The days of elderly women doing nothing but cooking huge meals on holidays are gone．Enter the Red Hat Society －a group holding the belief that old ladies should have fun．

“My grandmothers didn’t do anything but keep house and serve everybody．They were programmed to do that,” said Emily Cornette, head of a chapter of the 7-year-old Red Hat Society．

While men have long spent their time fishing and playing golf, women have sometimes seemed to become unnoticed as they age．But the generation now turning 50 is the baby boomers(生育高峰期出生的人), and the same people who refused their parents’ way of being young are now trying a new way of growing old．

If you take into consideration feminism(女权主义), a bit of spare money, and better health for most elderly, the Red Hat Society looks almost inevitable(必然的)．In this society, women over 50 wear red hats and purple(紫色的) clothes, while the women under 50 wear pink hats and light purple clothing．

“The organization took the idea from a poem by Jenny Joseph that begins: “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple．With a red hat which doesn’t go,” said Ellen Cooper, who founded the Red Hat Society in 1998．When the ladies started to wear the red hats, they attracted lots of attention．

“The point of this is that we need a rest from always doing something for someone else,” Cooper saiD．“Women feel so ashamed and sorry when they do something for themselves．” This is why chapters are discouraged from raising money or doing anything useful．“We’re a ladies’ play group．It couldn’t be more simple,” added Cooper’s assistant Joe Heywood．

56．The underlined word “chapter” in paragraph 2 means __________．

         A．one branch of an organization  B．a written agreement of a club

         C．one part of a collection of poems     D．a period in a society’s history

57．From the text , we know that the “baby boomers” are a group of people who       ．

         A．have gradually become more noticeable         

         B．are worried about getting old too quickly 

         C．are enjoying a good life with plenty of money to spend

         D．tried living a different life from their parents when they were young

58．It could be inferred from the text that members of the Red Hat Society are         ．

         A．interested in raising money for social work    

         B．programmers who can plan well for their future

         C．believers in equality between men and women

         D．good at cooking big meals and taking care of others

59．Who set up the Red Hat Society ?

         A．Emily Cornette．       B．Ellen Cooper． 

         C．Jenny Joseph．          D．Joe Heywood．

Although April did not bring us the rains we all hoped for, and although the Central Valley doesn’t generally experience the sound and lightning that can go with those rains, it’s still important for parents to be able to answer the youthful questions about thunder and lightning.
The reason these two wonders of nature are so difficult for many adults to explain to children is that they are not very well understood by adults themselves. For example, did you know that the lightning we see flashing down to the earth from a cloud is actually flashing up to a cloud from the earth? Our eyes trick us into thinking we see a downward motion when it’s actually the other way around. But then, if we believed only what we think and we see, we’d still insist that the sun rises in the morning and sets at night.
Most lightning flashes take place inside a cloud, and only a relative few can be seen jumping between two clouds or between earth and a cloud. But, with about 2,000 thunderstorms taking place above the earth every minute of the day and night, there’s enough activity to produce about 100 lightning strikes on earth every second.
Parents can use thunder and lightning to help their children learn more about the world around them. When children understand that the light of the lightning flashing reaches their eyes almost at the same moment, but the sound of the thunder takes about 5 seconds to travel just one mile, they can begin to time the interval (间隔) between the flash and the crash to learn how lose they were to the actual spark (闪光).
【小题1】According to the author, in the area of the Central Valley____.

If you look for a book as a present for a child. You will be spoiled for choice even in a year when there is no new Harry Patten J.K Rowling’s wizard is not alone: the past decade has been a harvest for good children’s books ,which has set off a large quantity of films and in turn led to increased sales of classics such as The Lord of the Rings.

Yet despite that ,reading is increasingly unpopular among children .According to statistics, in 1997 23% said they didn’t like reading at all . In 2003, 35% did . And around 6% of children leave primary school each year unable to read properly.

Maybe the decline is caused by the increasing availability of computer games. Maybe the books boom has affected only the top of the educational pile . Either way , Chancellor Cordon Brown plans to change things for the bottom of the class .In his pre-budget report , he announced the national project of Reading Recovery to help the children struggling most.

Reading Recovery is aimed at six-year-olds ,who receive four months of individual daily half-hour classes with a specially trained teacher . An evaluation earlier this year reported that children on the scheme made 20 months’ progress in just one year, whereas similarly weak readers without special help made just five months’ progress ,and so ended the year even further below the level expected for their age.

International research tends to find that when British children leave primary school they read well ,but read less often for fun than those elsewhere .Reading for fun matters because children who are keen on reading can expect lifelong pleasure and loving books is an excellent indicator of future educational success . According to the OECD, being a regular and enthusiastic reader is of great advantage.

46.Which of the following is true of Paragraph 1?

A.Many children’s books have been adapted from films.

B.Many high-quality children’s books have been published .

C.The sales of classics have led to the popularity of films.

