July 21^st, 2007 was a typical English summer’s day – it rained for 24 hours! As usual, I rushed home from work at midday to check on the house. Nothing was amiss. By the time I left work at 5 pm, however, the road into our village was flooded （淹没的）. Our house had never been flooded but, as I opened the front door, a wave of water greeted me. Thank God the kids weren’t with me, because the house was 5 feet deep in water. We lost everything downstairs. And the plaster had to be torn off the walls, ceilings pulled down.

At first we tried to push on through. We didn’t want to move the children out of home. So we camped upstairs. We put a sheet of plastic across the floor to protect us from being wet. But after three months, we felt very sick, so we moved to a wooden house in a park. The house was small, but at first we were all just happy to be in a new place. Unluckily, things took longer than expected. What surprised me most was how much I missed being part of a community （社区）. We had lived in a friendly village with good neighbours, and I’d never thought how much I’d miss that. Although our situation was very bad, it’s difficult to feel too sorry for yourself when you look at what’s happening elsewhere.

We moved back home in August. With December coming, there’s reconstruction（重建）work to be done, so it’s difficult to prepare for Christmas. But I can’t wait- I’m going to throw a party for our friends in the village to say thanks for their support. This year, I won’t need any gifts-living away from home for months has made me realize how little we actually need or miss all the things we have. Although we are replacing things, there’s really no rush-we have our home back, and that’s the main thing.

53 What does the underlined word “amiss” in Paragraph I mean?

A. Wrong.                    B. Missing.                   C. Right.               D. Normal.

54. We can learn from the passage that the family _____.

A. was sick of staying downstairs

B. stayed away for nearly 10 months

C. was happy to live in the wooden house

D. did not deal well with the trouble during the flood

55. What does the writer mainly want to express by telling her story?

A. She valued human feelings more than before.

B. She realized she almost didn’t need anything.

C. She found Christmas gifts could be replaced easily.

D. She thought her own home was the most important.

People at home keep asking me, "Is it hard to learn Chinese? Why have you learned it so well?" Well, there's one thing that makes Chinese easy to learn: there are so many people to talk to. You've probably heard that it's the most spoken language. Today it's also one of the most written languages online. And with so many Chinese people interested in learning English, it couldn't be easier to find a friend for language learning. You just have to know where to look for them.
The really good place to look for them is QQ. QQ has the same status(地位) in China as AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) does in the US. It is reported that at any moment, up to 9,000,000 people are using QQ. They're at work, or in a web café(网吧), or at home, and the information of the users can be found. If you sign on with your address set to "abroad", you'll soon find that many thousands of them are interested in speaking to you! This is a great way for you to learn Chinese, and for them to learn English. I think that it's a very interesting way of cultural contact(文化交流), too, for ordinary people from around the world to be able to have one-on-one contact.
【小题1】In the first paragraph(段落), the writer tells us ___________.