The campaign is over. The celebrations have ended. And the work for US president-elect Barack Obama has begun.

The 47-year-old politician rose to the highest post because of his stand against the war in Iraq and his plans to fix a weak economy. But what will the first 47-year-old African-American president do for race relations?

Obama’s victory appears to have given blacks and other minorities a true national role model. For years, many looked to athletes and musicians for inspiration. As Darius Turner, an African-American high school student in Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times, “Kobe doesn’t have to be everybody’s role model anymore.”

Recent polls（民意测验）also suggest that Obama’s victory has given Americans new optimism about race relations. For example, a USA Today poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe relations between blacks and whites “will finally be worked out”. This is the most hopeful response since the question was first asked during the civil rights revolution in 1963.

However, it’s still too early to tell whether Obama’s presidency will begin to solve many of the social problems facing low-income black communities.

Although blacks make up only 13 percent of the US population, 55 percent of all prisoners are African-American. Such numbers can be blamed on any number of factors on America’s racist past, a failure of government policy and the collapse(瓦解)of the family unit in black communities.

It is unlikely that Obama will be able to reverse (扭转) such trends overnight. However, Bill Bank, an expert of African-American Studies, says that eventually young blacks need to find role models in their own communities. “That’s not Martin Luther King, and not Barack Obama,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s actually the people closest to them. Barack only has so much influence.”

In the opinion of black British politician Trevor Phillips, Obama’s rise will contribute more to multiculturalism than to race relations in the US.

“When the G8 meets, the four most important people in the room will be the president of China, the prime minister of India, the prime minister of Japan and Barak Obama,” he told London’s The Times newspaper. “It will be the first time we’ve seen that on our television screens. That will be a huge psychological shift (心理转变) for both the white people and the colored ones in the world.”

1.For years, before Obama was elected president of the US, __________.

2.According to Bill Bank, ____________.

3.What would be the best title for this passage?

4.What will be the huge psychological shift Trevor mentioned at the end of the passage?

III. 阅读(共两节，满分40分)

第一节阅读理解(共15小题；每小题2分，满分30分)

阅读下列短文，从媒体所给的A、B、C和D项中，选出最佳选项，并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。

In Stockholm, the Swedish Academy has chosen the British author Doris Lessing for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The selection of Doris Lessing for a Nobel was popular among the hundreds of journalists gathered for the announcement in Stockholm.

Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl said with skepticism, fire and visionary power Lessing has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny.

Doris Lessing was born in 1919 in Persia - modern-day Iran - to British parents, moving as a child with her family to southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where she stayed in school only to the age of 14.

A year after moving to London, she published her first novel in 1950. The Grass is Singing examines unbridgeable racial conflict in colonial Africa through the eyes of a white farmer's wife and her black servant.

A member of the British Communist Party during the 1950s and a campaigner against nuclear arms and South African apartheid, Lessing was for years banned from that country and from Rhodesia.

Her literary breakthrough came in 1962 with publication of The Golden Notebook, seen by many, though not necessarily Lessing, as a pioneering work of modern feminism. A disjointed study of the mind of the main character, Anna Wulf, the novel explores her thoughts about Africa, politics and communism, relationships with men and sex, and Jungian analysis and dream interpretation.

Lessing's themes shifted to psychology in her works from the 1960s, and by the 1970s she was fascinated with the Islamic mystic tradition of Sufism. Her turn toward science fiction with the Canopus series in the early 1980s was not warmly received by traditionalist critics, but she has continued to win new readers and numerous literary awards, including the David Cohen British Literary Prize and the Companion of Honour from the Royal Society of Literature, both in 2001.

Following the announcement, the Horace Engdahl told VOA why he was personally so pleased with Lessing's selection.

"She is one of the truly great writers - of novels, short stories, fiction and non-fiction," Engdahl said. "She is one of the few writers who have had the courage to uphold the principle of equality between the male and female experience, and she has given the impulse to numbers of other women writers. And she is really the mother of a school that is one of the most important in our contemporary literature."

At 87, Doris lessing is the oldest Nobel Literature laureate since the first prizes were awarded in 1901. Each Nobel Prize is this year accompanied by a check for approximately $1.4 million.

