Briana, a student at John Fenwick School in Salem County, US, has a lot of free time. The 13-year-old girl used to hang out on the streets after school. “I know it wasn’t good, but I really had nothing else to do,” Briana said.

Briana was not alone. Many kids in her city had too much free time and nothing to do. To solve this problem, four school districts in Salem began a program called Big Brothers/Big Sisters. The program helps students make good use of their after-school time. Big Brothers/Big Sisters invites mentors to help students in grades 6 to 8 build healthy relationships and take part in productive activities.

The “Littles” and the “Bigs” are nicknames (昵称) for students and mentors. Most mentors are teachers. The “Bigs” and “Littles” usually meet once a week. They play games, share stories and go on trips.

The program has already helped many Salem students.

Briana’s mentor is the school principal (校长), Syeda Woods. Woods took Briana ice-skating, to pizza parties and for a visit to Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. “When I got out, I saw that Salem is a very small place,” Briana said. “The program helps me experience the outside world and see many new things.”

Kathy Jennings, 13, said she was very shy before, but now is much more open.

“In the program, I see my mentor as a big sister, not a teacher. I can tell her anything,” Jennings said. “And she has taught me a lot about making good decisions. I think it will make a big difference in my life.”

1.The program of Big Brothers/Big Sisters is designed for          .

2.The underline word “mentors” in the second paragraph most probably means “          ”.

3.The purpose of the program is to help students         .

4.The writer uses the examples of Briana and Kathy to show          .

If your preschoolers turn up their noses at carrots or celery, a small reward like a sticker for taking even a taste may help get them to eat previously disliked foods, a UK study said.

    Though it might seem obvious that a reward could encourage young children to eat their vegetables, the idea is actually controversial, researchers wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. That’s because some studies have shown that rewards can backfire and cause children to lose interest in foods they already liked, said Jane Wardle, a researcher at University College London who worked on the study. Verbal praise, such as “Brilliant! You’re a great vegetable taster,” did not work as well.

    The study found t hat when parents gave their small children a sticker each time they took a “tiny taste” of a disliked vegetable, it gradually changed their attitudes. The children were also willing to eat more of the vegetables-either carrots, celery, cucumber, red pepper, cabbage or sugar snap peas-in laboratory taste tests, the study said.

Researchers randomly assigned（分派）173 families to one of these groups. In one, parents used stickers to reward their children each time they took a tiny sample of a disliked vegetable. A second group of parents used verbal praise. The third group, where parents used no special vegetable-promoting methods, served as a “control”.

Parents in the reward groups offered their children a taste of the “target” vegetable every day of 12 days, Soon after, children in the sticker group were giving higher ratings to the vegetables-and were willing to eat more in the research lab, going from an average of 5 grams at the start to about 10 grams after the 12-day experience. The turnaround also seemed to last, with preschoolers in the sticker group still willing to eat more of the once disliked vegetable three months later.

Why didn’t the verbal praise work? Wardle said the parents’ words may have seemed “insincere” to their children.

1.The purpose of writing the passage is        .

A．to introduce a practical method of making children eat vegetables

B．to show the procedure of an experiment on children’s diet

C．to explain why children hate to eat vegetables

D．to present a proper way of vernal praise to parents

2.The underlined word “backfire” in Paragraph 2 probably means “            ”.

A．shoot from behind the back              

B．make a lire in the hackyard

C．produce an unexpected result            

D．achieve what was planned

3.According to the passage, which of the following statements is true?

A．Most children are born to dislike carrots or celery.

B．It remains a question whether rewarding is a good way to get children to eat vegetables.

C．Oral praise wokrs quite well in encouraging children to eat vegetables.

D．Children in the sticker group will never lose interest in eating vegetables.

4.How did the researchers get their conclusion from the experiment?

A．By comparison.                           B．By asking questions.

C．By giving examples,  D．By discussion.

5.What can we learn from the last paragraph?

A．Children like rewards, not verbal praise.

B．Parents should praise their children in a sincere tone.

C．Children are difficult to inspire.

D．Parents should give up verbal praise.

It’s true that quite a few most respected scientific authorities have confirmed that the world is becoming hotter and hotter. There’s also strong evidence that humans are contributing to the warming. Countless recent reports have proved the same thing. For instance, a 2010 summary about the climate science by the Royal Society noted that: “The global warming over the last half-century has been caused mainly by human activity.”

You may not believe that humans could change the planet’s climate, but the basic science is well understood. Each year, billions of tons of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere because of human activity. As has been known for years, these gases hold heat that would otherwise escape to space, wrapping the planet in an invisible (看不见的) blanket.

Of course, the earth’s climate has always been changing due to “natural” factors such as volcanic eruption or changes in solar, or cycles concerning the Earth’s going around the sun. According to the scientific research, however, the warming observed by now matches the pattern of warming we would expect from a build-up of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere – not the warming we would expect from other possible causes.

