I start to wonder what else had changed since I’d been gone. My parents are in an awkward puzzle, wondering how to treat me now----whether to treat me—still their daughter—as one of them, an adult, or as the child they feel they sent away months earlier.

I run into two of my best friends from high school; we stare at each other, expressionless. We ask the simple questions and give simple answers. It’s as if we have nothing to say to each other. I wonder how things have changed so much in such a small amount of time. We used to laugh and promise that no matter how far away we were, our love for each other would never change. Their interests don’t interest me anymore, and I find myself unable to relate my life to theirs.

I had been so excited to come home, but now I just look at it all and wonder: Is it me? Why hadn’t the world stood still here while I was gone?  My room isn’t the same, my friends and I don’t share the same promise, and my parents don’t know how to treat me—or who I am, for that matter.

I get back to school feeling half-satisfied, but not disappointed. I sit up in my bed in my dorm room, surrounded by my pictures, dolls. As I wonder what has happened, I realize that I can’t expect the world to stand still and move forward at the same time.  I can change and expect that things at home will stay the same. I have to find comfort in what has changed and what is new; keep the memories, but live in the present.

A few weeks later, I’m packing again, this time for winter break. My mom meets me at the door. I have come home accepting the changes, not only in my surroundings, but most of all in me.

What can we infer about the writer?

       A. She is a high school student.    B. She is a college student.

       C. She is a clerk in a school.       D. She is a traveler.

What surprises the writer most?

       A. The living conditions of her parents.       B. The decorations in her room.

       C. The meeting with her best friends.   D. The things still staying the same.

What is this passage mainly about?

       A. The writer’s curiosity about the changes.

       B. The changes in the writer’s surroundings and in herself.

       C. The writer’s disappointment about the changes.

       D. The writer’s refusal to accept the changes.

She’s not afraid of anything. Snakes? No problem. Walking alone in the dark? Easy. We’re not talking about a superhero here -- SM is a 44-year-old mother.  And she’s fearless because she happens to be missing part of her brain: the amygdala(扁桃腺).

   Shaped like a pair of almonds sitting in the middle of your brain, the amygdala helps control fear and anxiety. A rare condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease left SM without her amygdala, and seems to have completely erased her sense of fear.

   To try to understand how the amygdala works, a team of researchers made their efforts to scare SM. They showed her horror movies and took her to the Waverly Hills Sanatorium Haunted House in Kentucky. She pushed out one of the monsters(巨物) and laughed. SM said she didn’t like snakes, but at a pet store full of poisonous creatures, she kept asking to touch them. When asked to rate her feelings, SM reported feeling surprised or disgusted, but never fearful.

   “She tends to approach everything she should be avoiding,” says Justin Feinstein of the  University of Iowa. This means the amygdala could control deeper urges to approach or avoid danger. Other scientists have a different opinion, though.  “I don’t believe you can make a general statement about what the amygdala does by a single case study,” Elizabeth Phelps said. In 2002, Phelps published a study on a similar patient with amygdala damage who still showed fear.

It may sound like fun to be totally fearless, but we get scared for a good reason. “The nature of fear is survival and the amygdala helps us stay alive by avoiding situations, people, or objects that put our life in danger,” Feinstein said. SM was once followed in a park after dark by a man with a knife, and she simply walked away. “It is quite remarkable that she is still alive,” said Feinstein.

1.SM dares to walk alone in the dark mainly because ____________.

A. she is a superhero

B. she has experienced such conditions a lot

C. she is a mental patient

D. she has no sense of fear

2.Researchers tried their best to frighten SM in order to find ___________.

A. The function of a particular organ

B. SM’s reaction of fear and anxiety

C. The process of removing amygdale

D. A special way to get along with monsters

3.What do we know from the research on SM?

A. It was easy for her to avoid danger.

B. SM never felt fearful but disgusted.

C. SM was frightened by nothing except monsters.

D. SM got along well with the snakes.

4.What is Elizabeth Phelps’ attitude toward the function of the amygdala based on the research on SM?

A. Indifferent    B. Supportive    C. Disapproving     D. Interested

5.What can we infer from the last paragraph?

