Throughout the history of the arts,the nature of creativity has remained constant to artists.No matter what objects they select,artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change—to find poetry where no one has ever seen or experienced it before.
Landscape(风景) is another unchanging element of art.It can be found from ancient times through the 17th-century Dutch painters to the 19th-century romanticists and impressionists.In the 1970s Alfred Leslie,one of the new American realists,continued this practice.Leslie sought out the same place where Toomas Cole,a romanticist,had produced paintings of the same scene a century and a half before.Unlike Cole who insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature,Lealie paints what he actually sees.In his paintings,there is no particular change in emotion,and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the background.He also takes advantage of the latest developments of color photography(摄影术) to help both the eye and the memory when he improves his painting back in his workroom.
Besides,all art begs the age-old question:What is real?Each generation of artists has shown their understanding of reality in one form or another.The impressionists saw reality in brief emotional effects,the realists in everyday subjects and in forest scenes,and the Cro-Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of the animals in the ancient Forests.To sum up,understanding reality is a necessary struggle for artists of all periods.
Over thousands of years the function of the arts has remained relatively constant.Past or present,Eastern or Western,the arts are a basic part of our immediate experience.Many and different are the faces of art,and together they express the basic need and hope of human beings.
【小题1】The underlined word “poetry” most probably means______.

第二部分：阅读理解(第一节20小题。第二节5小题；每小题2分，满分50分)
第一节：阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项(A、B、C和D)中，选出最佳选项，并在答题纸上将该
选项标号涂黑。
When you are little, the whole world feels like a big playground. I was living in Conyers, Georgia the summer it all happened. I was a second grader, but my best friend Stephanie was only in the first grade. Both of our parents were at work and most of the time they let us go our own way.
It was a hot afternoon and we decided to have an adventure in Stephanie's basement. As I opened the basement door, before us lay the biggest room, full of amazing things like guns, dolls, and old clothes. I ran downstairs, and spotted a red steel can. It was paint. I looked beyond it and there lay even more paint in bright colors like purple, orange, blue and green.
"Stephanie, I just found us a project for the day. Get some paintbrushes. We are fixing to paint. " She screamed with excitement as I told her of my secret plans and immediately we got to work. We gathered all the brushes we could find and moved all of our materials to my yard. There on the road in front of my house, we painted big stripes ( 条纹) of colors across the pavement (人行道). Stripe by stripe, our colors turned into a beautiful rainbow. It was fantastic!
The sun was starting to sink. I saw a car in the distance and jumped up as I recognized the car. It was my mother. I couldn't wait to show her my masterpiece. The car pulled slowly into the driveway and from the look on my mother's face, I could tell that I was in deep trouble.
My mother shut the ear door and walked towards me. Her eyes glaring, she shouted, "What in the world were you thinking? I understood when you made castles out of leaves, and climbed the neighbors' trees, but this! Come inside right now !" I stood there glaring back at her for a minute, angry because she had insulted (侮辱) my art.
"Now go clean it up!" Mother and I began cleaning the road. Tears ran down my cheeks as I saw my beautiful rainbow turn into black cement.
Though years have now passed, I still wonder where my rainbow has gone. I wonder if, maybe when I get older, I can find my rainbow and never have to brush it away. I guess we all need some sort of rainbow to brighten our lives from time to time and to keep our hopes and dreams colorful.
1. What did the writer want to do when his mother came home?
A. To introduce Stephanie to her.          B. To prevent her from seeing his painting.
C. To put the materials back in the yard.    D. To show his artwork to her.
2. In his mother's eyes, the writer __ .
A. was a born artist                          B. always caused trouble
C. was a problem solver                      D. worked very hard
3. The underlined word "rainbow" in the last paragraph refers to __ .
A. the rainbow in the sky                    B. the stripes on the pavement
C. something imaginative and fun              D. important lessons learned in childhood
4. It can be learned from the passage that parents should       .
A. encourage children to paint          
B. value friendship among children
C. discover the hidden talent in children 
D. protect rather than destroy children's dreams

第二部分：阅读理解(第一节20小题。第二节5小题；每小题2分，满分50分)

第一节：阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项(A、B、C和D)中，选出最佳选项，并在答题纸上将该

选项标号涂黑。

     When you are little, the whole world feels like a big playground. I was living in Conyers, Georgia the summer it all happened. I was a second grader, but my best friend Stephanie was only in the first grade. Both of our parents were at work and most of the time they let us go our own way.

