Many different tribes live in the Ituri rain forest of Africa, but the Pygmies are the most unusual. Most of the men are not much more than four feet tall. They weigh only about eighty pounds. The women are even smaller and thinner. But in spite of the fact that they are small, these people are perfectly formed men and women.

      It is an exciting experience to visit a Pygmy encampment for the first time. Before you go, you must send word ahead that you are coming. Some friendly native or trader must take the message to the Tiki-Tikis. Otherwise the whole tribe will disappear into the depths of the jungle long before you have come close enough to be welcomed.

      The great Ituri rain forest seems cut off from the rest of the earth. There are living, dead, and dying trees on every side. Except where a clearing has been burned and chopped out, a man may live his whole life in the Ituri and never see farther than twenty yards.

      It takes sharp eyes to discover the almost hidden path to the Pygmy camp. The path is no wider than a small man’s foot. No sound breaks the silence in this part of the forest. There are no signs of people.

      The stranger must walk carefully. What appears to be a bent branch may prove to be a deadly snake. A spotted gold patch of sunlight may be a crouching leopard(豹).

Even the Pygmy camp comes as a surprise. The leafy shelters in which the little people live are hardly three feet high. They look so much like the surrounding undergrowth that they might easily be passed by. These houses contain no furniture of any sort. The beds are merely plantain leaves spread out on the earth floor. There are no cooking pots: food is eaten raw or smoked over a fire. Spears, bows and arrows are the only possessions of these people. When the tribe moves to a new camp there is nothing to carry except these weapons and babies too small to walk.

According to the passage, we can conclude _____.

    A. the Pygmies are the shortest tribe worldwide

    B. the Pygmies are short but normal in mentality

    C. most of the Pygmy men are more than four feet

    D. the Pygmies live in the forest of America

Paragraph 2 mainly suggests that the Pygmies ______.

    A. are unwilling to communicate with people outside

    B. are very cruel and they will kill you with the spears

    C. are friendly to the tourists visiting them for the first time

    D. move so fast and often that can’t be caught up with easily

Which of the following word can describe the life of Pygmy?

    A. Quiet.        B. Active.     C. Hard.        D. Busy.

Which of the following is TRUE of the Pygmy?

    A. Their houses can’t be easily found in the hurt rain forest.

    B. Their houses, which are three feet high, are made of wood.

    C. Weapons and cooking pots are their most valuable possessions.

D. They are living in harmony with dangerous animals around.

My parents have certainly had their troubles, and as their child I’ll never know how they made it to 38 years of marriage. They loved each other, but they didn’t seem to like each other very much. Dad was too fond of his beer, and he talked down to Mom a lot. When she tried to stand up to him, a fight would unavoidably follow.

   It was my dad’s disease that began to change things. The year 1998 was the beginning of a remarkable transformation for my family. My father, Jim Dineen, the always healthy, weightlifting, never-missed-a-day-of-work kind of dad, discovered he had kidney (肾)disease.

   The decision to go ahead with a transplant for my father was a long and tough one, mostly because he had liver damage too. One physician’s assistant told him, “According to your file, you’re supposed to be dead.” And for a while, doctors mistakenly thought that he would need not just a kidney transplant, but a liver transplant too. Dad’s future hung in midpoint.

   When the donor testing process finally began in the spring of 2003, numerous people, including me, my uncle Tom, and my mom, came back as matches of varying degree. But Mom was the one who insisted on going further. She decided to donate a kidney to my father. She said she was not scared, and it was the right thing to do. We all stepped back in amazement.

   At last a date was chosen – November 11, 2003. All of a sudden, the only thing that seemed to matter Dad was telling the world what a wonderful thing Mom was doing for him. A month before the surgery, he sent her birthday flowers with a note that read, “I love you and I love your kidney! Thank you!”

   Financially, the disease was upsetting to them. So my sister and I were humbled and surprised when, shortly before his surgery day, Dad handed us a diamond jewelry that we were to give to Mom after the operation. He’d accumulated his spare dollars to buy it.

   At the hospital on the day of the transplant, all our relatives and friends gathered in the waiting room and became involved in a mean euchre (尤克牌游戏) tournament. My family has always handled things with a lot of laughter, and even though we were all tense, everybody was taking bets on how long this “change of conduct” would last in my parents.

   We would inform Dad that if he chose to act like a real pain on any particular day after the operation, he wasn’t allowed to blame it on PMS just because he’d now have a female kidney.

   The surgeries went well, and not long afterward, my sister and I were allowed to go in to visit. Dad was in a great deal of pain but again, all he could talk about was Mom. Was she okay? How was she feeling? Then the nurses let us do something unconventional. As they were wheeling Mom out of recovery room, they rolled her into a separate position to visit Dad. It was strange to see both my parents hooked up to IVs and machines and trying to talk to each other through tears. The nurses allowed us to present the diamond jewelry to Mom so that Dad could watch her open it. Everyone was crying, even the nurses.

  As I stood with digital camera in hand, I tried to keep the presence of mind to document the moment. My dad was having a hard time fighting back emotion, and suddenly my parents unexpectedly reached out to hold each other’s hands.

  In my nearly 35 years of existence, I’d never seen my parents do that, and I was spellbound. I snapped a picture and later rushed home to make sure I’d captured that enormous, life-defining moment. After so many years of disagreement, it was apparent to me that they finally understood how much each loved the other. 65—70

1.From the first paragraph we can learn that ____________.

