CAREFUL READING

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

     Facebook, the Web’s most popular social networking site, has been caught in a content-rights battle after revealing that it was granting itself permanent rights to users ’ photos, wall posts and other information even after a user closed an account. Under fire from tens of thousands of users, Facebook posted a brief message on users ’ home pages that said it was returning to its previous “Terms of Use” policy.
     Member backlash against Facebook began after a consumer advocate website. The Consumerist, flagged a change made to Facebook's policy. Facebook deleted a sentence from the old Terms of Use. That sentence said Facebook could not claim any rights to original content that a user uploaded once the user closed his or her account. The company replaced it with: "You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. However, you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content." In response, Chris Walters, wrote in the Consumerist post, “Make sure you never upload anything you don’t feel comfortable giving away, because it’s Facebook’s now. ’’ Thousands of indignant members either canceled their accounts or created online petition. Among them were more than 64,000 who joined a group called “The People Against the New Terms of service ".
     Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg tried to quell （平息）the controversy by saying the company’s philosophy is that “people own their information and control who they share it with”. But members were not appeased because the site did not fix its Terms of Use. The company，in its post，said it was returning to its previous Terms of Use because of the “feedback” it had received. “It was never our intention to confuse people or make them uneasy about sharing on Facebook,” company spokesman Barry Schnitt said in a blog post. "I also want to be very clear that Facebook does not, nor have we ever, claimed ownership over people's content. Your content belongs to you." Schnitt said the company is in the process of rewording its Terms of Use in "simple language that defines Facebook’s rights much more specifically”.

阅读下列文字，选出最佳答案。

Considering this, parents should avoid the authoritarian（独断专行的）style of establishing curfews; instead, they should have a conversation with their teenager that would be aimed at finding best conditions for a curfew that would satisfy both sides.

To make curfews more effective, parents had better（ ）. 

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

     A head track coach, Bill Bowerman, designed a pair of lighter shoes with better support and greater strength and sent the design to leading sporting-goods companies. They all turned him down.
     The rejections brought Bowerman face to face with his own philosophy of“competitive response.” He had taught his sportsmen to value competition not so much for its prizes as for its intellectual and spiritual satisfaction. This was true of his determination to make the shoes himself.
     He made his first pair of track shoes light and graceful. His runners won in his hand-made shoes. But who would like to manufacture such shoes?
     In 1962, Knight, one of Bowerman’s sportsmen, offered to travel to Japan and called on one of Japan’s best manufacturers of sports shoes. The manufacturer promised to produce shoes of his design and Knight’s company would be their only distributor in the U.S. A year later, a shipment of 200 Bowerman shoes arrived in Oregon.
     At first, Knight and Bowerman worked with a small team and went selling out of cars at track meets. But slowly, the running world got to know the secret of their product.
     Then in 1972, the Japanese company cut off all supplies to their company and established a separate distribution network in the U.S. In 30 days Knight succeeded in finding a new manufacturer. And today the company takes the largest share in the shoe business. You ask me the brand name of the shoes? It’s Nike, named after the Greek Goddess of Victory.
     Bowerman, Knight and the Nike team have a firm belief that a shared responsibility requires outstanding individual performance and a willingness to contribute that performance to the group.

