Read the passage below and finish the questions according to the passage. Note that you should finish 3 and 4 in complete sentence.

Please write your answers on your Answer Sheet.

        When it comes to friends, I desire those who will share my happiness, who possess wings of their own and who will fly with me. I seek friends whose qualities illuminate（照亮） me and train me up for love. It is for these people that I reserve the glowing hours, too good not to share.

     When I was in the eighth grade, I had a friend. We were shy and too serious about our studies when it was becoming fashionable with our classmates to learn acceptable social behaviours. We said little at school, but she would come to my house and we would sit down with pencils and paper, and one of us would say, “Let’s start with a train whistle today.” We would sit quietly together and write separate poems or stories that grew out of a train whistle. Then we would read them aloud. At the end of that school year, we, too, were changing into social creatures and the stories and poems stopped.

When I lived for a period of time in London, I had a friend, He was in despair and I was in despair. But our friendship was based on the idea in each of us that we would be sorry later if we did not explore this great city because we had felt bad at the time. We met every Sunday for five weeks and found many excellent things. We walked until our despairs disappeared and then we parted. We gave London to each other.

   For almost four years I have had a remarkable friend whose imagination illuminates mine. We write long letters in which we often discover our strangest selves. Each of us appears, sometimes in a funny way, in the other’s dreams. She and I agree that, at certain times, we seem to be parts of the same mind. In my most interesting moments, I often think: “Yes, I must tell…” We have never met.

   It is such comforting companions I wish to keep. One bright hour with their kind is worth more to me than the lifetime services of a psychologist , who will only fill up the healing silence necessary to those darkest moments in which I would rather be my own best friend.

1．When I was in the eighth grade, we did not learn acceptable social behavior because        

                                                                              .

2．According to paragraph three, we gave London the each other by                      .

3．In the author’s opinion, what kind of person can be regarded as a friend?

                                                                              .

4．In the darkest moments, why does the author prefer to stay with her best friend?

                                                                              .

Disease, poverty, hate, love－Charles Dickens’ stories opened his readers eyes to the most important themes of his age. Two hundred years on, his stories still speak volumes across the world, proving that Dickens’ legacy（遗产） was far greater that just “great-literature”. February 7 marks the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birthday. To mark this date, BBC writer Alex Hudson listed six things Dickens gave the modern world. Let’s take a look at two of them.
A White Christmas
Dickens is described as “the man who invented Christmas” － not the religious festival, but the cultural aspects that we associate with the festive season today. In the early 19th century, Christmas was barely worth mentioning, according to critic and writer Leigh Hunt. The committee which ran the Conservative Party even held ordinary business meetings on Christmas Day－unthinkable in the West nowadays, when everyone but the most necessary workers takes at least three days off. Many people believe that Dickens’ popular descriptions of the festive period became a blueprint for generations to come. In his classic novel, A Christmas Carol, he not only put forward the idea of snow at Christmas, but also painted a picture of glowing warmth－“home enjoyments, affections and hopes”. In his biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd wrote: “Dickens can be said to have almost single-handedly created the modern idea of Christmas.”
“Dickens” poverty
Dickens was one of the first to take an honest look at the underclass and the poor of Victorian London. He helped popularize the term “red tape” to describe situations where people in power use needless amounts of bureaucracy(官僚作风) in a way that particularly hurts the weaker and poorer members of society.
“Dickensian” has now become a powerful word for describing an unacceptable level of poverty. In 2009, when the president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in the UK wanted to talk about poverty in some areas of Britain, she did not use words like “terrible” or “horrific”, but rather described it as “life mirroring the times of Dickens”.
【小题1】The article is mainly about          .

Disease, poverty, hate, love－Charles Dickens’ stories opened his readers eyes to the most important themes of his age. Two hundred years on, his stories still speak volumes across the world, proving that Dickens’ legacy（遗产） was far greater that just “great-literature”. February 7 marks the 200th anniversary of the writer’s birthday. To mark this date, BBC writer Alex Hudson listed six things Dickens gave the modern world. Let’s take a look at two of them.

A White Christmas

Dickens is described as “the man who invented Christmas” － not the religious festival, but the cultural aspects that we associate with the festive season today. In the early 19th century, Christmas was barely worth mentioning, according to critic and writer Leigh Hunt. The committee which ran the Conservative Party even held ordinary business meetings on Christmas Day－unthinkable in the West nowadays, when everyone but the most necessary workers takes at least three days off. Many people believe that Dickens’ popular descriptions of the festive period became a blueprint for generations to come. In his classic novel, A Christmas Carol, he not only put forward the idea of snow at Christmas, but also painted a picture of glowing warmth－“home enjoyments, affections and hopes”. In his biography of Dickens, Peter Ackroyd wrote: “Dickens can be said to have almost single-handedly created the modern idea of Christmas.”

“Dickens” poverty

Dickens was one of the first to take an honest look at the underclass and the poor of Victorian London. He helped popularize the term “red tape” to describe situations where people in power use needless amounts of bureaucracy(官僚作风) in a way that particularly hurts the weaker and poorer members of society.

“Dickensian” has now become a powerful word for describing an unacceptable level of poverty. In 2009, when the president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers in the UK wanted to talk about poverty in some areas of Britain, she did not use words like “terrible” or “horrific”, but rather described it as “life mirroring the times of Dickens”.

1.The article is mainly about          .

2.Why is Dickens’ called “the man who invented Christmas”?

3.We can learn from the passage that          .

4.What can we infer from the passage?