As I understand, if scientists produced a human clone, there would be a great risk of it having a disease. Nobody seems to understand the ageing process of a clone. It would be terrible if a baby was the age of its parent at     31   . Its cells would grow old fast and it would die young.    32    until the technique is perfectly safe, it should be     33   .

I'd love to have a clone of     34   . I often wish I had a twin sister, someone who    35   me in everything. So why not a clone? Well, the idea    36   be fun but I'm not sure if it would be     37   . I think we would be playing with fire if we let scientists go ahead with     38   cloning. There are so many     39   

involved that all research in this area should be strictly controlled.

There are so many arguments     40    cloning that it is difficult to get anyone to consider the possible benefits. I am     41    that it is a technique which could be beneficial. The most obvious use would be for childless     42   . They would be able to have babies with their own genetic material. I don't see what's wrong with that.

Imagine a child     43    up knowing that his or her mother is really a sister or a brother. The emotional     44    on the child would be     45   . Or a child who was cloned from a dead brother or sister. What kind of emotional pressure would they feel, knowing they were made as a replacement for another? The whole idea

    46    me!

It's all very good to ban human cloning but scientists should be allowed to   47   

research. If they don't, we may     48    important benefits for our society, such as producing body organs. A clone is an     49    copy of a person with the same gene. Therefore, it is the     50    donor for an organ(器官) transplant.

Wednesday, October 29,2008.

The United States federal government had two young men in the state of Tennessee arrested on October 22 on unknown charges.

In court documents published on Monday, it came to light that the men had discussed attacking an African – American school and killing 14 of them.

Another crime was about planning to murder Presidential candidate Barack Obama. According to their affidavits (口供), the suspects’ “final act of violence” would be like this: when they attacked Obama they would wear white suits and top hats and drive “their vehicle as fast as they could toward Obama shooting at him from the windows.”

The two suspects are Paul Schlesselman, 18, of West Helena, Arkansas and Daniel Cowart, 20, of Bells, Tennessee. According to the court papers, they met last month over the Internet through a friend. Schlesselman and Cowart are believed to share “very strong views” about White Power.

Schlesselman listed “being racist” as his occupation on his MySpace page. He further wrote: “I'm white. I'm proud. I get angry. I like guns.”

Cowart also had a MySpace page on which photos of guns were presented under a heading of “My Guns”. On his page he wrote, “Better to die quick fighting on your feet than to live forever begging on your knees.”

Some have questioned the pair's ability to carry out the charged plan, but authorities have been very concerned about Obama as the first black presidential candidate from a major party.

“We honestly don't know if they had the ability or the skill to carry out the kind of plan that they talked about.” said Malcolm Wiley, of the United Satates Secret Service in an interview with The New York Times. “But we take any threat seriously no matter how big or how small it is.”

Cowart and Schlesselman are scheduled to appear before a judge on Thursady.

The passage is mainly about____________.

 A．Americans’ attitudes towards Barack Obarma        B．two young men planning to commit violence

 C．the violence in the United States                   D．the disadvantages of the Internet

From the passage, we can know that the two young men_________.

 A．shot 14 students in an African – American school     B．came from the state of Tennessee

 C．were proud of Barack Obama                     D．have not been sentenced yet

Which of the following shows the right order of the events?

 a．The two suspects were arrested.

 b．The two suspects will be tried in the court.

 c．Cowart set up his MySpace page on the Internet.

 d．Malcolm Wiley was interviewed by The New York Times.

 A．a; b; c; d      B．d; c; b; a        C．c; a; d; b        D．c; a; b; d

What can we infer from the news?

   A．Most of the white people in the United States don’t like Barack Obama.

  B．The two young men planned to shoot President Barack Obama.

  C．The two young men were innocent in fact.

D．The two young men strongly believed that the president should be a white man

Poet Dean Young has dealt with impermanence（ 无常）a lot in his career, but it's a particularly strong theme in Young's latest collection, Fall Higher．The new collection was published in April, just days after the poet received a life-saving heart transplant （移植） after about a decade of living with a weakening heart condition．

Young, whose work is often frank and rich with twisted humor, tells NPR's Renee Montaigne that as he recovers from operation, he's also slowly returning to his everyday writing habits．

"I'm getting back to it," Young says．"Not with the sort of concentration and sort of flame that I look forward to in the future, but I am blackening some pages．"

And on those blackened pages you'll find poems like " How Grasp Green," which carries themes of springtime and rebirth．It's one of the first poems Young has written since his transplant．

It's easy to spot clues （线索） to Young's awful health situation in the lines of his poetry. Fall Higher's "Vintage" opens with, "Because I will die soon, I fall asleep, during the lecture on the ongoing emergency．" And the poem "-The Rhythms Pronounce Themselves Then Vanish—published in The /Vew Barker in February —opens with the CT scan that revealed Young's heart condition．

Young says "Rhythms" was written about the beginning of his illness．

"I had been having a lot of physical pain so that I could hardly walk a block．I got sent to a gastroenterologist and he did a series of tests, and then the tests came back to me and it was all heart related," he says．" And the outlook wasn't good．

Hearts tend to come up a lot in poetry, and that's especially true of Young's work, which has clearly been influenced by the troubles of his own heart,

"A lot of times, it's not just a metaphor （比喻） ," Young says．"For me, it's an actual concern because I've been living with this disease for over 10 years．My father died of heart problems when he was 49, so it's been a sort of shadowy concern for me my whole life．

But Young's poems also deal with more abstract matters of the heart．He wrote Fall Higher's, "Late Valentine" for his wife．"We've been married since late November and most of it has been spent in the hospital," Young says of his marriage to poet Laurie Saurborn Young, who says " 'Late Valentine' is very sweet．

Today, Young says, his friends can't help but comment on how pink his cheeks have become—the result of a new heart and better circulation （循环）．But Young wrote the poems of Fall Higher before the transplant, at a time when, at its weakest point, his old heart was pumping at 8 percent of what it should have been．

He was staring death in the face—but he was still able to look at his life and see art

in it.

