题目内容

Walk through the Amazon rainforest today and you will find it steamy, warm, damp and thick. But if you had been there around 15,000 years ago, during the last ice age, would it have been the same? For more than 30 years, scientists have been arguing about how rainforests might have reacted to the cold, dry climate of the ice ages, but till now, no one has reached a satisfying answer.

Rainforests like the Amazon are important for mopping up CO2 from the atmosphere and helping to solve global warming. Currently the trees in the Amazon take in around 500 million tons of CO2 each year: equal to the total amount of CO2 given off in the UK each year. But how will the Amazon react to the future climate change? If it gets drier, will it survive and continue to draw down CO2? Scientists hope that they will be able to learn in advance how the rainforest will manage in the future by understanding how rainforests reacted to climate change in the past.

Unfortunately, collecting information is incredibly difficult. To study the past climate, scientists need to look at fossilized pollen(花粉)kept in lake mud, Going back to the last ice age means drilling down into lake sediments(沉淀物), which requires specialized equipment and heavy machinery. There are very few roads and paths, or places to land helicopters and aeroplanes. Rivers tend to be the easiest way to enter the forest, but this still leaves vast areas between the rivers completely unsampled(未取样). So far, only a handful of cores have been drilled that go back to the last ice age and none of them provide enough information to prove how the Amazon forest reacts to climate change.

1.How do scientists study the past climate change?

A. By predicting the climate change in the future.

B. By drilling down deep into land sediments.

C. By analyzing fossilized pollen in lake mud.

D. By taking samples from rivers in the Amazon.

2.Why is it difficult to collect information about the past climate change?

A. Because scientists can't find proper equipment and machinery.

B. Because it is very difficult to obtain complete samples.

C. Because helicopters and aeroplanes have no place to land.

D. Because none of the cores provide any information.

3.Where is the passage most probably taken from?

A. A medical journal. B. A news report

C. A travel brochure. D. A science magazine.

4.The best title for the text may be .

A. Secrets of the Rainforest

B. Climates of the Amazon

C. The History of the Rainforest

D. Changes of the Rainforest

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Almost every machine with moving parts has wheels, yet no one knows exactly when the first wheel was invented or what it was used for. We do know, however, that they existed over 5,500 years ago in ancient Asia.

The oldest known transport wheel was discovered in 2002 in Slovenia. It is over 5,100 years old. Evidence suggests that wheels for transport didn't become popular for a while, though. This could be because animals did a perfectly good job of carrying farming tools and humans around.

But it could also be because of a difficult situation. While wheels need to roll on smooth surfaces(光滑表面), roads with smooth surfaces weren't going to be built until there was plenty of demand for them. Finally, road surfaces did become smoother, but this difficult situation appeared again a few centuries later. There had been no important changes in wheel and vehicle design before the arrival of moden road design.

In the mid-1700s, a Frenchman came up with a new design of road—a base layer (层) of large stones covered with a thin layer of smaller stones. A Scotsman improved on this design in the 1820s and a strong, lasting road surface became a reality. At around the same lime, metal hubs (the central part of a wheel) came into being, followed by the pneumatic tyre(充气轮胎) in 1846. Alloy(合金) wheels were invented in 1967, sixty years after the appearance of tarmacked roads (柏油路). As wheel design took off, vehicles got faster and faster.

1. What might explain why transport wheels didn't become popular for some time?

A. Few knew how to use transport wheels.

B. Humans carried farming tools just as well.

C. Animals were a good means of transport.

D. The existence(存在)of transport wheels was not known.

2.How is the last paragraph mainly developed?

A. By giving examples.

B. By making comparisons.

C. By giving discussion

D. By making classifications.(分类)

3.What is the passage mainly about?

A. The beginning of road design.

B. The development of transport wheels.

C. The history of public transport.

D. His invention of fast-moving vehicles.

I have a neighbour we call Happy. I have never seen her angry at anything and never heard her say a harsh(难听的) word to anyone or about anyone.

Happy and her husband Ben, 70, have a huge garden. They spent many happy hours together working on it. Most of the neighbours watched interestingly as Ben doubled the size of their garden. As the cost of food climbed faster than Ben's beans, we all wished we also had such a large garden. As the rest of us spent our dollars at the market, Happy could be seen picking beans in her backyard.

