WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

（invent）The song gives a good example of Les Paul's experimental style and  spirit.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

（efficient）What is so impressive about their society is the  of the public services.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

（large）The ultimate goal will be to  networks of Parliaments on Science,Technology and Innovation.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

（famous）She moved to London in search of  and fortune.

WORD FORMATION
Complete each of the following sentences with the proper form of the word in brackets. 

​(emotion)  Life for the successful doctor can be  rewarding.

WORD FORMATION
Complete each of the following sentences with the proper form of the word in brackets. 

​(advertise) They put an  in The Morning News, offering a high salary for the right person.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

（influence）Mr. Johnson was very  in persuading the producers to put money into the film.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

（survive）All of us know that water is extremely important not just for ourbut also for our overall health and well-being.

WORD FORMATION
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

（sweet）A friend of mine has learned to fry the bananas and  them with a little honey.

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter. 

     Much of the fiction written by American women in the twenty-first century can be termed “popular”, owing to its sustained engagement with an expansive but clearly defined readership. Since the 1990s, popular women’s fiction has been dominated by “chick lit”, a term that has come to signify a particular brand of commercial fiction. In her article “ Who’ s Laughing Now? A Short History of Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre" , novelist Cris Mazza credits herself with inventing the taxonomy in her capacity as co-editor of an anthology of new women' s writing. The stories in Chick Lit sought “not to embrace an old silly or coquettish image of women but to take responsibility for our part in the damaging, lingering stereotype”. Mazza coined the term hoping that critics would recognize its “ironic intention”; as she observes, the ironic inflection oi lite term evaporated with the inception of the “second incarnation” of Chick Lit. It is this second incarnation that became a publishing phenomenon in the 1990s and continues to thrive in the twenty-first century.
     Arguably, tone is the defining characteristic of the genre. The signature tone of chick lit is humorous, irreverent, and journalistic. Many writers of chick lit novels began their careers as columnists and use their social commentaries as source material for their fictional worlds. Bridget Jones' s Diary ( 1996) evolved from British writer Helen Fielding ’ s newspaper columns for the Independent and later the Daily Telegraph, Candace Bushnell's column "Sex and the City" provided the material for her first novel and the hugely influential HBO television series (1998 -2004). 

     From its inception, chick lit secured the readership of the younger demographic through its engagement with contemporary issues and popular culture. Over the past decade, chick lit has sprouted a variety of subgenres. Although commentators on the genre regularly announce its decline, it continues to expand and attract a wider range of women readers. 

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

（1）Raj is a middle aged man. Although he was born in a poor family, he was raised well by his father and mother. His father owned a welding（焊接） shop, and used to work for more than 12 hours a day, so that his family could lead a comfortable life.
（2）However, Raj’s father could not earn sufficient money to provide a decent life to his family. Being an average student in school, and used to score around 70 percent marks. Raj’s dream was to become a doctor. Since his marks weren’t very high, he could not get the desired course that he wanted to study. Instead, he joined a bachelor’s degree course, completed the course successfully, and got a job in a company.
（3）While his life was going on with no dramatic change, his father continued to work in his welding shop, so that he did not have to depend on Raj. After getting a permanent job, Raj got married and at the same time was also promoted in his job. 
（4）Later, Raj began to earn a handsome salary, and started to live luxuriously. He bought a new house. Although his company provided him with a car, Raj purchased a new car!
（5）After an extravagant（奢侈的） life that spanned almost 6 to 7 years, Raj was neither able to manage all the household expenses, nor pay for the children’s education and other basic necessities.
（6）It so happened that Raj’s father fell sick, and as a result, could not continue his work. He requested Raj to give some money. Raj already suffering from financial crisis, refused to help.
（7）After a week, while Raj was on an official tour, he met a small boy aged about 10 years selling toys. The boy requested Raj to buy something. Raj asked the boy why he was selling toys instead of studying. The boy replied, “My father met with an accident a year ago and he lost one hand. He cannot work now. My mother works as a maid. I’m helping my parents by selling these toys. I go to school in the morning, and sell toys in the evenings. I work for 3 hours a day and study at night!”
（8）Raj purchased a few toys from the little boy. He thought about what the boy had said. He realized that he had been wrong in the way he treated his parents. He had learnt a lesson from the small boy. At a very small age, this boy was helping his parents, but Raj, in order to meet the demands of his lavish（奢侈的） lifestyle, had neglected his parents.