SPEED READING 

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

           There are guavas (番石榴）at the Shop & Save. I pick one the size of a tennis ball and finger the prickly stem end. It feels familiarly bumpy and firm. The guava is not quite ripe: the skin is still a dark green. I smell it and imagine a pale pink center, the seeds tightly embedded in the flesh.
           A ripe guava is yellow, although some varieties have a pink tinge. The skin is thick, firm, and sweet. Its heart is bright pink and almost solid with seeds. The most delicious part of the guava surrounds the tiny seeds. If you don't know how to eat a guava, the seeds end up in the crevices between your teeth.
         Some years, when the rains have been plentiful and the nights cool, you can bite into a guava and not find many seeds. The guava bushes grow close to the ground, their branches laden with green then yellow fruit that seem to ripe overnight. These guavas are large and juicy, almost seedless, their roundness enticing you to have one more, just one more, because next year the rains may not come.
          As children, we didn't always wait for the fruit to ripen. We raided the bushes as soon as the guavas were large enough to bend the branch.
          A green guava is sour and hard. You bite into it at its widest point, because it's easier to grasp with your teeth. You grimace, your eyes water, and your cheeks disappear as your lips purse into a tight O. But you have another and then another, enjoying the crunchy sounds, the acid taste, the gritty texture of the unripe center. At night, your mother makes you drink castor oil, which she says tastes better than a green guava. That's when you know for sure that you're a child and she has stopped being one.
         I had my last guava the day we left Puerto Rico. It was large and juicy, almost red in the center, and so fragrant that I didn't want to eat it because I would lose the smell. All the way to the airport I scratched at it with my teeth, making little dents in the skin, chewing small pieces with my front teeth, so that I could feel the texture against my tongue, the tiny pink pellets of sweet.
         Today, I stand before a stack of dark green guavas, each perfectly round and hard, each $1.59. The one in my hand is tempting. It smells faintly of late summer afternoons and hopscotch under the mango tree. But this is autumn in New York, and I'm no longer a child. I push my cart away, toward the apples and pears of my adulthood, their nearly seedless ripeness predictable and bittersweet.

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

     If you are looking for an explanation of why we don’t get tough with criminals, you need only look at the numbers. Each year almost a third of the households in America are victims of violence or theft. This amounts to more than 41 million crimes, many more than we are able to punish. There are also too many criminals. We don’t have room for any more!
     The painful fact is that the more crime there is, the less we are able to punish it. We think that punishment prevents crime, but it just might be the other way around. When there is so much crime it is simply impossible to deal with it or punish it. This is the situation we find ourselves in today: the gradual increase in the criminal population has made it more difficult to get into prison. Some of the most exclusive prisons now require about five serious crimes before a criminal is accepted.
     These features show that it makes little sense to blame the police or judges for being soft on criminals. There is not much else they can do. The police can’t find most criminals and those they do find are difficult and costly to convict. Those convicted can’t all be sent to prison. The public demands that we do everything we can against crime. The practical reality is that there is very little the police, courts or prisons can do about the crime problem.
     We could, of course, get tough with the people we already have in prison and keep them locked up for longer periods of time. Yet when measured against the lower crime rates this would probably produce, longer prison sentences are not worth the cost to states and local governments. Besides, those states that have tried to gain voters’ approval for building new prisons often discover that the public is unwilling to pay for prison constructions. And if it were willing to pay, long prison sentences may not be effective in reducing crime.
     More time spent in prison is also more expensive. The best estimates are that it costs an average of $13,000 to keep a person in prison for one year. If we had a place to keep the 124,000 released prisoners, it would have cost us $1.6 billion to prevent 15,000 crimes. This works out to more than $100,000 per crime prevented. But there is more. With the average cost of prison construction running around $50,000 per bed, it would cost more than $6 billion to build the necessary cells. The first-year operating cost would be $150,000 per crime prevented, worth it if the victim were you or me, but much too expensive to be feasible as a national policy.
     Faced with the reality of the numbers, I will not be so foolish as to suggest a solution to the crime problem. My contribution to the public debate begins and ends with this simple observation: getting tough with criminals is not the answer.

根据下列文字，选出最恰当的答案。

Mr. Foresters, who followed and counted tiger footprints, estimated that in May 1972 only about 1,800 tigers existed in India. Project Tiger supported by W. W. F. was immediately launched. Nine tiger reserves were created, with armed guards protecting them. 

The ultimate aim of Project Tiger is to（  ）.

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

     Recently a new postage stamp has been issued to honor Flannery O's Connor and her great contributions to American literature. The stamp costs 93 cents and has a pretty picture of the writer herself on it. She wears a simple top with a jewel neckline, and pearls. Her pink porcelain face, framed in a 1940s hairstyle, glows with the barest hint of a how-do-you-do smile.
     This stamp does not, to my eyes, show Flannery O' Connor, the 20th-century master of the short story，the “hermit （隐士）novelist” who fused her art and life as a Southerner and a Roman Catholic with stories that are shocking，hilarious （令人发笑的）and often bloody，the one who lived with her mother in Georgia and raised pheasants (雉鸡)，who got sick and died young in 1964, who gazed at the sin-stricken world through cat-eye glasses that are as much her visual signature as Hemingway's beard or Frida's eyebrow. 

