New York is one of the last large American cities to have some of its policemen on horseback. The New York police have 170 horses that they use in certain parts of the city. The horses are expensive to feed, but it is even more expensive to take care of them. Because the horses must walk on the streets, they need special horseshoes. In fact, they need more than 8,000 of them each year. Every police horse in New York gets new shoes every month. Keeping these shoes in good repair is the job of six blacksmiths. There are only about thirty-five of these blacksmiths in the whole Unite States.
The cost of shoeing a horse is between twenty dollars and thirty--five dollars, and it takes a good blacksmith two to three hours to do the job.  
A blacksmith’s job is not an easy one. He must be able to shape a shoe from a piece of metal and then fit it to the horse’s foot. The blacksmith must bend over all the time when he is fitting the shoe and must hold the weight of the horse’s leg while he works. But even more important, he must be able to deal with horses ------ for before the blacksmith can begin his work, he has to get the horse to lift its leg.
One of the blacksmiths in New York is James Corbin. He came to the country form Ireland in 1948.He not only makes horseshoes for the police but also works for a group of horse owners near the city. Corbin became interested in blacksmithing because his father did it, and, as he puts it, “It’s a good way to make a living.”
【小题1】According to the reading passage, a blacksmith must be likely a         man.

One of the greatest contributors to the first Oxford English Dictionary was also one of its most unusual. In 1879, Oxford University in England asked Prof. James Murray to serve as editor for what was to be the most ambitious dictionary in the history of the English language. It would include every English word possible and would give not only the definition but also the history of the word and quotations(引文) showing how it was used.
This was a huge task, so Murray had to find volunteers from Britain, the United States, and the British colonies to search every newspaper, magazine, and book ever written in English. Hundreds of volunteers responded, including William Chester Minor. Dr. Minor was an American surgeon who had served in the Civil War and was now living in England. He gave his address as “Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire,” 50 miles from Oxford.
Minor joined the army of volunteers sending words and quotations to Murray. Over the next 17 years, he became one of the staff’s most valued contributors.
But he was also a mystery. In spite of many invitations, he would always decline to visit Oxford. So in 1897, Murray finally decided to travel to Crowthorne himself. When he arrived, he found Minor locked in a book-lined cell at the Broadmoor Asylum(精神病院) for the Criminally Insane.
Murray and Minor became friends, sharing their love of words. Minor continued contributing to the dictionary, sending in more than 10,000 submissions in 20 years. Murray continued to visit Minor regularly, sometimes taking walks with him around the asylum grounds.
In 1910, Minor left Broadmoor for an asylum in his native America. Murray was at the port to wave goodbye to his remarkable friend.
Minor died in 1920, seven years before the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was completed. The 12 volunteers defined 414,825 words, and thousands of them were contributions from a very scholarly and devoted asylum patient.
【小题1】According to the text, the first Oxford English Dictionary ____.

Passage Nineteen (TV’s Harmfulness)
Yes, but what did we use to do before there was television? How often we hear statements like this! Television hasn’t been with us all that long, but we are already beginning to forget what the world was like without it. Before we admitted the one-eyed monster into our homes, we never fond it difficult to occupy our spare time. We used to enjoy civilized pleasures. For instance, we used to have hobbies, we used to entertain our friends and be entertained by them, we used to go outside for our amusements to theatres, cinemas, restaurants and sporting events. We even used to read books and listen to music and broadcast talks occasionally. All that belongs to the past. Now all our free time is regulated by the goggle box. We rush home or gulp down our meals to be in time for this or that programme. We have even given up sitting at table and having a leisurely evening meal, exchanging the news of the day. A sandwich and a glass of beer will do – anything, providing it doesn’t interfere with the programme. The monster demands and obtains absolute silence and attention. If any member of the family dares to open his mouth during a programme, he is quickly silenced.
Whole generations are growing up addicted to the telly. Food is left uneaten, homework undone and sleep is lost. The telly is a universal pacifier. It is now standard practice for mother to keep the children quiet by putting them in the living-room and turning on the set. It doesn’t matter that the children will watch rubbishy commercials or spectacles of sadism and violence – so long as they are quiet.
There is a limit to the amount of creative talent available in the world. Every day, television consumes vast quantities of creative work. That is why most of the programmes are so bad: it is impossible to keep pace with the demand and maintain high standards as well. When millions watch the same programmes, the whole world becomes a village, and society is reduced to the conditions which obtain in preliterate communities. We become utterly dependent on the two most primitive media of communication: pictures and the spoken word.
Television encourages passive enjoyment. We become content with second-hand experiences. It is so easy to sit in our armchairs watching others working. Little by little, television cuts us off from the real world. We get so lazy, we choose to spend a fine day in semi-darkness, glued to our sets, rather than go out into the world itself. Television may be s splendid medium of communication, but it prevents us from communicating with each other. We only become aware how totally irrelevant television is to real living when we spend a holiday by the sea or in the mountains, far away from civilization. In quiet, natural surroundings, we quickly discover how little we miss the hypnotic tyranny of King Telly.
1.What is the biggest harm of TV?
A.It deprives people of communication with the real world.
B.People become lazy.
C.People become dependent on second-hand experience.
D.TV consumes a large part of one’s life.
2.In what way can people forget TV?
A.Far away from civilization.
B.To a mountain.
C.By the sea.
D.In quiet natural surroundings.
3.What does a mother usually do to keep her children quiet?
A.Let them watch the set.
B.Put them in the living room.
C.Let them watch the rubbish.
D.Let them alone.
4.What does the first sentence in the first paragraph mean?
A.We found it difficult to occupy our spare time.
B.We become addicted to TV.
C.What we used to do is different from now.
D.We used to enjoy civilized pleasures.