CAREFUL READING 

Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer.

     Fashion myths have led women to believe that they are more beautiful or sophisticated for wearing heels, but in reality, heels pose short as well as long term hardships. Women should fight the high heel industry by refusing to use or purchase them in order to save the world from unnecessary physical and psychological suffering.               

     Fairly speaking, it must be noted that there is a positive side to high heels. First, heels are excellent for aerating (充氧）lawns. A simple trip around the yard in a pair of those babies eliminates all need to call for a lawn care specialist and provides the perfect sized holes to give lawn oxygen. Second, heels are quite functional for defense against oncoming enemies, who can easily be scared away with these sharp, deadly fashion accessories. Finally, anytime a hammer can't be found, a high heel shoe makes the perfect substitute tool for pushing in a nail. 

    Regardless of such practical uses for heels, the fact remains that wearing high heels is harmful to one's physical health. High heels are known to cause problems such as deformed feet and torn toenails. The risk of severe back problems and twisted or broken ankles is three times higher for a high heel wearer than for a flat shoe wearer. Also, of course, after wearing heels for a day, any woman knows she can look forward to a night of pain as she tries to comfort her swollen, throbbing feet. 

     Besides the obvious physical damage heels can cause, they are also responsible for a large amount of psychological damage. A woman with a closet full of heels may endanger her own social well-being as well as that of a man who chooses to date her. A night on the town in a pair of shoes that makes a woman feel as if she is a towering ostrich is not something to look forward to. In addition, an evening with a woman twice his height may make an insecure man slightly less than comfortable. Instead of enjoying the date, he may be feeling uncomfortable about his own height as he attempts to equal her height by stretching his back, holding up his chin, and standing on tiptoe. Ultimately, the man will lose interest in the heel-wearer as he realizes that no woman is worth the price of his diminishing self-esteem. In short, a woman who feels like a walking skyscraper and a man who feels like an ant are not likely to feel high self-esteem. 

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

     Before graduation from the University of Virginia, I sent my resume to African embassies and consulates, trying to find a position teaching English. But I didn't find a school in all the continent that would guarantee employment. In desperation, I applied to the Japanese Ministry of Education and Ministry of Foreign Affairs to teach English in Japan, which became my job offer.
     But the more I thought about going to Japan, the more apprehensive I became, I knew nothing of the history or culture, and I didn't speak the language. I worried that facing prejudice in a foreign country would be extremely frustrating.
     Arriving at Sakura Nishi High School, about 40 minutes from Tokyo, I was relieved to find that everyone, from my principal to the PTA mothers, treated me with kindness and respect. But I discovered that while Japanese teens respected me as an American, they idolized me because I was Black.
     While I was in Japan, trendy department stores advertised Booby Brown posters, Cross Colours gear and X caps in their windows, Rappers from Ice-T to Ice Cube toured, and Malcolm X was at the major theaters. On Saturday nights Shibuya ward. Tokyo’s hub of hip-hop and high fashion, was packed with students in baggy jeans, “Doc”Martens, Chicango Bulls caps, permed (烫头发的) Afros and dreadlocks. To them, my being African-American meant I was Kakoi, cool. And before long I was a star.
     At a track-and-field event in Tokyo, I was one of the few foreign spectators. I hadn't been there ten minutes when a screaming mob of young girls swarmed around me like bees, waving pens, notebooks and T-shirts in my face, shouting,“Sign, sign, sign!”I was petrifide(发呆的).Then it dawned on me that they thought I was an athlete. I couldn’t explain in Japanese that I was only a spectator, so I surrendered.
     That day was only the first of many incidents of mistaken identity and instant stardom. Nightclub managers let me in free, knowing my presence would attract patrons, and security guards at rap concerts gave me backstage passes. To be young, single and Black in Tokyo in the nineties was surely as exciting and romantic as the pre-World War Ⅱ Spain Hemingway knew.
     But I wanted to say to the Japanese, “You must understand, being Black is more involved than just wearing an X cap. It means being committed to furthering our race and nurturing our children. Being Black runs deeper than just having rhythm. It means possessing a history of more than 300 years of fighting for freedom and equality. And as a people, we are more diverse than our hair-styles. Our talents and interests vary as much as our shades of brown.”I wished I could have said what I really should have been telling myself all along, rather than defining myself by our images as either sports stars and performers or criminals and victims.