     This stamp shows the artist as a very young woman, barely 20 years old. It's based on a photo of her as an undergraduate at Georgia State College for Women. Her works then amounted to cartoons and stories for the college magazine.
     The United States Postal Service gave this job to an art director, who hired a freelance artist. I spoke with both of them, and learned that neither knew much about O' Connor, but they did their best with the images they had. The artist told me he had read one of her novels in college. He knew O'Connor had raised pheasants, so he framed her with feathers. The art director remembered that her work was “unsettling”，and that she was a Catholic. 

     I can't blame either of them for deciding on this striking portrait as the best fit for their tiny canvas, but I wish they and the Postal Service had produced a stamp that was more recognizably the grown-up Flannery, and contained some taste of her strange and noble artistic vision.
     I know she does not present an automatic illustrative equation, like mustache + steamboat = Mark Twain. But a better choice would be a painting made by the author herself, a self-portrait from 1953. She is wearing a yellow straw hat, holding a devilish-looking pheasant and looking straight at you, harmful and brilliant, as if she could smell your stupidity. It is gorgeous and rough and honest and perfect.

CAREFUL READING 

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

         Some estimates are that as many as 8% of adolescents suffer from depression at some time during any one-year period, making it much more common than, for example, eating disorders, which seem to get more attention as a source of adolescent misery.
           Even among psychiatrists and other mental health care professionals, the extent of the disability caused by depression is vastly underestimated. The World Health Organization has found that major depression is the single greatest cause of disability in the world—more than twice as many people are disabled by depression as by the second leading cause of disability, iron-deficiency anemia (贫血症). Other diseases and disorders may get more press coverage or more research money, or more sympathy and concern from a well-meaning public, but major depression causes more long term human misery than any other single disease.
           When I was a resident in psychiatry, we believed that true depression was rare among teenagers, or that insofar as it existed, it was just a normal phase of adolescent development with no lasting consequences. It didn’t take long after I began treating troubled kids to see that this couldn't possibly be true. Research over recent decades has confirmed my impression. These beliefs, if any still holds them, are false and dangerous. In fact, early onset of depression is not normal, and can predict numerous unhappy life events for youngsters, including school failure, teenage pregnancy, and suicide attempts.

         Although depression is increasingly common today, it is among the oldest diseases recorded in the history of medicine. As early as the fourth century, the symptoms of “melancholia” were well known. In other words, depression was first thought of as an exclusively physical illness—the loss of appetite, sleeplessness, irritability, and general depression was believed to have a physical, not a psychological cause. It wasn't until the nineteenth century—when the term depression was invented to substitute for melancholia—that a psychological understanding of the illness began to develop. Eventually this psychological explanation of depression would become the only one, although today it no longer is. We now know that depression has both psychological and physical symptoms, and that both psychological and medical treatments can help to alleviate them. 

CAREFUL READING

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

     I saw Jane last night for the first time in years. She was miserable. She had bleached her hair, trying to hide its true color, just as her rough appearance hid her deep unhappiness. She needed to talk, so we went for a walk. While I thought about my future, the college applications that had recently arrived, she thought about her past, the home she had recently left. Then she spoke. She told me about her love—and I saw a dependent relationship with a dominating man. She told me about the drugs—and I saw that they were her escape. She told me about her goals—and I saw unrealistic material dreams. She told me she needed a friend——and I saw hope，because at least I could give her that.
     We had met in the second grade. Jane was missing a tooth, I was missing my friends. I had just moved across the continent to find cold metal swings and cold smirking faces outside the foreboding doors of my new school. I asked her if I could see her Archie comic book,even though I didn't really like comics；she said yes, even though she didn't really like to share. Maybe we were both looking for a smile. And we found it. We found someone to giggle with late at night, someone to slurp hot chocolate with on the cold winter days when school was canceled and we would sit together by the bay window, watching the snow endlessly falling.
     In the summer, at the pool, I got stung by a bee. Jane held my hand and told me that she was there and that it was okay to cry—so I did. In the fall, we raked the leaves into piles and took turns jumping, never afraid because we knew that the multicolored bed would break our fall.

