III. 阅读 (共两节，满分40分)

第一节：阅读理解（共15小题；每小题2分，满分30分）

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，并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。

As goods and services improved, people were persuaded to spend their money on changing from old to new, and found the change worth the expense. When an airline equipped itself with jets, for example, its costs (and therefore air fare) would go up, but the new planes meant such an improvement that the higher cost was justified. A new car (or wireless, washing machine, electric kettle) made life so much more comfortable than the old one that the high cost of replacement was fully repaid. Manufacturers still cry their goods as persuasively as ever, but are the improvements really worth paying for? In many fields, things have now reached such a high standard of performance that further progress is very limited and very, very expensive. Airlines, for example, go to enormous expense in buying the latest prestige jets, in which vast research costs have been spent on relatively small improvements. If we abandon these vast costs we might lose the chance of cutting minutes away from flying times; but wouldn’t it be better to see airfares drop dramatically, as capital costs become relatively insignificant? Again, in the context of a 70 m. p. h. Limit, with lines of cars traveling so close as to control each other’s speeds, improvements in performance are actually irrelevant; improvements in handling are unnecessary, as most production cars grip（抓牢） the road perfectly, and comfort has now reached a very high level. Small improvements here are unlikely to be worth the thousands that anybody replacing an ordinary family car every two years may have spent on them. Let us instead have cars — or wireless, electric kettles, washing machines, television sets — which are made to last, and not to be replaced. Significant progress is obviously a good thing, but the insignificant progression from model-change to model-change is not.

1. The author is obviously challenging the social norm (社会规范) that ________________.

A. it is important to improve goods and services

B. development of technology makes our life more comfortable

C. it is reasonable that prices are going up all the time

D. slightly improved new products are worth buying

2. According to this passage, airfares may rise because ______________.

A. the airplane has been improved

B. people tend to travel by new airplanes

C. the change is found to be reasonable

D. the service on the airplane is better than before

3. According to the author, passengers would be happier if they ____________.

A. could fly in the latest model of good planes

B. could get tickets at much lower prices

C. see the airlines make vital changes in their services

D. could spend less time flying in the air

4. When manufactures have improved the performance of their products to a certain level, then it would be _______________.

A. justified for them to cut the price

B. unnecessary for them to make any new changes

C. difficult and costly to further better them

D. insignificant for them to cut down the research costs

5. In the case of cars, the author advises that we _____________.

A. cancel the speed limit                       B. further improve their performance

C. change models every two years          D. improve their durability (耐久性)

【小题1】 多数人统治，人头都算数；少数人统治，人头就落地。
Under m     rule, heads are counted; under minority(少数) rule, heads are cracked.
【小题2】 愚者的心长在嘴里，智者的嘴藏在心里。
The heart of a fool is in his mouth but the mouth of a wise man is in his h    .
【小题3】 快活的人通常都是傻瓜。
A m     man is usually a fool.
【小题4】 趁热打铁。
S     the iron while it is hot.
【小题5】 麻烦不找你，别去找麻烦。
Never trouble trouble until t     troubles you.
【小题6】 不要以从别人那里借来的观点为生。
Don’l     on the borrowed opinions of other men .
【小题7】 幸运和不幸是邻居。
F     and misfortune are next-door neighbors.
【小题8】世界是一出戏，要是事先知道情节，就不值得看了。
The world is a play that would not be worth seeing if we knew the p   .
【小题9】患难见真情。
A friend in n    is a friend indeed.
【小题10】 工欲善其事，必先利其器。
A craftsman who wishes to do his work well must first s     his tools.

阅读下面短文，根据以下要求：1)汉语提示；2)首字母提示；3）语境提示，在每个空格内填入一个英语单词，并将该词完整地写在右边相对应的横线上。所填单词要求意义准确、拼写正确。

Some people take it for granted that some lucky numbers can bring them good

luck. For instance, the so-called lucky numbers like 6 or 8 are  w _____（广泛地）_______

used because they have the similar pronunciation _______ the Chinese characters______

which mean “good luck”. So some young couples choose a date in _________________

there is a 6 or an 8 to h _______ their wedding; many shops choose such dates t______

_______________（庆祝）their opening. Yet many others don’t think so. They_______

think that numbers have _______ to do with luck. They regard numbers simply _______

as a mathematic symbol for counting. W ____ our own contribution, good luck _______

won’t fall on us automatically. I’m in f______________ of the latter opinion. I      _______

think our society is very modern now. Whether we can have good luck d_____       ______

on _____________（我们自己）. If we work hard, good luck will come to us.      _______

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 them as rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums (贫民窟).” More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurences 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 (低等的) 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 lightskinned 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 (养育), 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 tone was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography (自传) 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 question in 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.
【小题1】 How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowe’s?