Travel Tips from the Budget Traveler Plan in advance. Passengers planning to travel by plane or train should buy their tickets at least one week before the trip. You can save money that way. There are often special airfares and rail fares if you buy your ticket more than 7 days or 14 days in advance. Shop around. Not all travel agencies or airlines change the same amount of money for airline tickets to the same place. It’s a good idea to call several different places to get the best deal. Sometimes you can find really good flight prices on the Internet. Stay over a Saturday night. Some airlines offer low airfares if you stay over a Saturday night. This is because they want to attract the pleasure travelers. Pleasure travelers are usually able to stay over on a Saturday night. Business travelers usually want to be home with their families on Saturday nights. Take a boat. For some destinations, traveling by plane is not the only choice available. Most people travel from Japan to Korea or China, for example, by plane. This is because plane travel is quick and convenient. But you can make the journey by boat, instead. It takes more time, of course, but there are usually cheap deals for boat passengers—and you have lots of time to enjoy the journey. Travel with a friend or in a group. Traveling in a group is often a good way to save money. If you travel in a group of 10 or more, you can usually get a good deal from airlines. Also, when you rent a car, you can share the cost instead of paying for it yourself. In addition, sharing with another traveler can help get a cheap room price at a hotel. Join a Frequent Travel Program. Many airlines offer special programs for regular travelers. These are called “Frequent Travel Programs” or “Frequent Flyer Programs”. Every time you take their plane, you get points. When you have enough points, you can get free flights from the airline. 1. A cheaper air ticket may be got by all of the following means EXCEPT ______. 　　 A. trying different travel agencies and airlines 　　 B. buying a ticket ahead of time 　　 C. buying a ticket on line　　　　　 　　 D. shopping around the city 2. To get a cheap deal on a flight, which of these trips should you choose? 　　 A. Leave on Thursday and return on Sunday afternoon. 　　 B. Leave on Monday and return on Wednesday. 　　 C. Leave on Wednesday and return on Saturday morning. 　　 D. Leave on Friday and return on Saturday night. 3. The writer suggests taking a boat from Japan to Korea mainly because ______. 　　 A. it’s comfortable to take a boat 　　 B. the scenery on the sea is beautiful 　　 C. it’s cheap and you can enjoy the journey 　　 D. it is not far from Japan to Korea 4. Which of the statements is TRUE according to the passage? 　　 A. The writer recommends traveling in a group as a good way to save money. 　　 B. All airlines offer special programmes for regular travelers. 　　 C. Joining a Frequent Traveler Programme can help you get flights for free every time. 　　 D. The writer suggests renting a car as a great way to travel for free.

 

One thing Britain is famous for is pubs, and no trip to the UK would be complete without a visit to one of the thousands of pubs across the country.

Pubs play an important part in the social structure of the country. They are places where all ages and social classes mix to talk, do business, or just spend a couple of quiet hours before heading home in the evening.

There are many different types of beer available in pubs. Traditional British beer is called bitter, or ale, and is usually served at room temperature. As a result, the British are famous for their ‘warm beer’! If you prefer a cold beer, ask for lager. This beer is light yellow in colour whereas bitter is usually a darker brown. All beers are served as pints （500 ml） or halves （250ml）. To order, you need to ask for a pint or half, and then name the beer. So, you could say “                 .”

Wine, red or white, is normally available in all pubs, such as whisky, gin or vodka.It is not, however, necessary to drink alcohol. Non-alcoholic drinks are called soft drinks. You can have juice, lemonade, cola or among others.

If you visit a pub in a group, it is important to pay for your ‘round’. This means that you buy a drink for everyone in your group. Not buying your round is a big social mistake! Remember that you need to order and pay for your drinks at the bar.

So, follow these tips if you want to get the most out of visiting a pub, and, “cheers!”

1．Please fill in the blank in the third paragraph with proper words or phrases to complete the sentence. （Please answer within 10 words.） 

______________________________________________________________________

2．Which sentence in the passage can be replaced by the following one? 

If you don’t buy a drink for everyone in your group, you are socially wrong.

