A little girl was given so many picture books on her seventh birthday that her father. Who should have run his office and let her mother run the home, thought his daughter should give one or two of her new books to a little neighbor boy named Robert, who had visited their home sometimes.

   Now, taking books, or anything else, from a little girl is like taking sweets from a baby, but the father of the little girl had his way and Robert got a couple of her books. “After all, that leaves you with nine,” said the father, who thought he was a child psychologist（心理学家）,and couldn’t shout his big stupid mouth on the subject.

  A few weeks later, the father went to his library to look up “father” in The Oxford English Dictionary, eager to enjoy the praise of fatherhood through the centuries, but he couldn’t find volume（册）F-G and then he discovered that others were missing too. A-B,L-M, V-Z. He looked everywhere for them, and learned what had happened to the four missing volumes.

   “A man came to the door this morning” said the little daughter, “and he didn’t know how to get from here to Torrington or from Torrington to Wintec, and he was a kind man, much nicer than Robert, and so I gave him four of your books After all, there are thirteen volumes in the Oxford English Dictionary, and that leaves you with nine.

According to the writer’s opinion,      

A. a mother should keep house and father educate the children

B. A father should run the home as well as his office

C. A father should run his office and leave his children to his wife

D. A father shouldn’t only run his office but educate his children

“The father of the little girl has his way” means       

the father went out to work in his office 

B. the father decided to the girl a lesson

C. the father still did what he wanted to.

Considering himself a psychologist, the father        

couldn’t stop discussing the subject    

B. couldn’t helping（禁不住）talking about the subject

couldn’t refuse to listen to the subject  

D. couldn’t give an explanation of he subject

What’s still unclear to us in the story?

A. The exact number of the picture books the girl had received.

B. How many volumes the Oxford English Dictionary includes.

C. Whether each volume of the dictionary includes entries beginning with two letters.

D. Whether the father knew his daughter’s mind well

What do we know about the little girl?

A. She liked Robert very much.            B. She liked reading dictionary

She dislikes what her father did to her picture books.  

D. She is a kind and helpful girl.

Sorry to say, our brains naturally start slowing down at the Cruelty young age of 30. It used to be thought that this couldn't be helped, but new studies show that people of any age can train their brains to work faster. "Your brain is a learning machine," says University of California scientist Dr. Michael Merzenich. Given the right tools, we can train our brains to act like they did when we were younger. All that's required is the practice designed just for the purpose: a few exercises for the mind.

Merzenich has developed a computer-based training method to speed up the process(过程)                         in which the brain deals with information (positscience.com). Since much of the data we receive comes through speech, the Brain Fitness Program works with language and hearing to better speed and accuracy (准确性).

Over the course of training, the program starts asking you to distinguish (辨别) sounds (between "dog" and "bog", for example) at an increasingly faster speed. It's a bit like tennis instructor, says Merzenich, hitting balls at you ~faster and faster to keep you challenged(受到挑战). You may start out slow, but before long you're pretty quick.

The biggest finding in brain research in the last ten years is that the brain at any age is highly plastic. If you ask your brain to learn, it will learn. And it may even speed up while in the process.

To keep your brain young and plastic you can do one of a million new activities that challenge and excite you: playing table tennis or bridge, doing crossword puzzles, learning a language.... "When it comes to preventing ageing, you really do 'use it or lose it' ," says Barbara Sahakian, professor at Cambridge University.

Dr. Merzenich’s training method mainly depends on ________.

A. speech training                           B. computer languages

    C. the activities one joins in             D. the information being dealt with

By saying "the brain at any age is highly plastic ", the writer probably means the brain can be______.

    A. used              B. mastered        C. developed             D. researched

What can we learn from the text?

    A. Practice makes a quick mind.

    B. Brain research started ten yeas ago.

    C. Dr. Merzenich is a scientist in computer,

    D. People believed nothing could stop the brain slowing down.

Which of the following agrees with the writer's idea?

