Mr. Brown was going away for a week. Before he left, he said to his son, “If anyone comes to visit me, tell him that your father is away on business, and will be back in a week, then be sure to ask him to sit down for a cup of tea.”

   “OK, Dad,” said his son. Mr. Brown was afraid his son wouldn’t remember this, so he wrote these words down on a piece of paper and gave it to him. His son put the paper into his small pocket. He took it out and looked at it every now and then.

   Four days passed, but no one came to see his father. The boy thought that no one would come and that the piece of paper was of no more use to him, so he burnt it.

   The next afternoon, someone knocked at the door. The boy opened it. A man was standing at the door and said, “Is your father at home?” The boy put his hand into his pocket at once for the piece of paper. He could not find it. He suddenly remembered he had burnt it, so he shouted, “No more.”

   The man was very surprised. He asked, “No more? I met your father last week. When did it happen?”“Burnt yesterday evening.”

1.Mr Brown told his son that            

  A. he would be away from home for four days

B. he would be back in seven days

C. he would be back in a month

D. he liked a cup of tea

2.Mr Brown wrote the words down on           

  A. the wall           B. the door         C. a piece of paper         D. his son’s pocket

3.A man came to visit the boy’s father on          day.

  A. the second     B. the third            C. the fourth           D. the fifth

4.The man was very surprised because           

  A. he thought the child’s father was burnt

B. the child didn’t ask him to sit down

C. the child gave him a cup of tea

D. he couldn’t find that piece of paper

He wrote his ______ novel when he was ______.

“How many common English words were invented by Shakespeare?”
How long did it take people to find the answer to this question 15 years ago? And now! You can google it and find the answer immediately!
Google is the most popular Internet search engine（搜索引擎）in the world. It was invented by two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They met in 1993, when they were studying computer science at Stanford University, USA. They dreamed of producing something that could also answer any question in seconds.
Internet search engines at that time were slow and gave many websites that weren’t useful. In January 1996, Page and Brin decided to make a better and faster search engine. They thought the results should be based on the most popular websites.
Nobody would give them money for their project, so they used their own money. They also borrowed money from family and friends. Then, in 1998, they were given a cheque for $100,000, and they started their own company(公司). Their first office was in a friend’s garage(车库).The company name is Google, a word which comes from mathematics. A “google” is a very high number — 1 followed by a hundred zeros.
The Google search engine was soon used by thousands of people worldwide because it was fast, easy and correct. By 2002 it was the biggest search engine on the Internet. Now, more questions have been answered by Google than any other Internet service, from sport to science, and from music to medicine. Google hopes that in the future all the world’s information will be put on the Internet, so that everybody can find everything.
【小题1】Why did the writer begin this passage by asking you a question?

Do you sometimes argue about what seems to you to be a simple fact? Do you argue whether it’s cold outdoors or whether the car in front of you is going faster than the speed limit (限速)?

If you get into such arguments, try to think about the story about the six blind men and the elephant. The first blind man who felt the elephant’s trunk (象鼻) said it was like a snake. The second who felt the elephant’s side said it was like a wall, while the third said it was like a spear( 矛 ) as he touched the animal’s tusk. The fourth, who took hold of the elephant’s tail, insisted that it was like a rope. The fifth man said it looked like a tree as he put his arms around one of the elephant’s legs. The last, who was tall and got hold of the elephant’s ears, said it was like a huge fan.

Each man’s idea of the animal came from his own experience. So if someone disagrees with you about a “simple fact”, it’s often because his experience in the matter is different from yours.

To see how hard it is for even one person to make up his mind about a “simple fact”, try this simple experiment. Get three large bowls. Put ice water in one. Put hot water in the second. Put lukewarm water (温水)in the third. Now put your left hand in the hot water. Put your right hand in the lukewarm water. Your right hand will tell you the water is cold. Your left hand will tell you it is hot.

1.There were _______ blind man who were trying to tell what an elephant was like in the story.

2.The man who touched the elephant’s ears must be very_______.

3.The underlined word “it” in the last line of the paragraph refers to ___.

4.What makes people think about simple facts differently?

5.It can be inferred from the passage that we should__________.