How do you know if your home is an easy aim for thefts(偷窃)? Around the holidays, many families don’t consider taking proper measures to prevent their homes from suffering holiday thefts. With just a few simple steps, you can better make sure of the safety of your home during all of the holiday celebrations. Here are a few tips for making it difficult to tell you are away from home.

  ● Either have a trusted neighbor pick up your mail and newspapers, or tell your mailperson to hold your mail until you return. Nothing says “Hey, we are not home!” like when your postbox is filled with all kinds of mails and you have many different newspapers in your driveway.

  ● Set several different lights in your house on random timers (随机定时器)。Don’t leave your outdoor lights on all the time. Instead, put your outside lights on timers to be on during the nights.  If an outdoor light remains on for days at a time, it means that nobody is home to turn it off.

  ● If you have pets that you are not taking with you on vacation, leave them with a friend, rather than having someone come into your house every day to take care of them. When thefts see a neighbor or friend entering your house every day, they will know you are not home.

  ● Close all your curtains when you leave town. This is effective to deter possible thefts, as no one can see what is in your house. If they don’t know what there is to take, then the risk is even greater for them to break in.

  ● This article just has suggested a few tips to help you keep your house safe while you are on holiday. Nothing can truly protect your home unless you have it monitored by a professional home security system.

1.. What is the main idea of the passage?

A. to tell us how to prevent the thefts around the holidays

B. to let the outdoor lights on all the time

C. to tell us many families suffering from the thefts while they are on holiday

D. to tell you to have your neighbor go to your house to take care of your pet.

2..If you are on holiday in other places, the lights in your house should________.

A. be lit in an irregular way              B. be kept on all the night

C. be replaced by random timers          D be turned on only once one day

3..To make your home is well protected, what does the writer advise you to do?

A. Have all the curtains closed            B. Stop your mail service at once

C. Turn to your close neighbors or friends   D. Equip your home with security system

4.. Most of the tips mentioned in the text seem to ______.

A. be very popular with families             B. have no effect on preventing thefts

C. give a false impression on thefts.        D. be a little hard to be brought into effect.

5..The underlined word “deter ”probably means “___________ ”.

    A. discover         B. discourage       C. surprise         D. attract   

Increasingly, Americans are becoming their own doctors, by going online to diagnose their symptoms, order home health tests or medical devices, or even self-treat their illnesses with drugs from Internet pharmacies(药店). Some avoid doctors because of the high cost of medical care, especially if they lack health insurance. Or they may stay because they find it embarrassing to discuss their weight, alcohol consumption or couch potato habits. Patients may also fear what they might learn about their health, or they distrust physicians because of negative experiences in the past. But playing doctor can also be a deadly game.

Every day, more than six million Americans turn to the Internet for medical answers – most of them aren’t nearly skeptical enough of what they find. A 2002 survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 72 percent of those surveyed believe all or most of what they read on health websites. They shouldn’t. Look up “headache”, and the chances of finding reliable and complete information, free from a motivation for commercial gain, are only one in ten, reports an April 2005 Brown Medical School study. Of the 169 websites the researchers rated, only 16 scored as “high quality”. Recent studies found faulty facts about all sorts of other disorders, causing one research team to warn that a large amount of incomplete, inaccurate and even dangerous information exists on the Internet.

The problem is most people don’t know the safe way to surf the Web. “They use a search engine like Google, get 18 trillion choices and start clicking. But that’s risky, because almost anybody can put up a site that looks authoritative(权威的), so it’d hard to know if what you’re reading is reasonable or not,” says Dr. Sarah Bass from the National Cancer Institute.

1.According to the text, an increasing number of American _____.

A. are suffering from mental disorders

B. turn to Internet pharmacies for help

C. like to play deadly games with doctors

D. are skeptical about surfing medical websites

2.Some Americans stay away from doctors because they _____.

A. find medical devices easy to operate

B. prefer to be diagnosed online by doctors

C. are afraid to face the truth of their health

D. are afraid to misuse their health insurance

3.According to the study of Brown Medical School, ______.

A. more than 6 million Americans distrust doctors

B. only 1/10 of medical websites aim to make a profit

C. about 1/10 of the websites surveyed are of high quality

D. 72% of health websites offer incomplete and faulty facts

4.Which of the following is the author’s main argument?

