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题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通

广东省佛山一中、珠海一中、金山中学2018-2019学年高一下学期英语期中考试试卷

阅读理解

    When I graduated from high school, I wanted to major in comparative literature. But, once I found out my friends were going into "real" majors, like marketing, nursing, and engineering, I figured I needed to do the same to ensure a good career. So I changed my mind and chose Business Management as my major. I forced myself to believe that I would enjoy it and succeed in the future, but eventually I exhausted myself understanding the economy and trying new marketing techniques. Coming out of this experience, I realize it is ok to be different from others and to study things like art history and other majors offered in the College of Humanities(人文学科)!

    The worries most people have about a Humanities degree and finding a career afterwards are that the majors are too abstract, and one will not obtain any applicable skills. Actually ideas discussed in Humanities classes, which are occasionally different from what people commonly believe, offer a broad perspective(视角). How could one effectively be an unbiased(无偏见的)writer with only a knowledge of the popular opinion of society? How could one speak persuasively with closed minds? Only seeing the world through a single perspective leads to missed learning, missed friendships, and missed growth! With a broader perspective, we'll be freer, more open-minded, and less limited in what we can become!

    STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates learn actual skills in their studies, while humanities majors learn “soft skills” like communicating effectively through writing critically and speaking persuasively, synthesizing(综合)ideas through gathering and interpreting information, and developing cultural awareness. Do those soft skills sound useless and inapplicable to you? Think of it. How often do you communicate with others? Produce ideas? Encounter people from other cultures? Every day. Every SECOND of every day. So why not master these skills?

    If you choose a major in the College of Humanities, you will be needed. The job market is quietly creating thousands of openings a week for people who can bring a humanist's grace to our rapidly evolving high-tech future. Your skills will be valuable to any workplace you hope to be in. Chase after your dream major with all your energy, no matter what other people think.

(1)、Why did the author choose Business Management as his major at first?
A、He was tired of learning comparative literature. B、He came to enjoy learning marketing techniques. C、He wanted to go to the same university as his friends. D、He believed Business Management was more practical.
(2)、According to the author, what is a possible way to gain a broad perspective?
A、Making more friends and learning from them. B、Exchanging ideas in a philosophy class. C、Opening your mind to future possibilities. D、Getting to know the popular opinion of society.
(3)、In which of the following situations do soft skills play the most important role?
A、Writing a software program. B、Performing a heart operation. C、Playing a musical instrument. D、Negotiating with a business partner.
(4)、What could be the best title for the passage?
A、Stick to Your Desired major B、Broaden Your Perspective C、How to Acquire Soft Skills D、Humanities vs. STEM
举一反三
根据短文内容,选择最佳答案。

    Could a cave be the place of buried treasure in a small village in Marajgushu, near Navasha, Kenya? A rumor of treasure has some villagers dreaming of wealth, while ohters see it as a cheat. It's said that in the 1800s a white man left treasure inside the caves.

    This system of caves has become the center of excitement in the village. It is unclear where the rumor came from, but some local people believe white settlers hid gold and other precious metals in the cave before leavign the area, many years ago.

    Local villager Edward Maina says the rumors have brought a lot of treasure hunters flooding into town to dig in the caves. Villages say original treasure seekers entered the cave nearly two months ago before being arrested by police. Local governmetns closed up the entrance, but they broke back in.

    While neither gold nor silver has been found yet, the cave does guard another important resource: water. Many depend on a natural spring coming from the cave and local officials, among them Ward Councilor Gaka Mwaniki, worry the digging could affect or dirty the supply.

    “There's nothing. We've seen ourselves there's nothing in those caves. The cave is natural. It's the water table that they're affecting” says Mwaniki.

    Local resident James Mbugua Njenga wants the situation brought under control. “If at all there's treasure inside there, let the government come and dig and protect the water table,”says Njenga.

    It might be true. It might be a cheat. Whatever the case, treasure hunters continue to be attracted to the mystery of the caves.

阅读理解

    Some years ago, writing in my diary used to be a usual activity. I would return from school and spend the expected half hour recording the day's event, feelings, and impressions in my little blue diary. I did not really need to express my emotions by way of words, but I gained a certain satisfaction from seeing my experiences forever recorded on paper. After all, isn't accumulating memories a way of preserving the past?

