I had just moved to San Antonio, Texas. I worked for the tour bus service taking tourists on a short tour of the city's historic places and would end up at the Alamo.

    I was driving back from my last tour on a cool February day on my way back from the San Femando Catholic church with no one on my bus when I saw a man dressed in rags, thinking this person must be an actor or something walking around. I stopped and asked him, “Need a ride?” Without saying anything he just walked on broad and sat down in seat behind me.

    “Where are you heading?” I asked him. He looked up into the mirror at me and replied. “I've got to get to the fort(要塞)and report to Colonel(上校)Travis that the Mexicans are here!” I laughed to myself thinking that this man was a serious actor.

    “I'm guessing you mean the Alamo?” I said back to him. I looked up and saw he wasn't smiling nor laughing. All throughout the ride he was staring in amazement at all the towering skyscrapers and the buildings along the street.

    “I remember when this town was nothing more than a little trading village!” He finally said to me.

    “So what's your name?” I asked him.

    “Daniel Cloud, yours?”

    “David Zime.” I replied as I turned the corner of the street and laid eyes upon the Alamo.

    I pulled up to the sidewalk and opened the door. Cloud got out of his seat and came up to me.

    “Thanks for the ride.” He said extending his hand. I took his palm and it was freezing cold like he just stepped out of the freezer.

    “Not a problem, Mr. Cloud, and don't worry about the fee. It's on the house.” He nodded his head in gratitude like all us Texans do and walked away.

    It wasn't until then that I noticed that he was soaked(浸；泡)to the bone in dripping water and we had not a single drop of rain in a month or more. I just shook my head and closed the door behind him. When I turned around. Discovered amazingly how fast Cloud had gone away!

    A few days later I was reading a book about the Battle of the Alamo when I discovered the most shocking thing I had ever discovered. The names of the 183 defenders of the Alamo were listed on the roll of honor, including Daniel Cloud, who spotted the Mexicans before they took over the streets of San Antonio in February of 1836, and his post was on top of the San Femando Church where I had picked him up!

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    I want to tell you the story of one of my old friends called Bob，His teachers called him A Troublemaker，They also said that he had no future and no hope. But now he owns a small second -hand bookstore store which makes him enough money to live on and also to support his mother.

    He told me that after he finished grade nine, he went to study at a technical college. He was a pretty bad student so he became one of the gang (一帮) leaders there. Many of them got caught many times for fighting.

    It looked like nothing could change his life. That was until one sad day when his father died. That changed everything.

    After his father died, his mother had to work very hard to make enough money to support the family. He told me that he really pitied his mum after his dad died. He felt that he needed to earn some money rather than let his mum work alone. He loved reading cartoon(卡通)books and had been collecting them for years. As his family was short of money, he decided that he should sell them. He did this by the side of the road where his mother was selling food.

    Soon he realized that his books were very popular. So he decided to set up his own business. He started his business by going around buying cartoon books from other people. He bought them for 25% and then sold them for half price. He could make enough money to help support the family.

    He was a troublemaker to his teachers but he is a hero to me. If you are judged as a bad student or as someone being stupid, I suggest you pay no attention to what they say. Just do your best in everything. Don't give up so easily. Believe in yourself. If you think that you can do it, then you can. Believe me, one day you could be more successful than those persons who looked down upon you.

阅读短文，从每题所给的四个选项(A、B、C和D)中，选出最佳选项。

    Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer who helped shape the course of American literature. His life was full of tragedy and despair, but he managed some of the most influential American literature of the 19th century and continues to influence writers to this day.

    The early life of Edgar Allan Poe was quite miserable.Born in 1809, Poe was not yet three years old when his parents died.Adopted by a wealthy family,he got into trouble at school.He  entered the United States Military Academy at West Point,but he dropped out without graduating. His misery continued to his adult life.Later,because of a failed marriage, he suffered from mental illness. He was so upset about real life that he turned to writing.Expressing himself in an unreal and imaginary world was his only comfort.

    The tragedies in Poe's life influenced the tone,style and contents of his writing.His stories usually include death,which help build his reputation as a master of"dark"literature.In his The

    Tell-Tale Heart, the main character goes crazy and kills his roommate while in The Black Cat, the narrator kills his cat in a fit of madness.

    Poe died at the age of 40 in 1849.His life was tragic and short,but his legacy(遗产) is enormous.Poe is credited with creating crime fiction,and many say he contributed greatly to the appearance of science fiction.Fascinated by the scientific theories and new inventions of his time, he wrote about imaginary societies in the future.Writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle,the author of Sherlock Holmes,regarded Poe as the father of detective fiction. Jules Verne, a French writer who helped popularize science fiction,said Poe's work had a direct influence on the stories he wrote.

    No one is sure how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids near Cairo. But a new study suggests they used a little rock 'n' roll. Long ago builders could have attached wooden poles to the stones and rolled them across the sand, the scientists say.

    "Technically, I think what they're proposing is possible." physicist Daniel Bonn said.

    People have long puzzled over how the Egyptians moved such huge rocks. And there's no obvious answer. On average, each of the two million big stones weighed about as much as a large pickup truck. The Egyptians somehow moved the stone blocks to the pyramid site from about one kilometer away.

    The most popular view is that Egyptian workers slid the blocks along smooth paths. Many scientists suspect workers first would have put the blocks on sleds. Then they would have dragged them along paths. To make the work easier, workers may have lubricated the paths either with wet clay or with the fat from cattle. Bonn has now tested this idea by building small sleds and dragging heavy objects over sand.

    Evidence from the sand supports this idea. Researchers found small amounts of fat, as well as a large amount of stone and the remains of paths.

    However, phyficmt Josepn West thought there might have been a simpler way, who led the new study. West said, "I was inspired while watching a television program showing how sleds might have helped with pyramid construction. I thought, "Why don't they just try rolling the things?" A square could be turned into a rough sort of wheel by attaching wooden poles to its sides, he realized. That, he noted, should make a block of stone "a lot easier to roll than a square".

    So he tried it.

    He and his students tied some poles to each of four sides of a 30-kilogram stone block. That action turned the block into somewhat a wheel. Then they placed the block on the ground.

    They wrapped one end of a rope around the block and pulled. The researchers found they could easily roll the block along different kinds of paths. They calculated that rolling the block required about as much force as moving it along a slippery path.

    West hasn't tested his idea on larger blocks, but he thinks rolling has clear advantages over sliding. At least, workers wouldn't have needed to carry cattle fat or water to smooth the paths.

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