The common cold is the world's most widespread illness， which is plagues（病疫） that flesh receives. The most widespread fallacy（谬误） of all is that colds caused by cold. They are not. They are caused by viruses passing on from person to person. You catch a cold by coming into contact，directly or indirectly， with someone who already has one. If cold causes colds， it would be reasonable to expect the Eskimos to suffer from them forever. But they do not. And in isolated arctic regions explorers have reported being free from colds until coming into contact again with infected people from the outside world by way of packages and mail dropped from airplanes. During the First World War soldiers who spent long periods in the trenches（战壕）， cold and wet，showed no increased tendency to catch colds. In the Second World War prisoners at the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp（奥斯维辛集中营），naked and starving，were astonished to find that they seldom had colds. At the Common Cold Research Unit in England， volunteers took part in Experiments in which they gave themselves to the discomforts of being cold and wet for long stretches of time. After taking hot baths，they put on bathing suits， allowed themselves to be with cold water， and then stood about dripping wet in drafty room. Some wore wet socks all day while others exercised in the rain until close to exhaustion. Not one of the volunteers came down with a cold unless a cold virus was actually dropped in his nose. If，then， cold and wet have nothing to do with catching colds， why are they more frequent in the winter？Despite the most pains-taking research， no one has yet found the answer. One explanation offered by scientists is that people tend to stay together indoors more in cold weather than at other times， and this makes it easier for cold viruses to be passed on. No one has yet found a cure for the cold. There are drugs and pain suppressors（止痛片） such as aspirin， but all they do is relieve the symptoms。

Which of the following does not agree with the chosen passage？

    A. The Eskimos do not suffer from colds all the time.

    B. Colds are not caused by cold.

    C. People suffer from colds just because they like to stay indoors.

    D. A person may catch a cold by touching someone who already has one.

Arctic explorers may catch colds when _______.

    A. they are working in the isolated arctic regions

    B. they are writing reports in terribly cold weather

    C. they are free from work in the isolated arctic regions

    D. they are coming into touch again with the outside world

Volunteers taking part in the experiments in the Common Cold Research Unit _______.

    A. suffered a lot      

    B. never caught colds

    C. often caught colds    

    D. became very strong

The passage mainly discusses _______.

    A. the experiments on the common cold

    B. the fallacy about the common cold

    C. the reason and the way people catch colds

D. the continued spread of common colds

Andrew Ritchie, inventor of the Brompton folding bicycle, once said that the perfect portable bike would be “like a magic carpet…You could fold it up and put it into your pocket or handbag”. Then he paused: “But you’ll always be limited by the size of the wheels. And so far no one has invented a folding wheel.”
It was a rare — indeed unique — occasion when I was able to put Ritchie right. A 19th-century inventor, William Henry James Grout, did in fact design a folding wheel. His bike, predictably named the Grout Portable, had a frame that split into two and a larger wheel that could be separated into four pieces. All the bits fitted into Grout’s Wonderful Bag, a leather case.
Grout’s aim: to solve the problems of carrying a bike on a train. Now doesn’t that sound familiar? Grout intended to find a way of making a bike small enough for train travel: his bike was a huge beast. And importantly, the design of early bicycles gave him an advantage: in Grout’s day, tyres were solid, which made the business of splitting a wheel into four separate parts relatively simple. You couldn’t do the same with a wheel fitted with a one-piece inflated （充气的） tyre.
So, in a 21st-century context, is the idea of the folding wheel dead? It is not. A British design engineer, Duncan Fitzsimons, has developed a wheel that can be squashed into something like a slender ellipse （椭圆）. Throughout, the tyre remains inflated.
Will the young Fitzsimons’s folding wheel make it into production? I haven’t the foggiest idea. But his inventiveness shows two things. First, people have been saying for more than a century that bike design has reached its limit, except for gradual advances. It’s as silly a concept now as it was 100 years ago: there’s plenty still to go for. Second, it is in the field of folding bikes that we are seeing the most interesting inventions. You can buy a folding bike for less than £1,000 that can be knocked down so small that it can be carried on a plane — minus wheels, of course — as hand baggage.
Folding wheels would make all manner of things possible. Have we yet got the magic carpet of Andrew Ritchie’s imagination? No. But it’s progress.
【小题1】We can infer from Paragraph 1 that the Brompton folding bike        .

Throughout the history of the arts, the nature of creativity has remained constant to artists. No matter what objects they select, artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change-to find poetry where no one has ever seen or experienced it before.

 Landscape(风景) is another unchanging element of art. It can be found from ancient times through the 17th-century Dutch painters to the 19th-century romanticists and impressionists. In the 1970s, Alfred Leslie, one of the new American realists, continued this practice. Leslie sought out the same place where Thomas Cole, a romanticist, had produced paintings of the same scene a century and a half before. Unlike Cole who insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature, Leslie paints what he actually sees. In his paintings, there is no particular change in emotion, and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the background. He also takes advantage of the latest developments of color photography(摄影术) to help both the eye and the memory when he improves his painting back in his workroom.

