B
On one of her trips to New York several years ago, Eudora Welty decided to take a couple of New York friends out to dinner. They settled in at a comfortable East Side cafe and within minutes, another customer was approaching their table.
“Hey, aren’t you from Mississippi?” the elegant, white-haired writer remembered being asked by the stranger. “I’m from Mississippi too.”
Without a second thought, the woman joined the Welty party. When her dinner partner showed up, she also pulled up a chair.
“They began telling me all the news of Mississippi,” Welty said. “I didn’t know what my New York friends were thinking.”
Taxis on a rainy New York night are rarer than sunshine. By the time the group got up to leave, it was pouring outside. Welty’s new friends immediately sent a waiter to find a cab. Heading back downtown toward her hotel, her big-city friends were amazed at the turn of events that had changed their Big Apple dinner into a Mississippi.
“My friends said: ‘Now we believe your stories,’” Welty added. “And I said: ‘Now you know. These are the people that make me write them.’”
Sitting on a sofa in her room, Welty, a slim figure in a simple gray dress, looked pleased with this explanation.
“I don’t make them up,” she said of the characters in her fiction these last 50 or so years. “I don’t have to.”
Beauticians, bartenders, piano players and people with purple hats, Welty’s people come from afternoons spent visiting with old friends, from walks through the streets of her native Jackson, Miss., from conversations overheard on a bus. It annoys Welty that, at 78, her left ear has now given out. Sometimes, sitting on a bus or a train, she hears only a fragment(片段) of a particularly interesting story.

What can we learn about the characters in Welty’s fiction?（）

A:They live in big cities. B:They are mostly women. C:They come from real life. D:They are pleasure seekers.

Don’t come today. I would rather you（　）tomorrow.

A:come B:came C:to come D:coming

Passage Four
It was almost two o’ clock. A cold wind had come up, over the lake. As a black cloud moved across the sun, Walt, a small boy, looked up. "I smell a storm (暴风雨) ," he thought.
Shorty, a man of forty, had gone into town. He had said he would be back before two. He had told Walt to watch the boats and the shop. There were no people around. They had all gone out on the lake to fish.
So Walt went to work on one of the boats. From there he could hear the telephone if it rang. And he could watch the door.
It was a little after two when the stranger came. Walt saw him stop by the shop. The stranger looked in for a minute. Then he went down to the boats. He was a big man in a coat.
Walt called to him, "Do you want something, sir"
The stranger looked at Walt and said, "No, thanks." Then the stranger moved slowly away. As he went on, he looked at the boats one by one.
Walt sat there with his eyes on the back of the stranger’s coat. He thought, "I can smell something as I smell that storm. I hope Shorty comes back soon."

At the end of the story Walt thought （）

A:the stranger would not return again B:Shorty would not come back soon C:trouble might happen around the shop D:Shorty would lose his life in the storm

第二篇 　　 Shopping at Second-hand Clothing Stores 　　When 33-year-old Pete Barth was in college, shopping at second-hand clothing stores was just something he did - "like changing the tires on his car." He looked at his budget, and decided he could save a lot of money by shopping for clothes at thrift shops. 　　"Even new clothes are fairly disposable (用后即丢掉的) and wear out after a couple of years," Barth said. "In thrift shops, you can find some great stuff whose quality is better than new clothes." 　　Since then, Barth, who works at a Goodwill thrift shop in the US state of Florida, has found that there are all kinds of reasons for shopping for second-hand clothing. Some people like him, shop to save money. Some shop for a crazy-looking shirt. And some hop as a means of conserving energy and helping the environment. 　　Pat Akins, an accountant at a Florida Salvation Army (SA) (救世军) thrift shop, said hat, for her, shopping at thrift shops is a way to help the environment. 　　"When my daughter was little, we looked at it as recycling," Akins said. "Also, why ay 30 dollars for a new coat when you can get another one for a lot less?" 　　Akins said that the SA has shops all over the US - "some as big as department stores." All of the clothes are donated (捐赠), and when they have a surplus (盈余), they’ll have "stuff a bag" specials, where customers can fill a grocery sack with clothes for only or 10 dollars. 　　Julia Slocum, 22, points out, however, that the huge amount of second-hand clothing in the US is the result of American wastefulness. 　　I’d say that second-hand stores are the result of our wasteful, materialistic culture," said Slocum, who works for a pro-conservation organization, the Center for a New American Dream. "Thrift shops prevent that waste from going to landfills (垃圾填埋场); they give clothing a second life, provide cheaper clothing for those who can’t afford to buy new ones and generate (生成) income for charities. They also provide a way for the wealthy and middle classes to shed (摆脱) some of the guilt for their level of consumption." Thrift shops can do everything EXCEPT

