.---Sorry, Mum. I've lost my pen again.

I_____it! You never remember to put your things away after using them.

. How can you expect to get everything ______ you never give?

—May I tell this to my close friend?

—No, you      . Never let anybody else know about it.

Cast your mind back to the past twenty years and hardly did anyone have their own email account. The Internet had just taken off in 1991 and people were only using office and PC­based email exchanges.

In the mid 1990s external email providers appeared. The most famous of these was Hotmail, the first free email provider and web­based email service. Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched Hotmail on July 4, 1996. And Microsoft took note of and bought Hotmail for $400 million on December 30, 1997, a nice birthday present for Bhatia who turned 29 that day. It was relaunched as MSN Hotmail and in 2007 was relaunched again as Windows Live Hotmail.

Fast forward the present day and most of us have at least a personal web­based email account. It seems impossible to live without them. One of the biggest advantages of email is the fact that communication has become so much easier, especially with those across different time zones. Email takes seconds to send a message whereas letters, as we used to communicate by, could take weeks. Of course there was the fax, that beeping invention from the 1980s, but it wasn’t as secure as email and you never knew if the person on the other end had picked up your fax or if it had got lost somewhere in the office.

In conclusion, one of the best inventions from the 1990s has to be email. But sometimes people are too closely connected to their email and have a compulsion to check it several times a day. At work, people have become lazy and instead of going to speak to the person sitting next to them, they send an email，causing an in box to pile up with more time spent reading email and responding rather than working. Clearly, an invention that saved time because of its quick and speedy connection can now also cause us to waste a lot of time.

1.The earliest web-based email came into being probably _______.

A. in 1991                            B. in 1996                   C. in 1997                   D. in 2007

2.The author mentions “fax” in the third paragraph in order to tell us that _______.

A. it is exactly as good as email

B. it is much better than email

C. it is less convenient than email

D. it is easier and faster than email

3.The underlined word “compulsion” in Paragraph 4 probably means “_______”.

A. strong desire                  B. common sense               C. special curiosity          D. general idea

4.Which is the main idea of the last paragraph?

A. We should check email boxes frequently.

B. Lazy people like sending an email.

C. Email brings us great convenience.

D. Good inventions also cause problems.

Facebook means never having to say goodbye. The social media web site has earned a reputation for reconnecting old friends. Last week, a guy whom I hadn't seen since my bachelor party five years ago sent me a friend request. I accepted and waited for him to send me a greeting of some kind. He had sought me out, after all.

I learned from his profile that he was in a relationship and had a son. However, I'm pretty sure we won’t ever write wall-to-wall, let alone e-mail each other. But he'll remain a friend of online until one of us makes a point of removing the other from his official list.

My pool of friends consists of family members, college buddies, co-workers from past and present, and friends of friends. There are 35 in all. If I spent some time uploading old e-mail addresses, I'm confident that I could increase my friend count actually.

A person could make a mission out of reconnecting with childhood friends, former classmates, distant cousins, and those one would like to get to know better. And some people can even handle hundreds of on-screen relationships, keeping up with the daily happenings of their small army of companions. After all, there are worse fates than having too many friends.

Thanks to e-mail, the inability to schedule face-to-face meetings no longer means a friendship must come to a close. But even with e-mail, people will lose touch if one or both parties stop writing back. That's normal. People move from school to school, job to job, city to city. You never have to feel guilty for breaking away.

Every day, the masterminds of Web 2. 0 find new ways of making human communication easier. However, convenience can be a crutch. Some things shouldn't be simplified. When it comes to friendship, there can be no shortcuts.

1.According to Paragraph l, the web site is famous because _______.

  A. it has an interesting name of “Facebook”

  B. it helps people get in touch with old friends

  C. it can send people a greeting of some kind

  D. it reminds people of events in the past

2.From the second paragraph we can learn that the writer _______.

  A. would write to the friend quite often

  B. asked the friend to e-mail him

  C. did get some information about the friend

  D. would keep in touch with the friend forever

3. Which of the following statements is NOT true?

  A. There are 35 people in the author's list of friends right now.

  B. The author communicates with all the 35 friends by e-mails.

  C. The list of 35 friends doesn't include the old e-mail addresses.

  D. It is not difficult for the author to increase his friend count.

4.What does the author think of the convenience of communicating on line?

  A. The technology could not keep true friendship forever.

  B. The social web site of Facebook means nothing at all.

  C. There will be no ways of making real friends on line.

  D. People will not lose friends with the help of the Facebook.