it right now,” he said.

The child stood up, put out his hands, and     as snowflakes landed on his gloves. “These snowflakes are all different on my gloves, but those in the yard look the same. Together they are even more_    and striking. Then if people are like snowflakes, why don't they       well?”

“Choice,”Dad said. "Their choices     them what they are.”

    choice is a bad thing?” the boy asked.

“Oh, no. Only when we choose the     things.”

“How do we tell right from wrong?" the child asked.

Dad was given the chance to build upon the foundation of his son's     . He reached down and began to     with the snow. He     the snow into two sides, three large snowballs on one side and several smaller ones on the other.

“Which side did the right thing?” he asked the boy.

The child looked at both sides but      answer. Then Dad placed the three larger snowballs on top of each other.

“It’ s a snowman! The side     made me snowman!” the boy replied with    

Yes, all these people came together and recognized how special each of them was, so they joined in a(n)      to build up mankind,” Dad said.                    

The child then stood up and     an arm full of the smaller snowballs. One by one he began to throw them at the other small piles of snow. He said,”This is what happens when people can't work together. They have a(n)     .”

Dad was shocked. He stood up, lifted the boy and     him tightly, whispering to him, “I hope that your world will learn to work and live together. I hope you will make the right      

and learn to build the best snowman ever.”

1.A. different             B. similar                               C. freezing                            D. special

2.A. challenge            B. responsibility                  C. trouble                             D. position

3.A. private                          B. associated                        C. unique                              D. isolated

4.A. inspected            B. watched                           C. glanced                            D. glared

5.A. beautiful             B. effective                          C. comfortable                    D. significant

6.A. cheer up             B. take care                          C. get along                          D. break up

7.A. remain                          B. appear                              C. become                            D. make

8.A. Though                B. However                          C. So                             D. While

9.A. exact                    B.  Wrong                           C. fortunate                         D. coincident

10.A. interest                      B. concern                           C. worry                                D. faith

11.A. communicate   B. mix                                    C. work                                 D. relate

12.A. separated                  B. divided                    C. distinguished                   D. parted

13.A. couldn' t           B. shouldn' t                         C. wouldn' t                          D. needn' t

14.A. that                    B. what                                  C. how                                   D. when

15.A. disappointment        B. frustration                       C. enthusiasm                      D. humour

16.A. power                         B. effort                                C. organization           D. attempt

17.A. gathered           B. sorted                               C. threw                                D. formed

18.A.agreement        B. debate                              C. war                                    D. negotiation

19.A. trembled          B. swung                               C. pulled                               D. held

20.A. steps                           B. turns                                 C. choices                   D. points

 

One morning in Philadelphia, the sun shone bright through all the thick jungles and the tall churches. John, 6, wearing the worn-out clothes, walked from a far place, his dark small hands holding a piece of stolen bread.

John stopped for a moment at the entrance to the church and then left tightly holding the bread,      

He was an orphan(孤儿), whose parents were killed in World War II leaving him alone in the orphanage for five years, Like many children in the house, he had a lot of free time. Mostly no one took care of them, so they had to learn how to steal those they wanted.             

John believed God to be real, so every Sunday morning in any case he would go to the church to have a look and listen to those people singing inside or reading the Bible. He felt only at this moment he was the child of God and so close to God. But he couldn’t enter because his clothes were so dirty. John himself knew it.

John was quietly calculating the times. This was his 45th Sunday at the entrance to the church. He stood on tiptoe(踮着脚尖) for a while and walked away.

As time passed, the pastor(牧师) noticed John and learned from others that he was the small boy who liked stealing things in the orphanages.

On the 46th Sunday, the sun was shining and John came still holding a piece of bread with his dark small hands. When he just stood there, the pastor came out. He felt like running away, but he was carried by the pastor's friendly smile.

The pastor walked up to his side, clearly seeing John's small hands shaking.

"Are you John?"

John didn't answer, but looked at the pastor and nodded.

