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题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通

广东省汕头市达濠华桥中学2017-2018学年高二上学期英语阶段考试(二)试卷

阅读理解

    I am sure we've all come across inspiring quotes(引言)that made us nod in agreement or made us think, "Wow, that's good quotes". But we end up going back to procrastinating(拖延)on whatever it was we were procrastinating on. So is it worthwhile to read these inspirational quotes? Well, that depends.

    Quotes, books, articles, audio programs… all of these things are just tools and they're only effective when you use them. I don't know about you but most quotes I read don't do anything for me. However, every now and then, I will come across one that will positively affect me in some way such as reminding me to be grateful, getting me to work out extra hard at the gym without being pressed by my wife, or never give up when things get tough.

      From my experience, reading quotes is more effective when you're actually trying to motivate yourself rather than just reading them for the sake of reading them. The second you feel the urge to take action, you'd better immediately get up off your chair and take action.

    These quotes aren't for everyone. If you have read tons of them and have never been motivated or had a positive change in the way you look at life or how you treat others, or these quotes don't help you to insist on doing something when you feel like giving up on it, then it's probably not worthwhile to read more of them. If you have done something a bunch of times and it's not giving you the results you want, don't keep doing it. Try something else.

    Now if you've found some value in reading these quotes in the past, continue to make them more effective by letting them guide your life.

(1)、What attitude does the author have towards most quotes he has read?
A、Negative. B、Grateful. C、Doubtful. D、Interested
(2)、What does the author's wife expect him to do?
A、To be grateful for life. B、To exercise at the gym. C、To do extra work at home. D、To read more inspiring quotes.
(3)、For whom will the quotes be effective according to the author?
A、Those who understand them thoroughly. B、Those who lack practical tools in life. C、Those who have no one to turn to for help. D、Those who take immediate action after reading them.
(4)、What is implied in Paragraph 4?
A、Some quotes may have a bad influence on people. B、You shouldn't waste time on the things you don't like. C、Many ways can motivate you besides reading inspiring quotes. D、You'd better keep away from a quote if it doesn't benefit you.
(5)、What is the purpose of the passage?
A、To persuade people not to waste time on quotes. B、to explain how to make inspiring quotes effective. C、to encourage people to read more inspiring quotes. D、to give people advice on how to choose useful quotes.
举一反三
阅读理解

    Many foreign students report feeling lonely or unwelcome in Australia. Those feelings are among the reasons why Australia is taking a close look at its international education industry. But wherever international students go, making friends may not always be easy. Elisabeth Gareis of Baruch College in New York surveyed 454 international students. They were attending four-year colleges and graduate schools in the American South and Northeast.

    Students from English-speaking countries and from northern and central Europe were more likely to be happy with their friendships. But 38% of the international students said they had no close friends in the United States. And half of the students from East Asia said they were unhappy with the number of American friends they had. Thirty percent said they wished their friendships could be deeper and more meaningful.

    Professor Gareis says, “Students from East Asia have cultures that are different on many levels from the culture in the United States. There are also language problems, and maybe some social skills, such as small talks, which are possibly not as important in their native countries, where it's not as important to start friendships with small talks. Many East Asian students blamed themselves for their limited friendships with Americans, for not speaking the language well enough and for not knowing the culture well enough.”

    VOA's Students Union blogger Jessica Stahl did her own survey to find out how American students and foreign students relate to each other. More than 100 students, about half of them American, answered her online questions. Half of the international students and 60 % of the Americans said they related as well or better to the other group than to their own group.

    Professor Gareis says, “International students who make friends with host nationals are, overall, more satisfied with their stay in the host country. They have better language skills, better academic performance and better attitudes toward the host country.”

阅读理解

    An 18-year-old US girl gained unexpected appreciation and a surprise after she gave “extra help” to an elderly man in the restaurant she was working.

    It's social media that made her seemingly small action go viral and brought her appreciation from hundreds of thousands of strangers and a scholarship to Texas Southern University.

    The heroine Evoni Williams has reportedly been working full-time to earn money for further study in a restaurant in La Marque, Texas,the United States. It was last week when an old man named Adrian Charpentier asked for help to chop his ham for his hands were weak because of illness. On that busy morning when she had loads of work on shoulder, Williams helped the man without hesitation. The moment she was leaning over the counter and cutting the ham was shot by a customer known as Laura Wolf.

    Wolf posted the picture on the Internet and wrote, “I'm thankful to have seen this act of kindness and caring at the start of my day while everything in this world seems so negative. If we could all be like this waitress and take time to offer a helping hand…” According to local reports, Wolf didn't know Williams, neither did Williams know her act was shot and shared on the web. However, the small act of kindness soon accumulated its own power on and outside the Internet.

    Besides praise from netizens and media reports across the United States, a 16000-dollar scholarship to Texas Southern University was recently granted to Williams to support her study plan on business management.