     It was a hot afternoon and we decided to have an adventure in Stephanie's basement. As I opened the basement door, before us lay the biggest room, full of amazing things like guns, dolls, and old clothes. I ran downstairs, and spotted a red steel can. It was paint. I looked beyond it and there lay even more paint in bright colors like purple, orange, blue and green.

     "Stephanie, I just found us a project for the day. Get some paintbrushes. We are fixing to paint. " She screamed with excitement as I told her of my secret plans and immediately we got to work. We gathered all the brushes we could find and moved all of our materials to my yard. There on the road in front of my house, we painted big stripes ( 条纹) of colors across the pavement (人行道). Stripe by stripe, our colors turned into a beautiful rainbow. It was fantastic!

     The sun was starting to sink. I saw a car in the distance and jumped up as I recognized the car. It was my mother. I couldn't wait to show her my masterpiece. The car pulled slowly into the driveway and from the look on my mother's face, I could tell that I was in deep trouble.

     My mother shut the ear door and walked towards me. Her eyes glaring, she shouted, "What in the world were you thinking? I understood when you made castles out of leaves, and climbed the neighbors' trees, but this! Come inside right now !" I stood there glaring back at her for a minute, angry because she had insulted (侮辱) my art.

     "Now go clean it up!" Mother and I began cleaning the road. Tears ran down my cheeks as I saw my beautiful rainbow turn into black cement.

     Though years have now passed, I still wonder where my rainbow has gone. I wonder if, maybe when I get older, I can find my rainbow and never have to brush it away. I guess we all need some sort of rainbow to brighten our lives from time to time and to keep our hopes and dreams colorful.

1. What did the writer want to do when his mother came home?

   A. To introduce Stephanie to her.          B. To prevent her from seeing his painting.

   C. To put the materials back in the yard.    D. To show his artwork to her.

2. In his mother's eyes, the writer __ .

   A. was a born artist                          B. always caused trouble

   C. was a problem solver                      D. worked very hard

3. The underlined word "rainbow" in the last paragraph refers to __ .

   A. the rainbow in the sky                     B. the stripes on the pavement

   C. something imaginative and fun              D. important lessons learned in childhood

4. It can be learned from the passage that parents should       .

A. encourage children to paint          

B. value friendship among children

C. discover the hidden talent in children 

D. protect rather than destroy children's dreams

第二部分：阅读理解(第一节20小题。第二节5小题；每小题2分，满分50分)

第一节：阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项(A、B、C和D)中，选出最佳选项，并在答题纸上将该

选项标号涂黑。

     When you are little, the whole world feels like a big playground. I was living in Conyers, Georgia the summer it all happened. I was a second grader, but my best friend Stephanie was only in the first grade. Both of our parents were at work and most of the time they let us go our own way.

     It was a hot afternoon and we decided to have an adventure in Stephanie's basement. As I opened the basement door, before us lay the biggest room, full of amazing things like guns, dolls, and old clothes. I ran downstairs, and spotted a red steel can. It was paint. I looked beyond it and there lay even more paint in bright colors like purple, orange, blue and green.

     "Stephanie, I just found us a project for the day. Get some paintbrushes. We are fixing to paint. " She screamed with excitement as I told her of my secret plans and immediately we got to work. We gathered all the brushes we could find and moved all of our materials to my yard. There on the road in front of my house, we painted big stripes ( 条纹) of colors across the pavement (人行道). Stripe by stripe, our colors turned into a beautiful rainbow. It was fantastic!

