The website FarmersOnly.com calls itself an online dating and friendship finder. The idea started in the mind of a man, Jerry Miller in Ohio. He wondered how farmers could meet new people who understand the life of a farmer. Jerry Miller is not a farmer but he represents a lot of farmers.

As he tells it, the idea for the site was planted when a farmer told him one day that she was recently divorced and would like to date. But someone would invite her to meet for coffee at nine o’clock at night, when she had to start her day at five the next morning.

So, in 2005, Jerry Miller launched his website. “You don’t have to be a farmer to be on FarmersOnly.com, but you do have to have the good old-fashioned traditional values of America’s Heartland.” 

You also have to live in the United States or Canada to be a member of the site. Some services are free, but a full membership costs fifty dollars for a year. As of last week the site listed more than 58,000 members. Many of them are farmers in the United States. Others are students or workers involved in some way with agriculture. Jerry Miller tells us about thirty marriages in the last year have resulted from his website.

Some farmers have also found love through a group, Singles in Agriculture, which was formed as a nonprofit organization in 1986. It organizes gatherings that usually end with a dance, but is not a dating service. The purpose is to support educational and social activities that offer people a chance for friendship. Its website, singlesinag.org, says there are more than 1,000 members across the nation and as far away as France.

1.Jerry Miller started singlesinag.org in order to     .

2.What does the underlined sentence in Paragraph 2 indicate?

3.Which of the following is true of singlesinag.org?

4.The author of the text intends to     .

5.It can be inferred from the text that     .

Legends about the development of coffee are varied and interesting, involving chance occurrences, political tricks, and the pursuit of wealth and power.

According to one story, a sheepherder named Kaldi, as he tended his sheep, noticed the effect of coffee beans. He noticed that the sheep became excited after eating the red “cherries" from a certain plant when they changed pastures (牧场). He tried it himself, and was soon as overactive as his sheep. Another story relates that a monk happened to discover that this fruit from the shiny green plant could help him stay awake.

Another legend gives us the name for coffee, “mocha”. Omar, an Arabian was thrown to the desert with his followers to die of starvation. In desperation, Omar had his friends boil and eat the fruit from an unknown plant. Not only did the soup save the group, but the residents of the nearest town, Mocha, took their survival as a religious sign. The plant and its beverage (饮料) were named Mocha to honor this event.

Coffee was introduced much later to countries beyond Arabia, whose inhabitants believed it to be a tasty thing and guarded its secret as if they were top secret military plans. The government forbade transportation of the plant out of the Moslem nations. The actual spread of coffee was started illegally. One Arab named Baba Budan smuggled (走私) beans to some mountains near Mysore, India, and started a farm there. Early in this century, some of those original plants were found still growing fruitfully in the region.

Coffee today is grown and enjoyed worldwide, and is one of the few crops that small farmers in third-world countries can profitably export.

1.What does the second paragraph mainly talk about?

A. A sheepherder used coffee beans to keep sheep excited.

B. Coffee was a special kind of red cherry from a certain plant.

C. A sheepherder and a monk accidently discovered coffee’s effect.

D. Sheep ate a lot of coffee beans while they changed pastures.

2.Which of the following involves political tricks?

A. Kaldi’s story. B. The monk’s story.

C. Omar’s story. D. Baba Budan’s story.

3.Mocha is originally the name of ______.

A. a town  B. an Arabian    C. a kind of coffee    D. a sheepherder

4.What can be the best title for the text?

