Everyone knows that the Frenchmen are romantic, the Italians are fashionable and the Germans are serious. Are these just stereotypes or is there really such a thing as national character? And if there is, can it affect how a nation succeed or fail?

At least one group of people is certain that it can. A recent survey of the top 500 entrepreneurs (企业家) in the UK found that 70% felt that their efforts were not appreciated by the British public. Britain is hostile (敌意的) to success, they said. It has a culture of jealousy(嫉妒). 1.  Jealousy is sometimes known as the “green – eyed monster” and the UK is its home.

Scientists at Warwich University in the UK recently tested this idea. They gathered a group of people together and gave each an imaginary amount of money.  2.  Those given a little were given the chance to destroy the large amount of money given to others – but at the cost of losing their own. Two thirds of the people tested agreed to do this.

3.  . But there is also opposite evidence. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recently reported that the UK is now the world’s fourth largest economy. That is not bad for people who are supposed to hate success. People in the UK also work longer hours than anyone else in Europe. So the British people are not lazy, either.

“It is not really success that the British dislike,” says Carey Cooper, a professor of management at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. “It’s people using their success in a way that seems proud or unfair or which separates them from their roots.”

 4.  They set out to do things in their way. They work long hours. By their own efforts they become millionaires.  5.  . It hardly seems worth following their example. If they were more friendly, people would like them more. And more people want to be like them.

A．This seems to prove that the entrepreneurs were right to complain.

B．The one who owns most money in the end is the winner.

C．As a result, the survey said, entrepreneurs were “unloved, unwanted and misunderstood.”

D．It is not true that British people are born jealous of others` success.

E. Some were given a little, others a great deal.

F. But instead of being happy they complain that nobody loves them.

G. Perhaps it is the entrepreneurs who are the problem.

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 (共生的) 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 vitality of the ocean.

D. To prove the vastness of the sea.

3.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

阅读下面短文，根据所读内容在表格中的空白处填入恰当的单词。

注意：每个空格只填一个单词。

It’s every student’s dream to do well in the national college entrance examination and enter a good university. In the eyes of students and parents, a good university should have a high ranking, and the employment rate of its graduates should be high. But be careful! The employment rate they tell you might not always be true.

Recently, people created a Chinese phrase “bei jiuye”, which has become popular on the Internet almost overnight across China. The word “bei” has a grammatical use in Chinese: it has a function similar to the passive voice in English. But now people often use it to express their doubts about something. Here, the phrase “bei jiuye” has the literal meaning of “to be hired”, but people understand that it really means “to be hired without one’s knowledge” or “be hired for jobs that may not exist at all”.

The story of “bei jiuye” goes like this. Zhao Dongdong, a graduate of a university in Shanxi province, was surprised to find that he got a job from a company he never applied to, which he wasn’t even sure was a real place. On his last day of graduation ceremonies, he was surprised to come across the employment contract.

“God! At that time, I had not landed a job yet, but they gave me an employment contract! I wondered who on earth signed the contract with the company.” When Zhao made a phone call to the company to check it out, no one answered. He was not the only one in his college who was “hired” for a job that did not exist. One of his classmates signed a contract with a company called Xi’an Beilin Industrial Corporation, which could not be found on the Internet either. In the end, it turned out that the college had faked the contract to make it seem like the employment rate for new graduates was higher than that. By doing this, the college could build up a “good” reputation that could help it attract new students. “Bei jiuye” is just one of many hot “bei” words on the Internet. See some of them in “Bonus”. The use of “bei” is a satirical (讽刺的) way for the public to express its helplessness and criticize abuses of power, some people say. People also use “bei” words to bring attention to social problems, hoping they will be noticed by authorities.

-- I heard a student killed his mother cruelly.

-- So did I. It has ____ a serious problem about the education system in China.

A．taken up          B．made up          C．pulled up          D．brought up

To many web-building spiders, most of whom are nearly blind, the web is their essential window on the world: their means of communicating, capturing prey, meeting mates and protecting themselves. A web-building spider without its web is like a men cast away on an island of solid rock，totally out of touch and destined to starve to death. So important is the web to an orb-web spider's survival that the animal will continue to construct new webs daily even if it is being starved. For 16 days the starving spider builds completely normal webs. Then, as the animal gets scrawnier, it constructs a wider-meshed （网孔、网眼）web using fewer strands（线）. Such webs would only trap larger prey, which is more economical from the perspective of a starving spider. The spider stores energy by recycling web protein. It simply eats its own web each evening and reuses it to produce new silk. In studies with radioactivity, labeled materials, it was found that 95 percent of web protein reappears in the next day web. Most of the energy needed for web-building is used in walking over the strands as they are laid down. Scientists are impressed by the adaptability of the spider's highly preprogrammed brain, which is larger for its size than the brain of any other invertebrate（无脊推动物）. If web-building is interrupted, or if some of the existing strands are destroyed, the spider simply goes back to see where the web is left off and then finishes building a normal web. One spider will finish building the incomplete web of another.

1.Which of the following best expresses the main ideas of the passage?

A. Secrets of Spiders' Adaptability

B. Importance of Webs to Spiders

C. Secrets of the Spiders' Life

D. Spiders' Highly Preprogrammed Brain

2.According to the passage, which of the following statements is TRUE?

A. Most spiders will stop conducting webs when hungry.

B. One Web-building spider usually conducts one web. 

C. Web-building spiders will probably die without their webs. 

D. Web-building spiders have good eyesight.

3.The underlined word “scrawnier” in the second paragraph probably means ______. 

A. weaker but good-looking

B. fatter and stronger

C. nice and healthier

D. thinner and bony

4.A spider's ability to finish an incomplete web proves that ______.

A. it has a highly preprogrammed brain

B. it reuses its web protein to reproduce new silk

C. the web is everything for a spider

D. it is able to rebuild a destroyed web