     The sun was starting to sink. I saw a car in the distance and jumped up as I recognized the car. It was my mother. I couldn't wait to show her my masterpiece. The car pulled slowly into the driveway and from the look on my mother's face, I could tell that I was in deep trouble.

     My mother shut the ear door and walked towards me. Her eyes glaring, she shouted, "What in the world were you thinking? I understood when you made castles out of leaves, and climbed the neighbors' trees, but this! Come inside right now !" I stood there glaring back at her for a minute, angry because she had insulted (侮辱) my art.

     "Now go clean it up!" Mother and I began cleaning the road. Tears ran down my cheeks as I saw my beautiful rainbow turn into black cement.

     Though years have now passed, I still wonder where my rainbow has gone. I wonder if, maybe when I get older, I can find my rainbow and never have to brush it away. I guess we all need some sort of rainbow to brighten our lives from time to time and to keep our hopes and dreams colorful.

1. What did the writer want to do when his mother came home?

   A. To introduce Stephanie to her.          B. To prevent her from seeing his painting.

   C. To put the materials back in the yard.    D. To show his artwork to her.

2. In his mother's eyes, the writer __ .

   A. was a born artist                          B. always caused trouble

   C. was a problem solver                      D. worked very hard

3. The underlined word "rainbow" in the last paragraph refers to __ .

   A. the rainbow in the sky                     B. the stripes on the pavement

   C. something imaginative and fun              D. important lessons learned in childhood

4. It can be learned from the passage that parents should       .

A. encourage children to paint          

B. value friendship among children

C. discover the hidden talent in children 

D. protect rather than destroy children's dreams

Throughout the history of the arts, the nature of creativity has remained constant to artists. No matter what objects they select, artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change-to find poetry where no one has ever seen or experienced it before.

Landscape(风景) is another unchanging element of art. It can be found from ancient times through the 17th-century Dutch painters to the 19th-century romanticists and impressionists. In the 1970s Alfred Leslie, one of the new American realists, continued this practice. Leslie sought out the same place where Thomas Cole, a romanticist, had produced paintings of the same scene a century and a half before. Unlike Cole who insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature, Leslie paints what he actually sees. In his paintings, there is no particular change in emotion, and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the background. He also takes advantage of the latest developments of color photography(摄影术) to help both the eye and the memory when he improves his painting back in his workroom.

Besides, all art begs the age-old question: What is real? Each generation of artists has shown their understanding of reality in one form or another. The impressionists saw reality in brief emotional effects, the realists in everyday subjects and in forest scenes, and the Cro-Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of the animals in the ancient forests. To sum up, understanding reality is a necessary struggle for artists of all periods.

Over thousands of years the function of the arts has remained relatively constant. Past or present, Eastern or Western, the arts are a basic part of our immediate experience. Many and different are the faces of art, and together they express the basic need and hope of human beings.

1.The underlined word “poetry” most probably means __________.

A. an object for artistic creation                                    B. a collection of poems

C. an unusual quality                                                        D. a natural scene

2.Leslie's paintings are extraordinary because.

A. they are close in style to works in ancient times

B. they look like works by 19th-century painters

C. they draw attention to common things in life

D. they depend heavily on color photography

3. What is the author's opinion of artistic reality?

A. It will not be found in future works of art.

B. It does not have a long-lasting standard.

C. It is expressed in a fixed artistic form.

D. It is lacking in modern works of art.

4. What does the author suggest about the arts in the last paragraph?

A. They express people's curiosity about the past.

B. They make people interested in everyday experience.

C. They are considered important for variety in form.

D. They are regarded as a mirror of the human situation.

5. Which of the following is the main topic of the passage?

A. History of the arts.

B. Basic questions of the arts.

C. New developments in the arts.

D. Use of modern technology in the arts.