C
A light emitting diode （发光二极管）, or L．E．D．, is a device that shines when electricity passes through it．But it works differently than traditional kinds of light bulbs．Light emitting diodes use less energy and last much longer than bulbs with a filament （灯丝） inside．L．E．                               D．’s are also cooler to the touch, and shine a lot brighter than they used to．  
Red L．E．D．’s have long been used as signal lights on electronic equipment．But now light emitting diodes also come in blue and other colors．Colored L．E．D．’s are used to show images on everything from wireless phones to huge video signs．And white L．E．D．’s are being used increasingly to replace traditional lighting systems．  
But all these require electricity．In poor countries, people often burn fuel to produce light．But the smoke can make people sick．So an electrical engineering professor from Canada started a project to produce L．E．       D．lighting systems for the developing world．These lights are powered by batteries that can be recharged with energy from the sun．The batteries can also be charged through other ways, such as wind power and water power．
Professor David Irvine-Halliday tells the story of how he got the idea．In 1997, while climbing in the Annapurna mountains in Nepal, he saw a small school．All the children were outside．He looked through a window and saw that inside the school was dark．The school had a sign that read: "We have no teachers．If you want to stay and teach for a few days, we would be very pleased．" Professor Irvine-Halliday says that experience had a big effect on him．Back at the University of Calgary, he was on the Internet one day．He saw a company in Japan selling bright white L．E．                           D．’s．So he built a light with some．This is how he began the Light Up the World Foundation．
48．Compared with traditional kinds of light bulbs, L．E．D．’S________．
A．waste a lot of energy                    B．need shorter time to make
C．shine much brighter                 D．are warmer to touch
49．According to the passage, we know that L．E．D．’s________．
A．will replace all the lights            B．will be more and more popular
C．will be only colored ones               D．will be only used in developing countries
50．According to the passage, we can infer that the purpose of the Light Up the World Foundation is to________．
A．develop L．E．D．lighting system for the developing world                   
B．sell bright white L．E．D．’s
C．collect money for developing countries                                        
D．earn money by selling L．E．D．’s

It was the last day of July and the long hot summer was drawing to a close As for me．1 was out of spirits，and，if the truth must be told, out of money as well，During the past year I had not managed my finances as carefully as usual；and 1 was now limited to spending the autumn economically between my mother’s cottage at Hampstead and my own in town.

? My father had been dead for some years，and my sister and 1 were the sole survivors of a family of five children. My father was a drawing-master before me He had been highly successful in his profession and my mother and sister were left economically independent after his death.

??? The view of London below me had sunk into the black shadow of the cloudy night, when I stood before the gate of my mother’s cottage I had hardly rung the bell．When the house door was opened violently．My worthy Italian friend，Professor Pesca，appeared in the servant’s place，and rushed out joyously to receive me．

??? I had first become acquainted(熟悉)with my Italian friend at certain great houses，where he taught Italian and I taught drawing What I then knew of the history of his life was that he had left Italy for political reasons and that he had been respectably established for many years in London as a teacher of languages It once happened that I saved him from certain death by drowning while we

were swimming in the sea at Brighton Afterwards he overwhelmed(淹没)me with the wildest expressions of affection and exclaimed passionately, that he would hold his life at my disposal from then on, and declared that he should never be happy again until he had had the opportunity of proving his gratitude．Little did I think that the occasion to serve me was soon to come．

? Pesca dragged me in by both hands into the parlor, where my mother sat by the open window, laughing and fanning herself．Pesca was one of her especial favorites，and his wildest strange acts were always pardonable in her eyes．

? “Now, my good dears．”began Pesca．“listen to me The time has come I recite my good news．I speak at last…'Hear, hear!”said my mother, humoring the joke“I go back into my life，and I address myself to the noblest of men，who found me dead at the bottom of the sea，and who pulled me up to the top. What did I say when l got into my own life and my own clothes again? I said that my life belonged to my dear friend，Walter, for the rest of my days Now,”cried the enthusiastic little mall at the top of his voice．“happiness bursts out of me at every pore of my skin．For I have found a job for you”

1.The first two paragraphs of the passage serve as an introduction to——

A. the financial situation the writer then faced?

B. the season that the story was set in

C. the family members of the writer????????

D. the successful profession of the writer’s father

2.The underlined word‘‘sole’’in the second paragraph probably means‘‘????????? ”

A．main??? ????? B. only??? ????? C. lucky ??????? D. possible

3.It can be learned from the passage that Pesca ??????????

A. used to be a politician??? ???????

B. was a successful drawing-master

C. was quite close to the mother ????

D. wanted to give the writer some money in return

4.According to the last paragraph，Pesca was more than happy because ?????????? ?????

A. he went back into his life????????

B . he met his dear friend again

C. his friend ever saved his life?????

D. he had done something good for his friend

第四部分：任务型阅读(共10小题；每小题l分，满分10分)

请认真阅读下列短文，并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。注意：每个空格只填1个单词。请将答案写在答题卡上相应题号的横线上。

Experts debunk Maya doomsday（末日） predictions -- But that hasn't stopped books, movies from cashing in.

If the ancient Maya and filmmaker Roland Emmerich are correct, the apocalypse（大灾变） will happen very fast, maybe quicker than his new 2½-hour movie.

