love charity(慈善) shops and so do lots of other people in Britain because you find quite a few of them on every high street. The charity shop is a British institution, selling everything from clothes to electric goods, all at very good prices. You can get things you won’t find in the shops anymore. The thing I like best about them is that your money is going to a good cause and not into the pockets of profit-driven companies, and you are not damaging the planet, but finding a new home for unwanted goods.
The first charity shop was opened in 1947 by Oxfam. The famous charity’s appeal to aid postwar Greece had been so successful it had been flooded with donations(捐赠物). They decided to set up a shop to sell some of these donations to raise money for that appeal. Now there are over 7,000 charity shops in the UK. My favourite charity shop in my hometown is the Red Cross shop, where I always find children’s books, all 10 or 20 pence each.
Most of the people working in the charity shops are volunteers, although there is often a manager who gets paid. Over 90% of the goods in the charity shops are donated by the public. Every morning you see bags of unwanted items outside the front of shops, although they don’t encourage this, rather ask people to bring things in when the shop is open.
The shops have very low running costs: all profits go to charity work. Charity shops raise more than ￡110 million a year, funding（资助）medical research, overseas aid, supporting sick and poor children, homeless and disabled people, and much more. What better place to spend your money? You get something special for a very good price and a good moral sense. You provide funds to a good cause and tread lightly on the environment. （08天津卷）
【小题1】The author loves the charity shop mainly because of _______.

A．its convenient location

B．its great variety of goods

C．its spirit of goodwill

D．its nice shopping environment

【小题2】The first charity shop in the UK was set up to ____.

A．sell cheap products

B．deal with unwanted things

C．raise money for patients

D．help a foreign country

【小题3】 Which of the following is TRUE about charity shops?

A．The operating costs are very low.

B．The staff are usually well paid.

C．90% of the donations are second-hand.

D．They are open twenty-four hours a day.

【小题4】 Which of the following may be the best title for the passage?

A．What to Buy a Charity Shops.

B．Charity Shop: Its Origin & Development.

C．Charity Shop: Where You Buy to Donate.

D．The Public’s Concern about Charity Shops.

love charity(慈善) shops and so do lots of other people in Britain because you find quite a few of them on every high street. The charity shop is a British institution, selling everything from clothes to electric goods, all at very good prices. You can get things you won’t find in the shops anymore. The thing I like best about them is that your money is going to a good cause and not into the pockets of profit-driven companies, and you are not damaging the planet, but finding a new home for unwanted goods.

The first charity shop was opened in 1947 by Oxfam. The famous charity’s appeal to aid postwar Greece had been so successful it had been flooded with donations(捐赠物). They decided to set up a shop to sell some of these donations to raise money for that appeal. Now there are over 7,000 charity shops in the UK. My favourite charity shop in my hometown is the Red Cross shop, where I always find children’s books, all 10 or 20 pence each.

Most of the people working in the charity shops are volunteers, although there is often a manager who gets paid. Over 90% of the goods in the charity shops are donated by the public. Every morning you see bags of unwanted items outside the front of shops, although they don’t encourage this, rather ask people to bring things in when the shop is open.

The shops have very low running costs: all profits go to charity work. Charity shops raise more than ￡110 million a year, funding（资助）medical research, overseas aid, supporting sick and poor children, homeless and disabled people, and much more. What better place to spend your money? You get something special for a very good price and a good moral sense. You provide funds to a good cause and tread lightly on the environment. （08天津卷）

The author loves the charity shop mainly because of _______.

   A. its convenient location

   B. its great variety of goods

   C. its spirit of goodwill

   D. its nice shopping environment

The first charity shop in the UK was set up to ____.

   A. sell cheap products

   B. deal with unwanted things

   C. raise money for patients

   D. help a foreign country

Which of the following is TRUE about charity shops?

   A. The operating costs are very low.

   B. The staff are usually well paid.

   C. 90% of the donations are second-hand.

   D. They are open twenty-four hours a day.

Which of the following may be the best title for the passage?

   A. What to Buy a Charity Shops.

   B. Charity Shop: Its Origin & Development.

   C. Charity Shop: Where You Buy to Donate.

   D. The Public’s Concern about Charity Shops.

 (08·天津)

Jenna, a popular girl from Westwood Middle School, had graduated first in her class and was

ready for new  16  in high school.

      17  , high school was different. In the first week, Jenna went to tryouts(选拔赛) for cheerleaders(拉拉队队员). She was competing against very talented girls, and she knew it would be  18  for her to be selected. Two hours later, the  19  read a list of the girls for a second tryout. Her heart  20  as the list ended without her name. Feeling   21   , she walked home carrying her schoolbag full of homework.