CAREFUL READING

Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.    

     The history of the word "creole" itself dates back to the slave trade. After slaves had been gathered from many parts of Africa, they were imprisoned in West African camps, euphemistically (委婉地）called "factories," for "processing" before being shipped out to "markets." The managers of the factories took great care to separate slaves who spoke the same tribal language, thereby lessening the danger of revolt among slaves who could communicate with one another. And further separation on the basis of language was made by the purchasers in the New World. As a result, the only tongue the slaves had in common was a pidgin that originated in West Africa and developed in the colonies to which they were sent. These pidgins became entrenched (根深蒂固), and after a generation or two they began to expand to meet the needs of the slaves' way of life. The slaves' new language became known as creole, a French word meaning "native", which in turn was derived from Portuguese. 

     Nowadays "creole" refers to any language that developed from a pidgin by expansion of vocabulary and grammar and became the mother tongue for many speakers in a community. The largest center of creole languages today is undoubtedly the Caribbean area, with more than six million speakers. Several million additional people speak creoles in West Africa, South Africa, and Southeast Asia, and probably another three million people around the world use various pidgin languages. Clearly, pidgin and creole are not rare or isolated phenomena; they number more speakers today than do such languages as Dutch, Swedish, or Greek.

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

     Pronouncing a language is a skill. Every normal person is expert in the skill of pronouncing his own language; but few people are even moderately proficient at pronouncing foreign languages. Now there are many reasons for this, some obvious, some perhaps not so obvious. But I suggest that the fundamental reason why people in general do not speak foreign languages very much better than they do is that they fail to grasp the true nature of the problem of learning to pronounce, and consequently pronouncing a foreign language is a skill—one that needs careful training of a special kind, and one that cannot be acquired by just leaving it to take care of itself. I think even teachers of language, while recognizing the importance of a good accent, tend to neglect, in their practical teaching, the branch of study concerned with speaking the language. So the first point I want to make is that English pronunciation must be taught; the teacher should be prepared to devote some of the lesson time to this, and by his whole attitude to the subject should get the student to feel that here is a matter worthy of receiving his close attention. So, there should be occasions, when other aspects of English, such as grammar or spelling, are allowed for the moment to take second place.
     Apart from this question of the time given to pronunciation, there are two other requirements for the teacher: the first, knowledge; the second, technique.
     It is important that the teacher should be in possession of the necessary information. This can generally be obtained from books. It is possible to get from books some idea of the mechanics of speech, and of what we call general phonetic theory. It is also possible in this way to get a clear mental picture of the relationship between the sounds of different languages, between the speech habits of English people and those, say, of your students. Unless the teacher has such a picture, any comments he may make on his students' pronunciation are unlikely to be of much use, and lesson time spent on pronunciation may well be time wasted.
     But it does not follow that you can teach pronunciation successfully as soon as you have read the necessary books. It depends after that what use you make of your knowledge; and this is a matter of technique. 