"Do you believe in God?" the pastor patted John on his head with dust.

"Yes, I do!" This time John told him loudly.

"So you believe in yourself?"

John looked at the pastor, without a word.

The pastor went on saying, "At the first sight of you, I find you're different from other kids because you have a good heart."

His face turning red, John said nervously, "In fact, I'm a thief." With that, he lowered his head.

The pastor didn't speak, but held John's dark small hands, slowly opened them and put them against his wrinkled face.

"Ah" Just at the same time, John shouted and was about to take out his dark small hands. Yet the pastor tightly held his small hands and spread them out in the sun.

"Do you see, John?"

"What?"

"You're cupping the sunshine in your hands."

John blankly looked at his hands: when did they become so beautiful?

"In God's eyes, all children are the same. When they are willing to spread out their hands to greet the sun, the sun will naturally shine on them. And you have two things more than they do. First is courage and the second is kindness." With that, the pastor led him into the church. It was the first time that John went into this sacred place, and at this moment he didn't feel inferior, but the unspeakable warmth.

On that morning greeting the sunshine, John found himself again, along with the confidence, satisfaction, happiness, dreams he had never had.

Twenty years have passed. Now the boy who ever tightly held the bread with his dirt hands has been the most famous cook in Philadelphia and made many popular dishes.

Every Sunday morning, he would personally send the bread he baked to the orphanage. Those children who greeted him with cheers were used to consciously spreading their palms before they got the bread.

Because they all knew when we are willing to spread out our hands to greet the sunshine, the sun will naturally shine on us.

1.The method the writer uses to develop Paragraph is ______________

A.presenting contrasts (对比)                B.showing causes (原因)

C.offering analyses                        D.providing explanations

2.Why didn't John go inside whenever he went to the church?

A.He was frightened to be recognized by the pastor

B.He was not welcomed by those singing in the church.

C.He was sorry for his dirty clothes and identity as a thief.

D.He was left alone in the orphanage and nobody cared for him.

3.Which of the following questions did John reply certainly?

A.“Are you John?"                        B."Do you see, John?"

C."So you believe in yourself?"               D."Do you believe in God?"

4.Which of the following can best describe the pastor's great effect on John?

A.John became a famous cook.

B.John admitted his bad behavior. (行为)

C.John believed God to be real

D.John spread warmth to other orphans.

5.According to the passage, the sunshine cupped in hands can bring ________

A.cheers and confidence                   B.dreams and imagination

C.courage and kindness                    D.forgiveness and satisfaction

 

Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.

I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.

Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums (贫民窟).” More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)

But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction—a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”

There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior (低等的) to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold South, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s lightskinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.

The point was difficult to miss: nurture (养育), not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice—manner of speech, for example— were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.

Twain’s racial tone was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography (自传) about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth—mostly with white men performing in black-face—and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.

Was Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.

1. How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowe’s?

A.Twain was more willing to deal with racism.

B.Twain’s attack on racism was much less open.

C.Twain’s themes seemed to agree with plots.

D.Twain was openly concerned with racism.

2.Recent criticism of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn arose partly from its ______.

A.target readers at the bottom

B.anti-slavery attitude

C.rather impolite language

D.frequent use of “nigger”

3.What best proves Twain’s anti-slavery stand according to the author?

A.Jim’s search for his family was described in detail.

B.The slave’s voice was first heard in American novels.

C.Jim grew up into a man and a father in the white culture.

D.Twain suspected that the slaves were less intelligent.

4.The story of two babies switched mainly indicates that ______.

A.slaves were forced to give up their babies to their masters

B.slaves’ babies could pick up slave-holders’ way of speaking

C.blacks’ social position was shaped by how they were brought up

D.blacks were born with certain features of prejudice

5.What does the underlined word “they” in Paragraph 7 refer to?

A.The attacks.                            B.Slavery and prejudice.

C.White men.                            D.The shows.

