How a person reacts to criticism(批评) often means the difference between success and failure. Take the   1  of Ole Bull, the famous Norwegian   2   of the 19th century.

His   3  father, a chemist, sent him to the University of Christiania to study for the ministry(牧师) and  4   him to play his beloved violin. He soon   5   the course and, disobeying his father,   6   all his time and energy to the violin. Unfortunately, though he had great ability, his teachers were   7  unskilled, so that by the time he was ready to start his concert   8   he wasn’t prepared.

In Italy a Milan newspaper   9   wrote: “He is a (n)   10   musician. If he be a diamond, he is certainly in the   11  and unpolished.”

There were two ways Ole Bull could have   12   to that criticism. He could have let it make him angry, or he could learn from it. Fortunately he chose the   13  . He went to the newspaper office and asked to see the critic. The   14   editor introduced him. Ole spent the evening with the 70-year-old critic, asked about his faults, and   15   the old man’s advice on how to correct them.

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Then he   16   the rest of his tour, returned home, and   17   the next six months studying under really   18   teachers. He practiced hour   19   hour to overcome his faults. Finally, he returned to his concerts and,   20   only 26, became the wonder of Europe.

1．A．position                 B．place                   C．sample                D．case

2．A．musician               B．violinist               C．pianist                 D．performer

3．A．awkward              B．generous             C．stubborn             D．confident

4．A．allowed                 B．forbade               C．forced                 D．urged

5．A．gave up                 B．took up               C．made up              D．picked up

6．A．devoted                 B．donated               C．supplied              D．allocated

7．A．absolutely              B．completely           C．relatively             D．gradually

8．A．journey                 B．travel                  C．voyage                D．tour

9．A．editor                    B．critic                   C．reporter               D．journalist

10．A．untrained             B．gifted                  C．mature                D．leading

11．A．rough                  B．delicate                C．desperate             D．evident

12．A．referred               B．attracted              C．affected              D．reflected

13．A．former                B．latter                   C．later                    D．earlier

14．A．frightened            B．ashamed              C．astonished           D．convinced

15．A．questioned           B．sought                 C．offered                D．explored

16．A．delayed               B．deleted                C．cancelled             D．ignored

17．A．totalled                B．squeezed             C．spent                  D．spared

18．A．beneficial             B．theoretical            C．academic             D．able

19．A．by                      B．of                       C．upon                   D．after

20．A．when           B．as             C．while              D．since

OSLO — Excited with pride, Norwegians sang in the streets of Oslo on Sunday, celebrating Norway’s National Day and the country’s Eurovision Song Contest victory.
Hundreds of Norwegians sang along to Alexander Rybak’s winning song Fairytale as they walked in the country’s traditional National Day parade (游行) celebrating the Norwegian constitution.
Alexander Rybak — called “Alexander the Great” by the Norwegian media — won a great victory in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) by gaining the most votes in its 53-year history in Moscow on Saturday.
Alexander has played violin and piano since he was five years old, and he also composes his own music and sings. In 2006 he won the Norwegian talent show Kjempesjansen with his own song Foolin. Alexander has performed with one of the world’s most celebrated violinists, Pinchas Zukerman, won the Anders Jahres Culture Price and has been the concertmaster for Norway’s largest symphony orchestra (交响乐队) for youths, Ung Symfoni.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said there was clearly something special about the 23-year-old and his folk music. “This is a phenomenal performance by a young and talented musician,” Stoltenberg said in a statement.
Rybak is expected to draw a large crowd of fans to Oslo’s Gardermoen airport when he arrives next Sunday, after having invited all his countrymen from the stage in Moscow.
With Rybak’s win, Norway will host next year’s Eurovision finals, a show that reaches a television audience of over 100 million people. Norway’s Minister of Culture, Trond Giske, promised that Norway would put on a splendid show next year but without spending as much as Moscow, which spent 24 million euros this year. “I don’t think that is necessary,” he told national broadcaster NRK.
The win was Norway’s third. The Nordic country also won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1985 and 1995.
【小题1】What do Norwegians usually do on the country’s National Day?
A. Sing Fairytale.   B. Have a parade.  C. Hold a song test.  D. Watch the ESC. 
【小题2】Which of the following statements about Rybak is TRUE?
A. He has a lot of fans all over the world.
B. He is the first Norwegian to win the ESC.
C. He is called “Alexander the Great” when he was born.
D. He showed a great talent for music before this ESC.
【小题3】The underlined word “phenomenal” in Para. 5 means “____”.

