A year after graduation, I was offered a position teaching a writing class. Teaching was a profession I had never seriously considered, though several of my stories had been published. I accepted the job without hesitation, as it would allow me to wear a tie and go by the name of Mr. Davis. My father went by the same name, and I liked to imagine people getting the two of us confused. “Wait a minute,” someone might say, “are talking about Mr. Davis the retired man, or Mr. Davis the respectable scholar?”
The position was offered at the last minute, and I was given two week to prepare, a period I spent searching for a briefcase and standing before my full-length mirror, repeating the words, “Hello, class, I’m Mr. Davis.” Sometimes I would give myself an aggressive voice. Sometimes I would sound experienced. But when the day eventually came, my nerves kicked in and the true Mr. Davis was there. I sounded not like a thoughtful professor, but rather a 12-year-old boy.
I arrived in the classroom with paper cards designed in the shape of maple leaves. I had cut them myself out of orange construction paper. I saw nine students along a long table. I handed out the cards, and the students wrote down their names and fastened them to their breast pockets as I required.
“All right then,” I said. “Okay, here we go.” Then I opened my briefcase and realized that I had never thought beyond this moment. I had been thinking that the students would be the first to talk, offering their thoughts and opinions on the events of the day. I had imagined that I would sit on the edge of the desk, overlooking a forest of raised hands. Every student would shout to be heard, and I would knock on something in order to silence them. I would yell, “Calm down, you’ll all get your turn. One at a time, one at a time!”
A terrible silence ruled the room, and seeing no other opinions, I instructed the students to pull out their notebooks and write a brief essay related to the theme of deep disappointment.
【小题1】The author took the job to teach writing because______________.

Last year, on report card day, my son and a group of his 13-year-old friends piled into the back seat of my car, ready for the last-day-of-school party at McDonald's. “Jack got a laptop for getting straight A's, and Laurie got a cell-phone,” one boy said. “Oh, yeah, and Sarah got an iPod Nano, and she's only in third grade,” said another. “And how about Brian? He got $10 for each A.”
I suddenly became concerned. These payoffs might get parents through grammar school, but what about high school and beyond? What would be left after the electric guitar, the cell-phone, and the DVD player?       
I saw the road ahead: As the homework load increased, my income would decrease. I saw my comfortable lifestyle disappear before my eyes---no more of those $5 bags of already-peeled organic（施有机肥料的）carrots. No more organic anything!            
I started to feel surprised and nervous. Would every goal achieved by my two children fetch a reward? A high grade point average? A good class ranking? Would sports achievements be included in this reward system: soccer goals, touchdowns（橄榄球底线得分）? What about the orchestra（管弦乐队）? Would first chair pay more than second? I'd be penniless by eighth-grade graduation.
“We never paid anything for good grades,” said my neighbor across the street, whose son was recently accepted at MIT. “He just did it on his own. Maybe once in a while we went out for pizza, but that's about it.”
Don't you just hate that? We're all running around looking for the MP3 player with the most updates, and she’s spending a few dollars on pizza. She gets motivation; we get negotiation. And what about the primary grades? What do these students get? “When the teacher asked if anyone got rewards for good grades, everyone in my class raised their hands and said they got ice cream cones (蛋卷),” said one third-grader.
【小题1】What's the best title for the passage?

Plants are flowering faster than scientists predicted（预测）in reaction to climate change, which could have long damaging effects on food chains and ecosystems.
Global warming is having a great effect on hundreds of plant and animal species around the world, changing some living patterns, scientists say.
Increased carbon dioxide（CO2）in the air from burning coal and oil can have an effect on how plants produce oxygen, while higher temperatures and changeable rainfall patterns can change their patterns of growth.
“Predicting species’ reaction to climate change is a major challenge in ecology,” said the researches of several U.S. universities. They said plants had been the key object of study because their reaction to climate change could have an effect on food chains and ecosystem services.
The study, published on the Nature website, uses the findings from plant life cycle studies and experiments across four continents and 1,634 species. It found that some experiments had underestimated（低估）the speed of flowering by 8.5 times and leafing by 4 times.
“Across all species, the experiments under-predicted the speed of the advance — for both leafing and flowering — that results from temperature increases,” the study said.
The design of future experiments may need to be improved to better predict how plants will react to climate change, it said.
Plants are necessary for life on the Earth. They are the base of the food chain, using photosynthesis（光合作用）to produce sugar from carbon dioxide and water. They let out oxygen which is needed by nearly every organism on the planet.
Scientists believe the world’s average temperature has risen by about 0.8℃ since 1900, and nearly 0.2℃ every ten years since 1979.
So far, efforts to cut emissions（排放）of planet-warming greenhouse gases are not seen as enough to prevent the Earth heating up beyond 2℃ this century — a point scientists say will bring the danger of a changeable climate in which weather extremes are common, leading to drought, floods, crop failures and rising sea levels.
【小题1】What is the key information the author wants to give in Paragraph 1?

In 1947 a group of famous people from the art world headed by an Austrian conductor decided to hold an intemational festival of music,dance and theatre in Edinburgh. The idea was to reunite Europe after the Second World War.
At the same time, the “Fringe” appeared as a challenge to the official festival.Eight theatre groups turned up uninvited in 1947,in the belief that everyone should have the right to perform,and they did so in a public house disused for years.
Soon,groups of studentsfirstly from Edinburgh University, and later from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge,Durham and Birmingham were making the journey to the Scottish capital each summer to perform theatre by little-known writers of plays in small church halls to the people of Edinburgh.
Today the “Fringe”,once less recognized, has far outgrown the festival with around 1,500 performances of theatre,music and dance on every one of the 21 days it lasts. And yet as early as 1959,with only 19 theatre groups performing,some said it was getting too big.
A paid administrator was first employed only in 1971, and today there are eight administrators working all year round and the number rises to 150 during August itself. In 2004 there were 200 places housing 1,695 shows by over 600 different groups from 50 different countries. More than 1,25 million tickets were sold.
【小题1】Point was the purpose of Edinburgh Festival at he beginning?

Can dogs and cats live in perfect harmony in the same home? People who are thinking about adopting a dog as a friend for their cat are worried that they will fight. A recent research has found a new recipe for success. According to the study, if the cat is adopted before the dog, and if they are introduced when still young (less than 6 months for cats, a year for dogs), it is highly probable that the two pets will get along swimmingly. Two-thirds of the homes interviewed reported a positive relationship between their cat and dog.
However, it wasn’t all sweetness and light. There was a reported coldness between the cat and dog in 25% of the homes, while aggression and fighting were observed in 10% of the homes. One reason for this is probably that some of their body signals are just opposite. For example, when a cat turns its head away it signals aggression, while a dog doing the same signals submission.
In homes with cats and dogs living peacefully, researchers observed a surprising behavior. They are learning how to talk each other’s language. It is a surprise that cats can learn how to talk ‘Dog’, and dogs can learn how to talk ‘Cat’.
What’s interesting is that both cats and dogs have appeared to develop their intelligence. They can learn to read each other’s body signals, suggesting that the two may have more in common than was previously suspected. Once familiar with each other’s presence and body language, cats and dogs can play together, greet each other nose to nose, and enjoy sleeping together on the sofa. They can easily share the same water bowl and in some cases groom (梳理) each other.
The significance of this research on cats and dogs may go beyond pets ─ to people who don’t get along, including neighbors, colleagues at work, and even world superpowers. If cats and dogs can learn to get along, surely people have a good chance.
【小题1】The underlined word swimmingly in Paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to ______.