Even if scientists did discover another reasonable explanation for the warming recorded so far, that would give birth to a difficult question. As Robert Henson puts it: “If some newly discovered factor is to blame for the climate change, then why aren’t carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases producing the warming that basic physics tells us they should be?”

The only way to prove with 100% certainty that humans are responsible for global warming would be to run an experiment with two identical Earths – one with human influence and one without. That obviously isn’t possible, and so most scientists are careful not to state human influence as an absolute certainty.

1.In most scientists’ opinion, the global warming is mainly caused by ________.

A．solar activity                           B．volcanic activity

C．natural factors                          D．human factors

2.The text is developed by ________.

A．giving typical examples

B．following the order of space

C．analyzing a theory and arguing it

D．comparing and finding differences

3.The underline word “identical” in the last paragraph probably means ________.

A．totally different                         B．exactly the same

C．extremely important                     D．partly independent

4.Which of the following is not the cause of climate change?

A．volcanic eruption

B．cycles concerning the Earth’s going around the sun

C．changes in solar

D．floods and droughts

5.Which of the following can be the best title?

A．Are All the Scientists Really Scientific?

B．Where Is Global Warming Leading Us to?

C．Are Humans Definitely Causing Global Warming?

D．What’s the Relation of Global Warming and Greenhouse Gases?

Dear editor,

I am writing to ask what has happened to our young people.They are not as polite or hard-working as my generation（一代人I will give you two examples.

Last Friday, I got on the underground at 9:15 a.m. It was very crowded so there was no free seat.There were some boys sitting on the seats near me.I didn't know why they were not at school.They were talking and laughing loudly. It was difficult for me to read my newspaper with all the noise.At the next stop, a pregnant（怀孕的）woman and her daughter got on with lots of shopping bags.I expected the boys to let them sit down.They saw the woman but they did nothing.I had to ask them to give the woman and her daughter seats.   They did so but gave me a rude look.

Last Saturday, I had dinner with my friend’s family.I was glad to see his children, who I hadn't seen for ten years.During the dinner, I started talking about world politics with the children.It soon became clear that they didn't know much about it.They couldn't tell me the name of the King of Spain or President of Italy.All they knew about was the Internet or which singers were the most beautiful.In my days, students knew the kings, the queens and the presidents of every country in Europe.

I worry about the future of Germany.How could these young people become good workers and parents? They sit around McDonald's after school instead of going to the library like I did at their age.Maybe they have too much money.Perhaps some readers can give us some ideas about what to do with this “lost generation”.

Yours sincerely,

Frantz Vogts.

1.Mr. Vogts writes this letter to the editor to _______.

2.When Mr Vogts met the boys on the underground , he_______.

3.Mr Vogts was disappointed at the dinner because _______.

4.By saying “lost generation”, Mr Vogts refers to ________.

Environmentalists said our planet was doomed to die. Now one man says they are wrong.

"Everyone knows the planet is in bad shape," thundered a magazine article last year. Species are being driven to die out at record rates, and the rivers are so poisonous that fish are floating on the surface, dead.

But there's a growing belief that what everyone takes for granted is wrong: things are actually getting better. A new book is about to overturn our most basic assumptions about the world's environment. Rivers, seas, rain and the atmosphere are all getting cleaner. The total amount of forests in the world is not declining. The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, is an attack on the misleading claims of environmental groups, and the "bad news" culture that makes people believe everything is getting worse.

Now the attacks are increasingly coming from left-wing environmentalists such as Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace. The accusation is that, although the environment is improving, green groups — with profits of hundreds of mil-lions of pounds a year — are using scare tactics(谋略)to gain donations. Lomborg's book doesn't deny global warming — probably the biggest environmental threat — but destroys almost every other environmental claim with many official statistics.

The Worldwatch Institute claims that "deforestation(沙漠化) has been accelerating over the last 30 years". But Lomborg says that is simply rubbish. Since the dawn of agriculture the world has lost about 20 per cent of its forest cover, but in recent decades the forest area's depleting has come to a stop. According to UN figures, the area of forests has remained almost steady, at about 30 per cent of total land area, since the 1940s. Forests in countries such as the US, the UK and Canada have actually been expanding over the past 40 years. Despite all the warnings the Amazon rainforest has only shrunk by about 15 per cent.

Nor are all our species dying out. Some campaigners claim that 50 per cent of all species will have died out within 50 years. But other studies show only 0.08 per cent of species are dying out each year. Conservation efforts have been successful. Whales are no longer threatened and the bald eagle is off the endangered list.

Environmental groups claim that many of the improvements are the results of the success of their campaigns. Stephen Tindale, director of Greenpeace UK, said, "There are important examples, such as acid rain and ozone, where things aren't as bad as predicted, and that's because behavior has changed."

1.In his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, what is Lomborg's main argument?

2.What is Lomborg's main accusation of environmentalists?

3.The underlined word "depleting" in Paragraph 5 is closest in meaning to "____".

4.According to the passage, which of the following statements is true?