Most of the 20th century has been a development on the Industrial Revolution taken to an extreme: people now own more products than ever before; there are enough unclear weapons to destroy the earth several times over; there is hardly any forest left and pollution has got to the point where we buy water. Within a few years I predict you will be able to buy air. (There once was a time when you didn’t need to buy food or shelter either.)
Important developments in the last century are the breading down of the class structures left over from the Industrial Revolution stage, bringing with it the empowerment of the “common man ”: the working day is set by law to only 8 hours a day, everyone has the vote, the media has less obvious government control, people have landed on the moon, sent spacecrafts to Mars and so on. Families have also shrunk drastically（强烈地）; the nuclear family came about, and especially in the last half of the 20th century, one-parent families are becoming more common. This shrinking in the size of the family shows the increased independence of people—once upon a time people had to live in large groups to survive.
As humans have “become the gods”, they have realized their individuality and independence and taken their control of the world to an extreme. In many countries the land is almost completely used in the land is almost completely used in the production of food and as living space and they live in small cities which are entirely human constructed, made from materials which are also entirely human constructed(concrete, bricks) with hardly any remains of nature. Weeds are poisoned because they are messy; even parks have trees grown in tidy lines; grass is mowed to keep it short and so on. I think the massive drug “problem” troubling people is a result of too much of this influence, humans needing to escape the stark world they have created by entering fantasy worlds.
Over the last 100 years, the 20th century consciousness has spread throughout the world; most of Asia has been thoroughly “Westernized”, and most of the Third World is being overrun by western ways of doing things and living.
【小题1】What’s the author most concerned about?

A businesswoman, a mother of four, an international fashion icon（偶像） , a woman committed to making the world a better place for women and children—Queen Rania of Jordan is truly changing the world．
Rania was bom in Kuwait, in 1970．Shortly after Iraq invaded that country in 1990, her family fled and settled in Jordan．After graduating from a business school, Rania became successful in the business world．
When she was just 22, she went to a dinner party that changed her life forever．It was there that she met Jordan' s Prince Abdullah．Six months later, Rania and Abdullah had a royal wedding and started a family．
After the death of her father – in – law, King Hussein, in 1999, Prince Abdullah was crowned King Abdullah II of Jordan, and Rania became the world' s youngest living queen．
In her role as Queen, Rania has become well known around the world for her charity work and her efforts to improve educational opportunities for girls．She is an outspoken advocate of women' s rights, education reform, and child abuse．She is also well - known for her efforts to remove Western stereotypes （旧观念） about the Muslim world．
Rania explains that there is a direct relationship between increasing education and eliminating poverty．" You can change the course of a nation through education," she says．" One of the most important things you can do for a girl is empower her with her education．Once she has the education she can then have control over her income, she can change her life, she can have choices．"
In the future, Rania says, she hopes for a more open and secure world．"We look at problems happening halfway across the world and we think,' Well, that' s their problem．' But it' s not," she says．" When you solve somebody else' s problem, you are solving a problem for yourself, because our world today is so interconnected．"
【小题1】Rania and her family moved to Jordan because ____．