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

     Queen Elizabeth II’s pronunciation of English has been infected by her subjects, Aussie scientists say.
     Phoneticists from Sydney's Macquarie University studied archive recordings of the Queen's annual Christmas message to the Commonwealth from the 1950s to1980s, analyzing her Majesty's vowels.
     They then compared those vowels with the standard accent of southern England, as used by female British broadcasters on the BBC in the 1980s, to see how the royal accent had changed.
     Their conclusion: the cut-glass speech of the early years of the Queen's reign has become—how shall we say—somewhat commoner over the years.
     That in itself subtly mirrors the changes is Britain, from a country with a rigid social hierarchy(等级制度)four decades ago to one where class differences have blurred and in some areas disappeared.
     “The Queen's pronunciation of some vowels has been influenced by the standard southern-British accent of the 1980s which is more typically associated with speakers who are younger and lower in the social hierarchy,”the researchers say.
     Standard speech in southern England has been influenced by Cockneys(伦敦人), whose accent was initiated by Dick Van Dyke in the Walt Disney movie“Mary Poppins.”
     Purists will be reassured that the Queen's “Hice (house) of Windsor”will not become the Ouse of Windsor”(by dropping the‘h’) in the foreseeable future.
     However, there have been changes in 10 out of the 11 vowel sounds in the standard English.
     These changes bring her speech closer to that of her Cockney subjects, the researchers found.  
     An example of this is the way in which she pronounces “had”. In the 1950s, the royal pronunciation of this word almost rhymed with“bed”. But 30 years later, it had migrated halfway to the standard southern English pronunciation, which rhymes “had”with“had”.
     The Australian team say the pronunciation of all languages alters subtly over time, mainly because of influence from the young, and it is foolish for anyone to try to prevent change.
     “The chances of societies and academies successfully preserving a particular form of pronunciation against the influence of community and social changes are unlikely,” they say.
     The research was published December 21 in Nature, the British science weekly.

CAREFUL READING

Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.    

      Willa Cather once said: "When people ask me if writing has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the quotation, ‘The end is nothing; the road is all.’ That is what I mean when I say writing has been a pleasure. I have never faced the typewriter with the thought that one more chore had to be done."
     Like most authors, Willa Cather did not write books for the money that they brought her, but rather for the pleasure that came in writing them. Her works were, like her, sturdy and simple. They were full of the vigor of her pioneer days in Nebraska, where she grew from childhood to young womanhood.
     Born near Winchester, Virginia, on December 7, 1873, Willa Cather moved with her family to Webster County, Nebraska, in 1883. There her father farmed for seven months before moving the family into neighboring Red Cloud, a fast developing town of 2,500 people. At Red Cloud, Mr. Cather gave up farming and opened an office dealing in farm loans and mortgages. Young Willa, with reddish-brown hair and blue eyes, lived in that small prairie town from 1883 to 1896.
     At that time, Nebraska was still a frontier state, having joined the Union only a few years before in 1876. It was a land of bitter winters, burning summers, endless prairies, and far-flung (分布广的）sod houses—houses made of blocks of dirt because there were no trees for lumber. Cather's childhood was spent in this place, visiting and playing with other children, almost all of whom were of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, German, French, Russian, or Czechoslovakian descent. She wrote later about the parents of these children.
     Watching these pioneers on the Nebraska prairie created in Cather a lasting affection for the qualities of courage, integrity (正直), and strength of character shown by these frontier people. Later these same people would appear as characters in her books. She also developed a deep love for the treeless land of the Great Plains with its wild flowers, wheat fields, and rivers.

CAREFUL READING
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and blacken the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET.

     Mount Rushmore(now known as the President’s Mountain), located just north of Custer State Park in South Dakota's Black Hills National Forest, was named for the New York lawyer Charles E. Rushmore, who traveled to the Black Hills in 1884 to inspect mining claims in the region. When Rushmore asked a local man the name of a nearby mountain, he reportedly replied that it never had a name before, but from now on would be known as Rushmore Peak (later Mount Rushmore).
     Seeking to attract tourism to the Black Hills in the early 1920s, South Dakota's state historian Doane Robinson came up with the idea to sculpt (雕刻)the rocks into the shape of historic heroes of the West. In August 1924, Robinson contacted Gutzon Borglum,an American sculptor of Danish descent who was then working on carving an image of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee into the face of Georgia's Stone Mountain.Borglum suggested that the subjects of the South Dakota work be George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as that would attract more national interest. He would later add Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt to the list, in recognition of their contributions to the birth of democracy and the growth of the United States.
     After President Calvin Coolidge traveled to the Black Hills for his summer vacation, Borglum convinced the president to deliver an official dedication speech at Mount Rushmore on August 10, 1927; carving began that October. In 1929, during the last days of his presidency, Coolidge signed legislation appropriating $250,000 in federal funds for the Rushmore project and creating the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission.
     On July 4, 1930, a dedication ceremony was held for the head of Washington. After workers found the stone in the original site to be too weak, they moved Jefferson's head from the right of Washington's to the left; the head was dedicated in August 1936, in a ceremony attended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In September 1937, Lincoln's head was dedicated, while the fourth and final head——that of Theodore Roosevelt——was dedicated in July 1939. Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, and it was left to his son LincoIn to complete the final details of Mount Rushmore in time for its dedication ceremony on October 31 of that year. Mount Rushmore National Memorial, known as the"Shrine of Democracy," has become one of the most iconic images of America and an international tourist attraction. In 1991, Mount Rushmore celebrated its 50th anniversary after undergoing a $40 million restoration project. The National Park Service, which maintains Mount Rushmore, records upwards of 2 million visitors every year.