Last month, Happy and Ben invited most of the neighbourhood over for an “all?day food fest”. We were told to bring gloves and arrive very early in the morning. We didn't know what was about to take place.

By 9:00 am, there were nine of us in the garden picking tomatoes, beans, okra and squash. By 10:00 am, there was lots of laughter. We shared a lot of stories. By 5:00 pm, everyone was a little drunk from the wine and beer. After dinner, we played games. As we were leaving, Happy and Ben handed each of us a shopping bag filled with the bounty(大量给予之物) of the day, already packaged and frozen. What a delightful gift!

Well, the point wasn't so much about the food. The true gift was a day of friends enjoying one another's company. None of it would have happened if it had not been for Happy and Ben's garden. Now they have a blog about gardening in case we decide to plant a garden. And I am so proud of my tomato plants!

1. We can infer that Happy and her husband Ben________.

A. are a generous and warm?hearted couple

B. sometimes quarrel with each other

C. live on the food they grow in their garden

D. don't like spending time with others

2.According to Paragraph 2, people wished they also had a garden so that ________.

A. they didn't have to spend so much money on food

B. they could grow vegetables and sell them at the market

C. they could invite their neighbours and hold parties in it

D. they could spend happy hours together with their families in it

3. For what purpose did Happy and Ben invite the neighbours to their garden?

A. To ask them to attend a birthday party.

B. To help them get to know each other.

C. To ask them to share some interesting stories.

D. To let them enjoy what they grew in the garden.

4.What did the writer most probably think of the time he spent in the garden?

A. It was too long.

B. It was wonderful.

C. It was not as good as he thought.

D. It was too terrible.

When you’re a parent to a young child, you spend a lot of time talking about feelings: about having to share, about being disappointed because you may not have a cookie instead of broccoli (绿花椰菜), about the great injustice of a parent pressing the elevator button before the child has a chance to.

And in a parenting culture that’s increasingly concerned with centering children’s needs above all else, mothers and fathers have become skillful at talking about their kids’ feelings while masking their own. But new research suggests that parents who hide their negative emotions are doing their children, and themselves harm.

A study published this month says that when parents put on a faux-happy (假开心) face for their kids, they do damage to their own sense of wellbeing and authenticity.

“For the average parent the findings suggest when they attempt to hide their negative emotion expression and overexpress their positive emotions with their children, it actually comes at a cost: doing so may lead parents to feel worse themselves,” researcher Dr Emily Impett, says.

It makes sense that parents often fall back on amping up (扩大) the positivity for the sake of their children—there are a lot of things in the world we want to protect our kids from. But children are often smarter than we expect and are quite in tune with what the people closest to them—their parents—are feeling.

There was a time about a year or so ago, for example, when I received some bad news over the phone; I was home with my four-year-old and so I did my best to put on a brave face. She knew immediately something was wrong though, and was confused.

When I finally let a few tears out and explained that Mom heard something sad about a friend, she was, of course, just fine. My daughter patted my shoulder, gave me a hug, and went back to playing. She felt better that she was able to help me, and the moment made a lot more sense to her emotionally than a smiling mom holding back sobs. I was glad that I could feel sad momentarily and not have to work hard to hide that.

Relaying positive feelings to your children when you don’t feel them is a move the researchers called high cost — that it may seem like the most beneficial to your child at the time but that parents should find other ways of communicating emotions that “allow them to feel true to themselves”.

But this is also about children seeing the world in a more honest way. While we will want to protect our children from things that aren’t age-appropriate or harmful, it’s better to raise a generation of kids who understand that moms and dads are people too.

1.What is the typical behavior of parents when they bring up their children?

A. Allowing their children chances to do things themselves.

B. Expressing their dissatisfaction with their children.

C. Hiding their true emotions from their children.

D. Sharing their favorite food with their children.

2. If parents put on a faux-happy face, _______.

A. their children will be protected

B. their children will be taken in

C. they will feel happy as a result

D. they will undergo worse feelings

3.The author mentioned the example of her daughter to illustrate ______.

A. children are not so clever as parents think

B. children can often understand parents’ true feelings

C. it’s meaningful for parents to always look positive

D. it’s necessary to expose children to harmful things

4. We can conclude from the passage that _______.

A. protecting children from age-inappropriate things is important

B. it makes sense for children to know their parents’ negative feelings

C. children will admire their parents more because of being protected

D. separation from negative feelings helps children see the world honestly

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