Goldie's Secret

She turned up at the doorstep of my house in Cornwall. No way could I have sent her away. No way, not me anyway. Maybe someone had kicked her out of their car the night before. "We're moving house.'; "No space for her any more with the baby coming." "We never really wanted her, but what could we have done? She was a present." People find all sorts of excuses for abandoning an animal. And she was one of the most beautiful dogs I had ever seen.

I called her Goldie. If I had known what was going to happen I would have given her a more creative name. She was so unsettled during those first few days. She hardly ate anything and had such an air of sadness about her. There was nothing I could do to make her happy, it seemed. Heaven knows what had happened to her at her previous owner's. But eventually at the end of the first week she calmed down. Always by my side, whether we were out on one of our long walks or sitting by the fire.

That's why it was such a shock when she pulled away from me one day when we were out for a walk. We were a long way from home, when she started barking and getting very restless. Eventually I couldn't hold her any longer and she raced off down the road towards a farmhouse in the distance as fast as she could.

By the time I reached the farm I was very tired and upset with Goldie. But when I saw her licking (舔) the four puppies (幼犬) I started to feel sympathy towards them. "We didn't know what had happened to her," said the woman at the door. "I took her for a walk one day, soon after the puppies were born, and she just disappeared." "She must have tried to come back to them and got lost," added a boy from behind her.

I must admit I do miss Goldie, but I've got Nugget now, and she looks just like her mother. And I've learnt a good lesson: not to judge people.

1.How did the author feel about Goldie when Goldie came to the house?

2.In her first few days at the author's house, Goldie ______.

3.Goldie rushed off to a farmhouse one day because she ______.

4. The passage is organized in order of ______.

Open Letter to an Editor

I had an interesting conversation with a reporter recently --- one who works for you. In fact, he's one of your best reporters. He wants to leave.

Your reporter gave me a copy of his resume(简历) and photocopies of six stories that he wrote for you. The headlines showed you played them proudly. With great enthusiasm, he talked about how he finds issues(问题), approaches them, and writes about them, which tells me he is one of your best. I'm sure you would hate to lose him. Surprisingly, your reporter is not unhappy. In fact, he told me he really likes his job. He has a great assignment (分工), and said you run a great paper. It would be easy for you to keep him, he said. He knows that the paper values him. He appreciates the responsibility you've given him, takes ownership of his profession, and enjoys his freedom.

So why is he looking for a way out?

He talked to me because he wants his editors to demand so much more of him. He wants to be pushed, challenged, coached to new heights.

The reporter believes that good stories spring from good questions, but his editors usually ask how long the story will be, when it will be in, where it can play, and what the budget is.

He longs for conversations with an editor who will help him turn his good ideas into great ones. He wants someone to get excited about what he's doing and to help him turn his story idea upside down and inside out, exploring the best ways to report it. He wants to be more valuable for your paper. That's what you want for him, too, isn't it?

So your reporter has set me thinking.

Our best hope in keeping our best reporters, copy editors, photographers, artists --- everyone --- is to work harder to make sure they get the help they are demanding to reach their potential. If we can't do it, they'll find someone who can.

1.What does the writer think of the reporter?

2.What does the reporter want most from his editors in their talks?

3.Who probably wrote the letter?

4.The letter aims to remind editors that they should ______.

Pacing and Pausing

Sara tried to befriend her old friend Steve's new wife, but Betty never seemed to have anything to say. While Sara felt Betty didn't hold up her end of the conversation, Betty complained to Steve that Sara never gave her a chance to talk. The problem had to do with expectations about pacing and pausing.

Conversation is a turn-taking game. When our habits are similar, there's no problem. But if our habits are different, you may start to talk before I'm finished or fail to take your turn when I'm finished. That's what was happening with Betty and Sara.

It may not be coincidental that Betty, who expected relatively longer pauses between turns, is British, and Sara, who expected relatively shorter pauses, is American. Betty often felt interrupted by Sara. But Betty herself became an interrupter and found herself doing most of the talking when she met a visitor from Finland. And Sara had a hard time cutting in on some speakers from Latin America or Israel.

The general phenomenon, then, is that the small conversation techniques, like pacing and pausing, lead people to draw conclusions not about conversational style but about personality and abilities. These habitual differences are often the basis for dangerous stereotyping (思维定式). And these social phenomena can have very personal consequences. For example, a woman from the southwestern part of the US went to live in an eastern city to take up a job in personnel. When the Personnel Department got together for meetings, she kept searching for the right time to break in --- and never found it. Although back home she was considered outgoing and confident, in Washington she was viewed as shy and retiring. When she was evaluated at the end of the year, she was told to take a training course because of her inability to speak up.