CAREFUL READING 

Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.

     In the American colonies there was little money. England did not supply the colonies with coins and it did not allow the colonies to make their own coins, except for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which received permission for a short period in 1652 to make several kinds of silver coins. England wanted to keep money out of America as a means of controlling trade: America was forced to trade only with England if it did not have the money to buy products from other countries. The result during this pre-revolutionary period was that the colonists used various goods in place of money: beaver pelts (生皮), Indian wampum (贝壳珠)，and tobacco leaves were all commonly used substitutes for money. The colonists also made use of any foreign coins they could obtain. Dutch, Spanish, French, and English coins were all in use in the American colonies.
     During the Revolutionary War, funds were needed to finance the war, so each of the individual states and the Continental Congress issued paper money. So much of this paper money was printed that by the end of the war it was virtually worthless. As a result, trade in goods and the use of foreign coins still flourished during this period.
     By the time the Revolutionary War had been won by the American colonists, the monetary system was in a state of total disarray. To remedy this situation, the new Constitution of the United States, approved in 1789, allowed only Congress to issue money. The individual states could no longer have their own money supply. A few years later, the Coinage Act of 1792 made the dollar the official currency of the United States and put the country on a bimetallic standard. In this bimetallic system, both gold and silver were legal money, and the rate of exchange of silver to gold was fixed by the government at sixteen to one.

SPEED READING

Skim or scan the following passages, and then decide on the best answer and blacken the corresponding letter on the ANSWER SHEET.   

     Potatoes are a tuber-producing crop originally grown in the Americas. Over 200 varieties of wild potatoes grow from what is now Colorado to what are now Chile and Argentina. The native peoples of the Andean region of South America were the first to domesticate potatoes and to cultivate them as a food crop. The earliest potato, found in an archaeological site in central Peru, has been dated back to about 8000 B.C.. Scientists believe that American Indians began domesticating potatoes at the end of the Ice Age. Four thousand years later, native peoples living in the Andean highlands had begun to rely on potatoes as a major part of their diet. By about 2000 B.C., Indians in the coastal region of what is now Peru were also cultivating this crop extensively.  
     During the reign of the Inca, who established their empire in what is now Peru in about A.D. 1000, American Indian farmers were growing not only white potatoes but red, yellow, black, blue, green, and brown ones as well. They were deliberately developing potatoes of varying sizes and shapes that would do well under a number of growing conditions. Because potatoes were easily grown, flourish in a number of climates, and high in vitamin C, they were an efficient way of meeting dietary needs.
     In 1531, when Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro landed in what is now Peru, the native Andean peoples had developed about 3,000 types of potatoes and had also invented a method to freeze-dry them for storage. The Inca, who called potatoes papas, ate boiled potatoes as a vegetable and also made a kind of unleavened potato bread made from flour that had been ground from freeze-dried potatoes. They also added this potato flour to soups and stews and made porridge from it.
     Pedro de Cieza, who traveled with Francisco Pizarro's expedition, compared potatoes to chestnuts. Because the tubers grew underground and were small, the Spaniards believed potatoes were truffles (块菌) and began calling them tartuffo. When English explorer Sir Francis Drake crossed the Strait of Magellan, he ate potatoes on the coast of what is now Chile that same year. Yet, historians are uncertain exactly whether the Spaniards or the English brought potatoes to Europe.