    A. The training methods work better for the old.

    B. People should use the brain to stop it from ageing.

    C. The training of the brain should start at an early age.

D.  It's necessary to take part in as many activities as possible.

B
One night last February, a seventeen-year-old Duffy drove home along a winding road, he saw a strange light thrown against the tree. “I knew it wasn’t the moon”, he said. “I drive this road all the time and I notice little things out of place.”
Duffy stopped his car and got out to examine. Below him far down in the deep valley lay a broken car with its headlights on. Thirty minutes earlier, a man had driven off the edge of the road, which has no guardrail. His car fell and rolled end over end, landing on its top more than two hundred feet below.
Duffy rushed to call for help, then returned and got down to reach the injured driver. Snow covered the valley and the temperature was below freezing. After struggling back up the cliff, Duffy took off his jacket and shirt and wrapped the injured man in time, along with the blankets from his car.
Life-saving deeds are starting to become usual action for Duffy, the oldest of seven children. When he was 12, he saved his ten-year-old brother from drowning. Two years ago, his three-year-old sister ate rat poison, and Duffy cleaned out her mouth, make her drink milk to protect her stomach and called doctors.
“We have tried to teach the children good values, and it looks like we have got some reward for it.” His father says.
46. The strange light came from ________.
A. The bright moon.          B. Duffy’s car.
C. The broken car in the valley   D. an unknown place
47. The phrase” landing on its top” means the car lay_________.
A. on the top of the cliff    B. with its wheels upward 
C. with its head upward    D. on the road as usual
48. Duffy wrapped the man because_________.
A. he was badly injured    B. he had lost too much blood  
C. he had nothing on      D. it was too cold that day
49. From the above article, we can see Duffy has saved ________ at least.  
A. two     B. three     C. four      D. five
50. “We have tried to teach the children good values” may probably mean Duffy’s parents often tell their children_________.
A. to help people in danger         B. how to save people’s lives
C. to remember the value of the car     D. how to do business

A new weapon (武器) is on the way in the fight against smoking in Europe. Soon when smokers buy cigarettes they might see a shocking photo of a blackened lung or a cancer patient staring back at them from the packet.

Some boys may think of smoking as cool and sexy. Their friends won’t agree when they see their packets of cigarettes lying on the table. The European Union announced that it had chosen 42 photos that showed the damage cigarettes could do to the body, calling on member nations to put these pictures on packets to discourage smokers. To catch the attention of teenagers, the special packets warn of long-term medical dangers, like cancer. Short-term effects, like bad skin, are also on the list.

“The true face of smoking is disease, death and horror. That is the message we should send to the young,” said David Byrne, an EU health official. “Hopefully these pictures will shock students out of their love for cigarettes.”

The EU head office hoped the pictures would work better than current (当前) written warnings on packs of cigarettes. The warnings included “smoking kills” and “smoking can lead to a slow and painful death”.

So far, Ireland and Belgium have shown interest in the photos. Canada has used similar pictures and warnings on cigarette packs since 2000. The country has recently seen a fall in the number of smokers. According to studies, smoking is the single biggest cause of avoidable deaths in the EU. Every year more than 650,000 smokers die, more than one person a minute.

By saying “a new weapon is on the way”, the writer means the EU is going to have _____ .

   A. the true face of smoking shown everywhere                     

   B. shocking photos printed on cigarette packets      

   C. written warnings printed on the cigarette packs                      

D. pictures put up where cigarettes are sold                            

The pictures chosen by the EU are supposed to mainly work on _____ .

   A. young smokers                  B. smokers in Ireland and Belgium

C. male smokers                   D. young smokers’ friends

What can we learn from the passage?

   A. Canada has been the first to use the EU’s “weapon”.            

 B. Most smokers don’t quite believe the written warnings.  

C. The new form of warning has already been proved to work.

D. Smoking has caused more deaths than anything else in the EU.

Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?

   A. Smoking Is Cool And Sexy.        B. A New Weapon to Fight Smoking.

   C. Young Smokers in The EU.        D. Deaths from Smoking.

Ever wonder how much a cloud weighs? What about a hurricane? A meteorologist has done some estimates and the results might surprise you.
Let's start with a very simple white puffy cloud — a cumulus cloud（积云）. How much does the water in a cumulus cloud weigh? Peggy LeMone, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, did the numbers. "The water in the little cloud weighs about 550 tons," she calculates. "Or if you want to convert it to something that might be a little more meaningful … think of elephants."
The thought of a hundred elephants-worth of water suspended in the sky begs another question — what keeps it up there?
"First of all, the water isn't in elephant sized particles（微粒）, it's in tiny tiny tiny particles," explains LeMone. And those particles float on the warmer air that's rising below. But still, the concept of so much water floating in the sky was surprising even to a meteorologist like LeMone. "I had no idea how much a cloud would weigh, actually, when I started the calculations," she says.
So how many elephant units of water are inside a big storm cloud—10 times bigger all the way around than the "puffy" cumulus cloud? Again, LeMone did the numbers: About 200,000 elephants.
Now, ratchet up the calculations for a hurricane about the size of Missouri and the figures get really massive. "What we're doing is weighing the water in one cubic meter theoretically pulled from a cloud and then multiplying by the number of meters in a whole hurricane," she explains.
The result? Forty million elephants. That means the water in one hurricane weighs more than all the elephants on the planet. Perhaps even more than all the elephants that have ever lived on the planet.
【小题1】The weight of      is NOT mentioned in the passage.