.If you read the two compositions carefully,you will find they           each other and no wonder Tom and Mary were punished by our English teacher.

A.are different from

B.are much like

C.are similar to

D.are diverse in

As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. “The woods” was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend’s house and found him not at home, his mother might say, “Oh, he’s out in the woods, ” with a tone(语气) of airy acceptance. It’s similar to the tone people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I’m looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even “away from his desk.” For us ten-year-olds, “being out in the woods” was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring(探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though, seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Italian burial mound.

Often we got “lost” and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical: the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly----tall beeches, easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence（青春期）. In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that were really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.

The author and his fiends were often out in the woods to _______.

   A. avoid doing their schoolwork

   B. play gold and other sports

   C. spend their free time

   D. keep away from their parents

What can we infer from Paragraph 2?

   A. The author explored in the woods aimlessly.

   B. Human history is not the result of exploration.

   C. Exploration should be a systematic activity.

   D. The activities in the woods were well planned.The author explored in the woods aimlessly.

The underlined word “skeptical” in Paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to ______.

   A. doubtful

   B. calm

   C. serious

   D. optimistic

How does the author feel about his childhood?

   A. Long and unforgettable.

   B. Lonely but memorable.

   C. Boring and meaningless.

   D. Happy but short.

A

A higher reading rate, with no loss of comprehension, will help you in other subjects as well as in English, and the general principles apply to any language. Naturally, you will not read every book at the same speed. You would expect to read a newspaper, for example, much more rapidly than a physics or economics textbook-but you can raise your average reading speed over the whole range of materials you wish to cover so that the percentage gained will be the same whatever kind of reading you are concerned with.

The reading passages which follow are all of an average level of difficulty for your stage of instruction. They are all about five hundred words long. They are about topics of general interest which do not require a great deal of specialized knowledge. Thus they fall between the kind of reading you might find in your textbooks and the much less demanding kind you will find in a newspaper or light novel. If you read this kind of English, with understanding at four hundred words per minute, you might skim (浏览) through a newspaper at perhaps 650-700, while with a difficult textbook you might drop to two hundred or two hundred and fifty.

Perhaps you would like to know what reading speeds are common among native English-speaking university students and how those speeds can be improved. Tests in Minnesota, USA, for example, have shown that students without special training can read English of average difficulty, for example, Tolstoy's War and Peace in translation, at speeds of between 240 and 250 words per minute with about seventy percent comprehension. Students in Minnesota claim that after twelve half-hour lessons, once a week, the reading speed can be increased, with no loss of comprehension, to around five hundred words per minute.

According to the passage, the purpose of effective reading with higher speed is most likely to help you ________.

A. only in your reading of a physics textbook

B. improve your understanding of an economics textbook

C. not only in your language study but also in other subjects

D. choose the suitable materials to read

Which of the following does not describe the types of reading materials mentioned in the second paragraph?

A. Those beyond one's reading comprehension.

B. Those concerned with common knowledge.

C. Those without much demand for specialized knowledge.

D. Those with the length of about five hundred words.

The average speed of untrained native speakers in the University of Minnesota is ________.

A. about 300 words per minute

B. about 245 words per minute

C. about 650-700 words per minute

D. about 500 words per minute

According to the passage, how fast can you expect to read after you have attended twelve half-hour lessons in the University of Minnesota?

A. You can increase your reading speed by three times.

B. No real increase in reading speed can be achieved.

C. Yon can increase your reading speed by four times.

D. You can double your reading speed.

To master a language one must be able to speak and understand the spoken language as well as to read and write．Lenin and his wife translated a long English book into Russian but when they went to England in 1902, English people couldn't understand a word Lenin and his wife said, and Lenin and his wife couldn't understand what was said to them．This shows the importance of spoken language．

Speaking, of course can't go without listening．If you want to pronounce a word correctly, first you must hear it correctly．The sounds of Chinese and English languages are not exactly the same．If you don't listen carefully, you'll find it difficult or even impossible to understand the native speakers．

Well, what about writing﹖ Like speaking, it's to exchange ideas．People usually use shorter words and shorter sentences in their writing．

The important thing is to make your idea clear in your mind and then to write it in a clear lively language．

Chinese students read too slowly．If you read fast, you understand better．If you read too slowly by the time you have reached to the end of a page you have forgotten what the beginning is about．When you meet with new words don't look them up in the dictionary．Guess the meaning to form the context. You may not guess quite correctly the first time but as new words appear again and again in different context their meaning will become clearer and clearer. If you look up every word you'll never finish a book．

Students of a foreign language need a particular knowledge, the knowledge of the life, history and geography of the people whose language they're studying. They should study those subjects in the foreign language not only in translation．In this way one can kill two birds with one stone: learn a foreign language and get some knowledge of the foreign country at the same time．

1.In England Lenin        ．

A．could be understood by Englishmen

B．could understand Englishmen

C．and Englishmen couldn't understand each other

D．and Englishmen could understand each other

2.In the first paragraph the writer told us        ．

A．how to speak English

B．how to read and write

C．why English people couldn't understand the Lenins

D．spoken English is important

3.In the fifth paragraph the writer advised us on        ．

A．how to guess the meaning of the words

B．how to read fast

C．how to look up new words in the dictionary

D．how to read carefully

4.“Kill two birds with one stone” means        ．

A．to get some particular knowledge

B．to get more than what one pays

C．the stone is very useful

D．the birds are blind enough

5.In the last paragraph the writer advised us        ．

A．to kill two birds with one stone

B．to learn two languages at the same time

C．to study all the subjects in a foreign language

D．to get some knowledge of the foreign country whose language we are studying

 

If you read the poem       second time, you’ll have     better understanding of it.

A. the; /          B. a; the         C. the; a                            D. a, a