A MAN planted a rose and watered it   41   . One day as he examined it, he saw a bud that would soon blossom, but he also    42     thorns (刺) on the stem . He thought, "How can a beautiful flower come from a plant with so many sharp thorns?" Saddened by this thought, he     43     to water the rose, and just before it was ready to bloom, it died.

So it is with many people. Within every soul there is a rose. The good    44  planted in us at birth grow amid the thorns of our faults. Many of us look at ourselves and see only the thorns, the defects. We become    45    , thinking that nothing good can possibly come from us. We neglect to water the good within us, and    46   it dies. We never realize our   47    .

Some people do not see the rose within themselves; someone else must show it to them. One of the greatest gifts a person can     48     is to be able to reach past the thorns and find the rose within others.

This is the characteristic of love ― to look at a person, know his faults, recognize the goodness in his soul, and help him realize that he can    49     his faults. If we show him the "rose" within himself, he will conquer the thorns. Only then will they blossom many times over.

              A middle-aged stranger visited us late on a dark rainy night when my father was working the night shift (a job for a period during the night). The stranger asked if he could wait under the eaves of our roof for the rain to stop. Then he disappeared, and we started hearing footsteps and creaking boards in the attic(the space or room at the top of a building, under the roof, often used for storing things). Was the stranger inside our house? My whole body couldn’t help but stiffen. In my mind’s eye, I could imagine the stranger pushing through the attic door and approaching us.
We immediately called Jerry, our neighbor, for help. He searched everywhere, but the visitor was nowhere to be found. As Jerry looked in the garage, he found the stranger lying underneath the car. Jerry exclaimed with fright, “You are not allowed to enter the house. Get off the property right now.”
We were determined to leave the house immediately. As we drove away, we saw the man blocking our way on the road and staring at us. We had to swerve to miss him. After that, I never saw the stranger again.
【小题1】The text is mainly about                .

Roger Conner is a modern?-day Horatio Alger hero. Roger started out as an unpaid worker in a small flower shop. He has become the owner of a florist company whose sales are well over $100 000 a year.

One day when Roger was only twelve, he stopped at a local flower shop. He asked the owner if he could work for him, without pay, in order to learn the business. Roger started working every day after school and on weekends. After two years on the job, he finally asked for a small salary. The owners told him he “wasn't good enough to be paid.” So he quit, and found a paying job at another local flower shop. He worked hard there, but after six months they laid him off because business was slow.

Not discouraged, Roger decided to do it alone and started his own flower store in a basement in his town. He started his business with only sixty?-five dollars. He bought old refrigerators at garage sales and knocked the shelves out. This turned them into coolers for his fresh?-cut flowers. His business grew rapidly as he built up a reputation for top quality and fine service.

In 1977, Roger bought out the flower store where he had worked without pay for over two years. The people who said he “wasn’t good enough to be paid” were astonished to find that they were being taken over by a teenager. He had plans to renovate (振兴) the whole store.

One of the reasons the owners sold out to Roger was that the store wasn't doing well. But after Roger took over ownership and redid the store, business started booming. In fact, business was so good that after one year, he celebrated by buying out the other store where he had worked. Roger then combined both stores and moved to a location in the center of his town.

The new store has 2 000 square feet and seven employees. And he did it all before he reached the age of twenty.

71．The author is wants to show us that people who want to succeed in business should ________.

A. work without pay

B. own a flower shop

C. work hard and never give up

D. work as teenagers

72．Which of the following is NOT true according to the passage?

A. He worked for two years without pay.

B. He needed luck to be successful.

C. He opened his first flower business in a basement.

D. He became successful before the age of twenty.

73. The passage may be a ________.

A. newspaper report　　 　 B. humorous story

C. television play 　　　　　 D. scientific story

74. The underlined part in Paragraph 2 probably means ________.

A. employed him

B. didn’t let him work there

C. paid him money

D. were proud of him

75. From the passage, a “Horatio Alger hero” may be the kind of person who________.

A. works hard in the flower business

B. was born into a rich family

C. starts out poor and becomes rich

D. becomes famous as a result of good luck　　

When women sit together to watch a movie on TV, they usually talk simultaneously (同时地) about a variety of subjects, including children, men, careers and what’ s happening in their lives. When groups of men and women watch a movie together, the men usually end up telling the women to shut up. Men can either talk or watch the screen — they can’t do both —and they don’ t understand that women can. Besides, women consider that the point of all getting together is to have a good time and develop relationships — not just to sit there like couch potatoes staring at the screen.

During the ad breaks, a man often asks a woman to explain the plot and tell him where the relationship between the characters is going. He is unable, unlike women, to read the subtle body language signals that reveal how the characters are feeling emotionally. Since women originally spent their days with the other women and children in the group, they developed the ability to communicate successfully in order to maintain relationships. For a woman, speech continues to have such a clear purpose: to build relationships and make friends. For men, to talk is to relate the facts.

66．While watching TV with others, women usually talk a lot because they________.

A. are afraid of awkward silence with their families and friends

B. can both talk and watch the screen at the same time

C. think they can have a good time and develop relationships

D. have to explain the plot and body language to their husbands

67．After a vacation with her girlfriend, a woman would talk to her again on the phone for hours in order to________.

A. experience the happy time again

B. keep a close tie with her

C. recommend her a new scenic spot

D. remind her of something forgotten

68．What does the author want to tell us most?

A. Women’s brains are better organized for language and communication.

B. Women love to talk because they are more sociable than men.

C. Men do not like talking because they rely more on facts.

D. Social conditioning is not the reason why women love talking.

69．Which of the following would be the best title for the passage?

A. Women Are Socially Trained to Talk

B. Talking Maintains Relationships

C. Women Love to Talk

D. Men Talk Differently from Women

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. 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 (坟冢).

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 we 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 (自助餐厅).

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

A. spend their free time                                     B. play golf and other sports

C. avoid doing their schoolwork                         D. keep away from their parents

2．What can we infer from Paragraph 2?

A. The activities in the woods were well planned.

B. Human history is not the result of exploration.

C. Exploration should be a systematic activity.

D. The author explored in the woods aimlessly.

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

A. calm                        B. doubtful                   C. serious                     D. optimistic

4．How does the author feel about his childhood?

A. Happy but short.                                                 B. Lonely but memorable.

C. Boring and meaningless.                                D. Long and unforgettable.