A:give clothing a second life. B:generate in come for charities. C:provide cheaper clothes for the poor. D:stop rich people from wasting money.

There are thousands of volcanoes (火山) all over the world. What makes volcanoes What happens
The inside of the earth is very hot. Because it is very, very hot, the rock has melted like ice. It has become liquid, like water. It is always boiling, like water in a kettle. If you have seen a kettle boiling, you know that the steam and boiling water try to get out. The very hot melted rock inside the earth also tries to get out. Usually it cannot because the outside of the earth is too thick and strong.
But in some places the outside of the earth is thin and weak. Sometimes a crack appears. The hot melted rock, which we call "lava" (熔岩), pushes out through the crack and bursts through. Steam and gas shoot up into the air and the hot melted lava pours out. Big pieces of rock may be thrown high into the air.
After a while the volcano becomes quiet again. The melted lava becomes hard. Later the same thing happens again and again. Each time more hot lava pours out on top of the cold lava and then becomes hard. In this way a kind of mountain is built up, with a hole down the middle. Perhaps the volcano will then be quiet. Perhaps it will start again hundreds of years later.
Vesuvius is the name of a very famous volcano in Italy. It first came to life many, many years ago. It was quiet for hundreds of years. Then in the year 79 it suddenly burst. A great cloud of smoke shot up into the sky with great burning rocks. Hot lava poured down its sides. About 3,000 people were killed.
This has happened again many times since that year. Sometimes no damage was caused, or only little damage. But there was serious damage in the years 472, 1631, 1794, 1861, 1872 and 1906. You can see that a volcano can stay alive for many years. There was also serious damage in 1914 but there has not been any since that year.
The phrase "stay alive" in the last paragraph can best be replaced by ______.

A:burst out B:remain active C:come to life D:throw out lava

One-room schools are part of the heritage of the United States, and the mention of them makes people feel a vague long for the way things were. One-room schools are an endangered species. However, for more than a hundred years, one-room schools have been systematically shut down and their students sent away to centralized schools. As recently as 1930, there were 149,000 one-room schools in the United States. By 1970 there were 1,800. Today, of nearly 800 remaining one-room schools more than 350 are in Nebraska. The rest are scattered through a few other states that have on their road maps wide-open spaces between towns.
Now that there are hardly any left, educators are beginning to think that maybe there is something yet to be learned from one-room schools, something that served the pioneers that might serve as well today. Progressive educators have come up with progressive-sounding names like "peer-group teaching" and "multi-age grouping" for educational procedures that occur naturally in the one-room schools. In a one-room school the children teach each other because the teacher is busy part of the time teaching someone else. A fourth grader can work at a fifth-grade level in math and a third-grade level in English without the stigma associated with being left back or the pressures of being skipped ahead. A youngster with a learning disability can find his or her own level without being separated from the other pupils. In larger urban and suburban schools today this is called mainstreaming. A few hours in a small school that has only one classroom and it becomes clear why so many parents feel that one of the advantages of living in Nebraska is that their children have to go to a one-room school.
It can be learned from paragraph 2 that many parents in Nebraska ______.

A:don’t like centralized schools B:come from other states C:received education in one-room schools D:prefer rural life

{{B}}第二篇{{/B}}

It can be learned from paragraph 2 that many parents in Nebraska

A:don’t like centralized schools． B:come from other states． C:received education in one room schools． D:prefer rural life．