    “We wanted to reward Evoni's act of kindness and let her know that good deeds do not go unnoticed,” said Melinda Spaulding, an administrator at Texas Southern University.

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    In China, Double Eleven Shopping Day is approaching. And there is a similar case in the United States—Black Friday. It has been regarded as the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Although it's not an official holiday, millions of employers give their employees the day off, and many people use that day to get a jump-start on their holiday shopping. A similar day in Canada and Great Britain is called "Boxing Day".

    Black Friday has become somewhat of a marketing sensation in recent years. Since 2005, it has been the busiest shopping day of the year. To lure shoppers, retailers (零售商) routinely open their doors as early as 4 a.m. and offer special sales and promotions to the shoppers that arrive early. Some of the special deals offered by stores are only available in limited quantities. That is why some shoppers intent on getting the best deals often camp out in front of stores overnight so that they'll be the first in line when the doors open.

    But why is it called Black Friday? Historians believe the name started in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. Bus drivers and police used "Black Friday" to describe the heavy traffic that would block city streets the day after Thanksgiving as shoppers headed to the stores.

    Businesses, however, didn't like the negative tone associated with the "Black Friday" name. In the early 1980s, a more positive explanation of the name began to circulate. According to this alternative explanation, Black Friday is the day when retailers finally begin to turn a profit for the year. In accounting terms (会计行业), operating at a loss is called being "in the red" because accountants traditionally used red ink to show negative amounts. Positive amounts were usually shown in black ink. Thus, being "in the black" is a good thing because it means stores are operating at a profit.

    Recently, for those who are too busy to shop on Black Friday or who just don't want to fight the crowds, the Monday following Black Friday has become known as Cyber Monday (网络星期一) for the many online deals.

阅读理解

    Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Professor Strickland is one of the recipients( 受领者) of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester in New York state. Together they paved the way toward the most intense laser pulses ever created.

    Professor Donna Strickland is only the third woman ever to have won a Nobel Prize in physics. She and her fellow winners were honored for what the Nobel Committee called ground-breaking inventions in laser physics. Professor Strickland devised a way to use lasers as very precise drilling or cutting tools. Millions of eye operations are performed every year with these sharpest of laser beams.

—"How surprising do you think it is that you're the third woman to win this prize? "

—"Well, that is surprising, isn't it? I think that's the story of Maria that people want to talk about — that why should it take 60 years? There are so many women out there doing fantastic research, so why does it take so long to get recognized? "

    Physics still has one of the largest gender gaps in science. One recent study concluded that at the current rates it would be more than two centuries until there were equal numbers of senior male and female researchers in the field.

    The last woman to win a physics Nobel was German-born Maria Goeppert-Mayer for her discoveries about the nuclei of atoms. Before that it was Marie Curie, who shared the 1903 prize with her husband, Pierre. This year's winners hope that breaking this half century hiatus will mean the focus in future will be on the research, rather than the gender of the researcher.

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What a Messy Desk Says About You

    For some time, psychologists have been studying how personality traits affect health and health-related choices. Not surprisingly, they have found that people blessed with innate conscientiousness, meaning that they are organized and predictable, typically eat better and live longer than people who are disorderly. They also tend to have immaculate offices.

    What has been less clear is whether neat environments can produce good habits even in those who aren't necessarily innately conscientious. To find out, researchers at the University of Minnesota conducted a series of experiments. In the first experiment, they randomly assigned a group of college-age students to spend time in two office spaces, one of which was very neat, the other wildly cluttered (乱堆) with papers and other work-related stuff. The students spent their time filling out questionnaires unrelated to the study. After 10 minutes, they were told they could leave with an apple or a chocolate bar. Those students who sat in the orderly office were twice as likely to choose the apple as those who sat among the mess.

    A second experiment, however, found that working in chaos has its advantages, too. In this one, college students were placed in a messy or a neat office and asked to dream up new uses for Ping-Pong balls. Those in messy spaces generated ideas that were significantly more creative, according to two independent judges, than those in offices where stacks of papers and other objects were neatly arranged.

    The results were something of a surprise, says Dr. Vohs, the leader of the study. Few previous studies found much virtue in disorder. The broken window theory, proposed decades ago, holds that even slight disorder and neglect can encourage indifference and poor discipline.

    But in the study by Dr. Vohs, disordered offices encouraged originality and a search for novelty. In the final portion of the study, adults were given the choice of adding a health "boost" to their lunchtime smoothie that was labeled either "new" or "classic." The volunteers in the messy space were far more likely to choose the new one; those in the tidy office generally chose the classic version. "Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition," Dr. Vohs and her co-authors conclude in the study, "which can produce fresh insights."

    The implications of these findings are also practical. "My advice would be, if you need to think outside the box for a future project", Dr. Vohs says, "then let the clutter rise and free your imagination. But if your primary goal is to eat well or to go to the gym, pick up around your office first. By doing this, the naturally messy can acquire some of the discipline of the conscientious."

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