E
When I was growing up, 16 was always a magical age, a symbol of maturity, responsibility and of course more independence and freedom.  I sat through the hours of Driver’s Ed classes eager to get out on the road. I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license.
But it’s a different story for today’s teens. In January, the U.S. Department Transportation released 2012 data that showed only 30.7 percent of U.S. teens got their license at age 16, Twenty years before, that number was almost 45 percent.
There are numbers of reasons for the fall – off. The growing responsibilities like paying for insurance and high gas prices discourage teens from getting behind the wheel. Plus, many teens today are so busy with homework, endless hours of activities and part-time jobs, that finding the time for Driver’s Ed classes may be more difficult that ever.
In addition, many states have raised the driving age, or restricted when teens can drive and who they can have in the car. Parents may also be making their own personal restrictions until they feel their teens are responsible enough to drive safely.
Driving is part of the American culture, but it’s not the central focus like it was 25 years ago. They have so many other things to do now. One of the more interesting factors delaying teens driving might be the change of their social life. Today, teens need to look no further than Face book or other social networking sites to connect with their friends. There is simply less need, maybe less desire, to be able to grab the keys and go.
Michelle Wei got her license as a senior in high school because her digital social life made it easy no to drive. “If I couldn’t get a ride to see my friend who lives a town over,” the 19-year-old said, “I could talk on IM or Skype.”
Research has shown that these online relationships can lead to higher quality friendships, so it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, it’s important to find a balance. If old face-to-face friendships are good, why not drive to find them?
【小题1】We can infer from the first paragraph that         .

B
China is going green．In order to reduce air pollution and oil shortages, carmakers have announced their plans to develop hybrid vehicles (混合燃料汽车) for the Chinese market．Toyota’s hybrid car Prius will be ready to drive in China this week．Let’s have a look at the new car．
Any vehicle is a hybrid run on a rechargeable battery and gas．Hybrid cars have special engines, which are smaller than traditional gas engines．The gasoline engine provides 99 percent of the power when the car is going at a steady speed. A specially designed battery motor provides extra power for running up hills or when it needs to speed up．
Step into a Prius, and turn on the engine．The first thing you notice is that it is quieter than a traditional car．At this point, the car’s gas engine is at rest．The electric motor will provide power until the car reaches about 24km/h．If you stay at a low speed, you are effectively driving an electric car, with no gas being used, and no waste gas given off．
The computer decides when to use the gas engine, when to go electric, and when to use a combination of the two．If you go over 24km/h, when you step on the gas pedal (油门), you are telling the computer how fast you want to go．
The electric motor recharges automatically using a set of batteries．And when driving at a high speed, the gas engine not only powers the car but also recharges the batteries．When you use the brake, the electric motor in the wheels will work like a generator (发电机) to produce electricity to recharge the batteries．As a result, the car’s batteries will last for around 200,000 miles．
66．The underlined sentence probably means ________.
A．there will be more and more green land in China  
B．China’s new cars are combinations of different green models
C．China is still young and lacking in experience
D．the environment is getting better in China
67. What is the most important feature of hybrid cars?
A. They are powered by both a rechargeable battery and gas.
B. They have smaller engines than traditional gas ones.
C. They only use 99 percent of their power to run up hill.
D. They are much quieter than traditional cars.
68. We can know from the story that ________.
A. the gas engine recharges the batteries as well as powering the car
B. using the brake suggests that the gas engine should work
C. the car’s batteries will last for around 200,000 miles without being recharged
D. the batteries can be recharged at any time you want
69. The author writes the passage mainly to________.
A. announce plans to develop hybrid vehicles for the Chinese market
B. let people know how to save their gas when driving a car
C. teach people how to drive a hybrid car
D. introduce a new kind of “green” car
70．Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the text?
A．The hybrid car is environmentally friendly．
B．The hybrid car is unable to get itself recharged．
C．The hybrid car has been made in mass．
D．The hybrid car can decide what power to use

Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums (贫民窟).” More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)
But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction—a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”
There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior (低等的) to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold South, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s lightskinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
The point was difficult to miss: nurture (养育), not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice—manner of speech, for example— were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
Twain’s racial tone was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography (自传) about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth—mostly with white men performing in black-face—and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
Was Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.
【小题1】 How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowe’s?

John H. Johnson was born in a black family in Arkansas City in 1918. His father died in an accident when John was six. He was reaching the high school age, but his hometown offered no high school for blacks.
Luckily he had a strong-willed caring mother. John remembered that his mother told him many times, “Son，you can be anything you want really to be if you just believe.” She told him not to depend on others，including his mother. “You have to earn success,” she said. “All the people who work hard don’t succeed, but the only people who do succeed are those who work hard.”
These words came from a woman with less than a third grade education. She also knew that believing and hard work don’t mean everything. So she worked hard as a cook for two years to save enough to take her son, who was then 15，to Chicago.
Chicago in 1933 was not the promised land that black southerners were looking for. John’s mother and stepfather could not find work. But here John could go to school, and here he learned the power of words — as an editor of the newspaper and yearbook at Du Sable High School. His wish was to publish a magazine for blacks.
While others discouraged (使气馁) him, John’s mother offered him more words to live by: “Nothing beats a failure but a try.” She also let him pawn（典当）her furniture to get the ＄500 he needed to start the Negro magazine.
It is natural that difficulties and failures followed John closely until he became very successful. He always keeps his mother’s words in mind: “Son, failure is not in your vocabulary!”
Now John H. Johnson is one of the 400 richest people in America — worth $150 million.
【小题1】 John’s father died in ________.

I love science and science fiction. Like many science fiction fans, I am fascinated by the possibility of time travel. However, one must combine romance with reasoning and look into the chances of time travel critically.
First of all, we must remember the whole universe is in motion. If we want to go back to yesterday, our "time machine" has to move back in time and space. If someone claimed he was at home when he suddenly travelled 200 years back in time, he either had an illusion or made the story up. Two hundred years ago, Earth was in a different place in space, so how can you travel back 200 years without moving in space? Don't get me wrong. I am not knocking the genius of science fiction writers. H.G. Wells's "The Time Machine" is a great work of fiction, but that’s all. I have read many other time travelling science fiction stories since reading H.G. Wells, but none address this problem of displacement.
My own argument for the impossibility of time travel is that physical states of the past no longer exist and those of the future are not here yet. To be able to move back and forth in time requires everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen everywhere in the whole universe at every single moment in time－past, present, and future－to be stored as a "reality" somewhere－like the save game file of a computer game that contains every single byte of information of the game at the point it was saved, but you would need an almost extremely large file and almost extremely many of them－so it can be re-entered and communicated with, and not just light signals for viewing. To me, I don’t buy it.
【小题1】Which of the following can be the best title?