That's why slight differences in conversational style --- tiny little things like microseconds of pause --- can have a great effect on one's life. The result in this case was a judgment of psychological problems --- even in the mind of the woman herself, who really wondered what was wrong with her and registered for assertiveness training.

1.What did Sara think of Betty when talking with her?

2.According to the passage, who are likely to expect the shortest pauses between turns?

3.We can learn from the passage that ______.

4.The underlined word "assertiveness" in the last paragraph probably means ______.

The Cost of Higher Education

Individuals (个人) should pay for their higher education.

A university education is of huge and direct benefit to the individual. Graduates earn more than non-graduates. Meanwhile, social mobility is ever more dependent on having a degree. However, only some people have it. So the individual, not the taxpayers, should pay for it. There are pressing calls on the resources (资源) of the government. Using taxpayers' money to help a small number of people to earn high incomes in the future is not one of them.

Full government funding (资助) is not very good for universities. Adam Smith worked in a Scottish university whose teachers lived off student fees. He knew and looked down upon 18th-century Oxford, where the academics lived comfortably off the income received from the government. Guaranteed salaries, Smith argued, were the enemy of hard work; and when the academics were lazy and incompetent, the students were similarly lazy.

If students have to pay for their education, they not only work harder, but also demand more from their teachers. And their teachers have to keep them satisfied. If that means taking teaching seriously, and giving less time to their own research interests, that is surely something to celebrate.

Many people believe that higher education should be free because it is good for the economy (经济). Many graduates clearly do contribute to national wealth, but so do all the businesses that invest (投资) and create jobs. If you believe that the government should pay for higher education because graduates are economically productive, you should also believe that the government should pay part of business costs. Anyone promising to create jobs should receive a gift of capital from the government to invest. Therefore, it is the individual, not the government, who should pay for their university education.

1. The underlined word "them" in Paragraph 2 refers to ______.

2.The author thinks that with full government funding ______.

3.The author mentions businesses in Paragraph 5 in order to ______.

请认真阅读下列短文，并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入1个最恰当的单词。

注意：每个空格只填1个单词。

How we look and how we appear to others probably worries us more when we are in our teens or early twenties than at any other time in our life. Few of us are content to accept ourselves as we are, and few are brave enough to ignore the trends of fashion.

Most fashion magazines or TV advertisements try to persuade us that we should dress in a certain way or behave in a certain manner. If we do, they tell us, we will be able to meet new people with confidence and deal with every situation confidently and without embarrassment. Changing fashion, of course, does not apply just to dress. A barber today does not cut a boy’s hair in the same way as he used to, and girls do not make up in the same way as their mothers and grandmothers did. The advertisers show us the latest fashionable styles and we are constantly under pressure to follow the fashion in case our friends think we are odd or dull.

What causes fashions to change? Sometimes convenience or practical necessity or just the fancy of an influential person can establish a fashion. Take hats for example. In cold climates, early buildings were cold inside, so people wore hats indoors as well as outside. In recent times, the late President Kennedy caused a depression in the American hat industry by not wearing hats, and more American men followed his example.

There is also a cyclical(周期性的) pattern in fashion. In the 1920s in Europe and America, short skirts became fashionable. After World War II, they dropped to ankle length. Then they got shorter and shorter until the miniskirt was in fashion. After a few more years, skirts became longer again.

Today, society is much freer and easier than it used to be. It is no longer necessary to dress like everyone else. Within reason, you can dress as you like or do your hair the way you like instead of the way you should because it is the fashion. The popularity of jeans and the “untidy” look seems to be a reaction against the increasingly expensive fashion of the top fashion houses.

At the same time, appearance is still important in certain circumstances and then we must choose our clothes carefully. It would be foolish to go to an interview for a job in a law firm wearing jeans and a sweater, and it would be discourteous(失礼的) to visit some distinguished scholar looking as if we were going to the beach or a night club. However, you need never feel depressed if you don’t look like the latest fashion photo. Look around you and you’ll see that no one else does either!

Fashion Change

假设你是新华中学的学生李华，你和在上海上学的英国朋友Tom约好下周末去北京旅游，但你因故不能赴约。请根据以下要点用英语给他写一封电子邮件：

1. 表示歉意；

2. 解释原因；

3. 另约时间。

注意：1. 单词数150左右；

2. 可适当增加细节。

The conference was _______ fixed for the 10th, August, but later the unexpected landslide(泥石流) in Zhouqu in Gansu province, made us put it off.

In those days, there was hardly any doubt ______ I would win the game, for all my friends stuck with me.

The national parks are very important for the protection of these wild animals, which would ______ run the risk of becoming extinct.

--Guess what! Tan Weiwei failed in the last round of the Super Girl Contest.

---How _______ it be? She is second to none in singing in my opinion.