Perhaps every older generation since ancient times has complained about young people, and today is no different. Isn’t it obvious that kids these days are self-absorbed social network addicts?
However, this summer, my impression of today’s kids has been restored by the story of Rachel Beckwith. She could teach my generation a great deal about maturity (成熟) and unselfishness — even though she’s just 9 years old, or was when she died on July 23.
At age 5, Rachel had her long hair cut off and sent to Locks of Love, which uses hair donations to make artificial hair for children who have lost their own hair because of cancer or other diseases. After that, Rachel announced that she would grow her hair long again and donate it again. And that’s what she did.
Then when she was 8 years old, her church began raising money to build wells in Africa through an organization called “charity: water”. Rachel was astonished when she learned that other children had no clean water, so she skipped her ninth birthday party. Rachel set up a birthday page on the charity: water website with a target of $300. Instead of presents, she asked her friends to donate $9 each to charity: water. Finally Rachel raised only $220 — which had left her just a bit disappointed.
Then, on July 20, a serious traffic accident left Rachel critically injured. Church members and friends, seeking some way of showing support, began donating on Rachel’s birthday page — charitywater.org/Rachel — and donations reached her $300 goal, and kept rising.
When it was clear that Rachel would never regain consciousness, the family decided to remove the life-support machine. Her parents donated her hair for the final time to Locks of Love, and her organs to other children.
Word spread about Rachel’s last fund-raiser (募捐行動(dòng)). Contributions poured in, often they donated $9. The total donations soon topped $100,000, then $300,000.
This is a story not just of one girl, but of a young generation of outstanding problem-solvers working creatively.
【小題1】Which of the following is TRUE of Rachel?

When I was six years old, my mom told me that I could find anyone's number in the phone book. I used to look through the phone book for hours trying to find Michael Jordan's phone number. When I couldn't find it, I just dialed seven numbers. When someone answered, I'd ask, "Is that Michael Jordan?" Obviously, I always had the wrong number.
A year later I started playing basketball at my local recreation center. It was very big. I never thought in my wildest dreams that a basketball court could be inside a building. The recreation center had a special smell in it, sort of like hot rubber. I guessed it was from the shoes hitting the floor so fast and hard. The atmosphere on the court was carefree. Our biggest excitement of the day was when we actually made a shot. We celebrated wins over ice cream at a fast food restaurant.
I got good at it, and my confidence grew. I played it all the time until the sixth grade. As soon as junior high school came, I stopped playing basketball and focused on school. When senior high school started, I tried out for the school team and made it. We worked hard. Every week we did 300 push-ups and 300 sit-ups on our own. Our coach encouraged the sit-ups to keep stomach power, because it gave us so much control when we were playing basketball. If we didn't want to do the sit-ups and push-ups, we could practice dribbling (運(yùn)球) and shooting more. It's just us, the ball, the court and the net. But don't take my word for it. See for yourself. After all, I'm just one kid playing the game.
【小題1】From Paragraph 1 we know that ____.

In the early 1950s, researchers found that people scored lower on intelligence tests if they spoke more than one language. Research in the sixties found the opposite. Bilingual people scored higher than monolinguals, people who speak only one language. So which is it?
Researchers presented their newest studies last month at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The latest evidence shows that being bilingual does not necessarily make people smarter. But researcher Ellen Bialystok says it probably does make you better at certain skills.
Ellen Bialystok said, “Imagine driving down the highway. There’re many things that could capture your attention and you really need to be able to monitor all of them. Why would bilingualism make you any better at that?”
And the answer, she says, is that bilingual people are often better at controlling their attention — a function called the executive control system.
Ms. Bialystok is a psychology professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. She says the best method to measure the executive control system is called the Stroop Test. A person is shown words in different colors. The person has to ignore the word but say the color. The problem is that the words are all names of colors.
Ellen Bialystok said, “So you would have the word blue written in red, but you have to say red. But blue is so salient(顯著的), it’s just lighting up all these circuits(電路) in your brain, and you really want to say blue. So you need a mechanism(機(jī)制) to override that so that you can say red. That’s the executive control system.”
Her work shows that bilingual people continually practice this function. They have to, because both languages are active in their brain at the same time. They need to suppress(抑制) one to be able to speak in the other.
This mental exercise might help in other ways, too. Researchers say bilingual children are better able to separate a word from its meaning, and more likely to have friends from different cultures. Bilingual adults are often four to five years later than others in developing dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.
【小題1】What’s the best title of the text?

