A man found the cocoon (茧) of a moth (蛾). He took it home so that he could   1  the moth come out of the cocoon. On that day a small   2  appeared. He sat and watched the moth for several hours as the moth struggled to   3  the body through that little hole. Soon it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had   4  as far as it could and it could go no further. It just seemed to be stuck. So the man, out of his kindness, decided to help the moth. He took a pair of scissors and   5  the remaining bit of the cocoon. The   6  then came out easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriven (无用的) wings. The man continued to watch the moth because he expected that, at any moment, the wings would enlarge and   7  to be able to support the   8  , which would get smaller in time. Neither happened! In fact, the little moth spent the rest of its life   9  around with a swollen body and shriven wings. It was   10   able to fly.
What the man in his kindness didn’t   11  was that the small cocoon and the   12  of the moth to get through the   13  opening was a way to push fluid (液体)   14  the body of moth    15  its wings so that it would be ready to fly   16  it got out of the cocoon. Freedom and   17  would come only after the struggle. By taking the struggle away, he also took away the moth’s health.
Sometimes struggles are exactly what we need in our lives. If we were to   18  our lives without any difficulties, we would become disabled. We would not be as   19  as what we could have been. Give every opportunity a chance. Leave no room for    20  .

A 7.0 magnitude（级）earthquake killed more than 230,000 people in Haiti. Then an 8.8 magnitude quake killed more than 900 people in Chile. And few weeks later, a 6.0 magnitude quake struck rural eastern Turkey, killing at least 57 people.
The earthquakes kept coming hard and fast.   1 It’s not. The problem is what’s happening above ground, not underground, experts say.
  2 They’re rapidly putting up buildings that can’t stand up to earth quakes, scientists believe.
And news reports and better earthquake monitoring make it seem as if earth quakes are increasing all the time.
On average, there are 134 earthquakes a year that have a magnitude between 6.0 and 6.9. So far this year there have been 40 earthquakes—more than in most years for that time period. But that’s because the 8.8 quake in Chile caused a large number of strong aftershocks.
Also, it’s not the number of quakes, but their destructive effects that gain attention. The death is largely due to building standards,   3  Paul Earle, a US seismologist, called for better building standards in the world’s big cities.
Of the 130 cities worldwide with populations of more than I million, more than half are likely to be hit by earthquakes.   4 “If you have a problem feeding yourself, you’re not really going to worry about earthquakes,” said Paul.
The earthquakes made everyone start to think   5  “People are paying attention to the violent planet we’re always lived on. Come back an another six moths if there has been no earthquakes, most people will have forgotten it again,” said US disaster researcher Dennis Mileti.

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 7, 9, 6. Read them loud. Now look away and spend 20 seconds memorizing them in order before saying them out loud again. If you speak English, you have about a 50% chance of remembering those perfectly. If you are Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because we most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within a two-second period. And unlike English, the Chinese language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
That example comes from Stanislas Dahaene’s book The Number Sense. As Dahaene explains: Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be spoken out in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is “si” and 7 “qi”). Their English pronunciations are longer. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length.
It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don’t. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen and fifteen. For numbers above 20, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), while for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to 40. American children at that age can count only to 15. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian friends in the most fundamental of math skills.
The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to change the words to numbers (37+22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation(等式) is right there, in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: it’s five-tens-nine.
When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have a built-in advantage. For years, students from China, South Korea, and Japan --- outperformed their Western classmates at mathematics, and the typical assumption is that it has something to do with a kind of Asian talent for math. The differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different --- that being good at math may also be rooted in a group’s culture.
【小题1】What does the passage mainly talk about?

One day a famous speaker gave a speech to a crowd of people. He held up a   21   bill. He asked, “Who would like this $20 bill ? ” Hands were   22  . Then he said, “I am going to give this $20 to one of you, but first let me do this.” He began to crumple（弄皱）the   23 . He then asked the audience, “   24  still wants it ?” Still the hands went  25  in the air.
“ What   26  I do this? ” He asked, and he  27  it on the ground, and started to step on it. He  28  it up. Now the bill was  29  and crumpled. “ Now who still wants it?” Still the hands went up.
“My friends,” He continued, “You have all  30   a good lesson . No matter   31  I did to the money, you still wanted it because the bill did not lose its  32 . It was still worth $20. Many times in our   33 , we are dropped, crumpled, and stepped on, because we sometimes  34  wrong decisions, or we may   35  with something we do not   36 .When that happens, we feel depressed and think we are   37 . But in fact no matter what has happened or what will happen, you will never lose your value. The worth of our life comes not   38  what we do or whom we know, but in who we are! Don’t forget ‘the worth of a thing does not depend on its outside   39  , but on its inner value.’ This is the   40  of life.

In 1977, a dead author of detective stories saved the life of a 19-month-old baby in a most unusual way. The author was Agatha Christie, one of the most successful writers of detective stories in the world.
In June 1977, a baby girl became seriously ill in Qatar, near Saudi Arabia. Doctors were unable to _31_the cause of her illness, so she _32_ to London and admitted to Hammersmith Hospital, where specialist help was _33 _. She was then only half-conscious（半昏迷） and on the “Dangerously Ill” list. A team of doctors hurried to _34_the baby only to discover that they,  35_, were puzzled by the very unusual symptoms. While they were discussing the baby’s case, a nurse asked to __36 to them.
“Excuse me,” said nurse Marsha Maitland, “_37_ I think the baby is __38_ from thallium poisoning.”
“_39 _ makes you think that?” Dr. Brown asked. “Thallium poisoning is extremely _40_.”
“A few days ago, I was reading a novel called A Pale Horse __41__ Agatha Christie,” Nurse Maitland explained. “In the book, somebody uses thallium poison, and _42_ the symptoms are _43_. They are exactly the same as the baby’s.”
“You’re very observant and you may be right,” another doctor said. “We’ll _44_some tests and find out _45_ it’s thallium or not.”
The _46_ showed that the baby had  47_ been poisoned by thallium, a rare metal used in making optical（光学的） glass. _48_ they knew the cause of illness, the doctors were able to give the correct treatment. The baby soon _49_ and was sent back to Qatar. Inquiries（调查）showed that the poison __50_ from an insecticide（杀虫剂）used in Qatar.