A farmer had a brother in town who was a gardener, and his brother had a garden full of the finest fruit trees. So his skill and his beautiful trees were famous everywhere. One day the farmer went into the town to visit his brother, and was surprised at the trees that grew quite well.

      "Look, my brother," said the gardener. "I will give you an apple tree, the best from my garden, and you, and your children, and your children's children will enjoy it."

       Then the gardener called his workmen and ordered them to take up the tree and carry it to his brother's farm. They did so, and the next morning the farmer began to wonder where he should plant it.

"If I plant it on the hill," he said to himself, "the wind might catch it and shake down the delicious fruit before it is ripe. If I plant it close to the road, passersby will see it and take away the apples--but if I plant it too near the door of my house, my children may pick the fruit." So, after he had thought the matter over, he planted the tree behind his barn (谷仓).

      Time passed, but the tree had no fruit the first year, nor the second-then the farmer called his brother. When the gardener came, the farmer said angrily, "You have cheated me, and given me a useless tree instead of a fruitful one. This is the third year and still it brings out nothing but leaves! "

      The gardener laughed and said, "See where the tree was planted, it has no sun or warmth. How could you expect flowers and fruit?"

阅读下列短文，从短文后各题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中选出最佳选项，并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。   

A little boy went into a shop, reached for box and pulled it over to the telephone. He climbed onto the box so that he could get the phone. The shop-owner watched and listened to the call.

Boy: Lady, can you give me the job of cutting your lawn (草坪)?

Woman: I already have someone to cut my lawn.

Boy: Lady, I will cut your lawn for half the price of the person who cuts your lawn now.

Woman: I'm very satisfied with the person who is now cutting my lawn.

Boy: Lady, I'll even sweep your sidewalk, so on Sunday you will have the prettiest lawn in the town.

Woman: No, thank you.

With a smile on his face, the little boy put down the phone. The shop-owner, who was listening to all this, walked over to the boy, "Son, I like your attitude (态度) and would like to offer you a job."

    "No, thanks, sir. I am the one who is working for that lady I was talking to!"

    Joseph Sekar is 62 years old and he is in India(印度). He feeds thousands of parrots(鹦鹉) every day. And he has got himself another new and interesting name "birdman".

    Joseph always left small number of rice on the top of his house. The neighborhood parrots often came to eat them. One day two parrots flew in and Joseph fed them some rice. The birds not only returned the following day, but also brought along other hungry friends. Today between 2,000~4,000 beautiful parrots visit the birdman twice a day.

    Joseph does not feed the birds raw(生的) rice. He cooks the rice! This means that the amazing man usually gets up at 4:30 am every morning and spends over an hour making the breakfast for birds. He then puts the rice on 14 boards on the top of his house carefully.

The breakfast rush begins at about 6:00 am when the beautiful parrots fly in and continues until every last piece of the delicious rice is gone! The similar situation happens in the evening when the birds arrive at around 4:00 pm and stay for almost two hours. Not only the superman feeds them, but also takes in sick and hurt birds and nurses them back to health.

    Of course, feeding so many birds is not a cheap job. Joseph spends 40% of his income(收入) of $13 as a camera repairman on the meals every day. The superman says all of his actions come out of a feeling of love.

    Though Joseph has no plans to stop the action now, he does worry about what will happen to the beautiful birds as he gets older and is unable to go on.

    Mrs. Jackson is a reporter at www. australian- labradoodle-book.com. Her hobby is taking photos. Now she writes a new book with a lot of pictures of her dog. The book tells about her puppy.

    When Harley was born, he only had two healthy legs.

    What happened to the other two legs? Mrs. Jackson was very sad at this.

    In fact, Harley also had two back legs, but they were deformed badly. When he was 8 weeks old, the owner took him to a nearby hospital. The doctors said they had no way to save（救）them. At last, they had to cut his back legs when he was just 12 weeks old. Later the poor dog had to practice running. Now he can run as fast as a usual dog.

    Luckily, Harley is a happy dog. He never thinks he is different from other dogs. He is now 16 weeks old. He tries to run every day. The other day, a warm-hearted man gave him a wheel-chair. Now he can go out easily with the help of his wheel-chair. You see, Harley is a dog that never gives up.

    I live in Mentone, a quiet, simple, restful place, where the rich never come. I met Theophile Magnan, a retired, rich, old man from Lyons yesterday. In the Hotel des Anglais. Theophile looked sad and dreamy, and didn't talk with anybody else. Which brought me back to the past.

A long time ago, Francois Millet. Claude, Carl and I were young artists — very young artists — in fact.

    Yes, Francois Millet. The great French artist, was my friend.

Millet wasn't any greater than we were at that time. He didn't have any fame, even in his own village.

    We were all poor though we had stacks and stacks of as good pictures as anybody in Europe painted. Once a person ever offered four francs for Millet's "Angelus", which he intended to sell for eight.

    It was a fact in human history that a great artist would never be acknowledged* until after he was starved and dead. His pictures climbed to high prices after his death.

    Then we made a decision that one of us must die, to save the others and himself.

    Millet was elected to die.

    During the next three months Millet painted with all his might, enlarged his stock all he could, not pictures, not sketches, studies, parts of studies, fragments of studies, of course, with his cipher *  on them.

    They were the things to be sold.

    Carl went to Paris to start the work of building up Millet's name. Claude and I went to sell Millet's small pictures and to build up his name as well.

    We made Millet a master. I always said to my customer, "I am a fool to sell a picture of Francois Millet's at all, for he is not going to live three months, and when he dies his pictures can't be had for love or money."

    Claude and I took care to spread that little fact as far as we could.

Carl made friends with the correspondents, and got Millet's condition reported to England and all over the continent, and America, and everywhere.

    The sad end came at last, Millet died, not really.  He became Theophile Magnan.

    The pictures went up. There's a man in Paris today who owns seventy Millet pictures. He paid us two million francs for them. Do you still remember the "Angelus"? Carl sold it for twenty—two hundred francs. And as for the bushels of sketches and studies which Millet produced in the last six weeks, well, it would astonish you to know the figure we sell them at nowadays.

    We are no longer artists and Millet dead.

    By the time Rihanna was seventeen, she had released(发行)her first album and had an international hit with her first single(单曲)Pon de Replay.

    Rihanna was born in Saint Michael, Barbados in 1988.She grew up there with her two younger brothers. As a child, she loved singing. She formed her first group with two friends from secondary school when she was just fifteen. In 2004 her friends introduced the group to American record producer Evan Rogers, who was on holiday in Barbados. Rogers thought Rihanna could be a big star in America, so she moved there aged sixteen to take up music after she finished school. Rihanna lived with Rogers and his wife. Then she worked for Def Jam Recordings and started working on her first album, Music of the Sun. It came out in 2005 and got into the top ten. Over 69,000 copies of the album were sold in the first week alone. It went on to sell over two million copies worldwide and Rihanna quickly became a big star. Her second album, A Girl Like Me, came out a year later and included the song SOS, which was her first number one hit in America. In 2007 Rihanna brought out her third album, Good Girl Gone Bad, which had more dance music than the first two albums.

    Rihanna sold more than fifteen million albums and forty-five million singles worldwide between 2005 and 2010, the most of any artist at the same time. However, she manages to find time for her charity work, too. She has performed in several concerts to raise money for charity and in 2006 she created her Believe Foundation to help sick children. She also took part in Gucci's activities to raise money for children in Africa.