Oscar the cat seems to have an unnatural ability for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up (蜷伏) next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means the patient has less than four hours to live. "Many family members take some comfort from it. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," said Dosa, a doctor and assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.
The 2-year-old cat was adopted as a kitten and grew up in a third-floor dementia (癡呆) unit at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, where the facility treats people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease and other illnesses. After about six months, the staff noticed Oscar would make his own rounds, just like the doctors and nurses. He'd smell and observe patients, then sit beside people who would end up dying in a few hours. Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously. "This is not a cat that's friendly to people," he said.
"Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work here," said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill. She was convinced of Oscar's talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn't eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish color, signs that often mean death is near. Oscar wouldn't stay inside the room, though, so Teno thought bis streak was broken. Instead, it turned out the doctor's prediction was roughly 10 hours too early. Sure enough, during the patient's final two hours, nurses told Teno that Oscar joined the woman at her bedside.
Doctors say most of the people who get a visit from the sweet-faced, gray-and-white cat are so ill that they probably don't know he's there, so patients aren't aware he's a predictor of death. Most families are grateful for the advance warning, although one wanted Oscar out of the room while a family member died. When Oscar is put outside, he paces and meows his displeasure.
No one's certain if Oscar's behavior is scientifically significant or points to a cause. Teno wonders if the cat senses mysterious scents or reads something into the behavior of the nurses who raised him. Nursing home staff aren't concerned with explaining Oscar, so long as he gives families a better chance at saying goodbye to the dying. The staff recently gave Oscar a wall sign publicly praising his "sympathetic care."
【小題1】What makes Oscar the cat so special?

As a young girl, Margaret “Mattie” Knight never played with dolls, preferring to make toys for her brothers instead. In 1849, Knight went to work in a cotton factory where she witnessed a “shuttle,” a device that carries thread back and forth across a textile loom（紡布機(jī)）, fly off the machine when the thread broke, striking and killing a young boy about her own age.
The 12-year-old Knight developed a safety mechanism that made it impossible for a shuttle to leave the loom. The design was so effective, soon virtually every new power loom carried her invention, saving countless workers from injury or death. Being so young, she didn’t bother to patent the device, so she never received payment.
Knight wouldn’t make the same mistake later in life when she invented a machine that could produce flat-bottomed paper bags. Knight had built a small wooden model in her home, but she needed a metal version to show it could hold up to the stress of mass production. So she hired Charles Annan to make the full-sized machine for her, only to have him try to claim the patent for himself. When Knight sued（起訴）, Annan’s argument was that the design had to be his, because no woman could possibly understand the complex mechanics. Knight proved him wrong when she brought back her wooden prototype and explained how every part worked. She won the case in 1871, making her the second woman to hold an American patent. Over a hundred years later, her design is still used as the basis for many modern flat-bottom bag machines.
But that wasn’t the last the world heard of Mattie Knight. During her lifetime, she made about 90 inventions and received 26 patents, becoming one of the most productive female inventors of the 19th century.
【小題1】We can learn from Paragraph 1 that ________.

Studying volcanoes is a demanding profession. Hazel Rymer frequently has to struggle through rainforests, climb to the top of mountains, then climb 200 metres into the crater of active volcanoes. But the 38-year-old volcanologist does her best to make it sound less alarming than it is. “Driving to work is more risky,” she insists. “And the deepest I go into the crater of a volcano is about 300 metres,” she adds, trying to make it all sound as ordinary as taking the dog for a walk.
Hazel has been studying volcanoes for a long time, so it’s not surprising she is used to the danger. Her interest in volcanoes began at school. A teacher gave her a book about Pompeii. “I remember reading about the eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction of the city,” she explains. “The thought of all those people just frozen in time had quite an effect on me and I am still excited by their dangerous beauty today.”
Nowadays, volcanoes are getting more and more unpredictable. There have been many changes in sea level caused by global warming and melting ice caps. These have resulted in some dormant volcanoes erupting, so studying them is more dangerous than ever before. Hazel says that although she doesn’t take any unnecessary risk she has had some frightening moments. Her worst experience was on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily, when she was slowly surrounded by lava. “I had a choice of walking ten hours to get around the lava flow or just walking across it,” she explains. She chose to pick a path across the cooler rocks in the lava stream. “I guess it was five metres. The flow was 1,000°C, so if you hesitated your boots would begin to melt. It was scary, but it really was a practical decision --- there wasn't time to do anything else.”
And what about the future? “I haven’t been to the volcanoes in Indonesia yet. And I would love to spend some time working in the Antarctic,” she says. “I would also like to know why quiet lava flows erupt from some volcanoes and why other volcanoes go bang.” In other words, Hazel Rymer won’t be exchanging her volcanoes for the relative safety of driving to work just yet.
【小題1】Hazel’s claim that “driving to work is more risky” than exploring volcanoes shows that ______.

