53. Which of the following is TRUE according to Paragraph 1?

A. People can be isolated from the surrounding culture.

B. The American youth accept popular culture without any thought.

C. People shouldn’t refuse popular culture totally.

D. Americans ignore cultures at all while growing up.

52. Which of the following can replace the underlined word “confronted by”?

A. Concerned about.　　　 B. Thought of.　　　 C. Confused with.　 D. Faced with.

51. What does the passage mainly tell us about Biro?

A. He is successful in business.　　　　　 B. He is an important inventor.

C. He is a famous magazine editor.　　　 D. He is a popular writer.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 　　 E★★★

It is impossible to think about “growing up” in modern America without considering “youth culture” which every young person-even those who do not attend public schools-is confronted by and must deal with. It is impossible to be so isolated that we are untouched by the surrounding culture. Nor should we wish to be-as we are called to be-salt and light in a very confused and broken world. Popular culture deserves neither uncritical acceptance nor knee-jerk rejection, but thoughtful critique(批评).

On the contrary, China paid too little attention to youth culture in the past. However, with society developing, more and more people have realized the importance of analyzing, understanding and promoting youth culture.

About 100,000 young Chinese people from all over the world will attend the first China Youth Culture Week scheduled to open Saturday in Shenzhen’s China Folk Culture Villages, a press conference was told Thursday.

A series of cultural activities will be staged from Saturday to Wednesday, including a huge performance expected to challenge for a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records.

About 10,000 young people will attend the opening ceremony Saturday. A final list of the Chinese Youth Idol Award to five outstanding young Chinese was announced at the conference. They are the country’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei, Chinese NBA star, Yao Ming, IT entrepreneur, Ding Lei, anchorperson, Wu Xiaoli, and Olympic Games gold medalist, Deng Yaping. The youth idols were selected by

Chinese teenagers with 380,000 votes cast nationwide.

During the past two months, the organizers received more than 3,000 applications from young people in Hong Kong and Macao who wanted to take part in the performance.

50. The underlined part “sank into obscurity”(last paragraph) is closest in meaning to“_______”.

A. became unknown to many people　　 B. became popular with people

C. lost interest in business　　　　　　　　　 D. lost a lot of money

49. Which of the following is the correct order of the events that happened to Biro?

a. applied for patent for first ballpoint pen

b. began to manufacture pens

c. fled from Hungary to escape Nazis

d. sold his invention

A. a c d b　　　　　　　　　　 B. c d a b　　　　　　　 C. a c b d　　　　　　　 D. c a b d

48. The reasons for the popularity of ballpoint pens are these EXCEPT that_______.

A. the inks dried very quickly　　　　　　　　　　 B. they were cheap

C. they were easy to carry around　　　　 D. they were mass-produced

47. Scientists are fairly sure that by the year 2050, _______.

A. the sea-level will have risen obviously

B. there will have been the Third World War

C. most countries will have been flooded

D. the polar ice-caps will have melted completely

D★★★

You may have never heard of Ladislao Biro, but you have certainly heard of the pen he invented-the ballpoint pen, or biro. Before Biro invented his pen, people wrote with fountain pens. The ink smudged(弄脏) and blotted and the pens sometimes leaked. In the 1930s Biro was a magazine editor in Budapest in Hungary. He noticed that the inks which the magazine’s printers used dried very quickly. Biro wondered if quick-drying inks could be used in pens. He came up with the idea of a tube of ink with a free-moving ball on the end. As a person wrote, the ball collected ink from the tube and rolled it on to the paper. The pen would be cheap and could be thrown away when the ink ran out.

Biro began to work on his invention, but before he could patent it the Second World War broke out. Biro left war-torn Europe and fled to Buenos Aires in Argentina. There, he and his brother Georg, who was a chemist, began to improve the pen. In the early 1940s Biro began to manufacture his new pen, the biro. In 1944, he sold his invention to another company, who began to mass-produce the pen for the British and American armed forces.

Biro was pleased that his pen was popular, but he did not gain much from his invention. The biro was later sold to the French firm, Bic, who now sell twelve million pens a day. Biro sank into obscurity in South America. His name, however, has become a household word.

46. One of the results of a warmer world climate could be ____.

A. an increase in food production

B. greater co-operation between countries

C. the death of millions of people from starvation

D. a reduction in the amount of oil we use

45. Weathermen believe that our future climate will be the direct result of ____.

A. the big scientific experiment　　 B. clever long-term forecasts

C. the melting of the ice-caps　　　　　　　 D. planets changing course

44. Long-term weather forecasts beyond the year 2050 may seem strange because ____.

A. none of us will be alive then

B. weathermen can even forecast next month’s weather correctly

C. weathermen can forecast much better than they used to

D. no one can stop engineering experiments