A. People can remove their amygdala to be fearless.

B. SM will be admired because of her bravery.

C. No one can survive if their amygdala is removed.

D. The sense of fear is crucial to humans.

Here’s an idyllic(田园风光的) scene: a small village where the sun always shines, crops always grow and your friends drop by to sweep your yard to the sound of guitar music. Animals do what they are told, there is no disease, and lending folks a helping hand makes you richer and wiser. Welcome to FarmVille — current population 69m and rising fast.
“It reminds me of my childhood,” says one player, Lia Curran, 37, a chemist from London. “Right now I’m growing wheat and poinsettia, I’ve got a small orchard, and I’m keeping some chickens and some cows. I like having the animals. It’s comfortable.”
Curran’s young animals, however, are nothing more than a collection of computer-controlled cartoons. FarmVille is an online computer game built into the social networking site Facebook and is described by its players as “addictive”. Launched last June by Zynga Game Network, FarmVille now has more players than Twiter’s entire user base — or more than the population of the UK. The players are largely women over the age of 35.
Jenny Glyn, 33, a London housewife, started playing in September. “I had a look at a friend’s farm and was hooked,” she says. “My first motivation was to overtake her, but I did that pretty quickly. Now there’s something satisfying about growing crops.”
FarmVille intellectually unites the worlds of social networking and gaming. Players are given a patch of ground with six fields, “cash”, a few seeds and a plough and have to build up wealth, skills and neighbors to create bigger, better, richer farms.
Inviting your online friends to play means you earn more and get free gifts; you rise rapidly through the first levels but, once hooked, have to work harder and harder with no final level or goal in sight.
“It’s very moreish,” says Curran. She hasn’t yet paid real-world money to advance in the game, but her friends do. One buys extra virtual currency at the exchange rate of $240 (£145) in FarmVille for $40 (£24) in the real world.
“I’d expanded on FarmVille as much as I could, but I just wanted a pond and some bushes and trees around it,” says the woman, who is too embarrassed to be named. “I didn’t tell my husband I’d paid real money because he’d think I’m mad. But then he did keep me waiting in the car outside our house while he harvested his raspberries.”
Brian Dudley, chief executive at Broadway Lodge, an addiction treatment centre, warns that this sort of obsessive(令人着魔的) play can lead to an addiction as severe as gambling.
59. What does Curran do in the passage?
A. She is a player.                                                      B. She is a farmer who grows wheat and poinsettia.
C. She is a chemist.                                                  D. She is a housewife who raises chickens and cows.
60. By FarmVille, the writer means ______.
A. an addictive farm on which live 69 million farmers
B. a London housewife’s farm
C. an online computer game built into the social networking site
D. a farm on which people grow real crops and play as well
61. In the last but one paragraph, the husband kept the woman waiting outside ______.
A. because he was angry at his wife’s being mad about the farm
B. because he himself was busy with his farm
C. in order to punish his wife for her having paid real money
D. so that his wife would wake up from her addiction to the farm
62. According to the passage, which of the following is NOT true?
A. The population of the UK is less than 69 million.
B. This sort of obsessive play can cause very severe addiction.
C. Once hooked, one has to make greater efforts to reach a higher level.
D. Up till now, nobody has yet paid real-world money to advance in the play.

When I learned that my 71-year-old mother was playing Scrabble – a word game – against herself, I knew I had to do something. My husband suggested we give her a computer to play against. I wasn’t sure my mother was ready for it. After all, it had taken 10 years to persuade her to buy an electric cooker. Even so, we packed up our old computer and delivered it to my parents’ home. And so began my mother’s adventure in the world of computers.

    It also marked the beginning of an unusual teaching task for me. I’ve taught people of all ages, but I never thought I would be teaching my mother how to do anything. She has been the one teaching me all my life: to cook and sew; to enjoy the good times and put up with the bad. Now it was my turn to give something back.

    It wasn’t easy at the beginning. There was so much to explain and to introduce. Slowly but surely, my mother caught on, making notes in a little notebook. After a few months of Scrabble and other games, I decided it was time to introduce her to word processing(文字处理). This proved to be a bigger challenge to her, so I gave her some homework I asked her to write me a letter, using different letter types, colors and spaces.

    “Are you this demanding with your kindergarten pupils?” she asked.

    “No, of course not,” I said. “They already know how to use a computer.”

     My mother isn’t the only one experiencing a fast personal growth period. Thanks to the computer, my father has finally got over his phone allergy(过敏反应). For as long as I can remember, any time I called, my mother would answer. Dad and I have had more phone conversations in the last two months than we’ve had in the past 20 years.

1.What does the author do?

A. She is a cook.                  B. She is a teacher.

C. She is a housewife.              D. She is a computer engineer.

2.The author decided to give her mother a computer        .

A. to let her have more chances to write letters

B. to support her in doing her homework

C. to help her through the bad times

D. to make her life more enjoyable

3.The author asked her mother to write her a letter           .

A. because her mother had stopped using the telephone

B. because she wanted to keep in touch with her mother

C. so that her mother could practice what she had learned

D. so that mother could be free from housework

4.After the computer was brought home, the author’s father          .

A. lost interest in cooking           B. took more phone calls

C. played more games              D. began to use it

I start to wonder what else had changed since I’d been gone. My parents are in an awkward puzzle, wondering how to treat me now----whether to treat me—still their daughter—as one of them, an adult, or as the child they feel they sent away months earlier.

I run into two of my best friends from high school; we stare at each other, expressionless. We ask the simple questions and give simple answers. It’s as if we have nothing to say to each other. I wonder how things have changed so much in such a small amount of time. We used to laugh and promise that no matter how far away we were, our love for each other would never change. Their interests don’t interest me anymore, and I find myself unable to relate my life to theirs.

I had been so excited to come home, but now I just look at it all and wonder: Is it me? Why hadn’t the world stood still here while I was gone?  My room isn’t the same, my friends and I don’t share the same promise, and my parents don’t know how to treat me—or who I am, for that matter.

I get back to school feeling half-satisfied, but not disappointed. I sit up in my bed in my dorm room, surrounded by my pictures, dolls. As I wonder what has happened, I realize that I can’t expect the world to stand still and move forward at the same time.  I can change and expect that things at home will stay the same. I have to find comfort in what has changed and what is new; keep the memories, but live in the present.

A few weeks later, I’m packing again, this time for winter break. My mom meets me at the door. I have come home accepting the changes, not only in my surroundings, but most of all in me.

1.

 What can we infer about the writer?

    A. She is a high school student.    B. She is a college student.

    C. She is a clerk in a school.      D. She is a traveler.

2.

. What surprises the writer most?

    A. The living conditions of her parents.             

B. The decorations in her room.

    C. The meeting with her best friends.                

D. The things still staying the same.

3.

What is this passage mainly about?

    A. The writer’s curiosity about the changes.

    B. The changes in the writer’s surroundings and in herself.

    C. The writer’s disappointment about the changes.

    D. The writer’s refusal to accept the changes.