6.What does the author mainly argue for?

A.Twain had done more than his contemporary writers to attack racism.

B.Twain was an admirable figure comparable to Abraham Lincoln.

C.Twain’s works had been banned on unreasonable grounds.

D.Twain’s works should be read from a historical point of view.

 

A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairy stories as formal texts. It is always much better to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what, in the actual situation of the time and the child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better.

A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him sad thinking. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than those who had not. As to fears, there are, I think, some cases of children being dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises from the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered.

There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not objectively true, that giants, witches, two - headed dragons, magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that, instead of being fond of the strange side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying history. I find such people, I must say so peculiar that I do not know how to argue with them. If their case were sound, the world should be full of mad men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a stick or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved girl -friend.

No fairy story ever declared to be a description of the real world and no clever child has ever believed that it was.

1.The author considers that a fairy story is more effective when it is ____ .

A.repeated without any change

B.treated as a joke

C.made some changes by the parent

D.set in the present

2.According to the passage, great fear can take place in a child when the story is ____ .

A.in a realistic setting

B.heard for the first time

C.repeated too often

D.told in a different way

3.The advantage claimed (提出) for repeating fairy stories to young children is that it ____.

A.makes them less fearful

B.develops their power of memory

C.makes them believe there is nothing to be afraid of

D.encourages them not to have strange beliefs

4.The author's mention of sticks and telephones is meant to suggest that ______.

A.fairy stories are still being made up

B.there is some misunderstanding about fairy tales

C.people try to modernize old fairy stories

D.there is more concern for children's fears nowadays

5.One of the reasons why some people are not in favor of fairy tales is that _______.

A.they are full of imagination

B.they just make up the stories which are far from the truth

C.they are not interesting

D.they make teachers of history difficult to teach

 

Sometimes children do not do what their parents tell them to do. When this happens, a parent tries to help the child to do the right thing. When this does not work, the parent usually punishes the child.

There are many things that a parent can do. One thing that people have done is to spank the child. When a parent spanks a child, they will use their hand or a hard object to strike them on their bottom. This is meant to show the child that they have done something wrong.

One parent remembers being spanked when he was a child. His parents used a wooden spoon. When he spanked his own children with his hand, he saw that he put a red mark on his child’s leg. He never did that again.

One problem with spanking is that it teaches the child to hit someone when they do not like what the other person is doing. Another problem with spanking is that the parent is usually angry and can hit the child too hard. Sometimes parents will use spanking for everything and not try other ways to get the child to do the right thing.

Many parents are not sure of what to do instead of spanking. Some people think that their religion(宗教)tells them that spanking is okay. Some think that the law lets them do it. The courts (法院) say that parents have the right to teach their children how to behave.

Other things should be tried before a parent decides to spank a child. Telling the child exactly what is wanted from them can be one thing. Giving a child more than one choice is another thing that can be tried. Getting down to the child’s level and taking a more child-friendly approach (方法) can help as well.

1.          According to the passage, when children do something wrong, one thing that parents usually do to punish them is to _______.

A.strike them on the bottom

B.try to help them do the right thing

C.teach them what to do

D.take them to court

2.          What does the word “spank” mean?

A.打屁股

B.下跪

C.罚站

D.打手心

3.          Which of the following is NOT the problem caused by spanking?

A.It teaches the child to hit others when they offend (冒犯) him or her.

B.The parent may get angry and hit the child too hard.

C.Sometimes parents may use spanking for everything.

D.It makes parents try other ways to make the child do right.

4.          Which of the following can best describe the writer’s attitude towards spanking?

A.favorable (赞同的)

B.indifferent (不关心)

C.interested

D.unfavorable

5.          From this passage, we can conclude (作出结论) that ________.

A.good children always do the right thing

B.parents should try their best to avoid (避免) spanking their children

C.parents have no choice but to spank their children when they do something wrong

D.children can have more than one choice to avoid being spanked

 

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