Question

【題目】 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 (氧氣). 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 (潛力) 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】

文章主要講述得是失敗是成功的必經(jīng)之路，人們不應該害怕失敗，而是要從失敗中吸取教訓，并且舉例說明失敗是成功之母。

【1】推理題。文章第二，三段主要講述的是“Every failure-even the worst ones – helps us learn to do things differently in the future”. 每一次失敗——即使是最糟糕的失敗——都會幫助我們學會在未來以不同的方式做事。并且舉例登山者Pete Athans的親身經(jīng)歷，故選A。

【2】詞義猜測題。unable不能；unsure不確定；unwilling不愿意；uninterested不感興趣；根據(jù)后句“because our good name depends on success”因為我們的好名聲取決于成功，可知，人們不愿意告訴別人自己的失敗，所以reluctant指的是“不愿意”，故選C。

【3】主旨大意題。整篇文章主要講述的是我們很多人都害怕面對失敗，但是沒有失敗，就不可能取得進展。只有通過一次次的失敗，才能從中總結經(jīng)驗教訓，才能一點點的成功，也就是失敗給我們的回報，故選D。