Young's work also touches on themes of randomness and fate —two factors that contributed to him getting a second chance in the form of a new heart from a 22-year-old student．

"Everything in life is molecules （分子） bouncing against molecules," Young says, and having a successful transplant is no different．" Somebody had to die; it had to be a fit; my blood and his blood had to not have an argument; the heart had to be transported; I had to get it．"

There were, in short, an amazing number of variables （变量） that led to Young

being here today.

"I just feel enormous gratitude," he says of his donor （捐献者）．"He gave me a heart so I'm still alive-"I'm sure I'm going to think about this person for the rest of my life．"

1.The poetry collection Fall Higher _______．

2.We can learn from the text that Young _______．

3.What does the writer try to say in Paragraph 3?

4.Which of the following statements is TRUE?

5.What is the text mainly about?

阅读下面短文，掌握其大意，然后从21～40各题所给的四个选项（A.B.C和D）中，选出最佳选项，并在答题纸上将该选项标号涂黑。

The subway train moved back and forth, its wheels producing more loud sounds than ever against the tracks. Outside the window was just the  21  cold of winter. The carriage was filled with frozen self-centered, bored  22 .

Suddenly a little boy  23  his way in between grown-up legs.  24  his father stayed by the door, the boy sat next to the window, surrounded by  25 , half-awake adults. What a brave child, I thought. As the train entered a tunnel (隧洞), something totally  26  happened. The little boy slid down from his seat and put his  27  on my knee. For a moment, I thought that he wanted to go  28  me and returned to his father, so I moved a bit. But instead of moving on, the boy held his  29  up towards me. He wanted to tell me something, I thought. I  30   to listen to what he had to say. Wrong  31 ! He kissed me softly on the cheek.

Then he returned to his  32 , settled down and cheerfully started looking out of the window. But I was  33. What happened? A kid kissing an unknown grown-up on the train? To my amazement, the kid  34  to kiss all my neighbors. 

Nervous and puzzled, we looked questioningly at his father. “He’s so happy to be  35 .” the father said. “He’s been very sick.”

The train stopped and the father and son got down and  36  into the crowd. The doors closed. On my cheek I could still  37  the child’s kiss -- a kiss that had caused  38  soul-searching. How many grown-ups go around kissing each other  39  the joy of being alive? How many even give much thought to the privilege of living? What would happen  40  we all just started being ourselves?

The little boy has given us a sweet but serious lesson: Don’t let yourself die before your heart stops!

1.A. great               B. freezing     C. strong       D. strange

2.A. drivers        B. boys        C. adults        D. passengers

3.A. pushed        B. left         C. got         D. felt

4.A. As           B. Since        C. If               D. While

5.A. polite          B. unfriendly  C. rude        D. strange

6.A. interesting      B. nervous      C. unexpected D. exciting

7.A. hand          B. face        C. finger       D. mouth

8.A. before         B. beyond       C. with        D. past

9.A. hand          B. luggage      C. head        D. ticket

10.A. got off       B. bent down  C. fell down   D. stood up

11.A. again         B. too         C. even        D. more

12.A. father        B. carriage      C. home        D. seat

13.A. frightened     B. excited       C. shocked      D. worried

14.A. kept on      B. went on      C. moved on   D. tried on

15.A. alive         B. active       C. young       D. awake

16.A. lost          B. joined       C. disappeared       D. rushed

17.A. get          B. find        C. know      D. feel

18.A. some         B. any         C. every        D. no

19.A. for         B. from       C. at           D. by

20.A. after         B. unless       C. if           D. when

How old is “old”?  The answer has changed over the years. Two hundred years ago，you were old at 35.At the beginning of the 20 th century，the average life span（平均寿命）was 45. In 1950，70-year-olds were really old.Today，a healthy 70-year-old is still thought young.

So，how old is old? The answer is one you’ve heard many times，from all kinds of people.“You are as old（or young）as you feel.”Your age simply tells you how many years you have lived.Your body tells you how well you’ve lived.

“Nobody grows old by living a number of years.” wrote a writer.“People grow old when they don’t have their ideas.”

People shouldn’t have the wrong ideas about aging.Sometimes，older minds can be as bright as young minds.Alice Brophy once said，“It makes me unhappy when people say，‘You look young for your age。’ What does that mean?You know you can die old at 30 and live young at 80. ”

1.In 1950, the average life span was       .

2.People grow old when        according to a writer.

3.The meaning of the underlined word “aging” is “        ”

4.Which question is NOT answered in the passage?

5.The passage is mainly about __________ .