41. How old was Doris Lessing when she published her first novel?

A. 14            B. 26           C. 31                D. 50

42. Which of the following about The Grass is Singing is true?

A. It is mainly about racial conflict between the whites and the blacks in the US.

B. The main characters are a white farmer’s wife and her black servant.

C. It was published in Africa.

D. It was Doris Lessing’s most famous novel.

43. We can infer from the passage that __________.

A. Journalists are very interested in the election of Doris Lessing’s for Nobel Prize.

B. Doris Lessing regard The Golden Notes as a pioneering work of feminism.

C. Doris Lessing has written about many different subjects.

D. Many writers have the courage to stick to the equality between the male and female experience.

44. The underlined word school in the last paragraph but one means________.

A. institution for educating children

B. college or university

C. department of a university 

D. group of writers, thinkers

45. Which of the following can be the best title of this passage?

A. Doris Lessing wins Nobel Prize for literature

B. The greatest British female writer

C. The oldest Nobel Prize winner

D. 2007 Nobel Prize announced in Stockholm

Abby Subark is a mother of two from Boston. “For my kids, I’m nervous. I don’t know if they’ll be able to achieve their American dream.” She may be right. More than hard work or education, the best way to get rich in America is to be born rich.
It is the case that somebody who is in the upper third of income, poor scores, in the bottom on tests when they are in eighth grade, is more likely to go to college and finish college than a poor kid with the top scores. That’s what the working persons’  children are up against.
The Economic Policy Institute finds it would take a poor couple with 2 children 9 or 10 generations to achieve middle class status. That’s about 200 years. The hallmark (特征) of American opportunity has always been the ability to do better than your parents. But compared with similar developed countries, the United States ranks fifth out of six for so-called intergenerational mobility (变动).
If you look at the mechanisms (机制) for upward mobility that were so readily available 50 years ago, they are becoming out of reach, like plentiful factory jobs with good wages and affordable education and health care.
White families are twice as likely as blacks to be upwardly mobile. For most people in America today, where you end up depends on where you start.
If you started in the middle-income class, about 40 to 45 percent of what you are making right now is due to the fact that your parents were in the middle-income class. The rest is up to you.
But for the millions of people who find themselves below the poverty line and the millions more who are the working poor, their starting point for the American dream leaves them painfully far away from the middle class.
【小题1】The main idea of the passage is _______.

Blogs are being used more and more by teachers. Many Internet services now offer free and easy ways to create personal Web pages.

Through comments on blogs, or Web logs, teachers can share their classroom experiences. They can exchange ideas and discuss successes and failures. They can debate educational policies. Or they can just sympathize with each other.

A teacher in the American state of North Carolina recently wrote on her blog: “Apparently the teachers at my school use too much paper. So my principal yelled at everyone at the last staff meeting for, like, ten minutes. Now, I’ve just been told, we are not getting anymore paper for the rest of the year.”

This unidentified blogger is now in her third year of teaching, but still calls her site firstyearteacher.blogspot.com.

A blogger who calls himself Minister Lawrence works as a substitute teacher. In April he wrote about a disputed plan to split the Omaha, Nebraska, public schools into separate systems for black, Latino and white students. Supporters say minority parents do not have enough power over their children’s education.

But Minister Lawrence wrote at teachersparadise.blogspot.com: “I’m afraid that what this says’ to a lot of people is that blacks, whites and Hispanics are not equal, and “reinforces” racist beliefs among people.”

Educators did not become involved with blogging right away. Many were concerned with privacy issues and security. But now, thousands of teacher blogs can be found on the Internet. Many teachers do not identify themselves, and they change the names of students and co-workers.

What are teachers not doing through blogs?

A. They discuss educational problem.         B. They send money to the poor students.

C. They share teaching ideas.                D. They comfort each other.

What is the main idea for the passage?

A. More and more teachers are using blogs.    B. It is exciting to use blogs.

C. Blogs are popular with students.        D. Educational problems are settled through blogs.

Why some teachers do not identify themselves? Because ___

A. they are forbidden to identify themselves.   

B. they are forbidden to write something through blogs

C. they want to ensure their security

D. they want to amuse others.

Which of the following is the result of the teachers’ using blogs?

A. Paper consuming is declining.           B. Teaching is improving.

C. Classes are more active.                D. Government is against it.

Minister Lawrence’s blogs are about___

A. classroom experiences                 B. teaching plans

C. educational policies                   D. the black minority