A. Dad was fond of drinking                        B. My parents got along well

C. Dad often beat Mom                           D. Mom never obeyed Dad

2.The underlined part “Dad’s future hung in midpoint” in Para.3 suggests that ____________.

A. Dad was bound to die

B. Dad came to a serious moment in his life

C. Dad’s future was decided by doctors

D. Dad faced a tough decision in his life

3.Before the surgery, which of the following words can best describe the feeling of the families?

A. Worried and negative.                     B. Anxious and helpless.

C. Nervous but optimistic.                    D. Relaxed and positive.

4.Which of the following is TRUE according the passage?

A. Dad bought a diamond jewelry to Mom for their wedding anniversary.

B. Dad asked the nurse to visit Mom soon after the operation.

C. Despite a lot of pain, Dad was eager to know Mom’s condition soon after the operation.

D. On the day of the transplant, the families involved in a euchre tournament to relax themselves.

5.What’s in the writer’s photo?

A. Everyone was crying, even the nurses.

B. His parents were trying to talk to each other.

C. Dad watched Mom opening the gift.     

D. His parents were holding each other’s hands.

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

A. Dad’s disease      B. Mom’s decision       C. The Gift of Life       D. The photo of hands

Anna lived on the side of a valley. One winter, there was a very big flood, and a lot of houses 36   Anna's were washed away. Anna's house was high enough to escape the flood, so when the water had disappeared and the other houses were __37   there with no roof and no walls and all covered with __38  , her house was  39  quite all right.

   Her house was quite small, her husband was dead, and she had four children ,  40  Anna took in one of the families that had lost  41  in the flood and she 42  her home with them until it was  43  for them to rebuild their houses.

  Anna's friends were  44   when they saw Anna do this. They could not understand why Anna wanted to give  45  so much more work and trouble when she already had quite a few children to  46  .

"Well," Anna  47 her friends, "at the end of the First World War, a woman in the town where I 48  lived found herself very poor, because her husband  49   in the war and she had a lot of children,  50   I have now. The day before Christams, this woman said to her children, ‘We won’t be able to have much for  51   this year, so I’m going to  52   only one present for all of us. Now I’ll go and get it.’ She came back  53   a girl who was even poorer than they, and who had no parents. ‘Here’s our present, ’ she said to her children. The children were  54   to get such a present. They welcomed the little girl, and she grew up as their sister.  55   was that Christmas present.

1.A．down below      B．just around        C．next to   D．above

2.A．rising          B．appearing          C．falling   D．standing

3.A．water           B．trees              C．dust  D．mud

4.A．just            B．already            C．yet   D．still

5.A．so              B．but                C．for   D．since

6.A．nothing         B．everything         C．anything  D．something

7.A．made            B．found              C．shared    D．built

8.A．possible        B．necessary          C．important D．valuable

9.A．worried         B．disappointed       C．puzzled   D．impressed

10.A．them           B．herself            C．them all  D．her

11.A．support        B．supply             C．grow  D．keep

12.A．explained to   B．asked for          C．talked with   D．spoke as

13.A．actually       B．then               C．before    D．later

14.A．had killed     B．might be killed    C．had been killed   D．killed

15.A．for            B．as                 C．like  D．that

16.A．you            B．us                 C．Christmas D．your birthday

17.A．get            B．send               C．buy   D．make

18.A．for            B．from               C．like  D．with

19.A．sad            B．happy              C．worried   D．sorry

20.A．It         B．She                C．Such      D．I

Not all bodies of water are so evidently alive as the Atlantic Ocean, an S-shaped body of water covering 33 million square miles. The Atlantic has, in a sense, replaced the Mediterranean as the inland sea of Western civilization. Unlike real inland seas, which seem strangely still, the Atlantic is rich in oceanic liveliness. It is perhaps not surprising that its vitality has been much written about by ancient poets.

“Storm at Sea”, a short poem written around 700, is generally regarded as one of mankind’s earliest artistic representations of the Atlantic.

When the wind is from the west

All the waves that cannot rest

To the east must thunder on

Where the bright tree of the sun

Is rooted in the ocean’s breast.

As the poem suggests, the Atlantic is never dead and dull. It is an ocean that moves, impressively and endlessly. It makes all kinds of noise—it is forever thundering, boiling, crashing, and whistling.

It is easy to imagine the Atlantic trying to draw breath—perhaps not so noticeably out in mid-ocean, but where it meets land, its waters bathing up and down a sandy beach. It mimics(模仿) nearly perfectly the steady breathing of a living creature. It is filled with symbiotic existences, too: unimaginable quantities of creatures, little and large alike, mix within its depths in a kind of oceanic harmony, giving to the waters a feeling of heartbeat, a kind of sub-ocean vitality. And it has a psychology. It has personalities: sometimes peaceful and pleasant, on rare occasions rough and wild; always it is strong and striking.

1.Unlike real inland seas, the Atlantic Ocean is______.

A．always energetic

B．lacking in liveliness

C．shaped like a square

D．favored by ancient poets

2.What is the purpose of using the poem “Storm at Sea” in the passage?

A．To describe the movement of the waves.

B．To show the strength of the storm.

C．To represent the power of the ocean.

D．To prove the vastness of the sea.

3.What does the underlined word “symbiotic” mean?

A．Living together.

B．Growing fast.

C．Moving harmoniously.

D．Breathing peacefully.

4.In the last paragraph, the Atlantic is compared to______.

A．a beautiful and poetic place

B．a flesh and blood person

C．a wonderful world

D．a lovely animal