Predictions of global ruination are rippling around the globe with seismic（地震的） force, all loosely based on a 5,000-year Maya calendar that ends Dec. 21, 2012. Countless Web sites and blogs anticipate(预料) the end of days, as do various New Age groups and would-be prophets(预言者) offering guidance and how-to tips. On Amazon.com , you can read hundreds of book titles combining the year 2012 with terms such as “apocalypse,” “catastrophe” and “end of the world.”

As always, doomsday sells — and a lot of people are buying it.

“There's the psychobabble(心理呓语) aspect,” said Robert Epstein, former editor of Psychology Today magazine and a lecturer at the University of California San Diego. “It's the Sigmund Freud/death wish idea: People glom onto（对…感兴趣） doomsday predictions because there's some small part of them that wants to die, and die spectacularly（壮观的）. I don't believe it, but it's one way to look at this.”

It's Emmerich's way. The German director specializes in wreaking havoc on an epic scale, from climatic cataclysm in 2004's “The Day After Tomorrow” to angry aliens and reptiles in “Independence Day” and “Godzilla.”  In “2012,” he finishes the job.

The digitized disasters of “2012” are oversized, overwrought and sometimes literally over the top, as when a humongous tsunami washes over the Himalayan mountains, whose average height exceeds 20,000 feet. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, a 10.5-magnitude earthquake — a temblor at least 30 times more powerful than any real quake ever recorded — yanks the city apart like a giant zipper, sending chunks sliding into the Pacific Ocean.

That's not physically possible, of course. Nor is a 10.5-magnitude quake, said Thomas Rockwell, a geologist at San Diego State University. To generate that much energy, “you'd need a rupture that extends all around the planet.”

All of that other stuff “is pure Hollywood bunk,” said Bernard Jackson at the UCSD Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences.

Entertaining, though, unless you happen to believe the Maya really predicted the end of the world. They didn't, said Geoff Braswell, a UCSD anthropologist. The long-count calendar doesn't signal the end of anything except the end of that particular calendar. “It's just like a car odometer. Unfortunately, hardly anybody reads ancient Mayan. Modern media hype（骗局）, on the other hand, is almost inescapable.

Nicholas Christenfeld, a professor of psychology at UCSD, suggests a more elemental human need. Being swallowed by the Earth or incinerated in a giant fireball “fits neatly with the idea that people want to believe there's a plan, that existence isn't random and pointless,” Christenfeld said.

“We all missed creation, but if we can bear witness at the other end, be part of some grand cosmic destruction, that gives life meaning,” he said. 

It helps, too, not to think very hard about the facts, said Lou Manza, a professor of psychology at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. “These claims have been around forever, and they have all been false, 100 percent wrong,” Manza said.

Of course, prognosticators（预言者, 占卜者） usually have an explanation for that, Christenfeld said.

“They might say it was a misinterpretation,” he said. “They got the date wrong. They might claim humanity acted in time to prevent the destruction. Or faith came to the rescue because people believed something bad was going to happen, it didn't have to happen.”

Why did humans evolve to walk upright? Perhaps because it’s just plain easier. Make that “energetically less costly”, scientifically speaking.

Bipedalism—walking on two feet, is one of the defining characteristics of being humans, and scientists have debated for years how it came about. In the latest attempt to find an explanation, researchers trained five chimps(黑猩猩)to walk on a treadmill(跑步机)while wearing masks that allowed measurement of their oxygen consumption. The chimps were measured both while walking upright and while moving on their legs and knuckles(膝关节).That measurement of the energy needed to move around was compared with similar tests on humans and the results are published in this week’s online edition of “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences”.

It turns out that humans walking on two legs use only one-quarter of the energy that chimps use while knucklewalking on four limbs(肢).And the chimps, on average, use as much energy using two legs as they did when they used all four limbs.

However, there were differences among chimps in how much energy they used, and this difference corresponded to their different manner of walking and anatomy(解剖构造).One of the chimps used less energy on two legs, one used about the same and the others used more, said David Raichlen, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona.

“What we were surprised at was the variation(变异) ”, he said in a telephone interview. Interview. “That was pretty exciting, because when you talk about how evolution works, variation is the bottom line, without variation there is no evolution.”

Walking on two legs freed our arms, opening the door to drive the world, said Raichlen. “We think about the evolution of bipedalism as one of first events that led hominids(原始人)down the path to being humans.”

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the L.S.B.Leakey Foundation.

The underlined word “Bipedalism” in Paragraph 2 probably means____.

A．moving sideways              B．walking upright

C．walking on four legs            D．running fast

We can infer from the passage that____.

A．scientists have no idea on how humans’ walking on two legs came about

B．scientists have had different views on why chimps walk on four legs

C．scientists have had different views on how humans’ walking on two legs vame about

D．scientists have had similar views on how humans’ walking on two legs came about

What is Paragraph 4 mainly about?

A．How chimps saved energy.

B．Why chimps didn't walk on two legs.

C．David Raichlen studied chimps.

D．Different chimps consumed different energy.

According to the passage, humans walk upright in order to____.

A．conserve energy                  B．differ from other animals

C．free their brains                  D．strengthen their legs