出自:西安石油大学-石油工程技术-大学英语l(下）
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). (单选题) The writer of this passage must be ______.( )(本题2.5分)
A、 an American
B、 a student
C、 a professor
D、 a
)If parents bring up a child with the sole aim of turning the child into a genius, they will cause a big problem. According to several leading educational psychologists, this is one of the biggest mistakes which ambitious parents make. Generally, the child will be only too aware of what the parent expects, and will fail. Unrealistic parental expectations can cause great damage to children.
However, if parents are not too unrealistic about what they expect their children to do, but are ambitious in a reasonable way, the child may succeed in doing very well --- especially if the parents are very supportive of their child.
Michael Lee Chao Tin is very lucky. He is crazy about music, and his parents help him a lot by taking him to concerts and arranging private piano and violin lessons for him. They even drive him 50 kilometers a week for violin lessons. Although Michael’s mother knows very little about music, Michael’s father is a good trumpet player. However, he never makes Michael enter music competitions if he is unwilling.
Michael’s friend, Winston Chiu Fang Weng, however, is not so lucky. Although both his parents are successful musicians, they set too high a standard for Winston. They want their son to be as successful as they are and so they enter him for every piano competition held. They are very unhappy when he does not win. “When I was your age, I used to win every competition I entered,” Winston’s father tells him. Winston is always afraid that he will disappoint his parents and now he always seems quiet and unhappy.
(1). (单选题) Which of the following mistakes are parents likely to make according to the passage? ( )(本题2.5分)
A、 To neglect their child’s education.
B、 To expect too much of their child.
C、 To make their child become a musician.
D、 To help their child to be a genius.
)The $11 billion self-help industry is built on the idea that you should turn negative thoughts like “I never do anything right” into positive ones like “I can succeed.” But was positive thinking advocate Norman Vincent Peale right? Is there power in positive thinking?
Researchers in Canada just published a study in the journal Psychological Science that says trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they are.
The study’s authors, Joanne Wood and John Lee of the University of Waterloo and Elaine Perunovic of the University of New Brunswick, begin by citing older research showing that when people get feedback which they believe is overly positive, they actually feel worse, not better. If you tell your depressed friend that he has the potential of an Einstein, you’re just underlining his faults. In one 1990s experiment, a team including psychologist Joel Cooper of Princeton asked participants to write essays opposing funding for the disabled. When the essayists were later praised for their sympathy, they felt even worse about what they had written.
In this experiment, Wood, Lee and Perunovic measured 68 students’ self-esteem. The participants were then asked to write down their thoughts and feelings for four minutes. Every 15 seconds, one group of students heard a bell. When it rang, they were supposed to tell themselves, “I am lovable.”
Those with low self-esteem didn’t feel better after the forced self-approval. In fact, their moods turned significantly darker than those of members of the control group, who weren’t urged to think positive thoughts.
The paper provides support for newer forms of psychotherapy that urge people to accept their negative thoughts and feelings rather than fight them. In the fighting, we not only often fail but can make things worse. Meditation (静思) techniques, in contrast, can teach people to put their shortcomings into a larger, more realistic perspective. Call it the power of negative thinking.
(1). (单选题) What do we learn from the first paragraph about the self-help industry? ( )(本题2.5分)
A、 It was established by Norman Vincent Peale.
B、 It is based on the concept of positive thinking.
C、 It is
D、 It has brought positive results.
Language is a marvelous thing. Every language consists of a limited number of sounds, a limited number of ways in which these sounds can be combined to form words and a limited number of rules for combining words into sentences. For example English has about 45 sound patterns and about 30 patterns for combining these sounds into sentences. Yet from these limited quantities of sounds and limited number of rules and patterns for combining the sounds, a speaker of English can produce an unlimited number of sentences that will be understood by other speakers of English.
The above is true of all languages. All languages are systematic. That is, all languages have an internally consistent system of rules for combining sounds into speech that is comprehensible to all those who speak the same language. There is no such thing as a “primitive” language, meaning an incomplete or rule-deficient language. A highly technological culture and a primitive culture each have a systematic, internally consistent language. Both cultures can discuss concrete thing and abstract ideas. Both cultures can use their languages to gossip, to lie, to tell joke ,to tell stories ,to discuss life.
And all human beings of normal hearing and adequate intelligence learn at least one language. Babies who are born deaf and cannot hear language have trouble learning to speak. They can, nevertheless, learn another systematic form of language called sign language. Also, some severely retarded(严重障碍的) children can fail to learn a complete language system. The rest of us, however learn the basics of our first languages by the time we are five years old, with a remarkable achievement.
(1). (单选题) What three things does every language consist of? ( )(本题2.5分)
A、 Spelling, sound rules, and small and capitalized letters.
B、 Spelling, reading rules, and hearing rules.
C、 Sounds, sentences, and paragraphs and articles.
D、 Sound rules, word-formations, and sentence patterns
nvestigators were testing the effects of different colored walls on two groups of visitors to an exhibit of paintings. For the first group the room was painted white; for the second, dark brown. Movement of each group was followed by an electrical system under the carpet. The experiment revealed that those who entered the dark brown room walked more quickly, covered more area, and spend less time in the room than the people in the white environment. Dark brown stimulate more activity, but the activity ended sooner. Another experiment presented three groups of subjects with the same photographs, but each group was, in a different kind of room ---, an “ugly” room like a messy storeroom, an average room, such as a nice office, a tastefully living room with carpeting and curtains. Results showed that the subjects in the beautiful room tended to give higher ratings to the faces than did those in ugly room. Other studies suggest that students do better on tests taken in comfortable, attractive rooms than in ordinary-looking or ugly rooms.
(1). (单选题) What can be concluded from the two experiments? ( )(本题2.5分)
A、 Beautiful decorations and a white color will cause people to react slowly to objects in the room.
B、 Environment will have effects on people’s movements.
C、 Students should take an exam in a comfortable room painted dark brown.
D、 Different colors and rooms will stimulate different reactions.