     Only now, she had fallen and there was no one to catch her. We hadn't spoken in months, we hadn't seen each other in years. I had moved to California; she had moved out of the house. Our experiences were miles apart, making our hearts much farther away from each other than the continent she had just traversed. Through her words I was alienated, but through her eyes I felt her yearning. She needed support in her search for strength and a new start. She needed my friendship now more than ever. So I took her hand and told her that I was there and that it was okay to cry—so she did.

Careful Reading

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

     The appeal of advertising to buying motives can have both negative and positive effects. Consumers may be convinced to buy a product of poor quality or high price because of an advertisement. For example, some advertisers have appealed to people’s desire for better fuel economy for their cars by advertising automotive products that improve gasoline mileage. Some of the products work. Others are worthless and a waste of consumers’ money. 
     Sometimes advertising is intentionally misleading. A few years ago, a brand of bread was offered to dieters with the message that there were fewer calories in every slice. It turned out that the bread was not dietetic (适合于节食的), but just regular bread. There were fewer calories because it was sliced very thin, but there were the same number of calories in every loaf. 
     On the positive side, emotional appeals may respond to a consumer’s real concerns. Consider fire insurance. Fire insurance may be sold by appealing to fear of loss. But fear of loss is the real reason for fire insurance. The security of knowing that property is protected by insurance makes the purchase of fire insurance a worthwhile investment for most people. If consumers consider the quality of the insurance plans as well as the message in the ads, they will benefit from the advertising. 
     Each consumer must evaluate her or his own situation. Are the benefits of the product important enough to justify buying it? Advertising is intended to appeal to consumers．but it does not force them to buy the product. Consumers still control the final buying decision.

SPEED READING
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

     Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, at Shrewsbury, England, the second son of Dr. Robert Darwin, an eminently successful physician. From his earliest youth, Darwin was a passionate lover of the outdoors. As he himself said, "I was born a naturalist. " Every aspect of nature intrigued him. He loved to collect, to fish and hunt, and to read nature books. School, consisting largely of the study of the classics, bored him intolerably. Before he turned seventeen years old, his father sent him to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. But medicine terrified Charles, and he continued to devote much of his time to the study of nature. When it became clear that he did not want to become a physician, his father sent him early in 1828 to Cambridge to study theology. This seemed a reasonable choice, since virtually all the naturalists in England at that time were ministers, as were the professors at Cambridge who taught botany and geology. Darwin's letters and biographical notes show that at Cambridge he devoted more time to collecting beetles, discussing botany and geology with his professors, and hunting and riding with similarly inclined friends than to his studies. Yet he did well in his examinations, and when he took his B. A. in 1831 he stood tenth on the list of nonhonors students. More importantly, when Darwin had completed his Cambridge years he was an accomplished young naturalist. 

     Immediately upon finishing his studies, Darwin received an invitation to join The Beagle as naturalist and companion of Captain Robert FitzRoy, who had been commissioned to survey the coasts of Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, and Peru to provide information for making better charts. The voyage was to be completed within two or three years but actually lasted five. The Beagle left Plymouth on December 27, 1831, when Darwin was twenty-two years old, and returned to England on October 2, 1836. Darwin used these five years to their fullest extent. In his Journal of Researches, he tells about all the places he visited——volcanic and coral islands, tropical forests in Brazil, the vast pampas of Patagonia, a crossing of the Andes from Chile to Tucuman in Argentina, and much, much more. Every day brought unforgettable new experiences, a valuable background for his life's work. He collected specimens from widely different groups of organisms, he dug out important fossils in Patagonia, he devoted much of his time to geology, but most of all he observed aspects of nature and asked himself many questions as to the how and why of natural processes. He asked “why” questions not only about geological features and animal life, but also about political and social situations. And it was his ability to ask profound questions and his perseverance in trying to answer them that would eventually make Darwin a great scientist.

