The Queen’s English is now sounding less upper-class, a scientific study of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts had found. Researchers have studied each of her messages to the Commonwealth countries since 1952 to find out the change in her pronunciation from the noble Upper Received to the Standard Received.

Jonathan Harrington, a professor at Germany’s University of Munich, wanted to discover whether accent (口音) changers recorded over the past half century would take place within one person. “As far as I know, there just is nobody else for whom there is this sort of broadcast records,” he said.

He said the noble way of pronouncing vowels (元音) had gradually lost ground as the noble upper-class accent over the past years. “Her accent sounds slightly less noble than it did 50 years ago. But these are very, very small and slow changes that we don’t notice from year to year.”

“We may be able to relate it to changes in the social classes,” he told The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper. “In 1952 she would have been hears saying ‘thet men in the bleck het’. Now it would be ‘that man in the black hat’. And ‘hame’ rather than ‘home’. In the 1950s she would have been ‘lorst’, but by the 1970s ‘lost’.”

The Queen’s broadcast is a personal message to the Commonwealth countries. Each Christmas, the 10-minute broadcast is put on TV at 3 pm in Britain as many families are recovering from their traditional turkey lunch. (传统火鸡午餐).

The results were published (发表) in the Journal of Phonetics.

1.The Queen’s broadcasts were chosen for the study mainly because ______.

A．she has been Queen for many years	B．she has a less upper-class accent now
C．her speeches are familiar to many people	D．her speeches have been recorded for 50 years

2.Which of the following is an example of a less noble accent in English?

A．“duaty”

B．“citee”

C．“hame”

D．“lorst”

3.We may infer from the text that the Journal of Phonetics is a magazine on _______.

A．speech sounds

B．Christmas customs

C．TV broadcasting

D．personal messages

4.What is the text mainly about?

A．The relationship between accents and social classes.

B．The Queen’s Christmas speeches on TV.

C．The changes in a person’s accent.

D．The recent development of the English language.

 

The Queen’s English is now sounding less upper-class, a scientific study of the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts has found. Researchers have studied each of her messages to the Commonwealth countries since 1952 to find out the change in her pronunciation from the noble Upper Received to the Standard Received.

Jonathan Harrington, a professor at Germany’s University of Munich, wanted to discover whether accent changes recorded over the past half century would take place within one person. “As far as I know, there just is nobody else for whom there is this sort of broadcast records,” he said.

He said the noble way of pronouncing vowels (元音) had gradually lost ground as the noble upper-class accent over the past years. “Her accent sounds slightly less noble than it did 50 years ago. But these are very, very small and slow changes that we don’t notice from year to year.”

“We may be able to relate it to changes in the social classes,” he told The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper. “In 1952 she would have been heard saying ‘thet men in the bleck het’. Now it would be ‘that man in the black hat’. Similarly, she would have spoken of ‘the citay’ and ‘dutay’, rather than ‘citee’ and ‘dutee’, and ‘hame’ rather than ‘home’. In the 1950s she would have been ‘lorst’, but by the 1970s ‘lost’.”

The Queen’s broadcast is a personal message to the Commonwealth countries. Each  Christmas, the 10-minute broadcast is put on TV at 3 pm in Britain as many families are recovering from their traditional turkey lunch (传统火鸡午餐).

The results were published (发表) in the Journal of Phonetics.

1.What is the text mainly about?

A．The relationship between accents and social classes.

B．The Queen’s Christmas speeches on TV.

C．The changes in a person’s accent.

D．The recent development of the English language.

2.The Queen’s broadcasts were chosen for the study mainly because ______.

A．she has been Queen for many years

B．she has a less upper-class accent now

C．her speeches are familiar to many people

D．her speeches have been recorded for 50 years

3.Which of the following is an example of a less noble accent in English?

A．“dutay”

B．“citee”

C．“hame”

D．“lorst”

4.We may infer from the text that the Journal of Phonetics is a magazine on ______.

A．speech sounds	B．Christmas customs
C．TV broadcasting	D．personal messages

 

Fear may be felt in the heart as well as in the head, according to a study that has found a link between the cycles of a beating heart and the chance of someone feeling fear.

Tests on healthy volunteers found that they were more likely to feel a sense of fear at the moment when their hearts are contracting(收缩) and pumping blood around their bodies, compared with the point when the heartbeat is relaxed. Scientists say the results suggest that the heart is able to influence how the brain responds to a fearful event, depending on which point it is at in its regular cycle of contraction and relaxation.

Sarah Garfinkel at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School said: "Our study shows for the first time that the way in which we deal with fear is different depending on when we see fearful pictures in relation to our heart."

The study tested 20 healthy volunteers on their reactions to fear as they were shown pictures of fearful faces. Dr Garfinkel said, "The study showed that fearful faces are better noticed when the heart is pumping than when it is relaxed. Thus our hearts can also affect what we see and what we don't see - and guide whether we see fear."

To further understand this relationship, the scientists also used a brain scanner(扫描仪) to show how the brain influences the way the heart changes a person's feeling of fear. “We have found an important mechanism by which the heart and brain ‘speak’to each other to change our feelings and reduce fear," Dr Garfinkel said.

"We hope that by increasing our understanding about how fear is dealt with and ways that it could be reduced, we may be able to develop more successful treatments for anxiety disorders, and also for those for those who may be suffering from serious stress disorder."

1.What is the finding of the study?

A．One's heart affects how he feels fear.

B．fear is a result of one's relaxed heartbeat.

C．fear has something to do with one's health.

D．Ones fast heartbeats are likely to cause fear.

