题目内容
Robinson Diaz lives in a small cottage high in the Andes Mountains of South America. Diaz is a “cable racer”, and every morning he faces the difficult task of taking the local teacher to her school. To do this, he first walks for an hour up to a place the locals call Los Pinos, right at the edge of the 400-foot deep gorge of the Negro valley. Here, one end of a thick metal cable has been fixed to a wooden post. The cable stretches right across the deep valley to the other side, a kilometer away.
A metal hook is fixed to the cable, with leather straps hanging from it. Diaz fastens the straps around his shoulders and waist, does a quick safety check and then, without hesitating, throws himself off the edge of the mountain. Attached to the cable by only the metal hook, he rapidly picks up speed and soon he is racing through the air. Crossing the valley by wire takes him 30 seconds, instead of the two hours it would take him to walk down through the rain forest and climb up the steep muddy slopes on the other side.
As Diaz begins his trip, Diana Rios, a 23-year-old elementary teacher, is waiting on the other side of the gorge for the moment when he will come racing through the mist towards her at 100 mph. She will then return with him, hanging on to him as he goes back along the cable. Diana had no idea when she took the teaching job that just getting to work in the village school would be dangerous. "At first I wanted to cry," she says, clutching her hook as the metal cable starts to rattle violently at Diaz’s approach. “But I soon got used to it.” She still prefers to go with Diaz, though, rather than making the frightening and dangerous crossing on her own.
For the inhabitants of Los Pinos, the wire cable is a lifeline. For more than 50 years, it has served the community as a form of transport to and from the rest of the world. Everything that comes arrives via the cable----bricks and wood for building, sacks of rice and corn. Pregnant mothers, who must get to the nearest clinic, cross the wire during the darkness of the night, returning with their newborn babies. It is dangerous, but they have no choice.
This time Robinson Diaz makes a perfect landing on Diana’s side of the gorge. For him, the dangers of this daily journey are insignificant. “What I’m really scared of are snakes,” he says. “This is nothing in comparison.” Then Dianna straps herself into her harness and hooks herself up to the wire behind Diaz, holding on to him tightly. He turns, flashes her a smile, releases the brake and kicks away. Within seconds, the teacher and the cable-racer have disappeared back into the mist.
60.Robinson Diaz has a difficult task every morning because he has to________.
A.climb a long way up a mountain B.get to the edge of a valley
C.walk through a dangerous area D.help someone get to work
61.In the second paragraph, the writer suggests that Diaz is________.
A.confident about what he is doing B.unaware of the danger he faces
C.careless about his own safety D.uncertain of what he is doing
62.What is Diana's opinion about the journey now?
A.She enjoys it. B.She no longer finds it a problem.
C.It makes her feel very frightened. D.It would be impossible without Diaz.
63.What does Diaz say about using the cable?
A.He does not find it as frightening as other things.
B.He does not think there is any risk.
C.He is happy that he can help the teacher.
D.He is worried about the danger of snakes
Fifty–eight percent of the teachers interviewed in the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) questionnaire had come across copying among their pupils. Gill Bullen from Itchen College in Southampton, for example, said, "Pieces handed in by two students were identical and significantly better than either of them could have done. Not only that, the essays handed in didn't quite answer the title question I had set". A teacher from Leeds said, "I had one piece of work so bravely cut and pasted that it still contained ads from the web page."
Connie Robinson from Stockton Riverside College said, "With less able students it is easy to spot copying as the writing style changes in the middle of the assignment, but with more able students it is sometimes necessary for tutors to carry out Internet research to identify the source of the copy."
Mary Bousted, general secretary of the ATL, said," Teachers are struggling under a mountain of cut-and-pasting to spot whether work was the student's own or copy." She called for policies to stop copying, and asked for help from exam boards and the government in providing resources and techniques to detect cheats.
But there was another side. "I have found once students clearly understand what copying is, its consequences and how to reference correctly so they can draw on published works, copying becomes less of a problem," said Diana Baker from Emmanuel College, Durham.
"I think the majority of students who engage in copying do it more out of ignorance than the desire to cheat. They really want to succeed on their own."
53. The passage mainly wants to tell us ____________.
A. the benefits of the Internet for students |
B. web copying is a serious problem in the UK |
C. the ways to find web copying for teachers |
D. how we can use the Internet to do homework |
A. excellent | B. contrasting | C. the same | D. complex |
A. It’s not easy to find the less able students copy from the Internet |
B. It’s difficult to find whether the more able students have copied. |
C. The less able student will not change their writing style when copying. |
D. The more able students needn’t copy from the Internet. |
A. The writer doesn’t tell us. | B. The writer feels angry about it. |
C. The writer thinks it doesn’t matter. | D. The writer approves of it. |