D.The sales of presents for children have increased.

47.Statistics suggested that _______.

A.the number of top students increased with the use of computers

B.a decreasing number of  children showed interest in reading

C.a minority of primacy school children read properly

D.a large percentage of children read regularly

48.What do we know about Reading Recovery?

A.An evaluation of it will be made sometime this year.

B.Weak readers on the project were the most hardworking.

C.It aims to train special teachers to help children with reading.

D.Children on the project showed noticeable progress in reading.

49.Reading for fun is important because book-loving children _________.

A.take greater advantage of the project        B.show the potential to enjoy a long life

C.are likely to succeed in their education.     D.would make excellent future researchers

50.The aim of this text would probably be _________.

A.to overcome primary school pupils reading difficulty.

B.to encourage the publication of more children’s books

C.to remind children of the importance of reading for fun

D.to introduce a way to improve early childhood reading

Each Indian（印第安人）was supposed to keep his birth name until he was old enough to earn one for himself．But his playmates（游戏伙伴）would always give him a name of their own．No matter what his parents called him, his childhood friends would use the name they had chosen．Often it was not pleasing, such as Bow Legs or Bad Boy．But sometimes a name fit so well that the youngster found it difficult to shake it off．If he could not earn a better one from a war later, he could be stuck with a name like Bow Legs for the rest of his life.

The Indian earned his real name when he was old enough for his first fight against the enemy．His life name depended on how he acted during this first battle．When he returned from the war, the whole tribe would gather and observe the ceremony in which he would be given his name by the chief．If he had done well, he would get a good name．Otherwise he might be called Crazy Wolf or Man-Afraid-Of-a-Horse．So an Indian’s name told his record or described the kind of man he was.

A man was given many chances to improve his name, however．If in a later battle he was brave in fighting against the enemy, he was given a better name．Some of our great fighters had as many as twelve names—all good and each better than the last.

An Indian’s names belonged to him for the rest of his life．No one else could use them．Even he himself could not give them away because names were assigned by the tribe, not the family．So no man could pass on his name unless the chief and the tribe asked him to do so.

Sometimes an Indian would be asked to give his name to a son who had performed a noticeable deed．I know of only three of four times when this happened．It is the rarest honor for a person—the honor of assuming（承担） his father’s name.

1.

An Indian could be given the second name by__________.

    A．his father                       B．the enemy        

    C．the chief of the tribe           D．his childhood friends

2.

The greatest honor an Indian could earn was____________.

    A．a victory in his first battle against the enemy 

    B．a name given by the chief

    C．a ceremony to get his real name           

    D．the right to use his father’s name

3.

If an Indian had more than ten names, it meant that____________.

    A．many people in the tribe liked him                 B．he was a great fighter

    C．he had a lot of friends          D．he had fought in fewer than ten battles

4.

Which of the following statements is not true according to the passage?

    A．The names given by the playmates of an Indian were usually not pleasant

    B．The life name of an Indian was earned in battle

    C．An Indian could throw away his birth name when he was old enough to earn one for himself.

    D．The Indians themselves were not allowed to give their names away.

Susan Sontag (1933 ------ 2004) was one of the most noticeable figures in the world of literature.  For more than 40 years she made it morally necessary to know everything----- to read every book worth reading, to see every movie worth seeing.  When she was still in her early 30s, publishing essays in such important magazines as Partisan Review, she appeared as the symbol of American culture life, trying hard to follow every new development in literature, film and art.  With great effort and serious judgment, Sontag walked at the latest edges of world culture.

Seriousness was one of Sontag’s lifelong watchwords (格言), but at a time when the barriers between the well-educated and the poorly-educated were obvious, she argued for a true openness to the pleasure of pop culture.  In Notes Camp, the 1964 essay that first made her name, she explained what was then a little-known set of difficult understandings, through which she could not have been more famous. Notes on Camp, she wrote, represents “a victory of ‘form’ over ‘content’, ‘beauty’ over ‘morals’”.

By conviction she was a sensualist (感觉论者), but by nature she was a moralist, and in the works she published in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the latter side of her that came forward.  In Illness as Metaphor ------published in 1978, after she suffered cancer ------ she argued against the idea that cancer was somehow a special problem of repressed (被压抑的) personalities, a concept that effectively blamed the victim for the disease.  In fact, re-examining old positions was her lifelong habit.

In America, her story of a 19^th century Polish actress who set up a perfect society in California, won the National Book Award in 2000.  But it was as a tireless, all-purpose cultural view that she made her lasting fame.

“Sometimes,” she once said, “I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending… is the idea of seriousness, of true seriousness.”  And in the end, she made us take it seriously too.

1.It is implied but not stated in the first paragraph that Sontag _________.

2.She first won her name through _________.

3.From the works Susan published in the 1970s and 1980s, we can learn that ________.

4.According to the passage, Susan Sontag would agree to the ideas except _________.

5.What is the passage mainly about?