    When I was thirteen years old, I went on a long journey on foot in a great valley, well-equipped with pens, a diary, and a camera. During the trip, I was busy recording every incident, name and place I came across. I felt proud to be spending my time productively, dutifully preserving for future generations a detailed description of my travels. On my last night there, I wandered out of my tent, diary in hand. The sky was clear and lit by the glare of the moon, and the walls of the valley looked threatening behind their screen of shadows. I automatically took out my pen….

    At that point, I understood that nothing I wrote could ever match or replace the few seconds I allowed myself to experience the dramatic beauty of the valley. All I remembered of the previous few days were the dull characterizations I had set down in my diary.

    Now, I only write in my diary when I need to write down a special thought or feeling. I still love to record ideas and quotations that strike me in books, or observations that are particularly meaningful. I take pictures, but not very often—only of objects I find really beautiful. I'm no longer blindly satisfied with having something to remember when I grow old. I realize that life will simply pass me by if I stay behind the camera, busy preserving the present so as to live it in the future.

    I don't want to wake up one day and have nothing but a pile of pictures and notes. Maybe I won't have as many exact representations of people and places; maybe I'll forget certain facts, but at least the experiences will always remain inside me. I don't live to make memories—I just live, and the memories form. themselves.

阅读理解

    Changing technology stimulates (刺激) the brain and increases intelligence. But that may only be true if the technology challenges us. In a world run by intelligent machines, our lives could get a lot simpler. Would that make us less intelligent?

    After the Industrial Revolution, machines began to replace manual workers. The process played out in agriculture as well as manufacturing so that groups of agricultural workers were replaced and forced to move to cities to make a living.

    When machines took away much of the manual work, people became less physically active and gained weight. The sedentary (久坐的) lifestyle contributed to a worldwide spreading of overweight and related metabolic disorders such as heart disease, secondary diabetes and kidney disease .

    As our bodies rested, our brains were forced to work harder, however. It is much more difficult to drive through an overcrowded modern city than it is to move around in a small rural village, for instance. Modern jobs are also more complex and urgent and they require more education because employees need to process new information quickly. Even during our leisure time, our brains work harder due to greater availability of books and explosion of audiovisual media, for entertainment, study, music, news, and so forth.

    Now in the Internet age, the amount of information grows fast along with the advance of electronic technologies. The number of people with whom we interact electronically grows by leaps and bounds thanks to the ease of use of social media like Facebook and Twitter.

    All of this extra work for our brains makes us more intelligent. That helps explain why human intelligence increases steadily from generation to generation in all developed countries, a phenomenon named the Flynn Effect. Of course, there are other reasons, including improved nutrition, better medical practices that reduce brain damage, and improved sanitation and public health that reduce diseases of childhood.

    In the P.G Wodehouse novels, Bertie Wooster got away with being a fool because Jeeves was there to back him up with superior brain power. Similarly, people of the future are at risk of being less intelligent because machines will do their thinking for them.

    Artificial intelligence is taking over many human jobs. For instance, planes are being flown much of the time by automatic pilots. Moreover, the complex problem of controlling air traffic around large modern airports is also achieved by artificial intelligence that operates well beyond the capability of mere human air traffic controllers.

    Artificial intelligence exists in many fields of modern life for the simple reason that intelligent machines can already outperform humans, including some aptitudes (天资) which were once thought to be a human advantage, such as playing chess or recalling details in a game of Jeopardy.

    Machine intelligence is increasing much faster than human intelligence. As machines get smarter, they will do more of our thinking for us and make life easier.

    Instead of struggling to identify ourselves to some electronic system via passwords that are secure only if they are hard to remember, the system will work harder to identify us using biometrics (生物测定学) such as fingerprints or even the individual sound of our hearts. More technologies of the future may also be voice-activated so that we will talk with machines much as we would talk to a friend.

    In the future, the electronic assistant will develop to the point where it serves similar functions as a real living chief male servant of a house, fulfilling requests such as: “Organize a dinner party for six on Thursday, Jeeves, and invite the usual guests .”

    At that point, our long struggle with challenging technologies is at an end. Like Bertie Wooster, we can take it easy knowing that the hard work of planning and organizing is being done by a better brain—the electronic assistant. Starved of mental effort, our brains will return to an earlier or less advanced form.

    The future is still in the fog.

阅读理解

    A person can use all five senses while spending time with dolphins. We can see them play in the waves, hear them call, and feel their skin. Dolphins can sense you, too, but not in all the same ways. They have good eyesight, for example, but no sense of smell. Sensory biologists try to understand connections between animal behaviors and the senses. One team of these scientists recently made an unexpected discovery about certain dolphins.