SPEED READING
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

     Joyce Carol Oates published her first collection of short stories, By the North Gate, in 1963, two years after she had received her master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and became an instructor of English at the University of Detroit. Her productivity since then has been tremendous, accumulating in less than two decades up to nearly thirty titles, including novels, collections of short stories and verse, plays, and literary criticism. In the meantime, she has continued to teach, moving in 1967 from the University of Detroit to the University of Windsor in Ontario, and in 1978, to Princeton University. Reviewers have admired her enormous energy, but they also find such a large body of writing very amazing.
     In a period characterized by the abandonment of so much of the realistic tradition by authors such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates has seemed at times determinedly old-fashioned in her insistence on depicting the world as it is. Hers is a world of violence, insanity, fractured love, and hopeless loneliness. Although some of it appears to come from her personal observations, her dreams and her fears, much more is clearly from the experiences of others. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), dealt with stock car racing, though she had never seen a race. In Them (1964) she focused on Detroit from the Depression through the riots of 1967, drawing much of her material from the deep impression made on her by the problems of one of her students. Whatever the source is and however shocking the events or the motivations are, her fictional world nonetheless remains strikingly related to that real one reflected in the daily newspapers, the television news, talk shows and the popular magazines of our day.

SPEED READING

Skim or scan the following passage, and then decide on the best answer.

Suggested Readings:
     Anne Allison, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994. Based on the author’s participant observation, this book explores what it is like to work as a hostess in a club that caters to corporate male employees and discusses how that microculture is linked to men’s corpoerate work culture.
     Fraces Dahlber, ed. Woman the Gatherer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. These path-breaking essays examine the role of women in four different foraging societies, provide insights on human evolution from studies of female chimpanzees, and give an overview of women’s role in human cultural adaptation. 

     Elliot Fratkin, Ariaal Pastoralists of Kenya: Surviving Drought and Development in Africa’s Arid Lands. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1988. Based on several phases of ethnographic research among the Ariaal beginning in the 1970s, this book provides insights about pastoralism in general and the particular cultural strategies of the Ariaal, including attention to social or agaization and family life.
     David Uru Iyam, The Broken Hoe: cultural Reconfiguration in Biase Southeast Nigeria. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Based on fieldwork among the Biase people by a scholar who is a member of a Biase group, this book examines changes since the 1970 in the traditional forms of subsistence—agriculture, fishing, and trade—and related issues such as environmental deterioration and population growth.
     Katherine S. Newman, Falling from Grace: The Experience of Downward Mobility in the American Middle Class. New York: The Free Press, 1988. This book provides ethnographic research on the downwardly mobile of New Jersey as a “special tribe,” with attention to loss of employment by corporate managers and blue-collar workers, and the effects of downward mobility on middle-class family life, particularly women.
     Richard H. Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. Boston: Longman, 1999. Robins takes a critical look at the role of capitalism and global economic growth in creating and sustaining many world problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, violence, and environmental destruction. The last section includes extended case studies to support the argument.
     Deborah Sick , Farmers of the Golden Bean: Costa Rican Households and the Global Coffee Economy. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999. This book is an ethnography of coffee-producing households in Costa Rica that describes the difficulties facing coffee farmers due to unpredictable global forces and the uncertain role of the state as a mediator between the global and the local.

​SPEED READING 

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

     Yellowstone National Park, established by the U. S. Congress as a national park on March 1,1872, is located primarily in the U. S. state of Wyoming, though it also extends into Montana and Idaho. The park was the first of its kind, and is known for its wildlife and its many geothermal (地热的) features, especially Old Faithful Geyser, one of the most popular features in the park. It has many types of ecosystems, but the subalpine (亚高山带的)forest is dominant.
     American Indians have lived in the Yellowstone region for at least 11,000 years. The region was bypassed during the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the early 1800s. Aside from visits by mountain men during the early to mid 1800s, organized exploration did not begin until the late 1860s. The U. S. Army was commissioned to oversee the park just after its establishment. In 1917 administration of the park was transferred to the National Park Service, which had been created the previous year. Hundreds of structures have been built and are protected for their architectural and historical significance, and researchers have examined more than 1,000 archaeological sites.
     Yellowstone National Park spans an area of 3,468 square miles, comprising lakes, canyons, rivers and mountain ranges. Yellowstone Lake is one of the largest high-altitude lakes in North America and is centered over the Yellowstone Caldera, the largest super-volcano on the continent. The caldera is considered an active volcano；it has erupted with tremendous force several times in the last two million years. Half of the world's geothermal features are in Yellowstone, fueled by ongoing volcanic activities. Lava flows and rocks from volcanic eruptions cover most of the land area of Yellowstone. The park is the centerpiece of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the largest remaining, nearly-intact ecosystem in the Earth's northern temperate zone.
     Hundreds of species of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles have been documented, including several that are either endangered or threatened. There are almost 60 species of mammals in the park. Apart from wildlife, there are 1,700 species of trees and other plants native to the park. Another 170 species are considered to be exotic species and are non-native.
     As one of the most popular national parks in the United States, Yellowstone provides numerous recreational opportunities, including hiking, camping, boating, fishing and sightseeing. Paved roads provide close access to the major geothermal areas as well as some of the lakes and waterfalls. Since the mid 1960s, at least 2 million tourists have visited the park almost every year. Nine hotels and lodges, with a total of 2,238 rooms and cabins, are available to tourists from all over the world. Hundreds of employees work either permanently or seasonally for the National Park Service.

