I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in (旁听生）   for another l8 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unmarried college graduate student, and she decided to, put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course. " My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers, She only gave in a few months later when my parents promised that would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I artlessly chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and ail of my working class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the $ 5 deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

1.From the passage we know that the author           .

A. was adopted by a lawyer and his wife

B. dropped out when he was 17 years old

C. The author was admitted to Stanford

D. valued his dropping out

2.The author dropped out mainly because           .

A. His academic performance was very poor.

B. He did not want to waste his parents' money.

C. His parents were too poor to afford the college tuition.

D. He didn't think university could help him to get a well-paid job

3.Why did the author think dropping out was a good decision?

A. He could transfer to Stanford.

B. He could follow his passion.

C. He didn't have to attend classes any more.

D. He could spend more time in Hare Krishna temple.

4.What can be inferred from this passage ?

A. The author was taking a risk when he made the decision of dropping out.

B. The author enjoyed the comfort and pleasure of life after he dropped out.

C. The author's parents were very angry at his decision.

D. The author was a very curious person.

完型填空（共20小题；每小题1．5分，满分30分）
阅读下面短文，掌握其大意，然后从36—55各题所给的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中，选出最佳选项，并在答题卡上涂黑。
When I was about five years old, I used to watch a bird in the skies of southern Alberta from the Blackfoot Blood Reserve in northern Montana where I was born．I loved this bird; I would    36 him for hours．He would    37  effortlessly in that gigantic sky, or he would come down and light on the   38 and float there beautifully．Sometimes when I watched him, he would not make a sound and liked to move   39  into the grasses．We called him meksikatsi, which in the Blackfoot language   40  “pink-colored feet”; meksikatsi and I became very good friends．
The bird had a very particular significance to me   41  I desperately wanted to be able to fly too．I felt very much as if I was the kind of person who had been born into a world where    42  was impossible．And most of the things that I    43   about would not be possible for me but would be possible only for other people．
When I was ten years old, something unexpected   44 my life suddenly．I found myself become an  45 child in a family I was not born into; I found myself in a   46 position that many native Americans find themselves in, living in a city that they do not understand at all, not in another culture but   47 two cultures．
A teacher of the English language told me that meksikatsi was not called meksikatsi, even though that is what   48 people have called that bird for thousands of years．Meksikatsi, he said, was really “duck”．I was very  49 with English．I could not understand it．First of all, the bird did not look like “duck”, and when it made a    50  , it did not sound like “duck”, I was even more   51  when I found out that the meaning of the verb “to duck” came from the bird．
As I   52 to understand English better, I understand that it made a great deal of    53   , but I never forgot that meksikatsi made a different kind of meaning．I   54  that languages are not just different words for the same things but totally different    55  , totally different ways of experiencing and looking at the world．

 I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, a city        name will create a picture of beautiful trees and green grass in our mind.

A. which           B. of which      C. that            D. whose

In the kitchen of my mother's houses there has always been a wooden stand with a small notepad and a hole for a pencil.
I'm looking for paper on which to note down the name of a book I am recommending to my mother. Over forty years since my earliest memories of the kitchen pad and pencil, five houses later, the current paper and pencil look the same as they always did. Surely it can't be the same pencil. The pad is more modern, but the wooden stand is definitely the original one.
"I'm just amazed you still have the same stand for holding the pad and pencil after all these years." I say to her, walking back into the living-room with a sheet of paper and the pencil. "You still use a pencil. Can't you afford a pen?"
My mother replies a little sharply. "It works perfectly well; I've always kept the stand in the kitchen. I never knew when I might want to note down an idea, and I was always in the kitchen in these days. "
Immediately I can picture her, hair wild, blue housecoat covered in flour, a wooden spoon in one hand, the pencil in the other, her mouth moving silently. My mother smiles and says, "One day I was cooking and watching baby Pauline, and I had a brilliant thought, but the stand was empty. One of the children must have taken the paper. So I just picked up the breadboard and wrote it all down on the back. It turned out to be a real breakthrough for solving the mathematical problem I was working on."
This story, which happened before I was born, reminds me how extraordinary my mother was, and is also a gifted mathematician. I feel embarrassed that I complain about not having enough child-free time to work. Later, when my mother is in the bathroom, I go into her kitchen and turn over the breadboards. Sure enough, on the back of the smallest one, are some penciled marks I recognize as mathematics. Those symbols have traveled unaffected through fifty years, rooted in the soil of a cheap wooden breadboard, invisible exhibits at every meal.
【小题1】Why has the author's mother always kept the notepad and pencil in the kitchen?

My dream ended when I was born. Although I never knew it then, I just held on to something that would never come to pass. Dreams really do exist. But in the morning when you wake up, they are remembered just as a dream. That is what happened to me.

I always had the dream to dance like a beautiful ballerina（芭蕾舞女演员）turning around and around and hearing people applaud for me. When I was young, I would turn around and around in the fields of wildflowers that grew in my backyard. 

Reality woke me up when I heard someone saying, "I don't know why you bother trying to dance. Ballerinas are pretty and slender(苗条) www..comgirls. Besides, you don't have the talent to even be a ballerina." I remember how those words hurt every feeling in my body. I fell to the ground and wept for hours. 

I enjoyed hanging out by the water. I would sit there for hours and stare at my reflection(倒影). There I was, looking nothing like a pretty ballerina dancer. Reflections don't lie. Once the waves would come, my reflection was washed away just like my dream to dance.

As I grew older, I began to realize that the reason my dream was even born was because it was something that was inside of me. The dream I had was never nurtured(培育) and cared for, so it slowly died. It's not that I wanted it to die, but I allowed it to die the day I started listening to the words, "You can't do it." When I finally woke up from many years of dreaming, I realized that you can't only settle for dancing in the wildflowers, you have to move on to the platform.

Which of the following can serve as the best title for the passage？

A. Care for your dream

B. Dream and reality

C. Nothing is impossible

D. Efforts to be a ballerina will pay  

The author didn’t realize her dream of being a ballerina mainly because_______.

A. she was bored of dancing and performing  

B. she had lack of self-respect  

C. her health conditions allowed her dream to die

D. she was deeply affected by others easily

From the passage, it can be inferred that _________.

A. the author was once a pretty and slender girl with wonderful dream.

B. we should dare to give up our dream facing much pressure and difficulty

C. if you stick to your dream and never say die, you will enjoy a bright life

D. You should necer give up.

What is the main purpose of writing the passage?

A. to complain    B. to praise     C. to warn    D. to criticize

The underlined expression “settle for” in the last paragraph means_________.

A. turn down     B. take up    C. give up   D. settle down