A. The Secret of Coffee     B. The Tales of Coffee

C. People’s Love for Coffee        D. The Function of Coffee

Historically, the term “fair trade” has meant many things. The Fair Trade League was  1 in Britain in 1881 to restrict 2  from foreign countries. In the United States, businesses and labor unions  3  “fair trade” laws to construct what economist Joseph Stiglitz calls “barriers to imports.” These so called “anti-dumping(反倾销)” laws allow a company that  4  a foreign one of selling a product below cost to request that the government charge special taxes to protect it from “unfair”  5 .
Such dark protectionist thoughts are far from the  6  of the organizers of the United Kingdom’s annual “Fairtrade Fortnight”. Their  7 aim is to raise the price paid to developing-country farmers for their  8  by cutting out the inflated profits of the middlemen on whom they  9  for getting their goods to distant markets. Fair-trade products  10  cocoa, coffee, tea, and bananas do not compete with domestic European production, and  11  do not have a protectionist motive(动机).
This is how it works: In  12  for being paid a guaranteed price and meeting “agreed labor and environmental standards” (minimum wages, no farm chemicals ), poor-country farming cooperatives(合作社) receive a FAIRTRADE mark for their products, given 13  by the FAIRTRADE Labeling Organization. This mark  14  supermarkets and other businesses to sell the products at a higher than  15  price . Third-world farmers get their income increased , 16  first-world consumers get to feel virtuous: a marriage made in heaven.
The fair-trade movement,  17  in the 1980’s, has been growing rapidly. In a significant breakthrough in 1997, the British House of Commons  18  to serve only fair-trade coffee. By the end of 2007, more than 600 producers’ organizations,  19  1.4 million farmers in 58 countries, were selling fair-trade products. Today, a quarter of all bananas in UK supermarkets are sold under a FAIRTRADE mark. But FAIRTRADE-labeled products still represent a very  20 share – typically less than 1% – of global sales of cocoa, tea, coffee, etc.

Bamboo（竹） is one of the nature’s most surprising plants. Many people call this plant a tree, but it is a kind of grass.

Like other kinds of grass, a bamboo plant may be cut very low to the ground, but it will grow back very quickly. A Japanese scientist recorded one bamboo plant that grew almost 1.5 meters in 24 hours! Bamboo grows almost everywhere in the world except Europe（欧洲）. There are more than 1,000 kinds of bamboo that grow around the world on both mountains and plains.

Not all bamboo looks the same. Some bamboo plants are very thin. They may only grow to be a few centimeters（厘米）wide while others may grow to more than 30 centimeters across. This plant also comes in different colors, from yellow to black to green.

Many Asian countries have been using bamboo for hundreds of years. They often use bamboo for building new buildings. As a matter of fact, the cables(绳索) hold up the hanging bridge across the Min River in Sichuan are made of bamboo. The bridge has been in use for more than 1,000 years, and is still holding strong.

In Africa, engineers are teaching poor farmers how to find water using bamboo. These African countries need cheap ways to find water because they have no money, and their fields often die from no rain and no water. It seems that bamboo is one of the best things they can use. Bamboo pipes and drills(钻) can help to make the poor thirsty fields be watered.

1.How is bamboo like grass?

2.The underlined sentence “while others may grow to more than 30 centimeters across.” means “Some other bamboo plants may grow to be very _______.”

3.From the text we know ______.

4.Why did the engineers teach the poor farmers in Africa to make use of bamboo?

5.Which of the following is NOT true?

C
Two farmers in northeast China Heilongjiang Province have been sentenced to nine and five years in jail because of eating a tiger, the local court said on Tuesday.
Zhang Licheng and Gong Weisheng, both farmers in Dongning County, were put into prison for the crime of illegally hunting and killing endangered wild animal species, according to the People’s Court of Dongning County.
The Siberian tiger, mistakenly trapped but intentionally（故意的）eaten by the farmers, was an endangered animal which is under the first-class state protection in the country. The farmers, living in a village very close to forests, used to trap wild animals like roe deer and hares when the dying tiger unfortunately caught in their trap in February 2003.
Knowing that tiger trade was illegal, Zhang and Gong, however, thought eating a dead tiger’s meat was not breaking the law. They decided to cover it up and therefore did not report to the relevant authorities, the court said.
Six days later they secrectly carried home the tiger that had died of hunger as they had expected.The two farmers burnt the tiger’s skin, ate its meat and hid away the bones, according to the court. The crime was uncovered and reported to the police about a year later and the transgressors（违反者）were arrested on Jan.16, 2004.
64.When the two farmers found the tiger trapped, they ______________.
A.wanted to kill it for its skin
B.were pleased to have the chance to eat its meat
C.hoped to sell it at good price
D.reported the case to some departments of the government
65.After reading the passage, we know that ___________.
A.roe deer are being well protected
B.the Siberian tigers do no harm to people
C.China values the protection of endangered animals
D.farmers in Dongning County won’t like endangered wild animal species any longer
66.What is the best title for the passage?
A.Tigers Are Endangering
B.Two Unlucky Farmers
C.Tigers Are Well Protected in China
D.Two Farmers Jailed for Eating Tiger
67.The right statement of the following about the tiger is ____________.
A.It died of hunger.
B.It was eaten by the farmers unintentionally.
C.Before dying, it had eaten roe deer and hares.
D.It was skinned and its bones and meat were sold.