​SPEED READING 

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

     The story of Cesar Estrada Chavez begins near Yuma, Arizona. He learned about justice or rather injustice early in his life. Cesar grew up in Arizona; in 1938 he and his family moved to California, He did not like school as a child, probably because at home he spoke only Spanish which was forbidden in school. He felt that education had nothing to do with his migrant（迁移的）way of life. In 1942 he graduated from the eighth grade, and became a migrant farm worker. 

     He joined the U. S. Navy in 1946 .and served for two years. Cesar returned to San Jose where he met and was influenced by Father Donald McDonnell. They talked about farm workers and strikes. Cesar began reading about St. Francis and Gandhi and nonviolence. After Father McDonnell came another very influential person, Fred Ross. Cesar became an organizer for Ross ’ organization，the Community Service Organization (CSO). His first task was voter registration. 

     In 1962 Cesar founded the National Farm Workers Association, later to become the United Farm Workers (UFW). By 1970 the UFW got grape growers to accept union contracts and had effectively organized most of that industry. The farm workers and supporters carried banners with the black eagle, with HUELGA (strike) and VIVA LA CAUSA (Long live our cause). The marchers wanted the state government to pass laws which would permit farm workers to organize into a union and allow collective bargaining agreements. Cesar made people aware of the struggles of farm workers for better pay and safer working conditions. He succeeded through nonviolent tactics. Cesar Chavez and the union sought recognition of the importance and dignity of all farm workers.
     Cesar was willing to sacrifice his own life so that the union would continue and that violence was not used. Cesar fasted many times. In 1968 Cesar fasted for 10 days. He repeated the fast in 1972 for 24 days, and again in 1988 for 36 days. Cesar was able to use the hunger strikes to move legislators to change the laws to improve the lives of farm workers. Because of Cesar's actions, he was jailed many times. What motivated him to do this? He said,"Farm workers are worried that we cannot win without violence. We can win and keep our own self-respect and build a great union that will secure the spirit of all people if we do it through a rededication and recommitment to the struggle for justice through nonviolence. ’’

CAREFUL READING 

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

    I was born in a pleasant old colonial house built near 1750, and bought by my grandfather sixty or seventy years ago. He joined a group of acquaintances who were engaged in the flourishing West Indian trade of that time. For many years he kept and extended his interests in shipping, building ships and buying large quantities of timber, and sending it down the river and then to the sea. The business was still in existence in my early childhood, so I came in contact with the up-country people who sold timber as well as with the sailors and shipmasters of the other side of the business. I used to linger about the busy country stores, and listen to the lively country talk.
    In my grandfather's business household, my father had taken to his book, as old people said, and gone to college and begun that devotion to the study of medicine which only ended with his life. He gave me my first and best knowledge of books by his own delight and dependence upon them, and ruled my early attempts at writing by his good taste. “Don't try to write about people and things, tell them just as they are!” How often my young ears heard these words without comprehending them! But while I was too young and thoughtless to share in an enthusiasm for Sterne or Fielding, and Smollett or Don Quixote, my mother and grandmother were leading me into the pleasant ways of Pride and Prejudice, and The Scenes of Clerical Life, and the delightful stories of Mrs. Oliphant.
    When the time came that my own world of imagination was more real to me than any other, I was sometimes perplexed at my father's directing my attention to certain points of interest in the character or surroundings of our acquaintances. I cannot help believing that he recognized, long before I did myself, in what direction the current of purpose in my life was setting. Now, as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the wise things he said, and the sights he made me see. I may have inherited something of my father's knowledge of human nature, but my father never lost a chance of trying to teach me to observe. I owe a great deal to his patience with a little girl given far more to dreams than to accuracy, and with perhaps too little natural sympathy for the dreams of others.