A. It’s cheap to self-treat your own illness.

B. It’s embarrassing to discuss your bad habits.

C. It’s reasonable to put up a medical website.

D. It’s dangerous to be your own doctor.

 –Don’t forget to turn to me if you have any trouble.

-- ______________.

While watching the Olympics the other night, I came across an unbelievable sight. It was not a gold medal, or a world record broken, but a show of courage.

The event was swimming and started with only three men on the blocks. For one reason or another, two of them false started, so they were disqualified. That left only one to compete. It would have been difficult enough, not having anyone to race against, even though the time on the clock is important.

I watched the man dive off the block and knew right away that something was wrong. I’m not an expert swimmer, but I can tell a good dive from a poor one, and this was not exactly medal quality. When he resurfaced, it was evident that the man was not out for gold – his arms were waving in an attempt at freestyle. The crowd started to laugh. Clearly this man was not a medal competitor.

I listened to the crowd begin to laugh at this poor man who was clearly having a hard time. Finally he made his turn to start back. It was pitiful. He made a few desperate strokes and you could tell he was worn out.

But in those few awful strokes, the crowd had changed.

No longer were they laughing, but beginning to cheer. Some even began to stand and shout “Come on, you can do it!” and he did.

A clear minute past the average swimmer, this young man finally finished his race. The crowd went wild. You would have thought that he had won the gold, and he should have. Even though he recorded one of the slowest times in Olympic history, this man gave more heart than any of the other competitors.

Just a short year ago, he had never even swum, let alone race. His country had been invited to Sydney.

1.From the passage we can learn that the young man         .

2.The crowd changed their attitudes because          .

3.What’s the best title for the passage?

完形填空（共20小题；每小题。1.5分，满分30分）

There are going to be moments in life when you must make very important decisions. You will find many people 36 to offer you advice if you ask for it (and even if you don’t), but always remember that the life you   37   is yours and nobody else’s. It’s important to decide for yourself what’s important to you and what you want before you   38   others. Because while there will be times   39 outside advice proves wise, there will be at least as many times when it proves completely   40.. The only way to really evaluate other folks’ advice is to first learn everything that you can about whatever challenge you are   41  . Once you’ve done that, in most cases you should be able to make a wise decision   42   anyway.

You were   43   with the ability to decide what is and what isn’t in your best interest. Most of the time, you will make the right decision and   44   the appropriate actions, and in thinking for yourself, you will become far more successful than if you had gone against your own  45  .

Early on in my investment career, I made the mistake of   46   a few important business decisions on colleagues’ opinions instead of conducting the   47   necessary to make a wise decision. It wasn’t due to   48   on my part; no one could ever accuse me of that. But, being   49   to Wall Street, I intended to assume that my more senior   50  knew more than I did, and so I   51   too much significance to their opinions.

You know what happened? Each of those investments ended in   52  . Eventually I stopped allowing myself to be influenced by   53   and began doing the work myself and making my own decisions. It took me until I was almost 30 years old to   54   this—it’s never too late for a person to change his approach both to   55   and to life. 

1. A. easy    B. ready    C. unwilling   D. hard

2. A. lead    B. lend    C. take    D. earn

3. A. look at    B. pick up   C. turn to    D. learn from

4. A. that    B. since    C. when    D. while

5. A. useless     B. useful    C. priceless   D. clever

6. A. getting     B. making    C. suffering   D. facing

7.A. on one hand   B. on your own  C. on the whole  D. on all sides

8. A. born    B. tired    C. satisfied   D. covered

9. A. enjoy    B. step    C. plan    D. take

10. A. assumption   B. judgment   C. condition   D. fortune

11. A. basing    B. depending   C. relying    D. focusing

12.A. research    B. search    C. resources   D. activity

13. A. poverty    B. laziness   C. fear    D. diligence

14.A. used    B. accustomed   C. new    D. old

15.A. students    B. brothers   C. colleagues   D. classmates

16. A. attached    B. paid    C. gave    D. held

17. A. disaster    B. progress   C. failure    D. success

18.A. either    B. another   C. each    D. others

19.A. think    B. remember   C. realize    D. recall

20. A. payment   B. dreams   C. happiness   D. business