江苏省高邮市2018-2019学年度高二下学期英语期中考试试...

—No surprise. He is always being careless.

—The headmaster, of course.

— As far as I know, he ______ to see his parents in the countryside on Sundays.

— ________. As far as I know, he often burns the midnight oil.

    It was March 15, 2012. My two brothers were out in the driveway shooting around when they suddenly screamed," The sky! The sky! It's green!" My dad 1 turned on the TV news. There was a tornado heading towards Dexter. I quickly ran up the stairs and seized my most 2 items that I felt I needed. My mom was piling clothing up in the basement to make a fort(堡垒)to 3 us. My dad was still up stairs watching the news. He usually never comes down when there's a bad 4. As my ears heard a loud "pop", I looked up to see my dad 5 full speed down into the basement swiftly 6 the door behind him to join us.

    I for a brief moment thought that I was going to 7. When the tornado was going by it sounded like a heavy train was tearing through our 8.

    Everything started to settle. My dad made his way back up the stairs to see what the damage was. The ceiling(天花板) had fallen down. Everywhere I 9all I could see was pure destruction. In that moment I felt 10, I had no idea what to do, and I didn't know what was happening or what the situation was. All I could think about was that my home was 11 going to be the same again.

    This was the event that caused my family to have a(n) 12 on how lucky we were to be alive and together. Although the tornado wasn't one that was that deadly we felt extremely 13 to be alive. This moment was a scary and life-changing situation, something that I never thought I would have to experience. It just made me think how I should be 14 for everything that I am able to have because you never know what 15 can throw at you, especially when you least expect it.

    Kerala, India, has placed a tax on hamburgers, pizza and other fast food. The 14.5 percent tax will be added to foods at restaurants such as McDonald's, Pizza Hut and Burger King.

    The tax is being called a "fat tax" because it adds cost to foods considered high in fat and calories. It is the first fast food tax enacted in India, where obesity levels are rising in the growing middle class.

    Kerala's Finance Minister Thomas Isaac suggested the tax after learning of similar measures in other countries. He hopes it will get people to choose to eat healthy food, which he said is "going out of fashion."

    Dr. Anoop Misra at New Delhi's Fortis Hospital strongly supports the" fat tax" as a way to reduce the number of diabetes cases in young people.

    A government finance official in central Gujarat says that the state is considering a similar 14.5 percent tax." This idea can also be adopted in the state, as we also have high consumption of junk and unhealthy food," the official said.

    Critics of the tax say it probably will not stop people from buying fast food. IT engineer Gaurav Singh wants the government to focus on education and awareness instead of taxing fast food.

    "The one food that is eaten widely in Kerala is the 'paratha', which is basically high in fat, high in refined(精制的)flour, and it is cheap. It can't be taxed because it is highly unorganized."

    Some doctors and health experts say the tax should also include other snack foods and sugary drinks sold across the country.

    One fast food customer In New Dehli, Vijay Deoli believes the government should deal with more important issues. "First you have to clear up the air, the water, etc. This is a small thing."

    Others say the government should do more to bring attention to fast food and obesity rather than changing people's choices.

    Many health experts agree that bringing attention to the issue is important. But Dr. Misra thinks education alone does not work.

    He compared the tax to a law passed several years ago that got people to wear seat belts to avoid paying a fine. "Laws can change people's habits."

    The human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is vital to the formation of complex societies. So is the face's ability to send emotional signals, whether through an unconscious red face or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives reading faces, for signs of attraction, hatred, trust and fraud. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide true feelings or intentions.

    Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers' attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. In China, it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple's new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the home screen.

    Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental(增值的). Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the Internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode(编码)them. Although faces are unique to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, interfere with something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyze images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to opinions of privacy, fairness and trust.

    Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. Facebook's bank of facial images cannot be used by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens' privacy.

    The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analyzing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic(孤独症的)people a grasp of social signals they find difficult.

    As long as people have been telling stories, crones(丑陋的老太婆)have been scaring the wits out of children. "Nags(怨妇),witches, evil stepmothers, cannibals(食人妇). It's quite dreadful," says Maria Tatar, who teaches a course on folklore and mythology at Harvard. "But old women are also powerful—they're often the ones who can work magic." In the Disney film Snow White, there's a scene in which the beautiful, charming, wicked queen turns into an old hag and poisons Snow White so she'll sleep forever. The old lady in Hansel and Gretel wants to roast children in her oven and the witch in The Little Mermaid cuts out Ariel's tongue.

    Tatar says old women villains (恶人)are especially scary because，historically, the most powerful person in a child's life was the mother. "Children do have a way of splitting the mother figure into...the evil mother—who's always making rules and regulations, policing your behavior, getting angry at you—and then the kind mother—the one who is giving and protects you, makes sure that you survive."

    Veronique Tadjo, a writer who grew up in the Ivory Coast, thinks there's a fear of female power in general. She says a common figure in African folk tales is the old witch who destroys people's souls. Still, they're not all bitter and evil hags. Elderly women in folk tales often use their knowledge and experience of the world to guide the troubled protagonist(主人公). Tadjo points to the Kenyan story Marwe In The Underworld about a girl who commits suicide by drowning herself and enters the Land of the Dead where she meets an old woman. "That old woman teaches her quite a lot of things," Tadjo says. "And also, when Marwe starts longing for the world of the living, she helps her go back to the surface with a lot of riches. And we understand that Marwe has been rewarded for her goodness." In other words: Do your chores and you'll be rewarded. The point of these ancient tales, no matter what continent they come from, may have been to scare children into behaving.