A．very unusual and impressive	B．too special to be understood
C．with an educational purpose	D．able to draw a large audience

【小题4】What’s Trond Giske’s opinion?

A．Norway will host next year’s Eurovision finals.

B．It doesn’t require too much money to win the finals.

C．Norway is determined to win next year’s Eurovision finals.

D．It doesn’t require a lot of money to make the finals splendid.

【小题5】The main idea of the text is that ______________________________.

A．the Eurovision Song Contest belongs to the world

B．National Day is being celebrated in Norway

C．Crazy fans expect to meet their idol at the airport in Norway

D．Norway celebrates a Eurovision win on National Day.

The government of Norway is planning to build an unusual storage center on an island in the Arctic Ocean. The place would be large enough to hold about two million seeds. The goal is to present all crops known to scientists. The British magazine New Scientist published details of the plan last month. The structure will be designed to protect the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change and other possible threats. It will be built in a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. The mountain is less than one thousand kilometers from the North Pole, the northernmost position on earth.

     An international group called the Global Crop Diversity Trust is working on the project. The director of the group, Cary Fowler, spoke to New Scientist. He said the project would let the world rebuild agriculture if, in his word, “the worst came to the worst”. Norway is expected to start work next year. The project is expected to cost three million dollars. Workers will drill（钻孔） deep in the side of a sandstone mountain. Temperatures in the area never rise above 0ºC. The seeds will be protected behind walls a meter thick and high-security door.

     The magazine report says the collection will represent the products of ten thousand years of farming. Most of the seeds at first will e from collections at seed banks in Africa, Asia and Latin America. To last a long time, seeds need to be kept in very low temperatures. Workers will not be present all the time. But they plan to replace the air inside the storage space each winter. Winter temperatures on the island are about eighteen degrees below 0ºC. The cold weather would protect the seeds even if the air could not be replaced.

Mr. Fowler says the proposed structure will be the world’s safest gene bank. He says the plant seeds would only be used when all other seeds are gone for some reason. Norway first put forward the idea in the 1980s. But safety concerns delayed the plan. At that time, the Soviet Union was meeting in Rome of the Food and Agriculture Organization.

1.The project is meant to ______.

    A．increase the world’s food output in the future

    B．carry out some scientific experiments on plant genes

    C．build an exhibition centre of the world’s plant seeds

    D．protect crop seeds from dying out in case of possible disasters

2.Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the above passage?

    A．The government of Norway will perform the project alone.

    B．Seeds to be collected there were produced ten thousands years ago.

    C．Spitsbergen is chosen because it is free of the nuclear war forever.

    D．Temperature is a major consideration when choosing the storage place.

3.We can infer from the text that _______.

    A．Norway had meant to build the storage centre about 20 years before.   

B．The storage center will greatly promote world agriculture

    C．People will get newly-developed seeds from the center every year.

    D．There haven’t been any seed storage centres in the world before.

4.What is probably the best title of the passage?