    The researchers found that Guiana dolphins can detect electric fields, an ability that may help them find fish to eat. The secret to this newly found sense, say the scientists, is hidden in the dolphins' snouts (口鼻部).

    "We were really surprised to find this in the dolphin. Nobody had expected it," said Wolf Hanke, who led the new dolphin study.

    Hanke and his team suspected the dolphin's electro-sense might have something to do with small dimples (酒窝) on the animal's snout. "We thought they must have some functions," Hank said. To find out for certain, his team studied two Guiana dolphins.

    The scientists first studied the dimples of a 29-year-old dolphin that had died of natural causes. Under a microscope, the dimples looked familiar: they were similar to the sensors used by other animals to detect electric fields.

    Next, Hanke and his team tested a live dolphin, a 28-year-old named Paco, to see if he could recognize an electric field. They taught Paco to swim close to a device that could create a weak electric field in the water. Then the team taught Paco to swim away from the device if he detected any changes. When the scientists created an electric field, Paco swam away—showing that he knew something had changed. When there was no electric field, Paco stayed there. When Paco's snout was covered in plastic, he didn't react to the electric field.

    Paco's behavior told the scientists that the dolphin used his snout to detect the tiny electric field. "This is a major breakthrough," Peter Madsen, a sensory biologist, said.

 阅读下列短文,从每题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中选出最佳选项。

The message is drummed into us from childhood: forgive people who've wronged you, because it's the right thing to do. Forgiveness is a virtue, we're told—the only way for us to truly move on and heal, freed from the baggage of bearing ill will.

However, I'm not buying it. Forgiving someone can indeed be a beautiful thing, but it's not always what's best for us. In fact, if someone has hurt you deeply and the relationship isn't healthy, trying to "fix" things can do more harm than good.

Most of us would probably agree that forgiving a wrongdoer means letting go of negative feelings—like anger and resentment—towards them, as if nothing happened. Actually this isn't helpful. It pressures us to minimize our feelings—to say "it's OK" when for us, it isn't. While it's not a good idea to focus on negative thoughts, recognizing and processing all of that pain is an important part of the healing journey.

A 2010 research paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that folks who forgave partners that didn't make them feel valued had less respect for themselves. Letting minor offences(冒犯) that happen now and again slide can be great for any relationship, but repeatedly forgiving bad behavior can encourage that person to keep hurting you.

At least, that's what 2011 research by psychology professor James McNulty argues. He found that when a partner was more likely to forgive those acts, the aggressor was more likely to keep committing them. McNulty suggests that this is because facing the consequences of their actions is what motivates people to change their ways, and being offered a clean slate can be a kind of pass to avoid making changes. So forgiving frequent and major offences, like verbal or physical abuse, can do more harm than good.

For me, this speaks to the core tension in the idea. Instead of looking to forgiveness like a magic medicine, we can focus on recognizing what happened and coming to terms with it, however that looks for us and without any sense of obligation towards our offender.

阅读下列短文,从每题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中选出最佳选项。

Coding(编码) apps and programming apps for kids are becoming increasingly popular. Here are some of the best apps for teaching kids to code.

Scratch

Scratch is by far the most popular coding app for kids, and it is now used in many schools all over the world. It is available for free on the web as well as for Android and iOS, which is why it is so popular. Created in 2003 by MIT students and staff, its coding language is designed for children aged 7 to 16.

The language employs visual blocks or bricks that can be dragged and dropped on a workspace to construct logical chains. As a result, the child will have a better understanding of the fundamental principles of coding.

Daisy the Dinosaur

Daisy the Dinosaur is a free iPad and iPhone programming app. What distinguishes it from the rest is that it is designed specifically for children aged 4 to 7. The app was developed by the same team that created the Hopscotch coding app for kids. If you've ever used that app, Daisy the Dinosaur has a similar user-friendly interface with limited features that is best for beginners.

Cargo-Bot

Cargo-Bot is a free coding app that is available for both Android and iOS devices. It is appropriate for children aged 10 and up. This app specialises in puzzle challenges involving a robotic arm that must be programmed to perform various tasks, most notably moving coloured boxes to create a specific design or pattern.

Kodable

Another relatively well-known coding app for kids is Kodable.' It is free for: both the iPhone and iPad, but there is no option for Android or the web. Kodable is appropriate for both younger children and older teenagers(from 8 years old and up). It is also remarkable for guiding users from a basic to a complex level of coding.

The approach is very game-like, with users able to select a character to guide them through the levels.

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