Humor is a most effective, yet frequently neglected, means of handling the difficult situations in our lives. It can be used for patching up differences, apologizing, saying “no,” criticizing, getting the other fellow to do what you want without his losing face. For some jobs, it’s the only tool that can succeed. It is a way to discuss subjects so sensitive that serious dialogue may start a quarrel. For example, many believe that comedians on television are doing more today for racial and religious tolerance than people in any other forum.
Humor is often the best way to keep a small misunderstanding from escalating into a big deal. Recently a neighbor of mine had a squabble with his wife as she drove him to the airport. Airborne, he felt miserable, and he knew she did, too. Two hours after she returned home, she received a long-distance phone call. “Person-to-person for Mrs. I. A. Pologize,” intoned the operator. “That’s spelled ‘P’ as in…” In a twinkling, the whole day changed from grim to lovely at both ends of the wire.
An English hostess with a quick wit was giving a formal dinner for eight distinguished guests whom she hoped to enlist in a major charity drive. Austerity（節(jié)儉）was a fashion in England at the time, and she had asked her children to serve the meal. She knew that anything could happen—and it did, just as her son, with the studied concentration of a tightrope walker, brought in a large roast turkey. He successfully elbowed the swinging dining-room door, but the backswing threw the bird onto the dining-room floor.
The boy stood rooted: guests stared at their plates. Moving only her head the hostess smiled at her son,” No harm, Daniel,” she said. “Just pick him up and take him back to the kitchen”… she enunciated clearly so he would think about what she was saying… “and bring in the other one.”
A wink and a one-liner instantly changed the dinner from a red-faced embarrassment to a conspiracy of fun.
【小題1】What is the main idea of the passage?

Did you ever wonder who invented products like Liquid Paper, Kevlar or paper bags? Most would think a man invented these items. Guess what? Women invented each of these. What? You don’t believe me? Well, read this:
Liquid Paper was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham in 1951 and originally called Mistake Out. Being a typist, Bette was increasingly irritated with being unable to erase her typing mistakes. The messy business left her hands black and the paper dirty. Bette was good at painting and remembered that an artist paints over mistakes. She applied that same principle to typing mistakes and Liquid Paper was born, making Bette into a self-made millionaire.
Kevlar, yes, the Kevlar of the bullet proof vest（防彈衣）—what police officers and soldiers wear, was invented by Stephanie Kwolek. Stephanie worked for the DuPont Company as a research chemist. She was asked to find a high-performance fiber. Originally, this fiber was intended to be used for car tires (輪胎). However, the fiber she developed in 1964 was amazing and is still used in products such as sailboats, skis, shoes, and yes, bullet proof vests. In 1995 Stephanie was named to the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame.
Margaret Knight invented a machine that revolutionized the making of paper bags. Paper bags had been made like envelopes but Margaret developed a machine that would fold and paste（粘）a flat-bottom paper bag, the very same type we still use today. Margaret’s family was poor and she started working at the age of nine. Her first invention at the age of twelve was a safety tool for a loom（織布機(jī)）. Later she worked for the Columbia Paper Bag Company. It was there that she worked on improving the making of paper bags. She was issued her patent（專利）in 1870.
So next time you use a new product or an old one, will you wonder who made it? Do some research on the web and answer a few questions like: Who invented it? How was it invented? You may be surprised at some of the stories you uncover.
【小題1】The underlined word “irritated” in Paragraph 2 is the closest in meaning to_________.

閱讀短文，根據(jù)短文的內(nèi)容判斷正誤，正確的涂A，錯(cuò)誤的涂B。
When my grandmother was raising me in Stamps，Arkansas，she had a particular routine(慣例)when people who were known to be whiners entered her store. My grandmother would ask the customer，“How are you doing today，Thomas？” The person would reply，“Not so good today, Henderson.You see，it’s this summer heat.I just hate it.It just makes me tired.It’s almost killing me.”Then my grandmother would stand calmly，her arms folded，and say，“Uh-huh，uh huh.”
As soon as the complainer was out of the store，my grandmother would call me to stand in front of her.Then she would say the same thing she had said at least a thousand times，it seemed to me.“Jane，did you hear what so-and-so complained about？”And I would nod.Grandmother would continue，“Jane，there are people who went to sleep all over the world last night，poor and rich and black and white，but they will never wake again.Those dead people would give anything，anything at all for just five minutes of this weather that person was complaining about.So you watch yourself about complaining，Jane.What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it.If you can’t change it，change the way you think about it.Don’t complain.”
I have learned a lot from my grandmother.Her opinions always hit the nail on the head.Whining is not only impolite, but can be dangerous.
【小題1】The underlined word “whiners” in Paragraph 1 refers to those people who enter a store regularly.
【小題2】 From what the author’s grandmother said we can infer that she was against whining.
【小題3】The author’s grandmother told her to treasure every moment of her life.
【小題4】The author was told different things after the whiners left Grandmother’s store.
【小題5】The purpose of the author in writing the passage is to show that complaining is not only rude but harmful.

Now we can see a man and his wife at the breakfast table. They are not speaking to each other. They haven’t spoken to each other at the breakfast table for years. The husband is reading his newspaper. We can’t see his face. The wife looks very worried as she gets a cup of tea ready for him. Today she is using a new kind of tea for the first time. The husband picks up his cup. He isn’t interested. He tastes his tea. Suddenly he puts down his newspaper. Something is different! Can it be the tea? He takes another taste. It’s wonderful. He smiles. He looks at his wife and says in surprise, “Doris, when did you cut your hair?” Doris is pleased. She answers, “Two months ago.” Doris asks, “ Herbie , when did your hair begin to become white?” He answers, “A long time ago.” Doris says, “We have been together for many years, but we never cared about each other.” Now they aren’t worried any longer. Breakfast is different. Has a new kind of tea changed their lives?
【小題1】This story happens______________________.