Arriving home, she started with math. She had always been a good math student, but now she was  22  . She moved on to English and history, and was  23   to find that she didn’t have any trouble with those subjects. Feeling better, she decided not to  24   math for the time being.

The next day Jenna went to see Mrs. Biden about being on the school  25  . Mrs. Biden wasn’t as  26  as Jenna. “I’m sorry, but we have enough  27  for the newspaper already. Come back next year and we’ll talk then.” Jenna smiled  28  and left. “Why is high school so

29  ?” she sighed.

Later in  30  class, Jenna devoted herself to figuring out the problems that had given her so much   31  . By the end of class, she understood how to get them right. As she gathered her books, Jenna decided she’d continue to try to  32  at her new school. She wasn’t sure if she’d succeed, but she knew she had to  33  . High school was just as her mom had said: “You will feel like a small fish in a big pond  34  a big fish in a small pond. The challenge is to become the  35  fish you can be.”

16. A. processes                    B. decisions             C. challenges            D. exercises

17. A. Therefore             B. However              C. Otherwise           D. Besides

18. A. difficult                B. easy                        C. boring              D. interesting

19. A. editor                        B. boss                        C. candidate            D. judge

20. A. jumped                B. sank                 C. stopped             D. raced

21. A. strange                B. happy                C. awful               D. lonely

22. A. struggling             B. improving             C. working            D. complaining

23. A. ashamed              B. disappointed           C. shocked            D. relieved

24. A. put up                B. prepare for            C. worry about         D. give up

25. A. committee             B. newspaper                   C. radio               D. team

26. A. enthusiastic            B. artistic                C. sympathetic         D. realistic

27. A. speakers                B. readers                C. cheerleaders         D. writers

28. A. widely                  B. weakly                C. excitedly            D. brightly

29. A. similar                  B. ordinary               C. different            D. familiar

30. A. physics                 B. history                C. English             D. math

31. A. pleasure                 B. hope                  C. trouble            D. sorrow

32. A. fit in                   B. look out               C. stay up            D. get around

33. A. swim                  B. try                    C. ask               D. escape

34. A. in return for             B. in case of              C. in terms of         D. instead of

35. A. slimmest                B. smallest               C. best              D. gentlest

 (08·天津E篇)

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(探索). 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 Indian burial mound.

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 had 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.

52. The author and his friends 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

53. 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.

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

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

55. How does the author feel about his childhood?

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

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

  

 (08·天津A篇)

Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954 to a Mexican American family. As the only girl in a family of seven children, she often felt like she had “seven fathers,” because her six brothers, as well as her father, tried to control her. Feeling shy and unimportant, she retreated(躲避) into books. Despite her love of reading, she did not do well in elementary school because she was too shy to participate.

In high school, with the encouragement of one particular teacher, Cisneros improved her grades and worked for the school literary magazine. Her father encouraged her to go to college because he thought it would be a good way for her to find a husband. Cisneros did attend college, but instead of searching for a husband, she found a teacher who helped her join the famous graduate writing program at the University of Iowa. At the university’s Writers’ Workshop, however, she felt lonely—a Mexican American from a poor neighborhood among students from wealthy families. The feeling of being so different helped Cisneros find her “creative voice.”

“It was not until this moment when I considered myself truly different that my writing acquired a voice. I knew I was a Mexican woman, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, but it had everything to do with it! That’s when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about.”

Cisneros published her first work, The House on Mango Street, when she was twenty-nine. The book tells about a young Mexican American girl growing up in a Spanish-speaking area in Chicago, much like the neighborhoods in which Cisneros lived as a child. The book won an award in 1985 and has been used in classes from high school through graduate school level. Since then, Cisneros has published several books of poetry, a children’s book, and a short-story collection.

36. Which of the following is TRUE about Cisneros in her childhood?

A. She had seven brothers.                       B. She felt herself a nobody.

   C. She was too shy to go to school.                 D. She did not have any good teachers.

37. The graduate program gave Cisneros a chance to _____.

   A. work for a school magazine                        B. run away from her family

   C. make a lot of friends                           D. develop her writing style

38. According to Cisneros, what played the decisive role in her success?

   A. Her early years in college.                    B. Her training in the Workshop.

   C. Her feeling of being different.               D. Her childhood experience.

39. What do we learn about The House on Mango Street?

   A. It is quite popular among students.

   B. It is the only book ever written by Cisneros.

   C. It wasn’t a success as it was written in Spanish.

   D. It won an award when Cisneros was twenty-nine.