When I walked into the house after school, the first thing I noticed was a box with items I recognized from my dad’s office.

“What are you doing at home?” I asked casually.

“Andrew, I was    31    today,” he answered quietly.

I was sure he was joking. “No, you weren’t. Why are you    32    at home?”

Then I noticed his    33    and realized he was telling me the truth. My father has always been a hard worker and prided himself on his career.    34    our family has been his joy, and I guess I have    35    his work for granted.

My father’s unemployment    36   many changes in our lives. For starters, he was at home all the time, which meant my bed had to be    37  , my room cleaned up, and my     38    done right after school. I would come home every day to find him at the computer     39    jobs. I began to notice how    40    he seemed, and how losing his job affected his self-esteem, though he tried to be    41   . For the first time, I    42   my dad as vulnerable (易受伤的). He asked my brother and me to    43    less. I gave up my pocket money,    44    it wasn’t much. I felt I was doing the right. I also found a part-time job.

After several difficult months of searching, my dad    45    to go in a totally different direction. He    46    that he never wanted to be laid off again, so he was going to start his own business. Day by day, I watched him    47    it, and I admired how much time and     48    he expended. I    49   knew he was a hard worker, but watching him in action really affected me.

Although this was one of the    50    experiences for our family, it taught me a lot about dealing with adversity (逆境), and will be my foundations for success.

Almost every machine with moving parts has wheels, yet no one knows exactly when the first wheel was invented or what it was used for. We do know, however, that they existed over 5,500 years ago in ancient Asia.

The oldest known transport wheel was discovered in Slovenia. It is over 5,100 years old. Evidence suggests that wheels for transport didn’t become popular for a while, though. This could be because animals did a perfectly good job of carrying farming tools and humans around. But it could also be because of a difficult situation. While wheels need to roll on smooth surfaces, roads with smooth surfaces weren’t going to be constructed until there was plenty of demand for them. Eventually, road surfaces did become smoother, but this difficult situation appeared again a few centuries later. There had been no important changes in wheel and vehicle design before the arrival of modern road design.

In the mid-1700s, a Frenchman came up with a new design of road — a base layer (层) of large stones covered with a thin layer of smaller stones. A Scotsman improved on this design in the 1820s and a strong, lasting road surface became a reality. At around the same time, metal hubs (the central part of a wheel) came into being, followed by the pneumatic type (充气轮胎） in 1846.Alloy wheels were invented in 1967, sixty years after the appearance of tarmacked roads (柏油路). As wheel design took off, vehicles got faster and faster.

1.What might explain why transport wheels didn’t become popular for some time?

A. Few knew how to use transport wheels.

B. Humans carried farming tools just as well.

C. Animals were a good means of transport.

D. The existence of transport wheels was not known.

2.What do we know about road design from the passage?

A. It was easier than wheel design.

B. It improved after big changes in vehicle design.

C. It was promoted by fast-moving vehicles.

D. It provided conditions for wheel design to develop.

3.How is the last paragraph mainly developed?

A. By giving examples.                                                               B. By making comparisons.

C. By following time order.                                                        D. By making classifications.

4.What is the passage mainly about?

A. The beginning of road design.

B. The development of transport wheels.

C. The history of public transport

D. The invention of fast-moving vehicles.

My wife passed away a few years ago, and I went through the worst time in my life. I even wanted to kill myself. Just for my kids, I had to continue to live and work as a small town doctor at my medical clinic in Hawaii. My kids had gone to live on the mainland, and I was alone. Then they asked me to have a family trip.

On our trip, we turned on the TV at the motel and saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. Seeing it falling down, I said to my kids：“ I'm going to Afghanistan.”And a few weeks later, International Medical Corps sent me to set up 20 clinics in provinces where people had no health care. In these field clinics surrounded by frightening shoots or deadly bombs ，we were eventually serving 27,000 patients a month in a very busy schedule.Tired and nervous, I gradually had a sense of achievement, a sense of purpose, and my depression went away.

In the years to follow, I went to Indonesia after the tsunami (海啸), Pakistan after the earthquakes, Sudan after the civil war, and Iraq after more and more bombs. Each time after disasters one after another, hundreds of people were killed, wounded and many more had to flee. We once set up movable clinics in an area with 19,000 refugees,_and it was supposed to hold 13,000 originally. Flu broke out, one of the biggest killers of kids in refugee camps, and it spread like wildfire. Water and food were also serious problems. “Adventure or not？”I often asked myself.

When my wife passed away, I thought my life was gone. But in reality, it was just getting started. At the end of her life, she went unconscious. I held her head in my hands and told her of all the places we would visit and the exciting adventures we would have.

I thought about the moment many times during my“adventures”. I didn't know how predictive those words would be，but I knew that she was still with me.

1.Where has the doctor been in the past few years?

A．Some countries where he could set up clinics.

