Ray Travers sat back at the large desk, and looked around his plush（豪华的）office．He was tired．

Ray's eyes stopped at a painting on the wall．It was a gift given by an old friend, Bull, as a farewell gift when he left his hometown．He recalled the life spent in that small town; pleasant times．The many hours he spent talking lo his good friend, and the tales he was told about hunting in the Africa of old．

Memories flowed back more than ten years; he remembered how he enjoyed hearing about the wonderful hunting, and how he wished he could have shared those times．

Ray opened his desk drawer and brought out a wooden box．He opened the lid and exposed a work of art, a hand-made hunting knife．This was a gift from Bull, given to Ray more than 20 years ago．It was one of the first knives Bull had made, and Ray had called it "Zambezi”, the river where Bull had been so many times．

He closed the box and sat upright at his desk; he was driving himself hard, and deserved a break．Things were going well with the business, everything running smoothly．He could afford a week off!

He went back home．A week in the hometown would be like going back in history．"Man, it's going to be good," Ray said aloud, as he turned onto the highway and watched the city lights fast disappearing, as he looked in the rearview mirror．

It was well into the night when Ray pulled into an all-night gas station He walked around the gas station and the memories started …  He was finally back on the road, the powerful car going its way through the night, headlights piercing （穿透） the darkness．Memories danced through the man' s mind．Memories of good times , when he knew what it was to relax , to talk, and to really visit．

Slowly entering town he looked around．Ray sat in his car, looking at the old building, smiling． Inside it was almost as though it was the same people as 15 years ago．

1.We learn from the passage that Bull is                    ．

2.What does the author mainly want to tell us in Paragraphs 2 －5?

3.What do we know from the passage?

4.What does the under lined part in Paragraph 7 mean?

5.What may the author talk about in the paragraph that follows the passage?

阅读下面短文, 请根据短文后的要求进行答题。（请注意问题后的字数要求)。

[1]Save the Children, the international support group, has issued a new study on the condition of mothers around the world. The study by Save the Children is part of a new campaign aimed at improving the health and education of mothers around the world. The group also hopes to pressure lawmakers to increase international aid for women’s programs.

[2]The report rates 96 countries on issues important to mothers. They include health care and family planning services the health of their children, education and political involvement, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were rated highest, followed by other industrial countries.

[3]The report confirms what Save the Children has been saying for more than 70 years. The lives of children around the world will not improve unless the lives of their mothers improve. There is a direct link between the health of children and the quality of health care, family planning services and education offered to mothers. The ten countries rated worst in the study have problems with childbirth. Less than one-third of the births in those countries are attended by trained health care professionals. Also, only three percent of the women use a system to prevent pregnancies. In these countries, one in twelve women die during childbirth. But              , the death rate for women during childbirth is only one in six thousand.

[4]Save the Children says more educational programs for mothers and girls will improve the ability of women to raise healthy babies. The group says millions of lives could be saved if more money were invested in training programs. Family planning alone could prevent one-fourth of all deaths among new–born babies and their mothers. It would teach women to wait two or more years between births.

1.What’s the best title of this passage? (no more than 6 words)

2.Complete the following statement with proper words. (no more than 3 words)

The group held the view that mothers should                                and this will view enable women to give birth to children in good health.

3. Fill in the blank in Paragraph 3 with proper words. (no more than 8 words)

4.List three solutions to the problem based on the text. (no more than 3 words on each blank)

5.What does the under lined phrase “the group” (in Paragraph 1) probably refer to? (no more than 3 words)

Ray Travers sat back at the large desk, and looked around his plush（豪华的）office．He was tired．
Ray's eyes stopped at a painting on the wall．It was a gift given by an old friend, Bull, as a farewell gift when he left his hometown．He recalled the life spent in that small town; pleasant times．The many hours he spent talking lo his good friend, and the tales he was told about hunting in the Africa of old．
Memories flowed back more than ten years; he remembered how he enjoyed hearing about the wonderful hunting, and how he wished he could have shared those times．
Ray opened his desk drawer and brought out a wooden box．He opened the lid and exposed a work of art, a hand-made hunting knife．This was a gift from Bull, given to Ray more than 20 years ago．It was one of the first knives Bull had made, and Ray had called it "Zambezi”, the river where Bull had been so many times．
He closed the box and sat upright at his desk; he was driving himself hard, and deserved a break．Things were going well with the business, everything running smoothly．He could afford a week off!
He went back home．A week in the hometown would be like going back in history．"Man, it's going to be good," Ray said aloud, as he turned onto the highway and watched the city lights fast disappearing, as he looked in the rearview mirror．
It was well into the night when Ray pulled into an all-night gas station He walked around the gas station and the memories started …  He was finally back on the road, the powerful car going its way through the night, headlights piercing （穿透） the darkness．Memories danced through the man' s mind．Memories of good times , when he knew what it was to relax , to talk, and to really visit．
Slowly entering town he looked around．Ray sat in his car, looking at the old building, smiling． Inside it was almost as though it was the same people as 15 years ago．
【小题1】We learn from the passage that Bull is                    ．

Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck the mass rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums”. More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurrences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it.)
But the attacks were and are silly—and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction — a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”
There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold south, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
The point was difficult to miss: nurture, not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice—manner of speech, for example—were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
Twain’s racial was not perfect . One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth--mostly with white men performing in black-face---and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
Was Twain a racist? Asking the questioning the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century

1. 1.