    A．The Best Place to Store Seeds    

    B．Noah’s Ark（诺亚方舟）of Plant Seeds in Plan

    C．Concerns of World Food Supply  

    D．A New Way to Feed the World

 

You are watching a film in which two men are having a fight. They hit one another hard. At the start they only fight with their fists（拳头）.But soon they begin hitting one another over the heads with chairs. And so it goes on until one of the men crashes through a window and falls thirty feet to the ground below. He is dead!
Of course he isn’t really dead. With any luck he isn’t even hurt. Why ? Because the men who fall out of high windows or jump from fast moving trains, who crash cars of even catching fire, are professionals（职业）.They do this for a living. These men are called stuntmen. That is to say, they perform tricks（骗局）.
There are two sides to their work. They actually do most of the things you see on the screen. For example, they fall from a high building. However, they do not fall on to hard ground but on to empty cardboard boxes covered with a mattress（床垫）. Again, when they hit one another with chairs, the chairs are made of soft wood and when they crash through windows, the glass is made of sugar!
But although their work depend on trick of this sort, it also requires a high degree of skill and training. Often a stuntman’s success depends on careful timing（计时）.For example, when he is “blown up” in a battle scene, he has to jump out of the way of the explosion（爆炸）just at the right moment.
Naturally stuntmen are well paid for their work, but they lead dangerous lives. They often get seriously injured, and sometimes killed. A Norwegian stuntman, for example, skied over the edge of a cliff a thousand feet high. His parachute（降落伞）failed to open, and he was killed.
In spite of（尽管）all the risks, this is no longer a profession for men only. Men no longer dress up as women when actresses have to perform some dangerous action. For nowadays there are stuntgirls too!
【小题1】Stuntmen are those who____________

A．Often dress up as actors

B．prefer to lead dangerous lives

C．often perform seemingly dangerous actions

D．often fight each other for their lives

【小题2】Stuntmen earn their living by___________

A．playing their dirty tricks

B．selling their special skills

C．jumping out of high windows

D．jumping from fast moving trains

【小题3】When a stuntman falls from a high building,___________

A．he needs little protection

B．he will be covered with a mattress

C．his life is endangered

D．his safety is generally all right

【小题4】Which of the following is the main factor(因素) of a successful performance?

A．Strength

B．Exactness

C．Speed

D．Carefulness

【小题5】What can be inferred from the author’s example of the Norwegian stuntman?

A．Sometimes an accident can occur to a stuntman.

B．The percentage of serious accidents is high.

C．Parachutes must be of good quality.

D．The cliff is too high.

British men are couch potatoes. They spend nearly half their free?time watching TV. They watch more TV than women, do less housework, less charity work and less childcare—but spend more time shopping, a poll(民意测验) suggests. Analysts(分析家) from Eurostat, the EU's statistical office, interviewed working men and women in 10 countries.?

Britain, where men devoted 49% of their free?time to the box, came a narrow second to the Hungarians with 51%.German and Norwegian men watched the least TV—just over one third of their spare time.?

The analysts took the average of the figures for the whole year including holidays and weekends. They broke down the “average day” into five categories(类)—free-time, sleep, meals and personal care, travel, domestic chores(家务事) and work or study. It shows that British men have four hours and 41 minutes free time each day—20 minutes more than women. But women spend nearly double the amount of time on domestic chores than men. Almost three-and-a-half hours of a woman's day is taken up with domestic work, compared to less than two hours for men.?

Food preparation makes up the bulk(量) of the chores, with leaning and shopping the next most time-consuming. They further broke down the free-time and domestic categories to show that men spend 137 minutes each day in front of the TV, compared to women's 114 minutes.

Women spend slightly more time socializing resting and reading than men, but slightly less time on hobbies, sport and exercise. Universally unpopular with both sexes is culture—accounting for just 2% of both men and women's leisure time.?

According to the passage, couch potatoes refer to _______.?

A. a kind of potatoes produced in Britain?

B. people spending much time sitting and watching television?

C. a kind of food offered by the English people?

D. people who like doing housework instead of watching TV?

According to the passage, which of the following may NOT be included in the ten countries??

A. Germany.   B. Norway.     C. Hungary.    D. Russia.?

What both men and women don't like in their spare time is _______.?

A. taking part in cultural activities       B. shopping?

C. enjoying their hobbies      D. doing domestic chores?

What would be the best title for the passage??

A. Domestic Chores—Only Women's Right?

B. British Men—Couch Potatoes?

C. What the Research Means?

D. Men and Women in Different Situations