B．Some African countries where flu broke out.

C．The places where the earthquakes happened.

D．The places that the horrible disasters struck.

2.How would the doctor describe his life after he had worked in Afghanistan?

A．Tired and troublesome.                   B．Busy and risky.

C．Meaningful and helpful.                  D．Frightening and depressing.

3.The underlined word“ refugees” means people________.

A．who are robbed, killed, or wounded           B．who suffer from flu in movable clinics

C．who like to take adventures              D．who have lost homes because of disasters

4.Which of the following is TRUE according to the passage?

A．The doctor's wife encouraged him to work in foreign countries.

B．What the doctor said to his wife before her death became reality.

C．The doctor's adventures made him understand the love of his wife.

D．With the true love of his wife, the doctor started to change his life.

Roslyn Hing School on long Island recently started a pilot program using iPads in some classrooms.

A growing number of schools across the U.S.are multimedia,history through gamse and math with step-by -step animation(动画）of complex problems.

As part of a pilot program,Roslyn High School handed out 47 iPads on Dec.20,2010 to the students and teachers in two humanities(人文学科）classes. The school district hopes to provide iPads eventually to all 1,100 of its students.

The iPads are to be used in class and at hom during the school year to replace texbooks,allow students to correspond with teachers and tum in papers and homework tasks,and preserve a rocord of student work in digital files.

“It allows us to extend the classes beyond these four walls.”said larry Reiff,an English teacher at Roslyn who now posts all his course mateials online.

But educators are still divided over whether practices to give every student a laptop have made a difference academically.

“Thre is very little evidence that kids learn more,faster of better by using these machines,”said Larry Cuban,a retried professor of eduction at Staford University.“IPads are excellent tools to attract kids,but then the fieshness wears off and you eget int hard-core problems of teaching and learning.”

But school leaders say the iPad is not just a cool new toy but rather a powerful and multifunctional tool with a number of applications,including thousands with educational uses.

“If there isn't an application that does something I need ,there will be sooner or later,”said Mr.Reiff,who said he now used an application that includes all of Shakespare's plays.

1.The program of using iPads in class is            .

2.The underlined part “these four walls”in paragraph 5 refers to    .

3.We can use iPads to do the following at school except     .

4.The school leaders tink highly of the iPad mainly because it is       .

5.We can infer from the passage that     .

My family and I lived across the street from Southway Park since I was four years old. Then just last year they city put a chain link fence around the park and started bulldozing (用推土机推平) the trees and grass to make way for a new apartment complex. When I saw the fence and bulldozers, I asked myself, “Why don’t they just leave it alone?”

Looking back, I think what sentenced the part to oblivion (别遗忘) was the drought (旱灾) we had about four years ago. Up until then, Southway Park was a nice green park with plenty of trees and a public swimming pool. My friends and I rollerskated on the sidewalks, climbed the tress, and swam in the pool all the years I was growing up. The park was almost like my own yard. Then the summer I was fifteen the drought came and things changed.

There had been almost no rain at all that year. The city stopped watering the park grass. Within a few weeks I found myself living across the street from a huge brown desert. Leaves fell off the park tress, and pretty soon the trees started dying, too. Next, the park swimming pool was closed. The city cut down on the work force that kept the park, and pretty soon it just got too ugly and dirty to enjoy anymore.

As the drought lasted into the fall, the park got worse every month. The rubbish piled up or blew across the brown grass. Soon the only people in the park were beggars and other people down on their luck. People said drugs were being sold or traded there now. The park had gotten scary, and my mother told us kids not to go there anymore.

The drought finally ended and things seemed to get back to normal, that is, everything but the park. It had gotten into such bad shape that the city just let it stay that way. Then about six months ago I heard that the city was going to “redevelop” certain worn-out areas of the city. It turned out that the city had planned to get rid of the park, sell the land and let someone build rows of apartment buildings on it.

The chain-link fencing and the bulldozers did their work. Now we live across the street from six rows of apartment buildings. Each of them is three units high and stretches a block in each direction. The neighborhood has changed without the park. The streets I used to play in are jammed with cars now. Things will never be the same again. Sometimes I wonder, though, what changes another drought would make in the way things are today.

1.How did the writer feel when he saw the fence and bulldozers?

      A. Scared.        B. Confused.      C. Upset.           D. Curious.

2.Why was the writer told not to go to the park by his mother?

      A. It was being rebuilt.                 B. It was dangerous.

      C. It because crowded.                 D. It had turned into a desert.

3.According to the writer, what eventually brought about the disappearance of the park?

      A. The drought.                    B. The crime.

      C. The beggars and the rubbish.       D. The decisions of the city.

4.The last sentence of the passage implies that if another drought came, ______.

      A. the situation would be much worse

      B. people would have to desert their homes

      C. the city would be fully prepared in advance

      D. the city would have to redevelop the neighborhood