Question

【题目】 Most of us fear failure. However, without failure, progress would be impossible. In fact, the word success comes from the Latin succedere, meaning “to come after.” And what does success usually come after? Failure. It seems that one cannot exist without the other.

Every failure – even the worst ones – helps us learn to do things differently in the future. “Learning from the past mistakes and making changes helped me to reach the top of Everest successfully,” says mountaineer Pete Athans, who has now reached the world’s highest peak (山峰) seven times. Failure also reminds us that things can go wrong – sometimes with terrible results.

Austrian Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner is the first woman to reach the top of all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks without extra oxygen (氧气). In 2007, while climbing in Nepal, she was in an avalanche ( 雪 崩 ). She survived, but two nearby Spanish climbers died. The experience taught Kaltenbrunner that no matter how prepared a person is, bad things can still happen. But Kaltenbrunner decided she had to learn from her experience and move on.

Accepting failure is not easy for many, though. We are often reluctant to tell people that we are failures because our good name depends on success. However, things are slowly changing. In the past ten years, some scientific magazines – mostly in medicine – have published reports of failed experiments. The belief is that the science community can also learn from “negative” results and that this can finally lead to positive outcomes.

The business world already understands the value of negative results. Eli Lilly and Company has failure parties to study data about medicine that doesn’t work. In fact, one of the business world’s most famous failures became one of its biggest successes. In the early 1990s, Apple Corporation created the Apple Newton. It was one of Apple’s biggest failures. However, Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs, believed the product had potential (潜力) and he began to improve it. In time, this led to the creation of the iPhone and the iPad, two of the company’s most successful products.

The story of the Apple Newton can teach us another important lesson about failure. There is a lot we can learn by studying mistakes. Perhaps the most important lesson is that failure and success are two sides of the same coin. One truly cannot exist without the other.

【1】The writer writes Paragraph 2 and 3 mainly to .

A.show how bad things can become important lessons

B.tell us that it’s possible for anyone to be successful

C.prove how bad things can happen in any situation

D.teach us what not to do when climbing mountains

【2】The underlined word “reluctant” in Paragraph 4 probably means “ ”.

A.unableB.unsureC.unwillingD.uninterested

【3】What is the passage mainly about?

A.An attitude towards failure.

B.The experience of success.

C.A difficult way to success.

D.The rewards of failure.

Answer 1

【答案】

【1】A

【2】C

【3】D

【解析】

文章主要讲述得是失败是成功的必经之路，人们不应该害怕失败，而是要从失败中吸取教训，并且举例说明失败是成功之母。

【1】推理题。文章第二，三段主要讲述的是“Every failure-even the worst ones – helps us learn to do things differently in the future”. 每一次失败——即使是最糟糕的失败——都会帮助我们学会在未来以不同的方式做事。并且举例登山者Pete Athans的亲身经历，故选A。

【2】词义猜测题。unable不能；unsure不确定；unwilling不愿意；uninterested不感兴趣；根据后句“because our good name depends on success”因为我们的好名声取决于成功，可知，人们不愿意告诉别人自己的失败，所以reluctant指的是“不愿意”，故选C。

【3】主旨大意题。整篇文章主要讲述的是我们很多人都害怕面对失败，但是没有失败，就不可能取得进展。只有通过一次次的失败，才能从中总结经验教训，才能一点点的成功，也就是失败给我们的回报，故选D。