    Perhaps the scariest old woman character—the ugly Baba Yaga—comes from Russia. She's bony with a hooked nose and long, iron teeth. Her hut(小屋)stands on chicken legs and she kidnaps children and eats them. Safe to say Baba Yaga has been making Eastern European children sleepless for centuries. In one interpretation, a mean stepmother sends the young girl Vasilisa to Baba Yaga's hut in the woods to get a candle. The girl is sure she's being sent to her death. Baba Yaga forces her to cook and clean, and Vasilisa does everything she's told. In the end, the old crone gives her what she needs and sends her home. "You see this kind of double face of the hag,"Maria Tatar says. "On the one hand: aggressive, threatening. And on the other hand: sometimes to make sure that there is a happily ever after."

    There's that power again. In Japanese folklore, the Yama Uba(山姥)is an equally ambiguous old woman. She's a mountain witch who, like Baba Yaga, lures people into her hut and eats them. But she'll also help a lost traveler. Noriko Reider is a professor at Miami University of Ohio who's done extensive research on Yama Uba stories. "She brings fortune and happiness," Reider says. "She can also bring death and destruction for those who are not very good."

    According to Cuban-American writer Alma Flor Ada, in Hispanic(拉美地区的)culture old women are multi-talented. Ada is co-author of Tales Our Grandmas Told, which includes a story about Caliph's son who becomes seriously ill. After "all of the best physicians in the land" fail to cure him, Caliph sends his messengers searching for help. Then one morning, an old woman arrives with this advice: To get well, the prince must wear the overcoat of a man who is truly happy. And of course it works.

    Most people have a list of wishes—things that they think will bring them happiness. Happiness lists are easy to come up with. However, the mechanism behind them is somewhat complicated, since it involves what psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls the greatest achievement of the human brain—the ability to imagine. To imagine what will bring joy to our future selves requires mental time travel, which is a unique human skill resulting from two million years of evolution. We use this skill every day, predicting our future emotions and then making decisions, whether big or small, according to our forecasts of how they'll make our future selves feel.

    Yet, our imagination often fails us. When we're lucky enough to get what we wished for, we discover that it doesn't come with everlasting happiness. And when the things we feared come to pass, we realize that they don't crush us after all. In dozens of studies, Gilbert has shown that we can mispredict emotional consequences of positive events, such as receiving gifts or winning football games, as much as negative events, like breaking up or losing an election. This impact bias(影响偏差) —overestimation of the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions to future events—is significant, because the prediction of the duration of our future emotions is what often shapes our decisions, including those concerning our happiness.

    Just as our immune systems work tirelessly to keep our bodies in good health, our psychological immune systems routinely employ an entire set of cognitive(认知) mechanisms in order to deal with life's habitual attack of less-than-pleasant circumstances. Actually, our psychological immune system has an impressive feature of its own: the ability to produce happiness. Thus, when life disappoints us, we "ignore, transform, and rearrange" information through a variety of creative strategies until the rough edges of negative effects have been dutifully dulled. When we fail to recognize this ability of our psychological immune systems to produce happiness, we're likely to make errors in our affective forecasting.

    Happiness, Gilbert points out, is a fast moving target. As passionate as we're about finding it, we routinely misforecast what will make us happy, and how long our joy will last. In reality, he adds that the best way to make an affective forecast is not to use your imagination, but your eyes. Namely, instead of trying to predict how happy you 'll be in a particular future, look closely at those who are already in the future that you're merely contemplating(冥想)and ask how happy they are. If something makes others happy, it'll likely make you happy as well.

True eccentrics d social conventions, unconscious that they are doing anything extraordinary.

Having received a radio message from the mainland i him to give up, the ship's captain decided to pull up anchor and head home.

Antique shops exert a peculiar f on many people, especially bargain hunters.

Seeing a thief caught on the spot, the shop assistants found it impossible to resist the t to say 'it serves him right'.

What i happens is that a great number of things go wrong at precisely the same time.

    Young Chinese parents embracing e-books for children

Chinese children are spending more time reading digital books as young parents are increasingly open to the idea, research shows.

    The amount of time children under 9 spend reading e-books every day increased almost 20 percent to 24. 3 minutes between 2016 and 2017, according to a joint study by e-book company Kada Story and teaching consultancy TAL Education Group.

    A three-year study of 6, 030 parents found that almost 70 percent said they are willing to let their children use mobile phones and tablets, while 25 percent of those born in the 1990s or later said they let their children spend more than 40 minutes a day on mobile devices.

    Parents in first-tier cities are more likely to let their children use mobile devices, with children in Beijing spending almost 70 minutes a day using the gadgets.

"Digital reading is an important skill for children to master in this age of information explosion," said Wang Jing, chief editor of Kada Story.

    However, not all parents want their children to read digitally.

    "I fear e-books will negatively affect my son's attention span or expose him to inappropriate content, " said Xie Wenfeng, mother of a 7-year-old boy in Shanghai.

She said she believed books in print are better for the eyes and do not affect sleep. "I also worry about possible addiction to e-books." she added.

【写作内容】

1）用约30个单词写出上文概要;

2）用约120个单词发表你的观点，内容包括:

⑴支持或反对家长让孩子读电子书籍；

⑵并用2-3个理由或论据支撑你的观点。

【写作要求】

1）写作过程中不能直接引用原文中的句子;

2）文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称;

3）不必写标题。

【评分标准】

内容完整,语言规范,语篇连贯,词数适当。