 Besides, all art begs the age-old question: What is real? Each generation of artists has shown their understanding of reality in one form or another. The impressionists saw reality in brief emotional effects, the realists in everyday subjects and in forest scenes, and the Cro-Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of the animals in the ancient forests. To sum up, understanding reality is a necessary struggle for artists of all periods.

 Over thousands of years the function of the arts has remained relatively constant. Past or present, Eastern or Western, the arts are a basic part of our immediate experience. Many and different are the faces of art, and together they express the basic need and hope of human beings.

1.The underlined word “poetry” most probably means __________.

A. an object for artistic creation                                    B. a collection of poems

C. an unusual quality                                                        D. a natural scene

2. Leslie's paintings are extraordinary because        .

A. they are close in style to works in ancient times

B. they look like works by 19th-century painters

C. they draw attention to common things in life

D. they depend heavily on color photography

3.What is the author's opinion of artistic reality?

A. It will not be found in future works of art.

B. It does not have a long-lasting standard.

C. It is expressed in a fixed artistic form.

D. It is lacking in modern works of art.

4.What does the author suggest about the arts in the last paragraph?

A. They express people's curiosity about the past.

B. They make people interested in everyday experience.

C. They are considered important for variety in form.

D. They are regarded as a mirror of the human situation.

5.Which of the following is the main topic of the passage?

A. History of the arts.

B. Basic questions of the arts.

C. New developments in the arts.

D. Use of modern technology in the arts.

No one has _____ been able to trace the author of the poem.

A. still   B. yet   C. already   D. just

第二节 完形填空（每题1.5分,共30分）
阅读下面短文，从短文后所给各题的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中，选出可以填入空白处的最佳选项。 
The day was Thankful Thursday. It’s a 36 tradition that my two little girls and I began years ago. Thursday has become our day to go out and make a positive 37 .
My girls shouted “McDonald’s, McDonald’s” as we 38 along a busy Houston road. Suddenly I 39 that almost every crossing I passed through was 40 by a panhandler(乞丐). And then it hit me! All these panhandlers must be hungry, too. Perfect! After we ate, I ordered a(an) 41fifteen lunches and we set out to deliver them. We would pull 42 a panhandler, make a contribution, and tell him or her that we hoped things got better. Then we’d say, “Oh, 43 …here’s lunch.”
We handed our final contribution to a small woman and then immediately 44 back in the opposite direction for home. 45 , the light caught us again and we were stopped at the same crossing where this small woman stood. I was 46 and didn’t know quite how to behave.  
She made her way to our car, “No one has ever done47 like this for me before,” she said with 48 . Feeling uneasy, and wanting to move the conversation along, I asked, “ So, 49 do you think you’ll eat your lunch?”  
She just looked at me with her huge, tired brown eyes and said, “Oh honey, I’m not going to eat this lunch.” I was 50 ,but before I could say anything, she continued, “You see, I have a little girl and she 51  loves McDonald’s, but I don’t have money. But you know what…tonight she is going to have McDonald’s!”
I don’t know if the kids 52 the tears in my eyes. So many times I had questioned whether our acts of kindness were too 53 or insignificant to really effect change. 54 in that moment, I recognized the 55 of Mother Teresa’s words: “We cannot do great things—only small things with great love.”  
36. A. weekly               B. daily             C. monthly                   D. yearly
37. A. decision                     B. choice           C. contribution              D. plan
38. A. walked               B. ran                   C. wandered                 D. drove
39. A. reminded            B. realized             C. understood               D. thought
40. A. crowded             B. occupied           C. discovered                D. laid
41. A. additional           B. expensive      C. cheap                       D. special
42. A. close                  B. together            C. alongside                  D. throughout
43. A. in fact         B. to tell the truth   C. generally speaking     D. by the way
44. A. faced                  B. headed                 C. took                         D. looked
45. A. Unfortunately      B. Luckily             C. Unexpectedly            D. Hopefully
46. A. excited               B. embarrassed       C. frightened            D. annoyed
47. A. something           B. everything     C. anything                   D. nothing
48. A. amazement          B. fear                  C. sorrow                        D. amusement
49. A. what                B. how                  C. where                      D. when
50. A. shocked                     B. confused           C. pleased                     D. worried
51. A. really                 B. even                 C. just                          D. never
52. A. watched                     B. felt                   C. noticed                     D. recognized
53. A. many                  B. small            C. big                          D. simple
54. A. Therefore            B. Although           C. Meanwhile           D. Yet
55. A. promise                     B. oath                  C. truth                    D. Spirit