SPEED READING 

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

           There are guavas (番石榴）at the Shop & Save. I pick one the size of a tennis ball and finger the prickly stem end. It feels familiarly bumpy and firm. The guava is not quite ripe: the skin is still a dark green. I smell it and imagine a pale pink center, the seeds tightly embedded in the flesh.
           A ripe guava is yellow, although some varieties have a pink tinge. The skin is thick, firm, and sweet. Its heart is bright pink and almost solid with seeds. The most delicious part of the guava surrounds the tiny seeds. If you don't know how to eat a guava, the seeds end up in the crevices between your teeth.
         Some years, when the rains have been plentiful and the nights cool, you can bite into a guava and not find many seeds. The guava bushes grow close to the ground, their branches laden with green then yellow fruit that seem to ripe overnight. These guavas are large and juicy, almost seedless, their roundness enticing you to have one more, just one more, because next year the rains may not come.
          As children, we didn't always wait for the fruit to ripen. We raided the bushes as soon as the guavas were large enough to bend the branch.
          A green guava is sour and hard. You bite into it at its widest point, because it's easier to grasp with your teeth. You grimace, your eyes water, and your cheeks disappear as your lips purse into a tight O. But you have another and then another, enjoying the crunchy sounds, the acid taste, the gritty texture of the unripe center. At night, your mother makes you drink castor oil, which she says tastes better than a green guava. That's when you know for sure that you're a child and she has stopped being one.
         I had my last guava the day we left Puerto Rico. It was large and juicy, almost red in the center, and so fragrant that I didn't want to eat it because I would lose the smell. All the way to the airport I scratched at it with my teeth, making little dents in the skin, chewing small pieces with my front teeth, so that I could feel the texture against my tongue, the tiny pink pellets of sweet.
         Today, I stand before a stack of dark green guavas, each perfectly round and hard, each $1.59. The one in my hand is tempting. It smells faintly of late summer afternoons and hopscotch under the mango tree. But this is autumn in New York, and I'm no longer a child. I push my cart away, toward the apples and pears of my adulthood, their nearly seedless ripeness predictable and bittersweet.

SPEED READING
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

     Getting a good night's sleep tonight could guard children against weight gain in the future. According to a new study, putting preschoolers in bed by 8 p. m. could reduce their chances of becoming overweight or obese （肥胖的）later in life by half. Preschoolers are children around the age of 4 or 5.

     The term “obese” refers to calculations of your Body Mass Index，what doctors call BMI. They use a person’s height，weight and age to assess their amount of body fat. BMIs help tell whether a person is underweight，normal, overweight or obese. The World Health Organization says obesity can lead to serious long-term health problems like diabetes （糖尿病），heart disease and stroke. 

     Researchers from the Ohio State University's College of Public Health have found that young children who go to bed after 9 p. m. are twice as likely to be obese later in life. The lead author of the study is Sarah Anderson. She is an associate professor of epidemiology （流行病学）. She studies how diseases spread and how they can be controlled. Anderson says that, for parents, the results of the study support the importance of creating a bedtime routine. She says that having a usual bedtime routine is something “families can do to lower their child’s risk” of becoming overweight.
     A usual, early bedtime, Anderson adds,"is also likely to have positive benefits on behavior and on social, emotional and cognitive development". Researchers used data from 977 children for the study. These children are part of a larger project called the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. The project follows healthy babies born in 1991 in 10 U. S. cities.
     The children were 4—5 years old when their mothers reported their usual weekday bedtime. Researchers then divided the children into three groups: A) those who went to bed by 8 p. m. or earlier ； B ) those who went to bed between 8 p. m. and 9 p. m. and C) those whose bedtimes were after 9 p. m.
     When these children turned 15 years old, the researchers looked at their rates of obesity. Of those with the earliest bedtimes, only one out of 10 was obese. Of those who went to bed between 8 and 9 p. m. ,16 percent became obese. And out of those with the latest bedtimes, 23 percent became obese. Anderson said putting children in bed early does not mean they will immediately fall asleep. But, she adds, it makes it "more likely that children will get the amount of sleep they need to be at their best”.

