In one way of thinking, failure is a part of life. In another way, failure may be a way towards success. The “spider story” is often told. Robert Bruce, leader of the Scots in the 13th century, was hiding in a cave from the English. He watched a spider spinning a web（蜘蛛織網(wǎng)）. The spider tried to reach across a rough place in the rock. He tried six times without success. On the seventh time he made it and went on to spin his web. Bruce is said to have taken heart and to have gone on to defeat the English… Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, made hundreds of models that failed before he found the right way to make one.
So what? First, always think about your failure. What caused it? Were conditions right? Were you in top from yourself? What can you change so things will go right next time?
Second, is the goal you’re trying to reach the right one? Try to do some thinking about what your real goals may be. Think about his question, “If I do succeed in this, where will it get me?” This may help you prevent failure in things you shouldn’t be doing anyway.
The third thing to bear in mind about failure is that it’s a part of life. Learn to “l(fā)ive with yourself” even though you may have failed. Remember, “You can’t win them all.”
【小題1】This passage deals with two sides of failure. In paragraph 1, the author talks mainly about________. 

Can hard work be replaced by machines in agriculture? Yes, man is trying out automatic (自動化) farming. It is fun to watch a machine picking tomatoes. The strange machine sails like a ship across a sea of plants. In its front is a hole. As the machine moves forward, tomato plants are pulled into the hole. The tomatoes are gathered while the rest of the plants are thrown back onto the fields.  Twelve workers sit on top of the machine. They rapidly pick out the bad fruit from the tomatoes. A red stream of ripe tomatoes is being sent into a cart that is pulled alongside the machine. One driver and twelve workers can pick in an hour ten tons of a new kind of tomato. Without the invention, it would take 60 men to do the job.
Not all plants cooperate well with the farming machines. Take lettuce(萵苣)for example, seeds plants in the same field in the same time ripe at different times. The only way to tell a ripe head of lettuce is to look at it and feel it. And now there is a machine even to do that!
There is a special machine to test lettuce. When it moves over one that feels right, it sends a signal back to the picking machine which goes behind. The cutting and picking is done satisfactorily by this unit.
64．This passage mainly tells us something about        .
A．the machines picking tomatoes      B．a(chǎn)utomatic farming
C．the science of farming     D．a(chǎn)griculture machines 
65．After the bad tomatoes are picked out,        .
A．the others are sent into a cart nearby
B．the workers carry them away
C．the others are put into bags
D．the others will be thrown into the field
66．The last paragraph mainly tells us          .
A．that lettuce is not good to get in
B．that a special unit of machines has been made to test and pick lettuce
C．a(chǎn)bout a wonderful machine that can be used pick all kinds of plants
D．that lettuce is not a cooperation plant

The best way to get a serious point ____ without causing offense is ____ humour.  

A.across; with                      B.out; within                       C.across; in                                   D.down; by

Let’s say you took violin lessons all through elementary school, but you haven’t got the instrument out of its case for years. Were all those lessons a waste of your parents’ money because you didn’t become a violinist?
Even though it has been a long time since you played the violin, a new study shows that as little as one year of music training can have a positive impact (影響) on your brain that will last the rest of your life.
In an experiment, researchers compared children who had taken music lessons to those who hadn’t. Laurel Trainor, who studies music and the mind, discovered that the musically-trained children had better brain responses in certain sound recognition exams. Trainor’s findings show the possibility that musical education can actually improve the brain’s hearing cortex(大腦皮層). “The study’s results show that music training affects attention and memory, and helps children develop learning skills. In this way music training might lead to better learning across a number of fields,” Trainor said in a statement. The effects of music education are even more obvious on children with difficulty in reading and writing and other language-related disabilities.
So, whether you can play a good piece of music or not, it’s likely that your years of music lessons have prepared your brain for all the speeches, emails, and adult conversations that are part of your life today. We should help make sure that children today have the same opportunities for music, and help out by volunteering with or donating instruments to your school’s music education department.
【小題1】Compared with children who haven’t taken music lessons, musically-trained children _______.

We live in a very competitive world. Everybody seems to be competing with someone at some level. Each week we spend hours playing or watching others compete in sporting activities all over the world. We cannot help being impressed by the level of excellence that these people achieve.
In sport and business, competition encourages excellence in performance. Where there is no competition, improvement in performance is less likely. Some level of competition is a have-to in all aspects of life.
The following story makes this point.
As two friends are hiking in the forest they come across a huge, ferocious and obviously hungry bear. Its next meal has just come into sight, and they are it! The first friend calculates that the bear will catch them in 27.3 seconds. At that point, she panics, realizing there is no escape. She faces her friend, with the fear of death in her eyes. To her amazement, she observes that her friend is not scared at all. On the contrary, her friend is quickly but calmly taking off her hiking boots and putting on running shoes. “What do you think you’re doing?” the first hiker says to her companion. “You’ll never be able to run faster than that bear”. “That’s true,” says the companion, “but all I have to do is escape, faster than you.”
We all compete when the motivation is strong enough. However, competition is not the real purpose of life. Fulfilling the measure of our creation can only be achieved individually.
Most of time, we are not in competition with any other person, so we do not have to compare ourselves with others. There is only one person that can fulfill our role and that is us. This means that others cannot beat us to the finish line because there is no race. This is not to say that others do not have a similar role to us, but it is never the same. This is important to understand if we are going to enjoy life. Every human being is unique and cannot be cloned. In this, I am not referring to the body, only to the spirit, soul, or the essence of a person.
【小題1】The first four paragraphs tell us that competition       .