2.The study was carried out by analyzing _______.

A．volunteers' heartbeats when they saw terrible pictures

B．the time volunteers saw fearful pictures and their health conditions

C．volunteers' reactions to horrible pictures and data from their brain scans

D．different pictures shown to volunteers and their heart-brain communication

3.Which of the following is closest in meaning to "mechanism" in Paragraph 6?

A．Order.            B．system.           C．machine.          D．treatment.

4.This study may contribute to _______.

A．treating anxiety and stress better

B．explaining the cycle of fear and anxiety

C．finding the sky to the heart-brain communication

D．understanding different fears in our hearts and heads

 

America is a mobile society. Friendships between Americans can be close and real, yet disappear soon if situations change. Neither side feels hurt by this. Both may exchange Christmas greetings for a year or two, perhaps a few letters for a while — then no more. If the same two people meet again by chance, even years later, they pick up the friendship. This can be quite difficult for us Chinese to understand, because friendships between us flower more slowly but then may become lifelong feelings, extending (延伸) sometimes deeply into both families.

Americans are ready to receive us foreigners at their homes, share their holidays, and their home life. They will enjoy welcoming us and be pleased if we accept their hospitality (好客) easily.

Another difficult point for us Chinese to understand Americans is that although they include us warmly in their personal everyday lives, they don’t show their politeness to us if it requires a great deal of time. This is usually the opposite of the practice in our country where we may be generous with our time. Sometimes, we, as hosts, will appear at airports even in the middle of the night to meet a friend. We may take days off to act as guides to our foreign friends. The Americans, however, express their welcome usually at homes, but truly can not manage the time to do a great deal with a visitor outside their daily routine. They will probably expect us to get ourselves from the airport to our own hotel by bus. And they expect that we will phone them from there. Once we arrive at their homes, the welcome will be full, warm and real. We will find ourselves treated hospitably.

For the Americans, it is often considered more friendly to invite a friend to their homes than to go to restaurants, except for purely business matters. So accept their hospitality at home!

1.The writer of this passage must be ______.

A. an American          B. a Chinese    C. a professor      D. a student

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

A. Friendships between Americans usually extend deeply into their families.

B. Friendships between Americans usually last for all their lives.

C. Americans always show their warmth even if they are very busy.

D. Americans will continue their friendships again even after a long break.

3.From the last two paragraphs we can learn that when we arrive in America to visit an American friend, we will probably be ______.

A. warmly welcomed at the airport     

B. offered a ride to his home

C. treated hospitably at his home       

D. treated to dinner in a restaurant

4. The underlined words “generous with our time” in Paragraph 3 probably mean ______.

A. strict with time    B. willing to spend time

C. careful with time    D. serious with time

5.A suitable title for this passage would probably be “______”.

A. Friendships between Chinese   

B. Friendships between Americans

C. Americans’ hospitality        

D. Americans’ and Chinese’s views of friendship

 

阅读下面短文, 掌握其大意, 然后从36—55 各题所给的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中选出最佳选项, 并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。

One windy spring day, I observed young people having fun using the wind to fly their kites. Multicolored creations of varying shapes and sizes   36   the skies like beautiful birds dancing. As the strong winds blew against the kites, a string kept them under   37  .

Instead of blowing away with the wind, they arose against it to achieve great   38  . They __39   and pulled, but the restraining string and the clumsy tail kept them in tow (拖着), facing upward and against the   40  . As the kites struggled and trembled against the string, they seemed to say, “Let me go! Let me go! I want to be   41  !” They flew beautifully even   42   they fought the restraint of the string. Finally, one of the kites succeeded in getting   43  . “Free at last,” it seemed to say. “Free to fly   44   the wind.”

Yet freedom from restraint simply put it at the   45   of an unsympathetic wind. It flew up and down to the ground and   46   in a mass of weeds and string against a dead bush. “Free at last”, free to lie powerless in the dirt, to be blown   47   along the ground.

How much like   48   we sometimes are. The heaven gives us adversity (逆境) and restrictions,   49   to follow from which we can grow and   50   strength. Some of us resist the rules so hard that we never fly to reach the heights we might have   51  . We keep part of the rules and never   52   high enough to get our tails off the ground.

Let us each rise to the great heights,   53   that some of the restraints that we may be annoyed at are   54   the powerful force that helps us climb and   55   our goal.

36. A. surrounded           B. covered             C. emptied                    D. filled

37. A. construction         B. discussion         C. control                       D. pressure

38. A. heights                 B. lengths              C. widths                         D. weights

39. A. crashed                B. shook                C. floated                       D. landed

40. A. rain                      B. sun                   C. wind                         D. storm

41. A. energetic              B. lonely                C. safe                          D. free

42. A. before                  B. as                      C. since                        D. after

43. A. crazy                   B. upset                 C. loose                         D. happy

44. A. with                    B. against               C. beneath                   D. over

45. A. edge                    B. expense             C. mercy                      D. bottom

46. A. fled                     B. hid                     C. existed                       D. landed

47. A. deliberately          B. helplessly           C. actively                    D. hopefully

48. A. strings                 B. kites                   C. bushes                       D. weeds

49.A. rules                    B. customs             C. wishes                      D. instructions

50. A. convey                B. consume            C. lose                        D. gain

51. A. contained             B. lowered              C. indicated                 D. obtained

52. A. rise                      B. rank                   C. kick                         D. jump

53. A. hoping                 B. supposing          C. recognizing              D. dreaming

54. A. strictly                 B. actually             C. hardly                     D. consequently

55. A. achieve                B. score                 C. miss                       D. set