   How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowes?

   1. A.
      Twain was more willing to deal with racism
   2. B.
      Twain’s attack on racism was much less open
   3. C.
      Twain’s themes seemed to agree with plots
   4. D.
      Twain was openly concerned with racism
2. 2.

   The story of two babies switched mainly indicates that                        

   1. A.
      slaves were forced to give up their babies to their masters
   2. B.
      slaves babies could pickup slave holders’ way of speaking
   3. C.
      blacks’ social position was shaped by how they were brought up
   4. D.
      blacks were born with certain features of prejudice
3. 3.

   What does the under lined word “they” in Paragraph 7 refer to?

   1. A.
      The attacks
   2. B.
      Slavery and prejudice
   3. C.
      White men
   4. D.
      The shows
4. 4.

   What does the author mainly argue for?

   1. A.
      Twain had done more than his contemporary writers to attack racism
   2. B.
      Twain was an admirable figure comparable to Abraham Lincoln
   3. C.
      Twain’s works had been banned on unreasonable grounds
   4. D.
      Twain s works should be read from a historical point of view

Ray Travers sat back at the large desk, and looked around his plush（豪华的）office．He was tired．
Ray's eyes stopped at a painting on the wall．It was a gift given by an old friend, Bull, as a farewell gift when he left his hometown．He recalled the life spent in that small town; pleasant times．The many hours he spent talking lo his good friend, and the tales he was told about hunting in the Africa of old．
Memories flowed back more than ten years; he remembered how he enjoyed hearing about the wonderful hunting, and how he wished he could have shared those times．
Ray opened his desk drawer and brought out a wooden box．He opened the lid and exposed a work of art, a hand-made hunting knife．This was a gift from Bull, given to Ray more than 20 years ago．It was one of the first knives Bull had made, and Ray had called it "Zambezi”, the river where Bull had been so many times．
He closed the box and sat upright at his desk; he was driving himself hard, and deserved a break．Things were going well with the business, everything running smoothly．He could afford a week off!
He went back home．A week in the hometown would be like going back in history．"Man, it's going to be good," Ray said aloud, as he turned onto the highway and watched the city lights fast disappearing, as he looked in the rearview mirror．
It was well into the night when Ray pulled into an all-night gas station He walked around the gas station and the memories started …  He was finally back on the road, the powerful car going its way through the night, headlights piercing （穿透） the darkness．Memories danced through the man' s mind．Memories of good times , when he knew what it was to relax , to talk, and to really visit．
Slowly entering town he looked around．Ray sat in his car, looking at the old building, smiling． Inside it was almost as though it was the same people as 15 years ago．

1. 1.

   We learn from the passage that Bull is           ．

   1. A.
      Ray's colleague
   2. B.
      a man in Ray' s hometown
   3. C.
      Ray's relative in Africa
   4. D.
      an African woodcarving artist
2. 2.

   What does the author mainly want to tell us in Paragraphs 2 -5?

   1. A.
      Bull loved Africa and knew much about it．
   2. B.
      Bull was good at making works of art．
   3. C.
      Ray missed his hometown and relatives．
   4. D.
      Ray missed the time he spent with Bull in his hometown．
3. 3.

   What do we know from the passage?

   1. A.
      Ray visited Africa together with Bull many times．
   2. B.
      Ray and Bull often went hunting together．
   3. C.
      Zambezi is the name of a river in Hay a hometown．
   4. D.
      Ray planned to stay in his hometown for about a week．
4. 4.

   What does the under lined part in Paragraph 7 mean?

   1. A.
      Ray knew how to relax after keeping busy for along time．
   2. B.
      Ray didn't want to leave his hometown because of so many memories．
   3. C.
      Ray's hometown changed a lot and was worth a visit．
   4. D.
      The visit to his hometown reminded Ray of the days together with Bull．
5. 5.

   What may the author talk about in the paragraph that follows the passage?

   1. A.
      The hard time Ray experienced in his career．
   2. B.
      Why Ray left his hometown alone．
   3. C.
      The situation in Ray's hometown．
   4. D.
      How Ray became a successful businessman．