SPEED READING
Complete the following sentence with the proper form of the word in the bracket.

     English is a vacuum cleaner language; it is able and willing to adopt any words it finds useful.
     Places, peoples, tongues from around the world all have become part of the English vocabulary. They give it flexibility and provide a certain sense of familiarity for people who speak it as a second or foreign language.
     According to the Oxford English Dictionary, English contains worlds from more than 350 living languages.
     “English is a free market,” says Allan Metacalf, author of The World in So Many Words. “Guardians of other languages tend to become alarmed when they notice foreign words creeping in. They say ,‘That’s a terrible thing; keep them out.’ But English is multicultural.”
     Linguistic historians believe that English began to absorb other languages on a large scale in 1066. That was the year when King William, a Norman from what is now France, conquered England. That meant English speakers were ruled by French speakers. The English language had to make some changes.
     During the Renaissance, words flowed into English form Latin and Greek. The Age of Exploration introduced new terms from all corners of the world.
     And America changed everything. America began as an English-speaking land but its language has been and is still shaped by generations of immigrants. Each new group brings new ideas and new expressions. Irish, Italians, Germans, Eastern Europeans, Latinos, Africans, Asians—all change English in some degree.
     Mass culture makes adoptions easier. Today, words like kungfu and chow are no longer odd Chinese words; they have gone mainstream.
     Then there are words invented or given new meanings when English needs them. Some words like e-mail, blurb and fax enter the mainstream. Others like laser begin life as acronyms（首字母缩略）for things that otherwise would be too difficult to say in everyday conversation. 

     Of course, language cannot be separated from culture, and importation depends on the situation. It also depends on whether the word remains useful.
     Linguists predict that foreign words will flow into English even faster as more non-native speakers reach global leadership positions. The pace will increase, but it still will be English, which always is ready to accept new words. This is because English is a practical language with a long tradition of borrowing.

CAREFUL READING 

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

         Some estimates are that as many as 8% of adolescents suffer from depression at some time during any one-year period, making it much more common than, for example, eating disorders, which seem to get more attention as a source of adolescent misery.
           Even among psychiatrists and other mental health care professionals, the extent of the disability caused by depression is vastly underestimated. The World Health Organization has found that major depression is the single greatest cause of disability in the world—more than twice as many people are disabled by depression as by the second leading cause of disability, iron-deficiency anemia (贫血症). Other diseases and disorders may get more press coverage or more research money, or more sympathy and concern from a well-meaning public, but major depression causes more long term human misery than any other single disease.
           When I was a resident in psychiatry, we believed that true depression was rare among teenagers, or that insofar as it existed, it was just a normal phase of adolescent development with no lasting consequences. It didn’t take long after I began treating troubled kids to see that this couldn't possibly be true. Research over recent decades has confirmed my impression. These beliefs, if any still holds them, are false and dangerous. In fact, early onset of depression is not normal, and can predict numerous unhappy life events for youngsters, including school failure, teenage pregnancy, and suicide attempts.

         Although depression is increasingly common today, it is among the oldest diseases recorded in the history of medicine. As early as the fourth century, the symptoms of “melancholia” were well known. In other words, depression was first thought of as an exclusively physical illness—the loss of appetite, sleeplessness, irritability, and general depression was believed to have a physical, not a psychological cause. It wasn't until the nineteenth century—when the term depression was invented to substitute for melancholia—that a psychological understanding of the illness began to develop. Eventually this psychological explanation of depression would become the only one, although today it no longer is. We now know that depression has both psychological and physical symptoms, and that both psychological and medical treatments can help to alleviate them.