                                                                             

3．If you are in a pub, what would you like to drink? Why? （Please answer within 30 words.）

______________________________________________________________________________

Detectives often look for footprints when they try to solve crimes. Scientists use footprints, too—dinosaur footprints when they try to figure out how dinosaurs lived and moved.

Dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago. Today scientists work to solve the mysteries of these ancient animals.

Footprints, or tracks(脚印), are an important way to learn about dinosaurs. Christian Meyer of the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland, calls dinosaur tracks “the closest thing to a movie” of dinosaurs.

“They tell us something about the size of the animal, the way they were walking…they tell us something about their speed,” Meyer said.

Tracks also show that dinosaurs sometimes traveled in groups. Traveling in groups probably helped dinosaurs protect themselves from enemies. Plus, some meat-eating dinosaurs may have hunted in groups, much like wolves do today. Being in a group could help dinosaurs work together to kill large animals.

Dinosaur footprints can be as small as a few inches across, but they can also be as big as a few feet across. Dinosaur footprints have been found throughout the world at over 1,500 sites, including a T. Rex footprint in New Mexico. “Trackways” are groups of footprints.

And scientists aren’t the only ones finding dinosaur tracks—kids can, too! Eleven-year-old Mark Turner and nine-year-old Daniel Helm discovered dinosaur tracks in British Columbia, anada. Soon scientists began studying the tracks.

Scientists and other people interested in studying dinosaurs are working to save the trackways from activities like construction and mining.

1.The passage mainly tells us that_______.

A.  there were really dinosaurs on the earth millions of years ago

B.  dinosaurs were the most frightening animals in the past

C. dinosaur footprints are important in learning about dinosaurs

C.  why dinosaurs died out millions of years ago

2.By studying footprints scientists can know the following EXCEPT _______.

A. how big the dinosaur was             B. what color the dinosaur was

C. how fast the dinosaur could run        D. how the dinosaur walked

3. By working in groups, some meat-eating dinosaurs_______.

   A. made the hunting of large animals easily

   B. could travel a long way without being lost

   C. could protect themselves from being hunted by wolves

   D. could get to a place faster

 

4. From the last paragraph we can infer that some human activities like mining_______.

   A. are helpful to the study of dinosaurs

   B. can help scientists solve many mysteries

   C. can lead to the discovery of the footprints

   D. can destroy the footprints of the dinosaur

 

 

Detectives often look for footprints when they try to solve crimes. Scientists use footprints, too—dinosaur footprints when they try to figure out how dinosaurs lived and moved.

Dinosaurs died out about 65 million years ago. Today scientists work to solve the mysteries of these ancient animals.

Footprints, or tracks(脚印), are an important way to learn about dinosaurs. Christian Meyer of the Natural History Museum in Basel, Switzerland, calls dinosaur tracks “the closest thing to a movie” of dinosaurs.

“They tell us something about the size of the animal, the way they were walking…they tell us something about their speed,” Meyer said.

Tracks also show that dinosaurs sometimes traveled in groups. Traveling in groups probably helped dinosaurs protect themselves from enemies. Plus, some meat-eating dinosaurs may have hunted in groups, much like wolves do today. Being in a group could help dinosaurs work together to kill large animals.

Dinosaur footprints can be as small as a few inches across, but they can also be as big as a few feet across. Dinosaur footprints have been found throughout the world at over 1,500 sites, including a T. Rex footprint in New Mexico. “Trackways” are groups of footprints.

And scientists aren’t the only ones finding dinosaur tracks—kids can, too! Eleven-year-old Mark Turner and nine-year-old Daniel Helm discovered dinosaur tracks in British Columbia, anada. Soon scientists began studying the tracks.

Scientists and other people interested in studying dinosaurs are working to save the trackways from activities like construction and mining.

The passage mainly tells us that_______.

there were really dinosaurs on the earth millions of years ago

dinosaurs were the most frightening animals in the past

C. dinosaur footprints are important in learning about dinosaurs

why dinosaurs died out millions of years ago

By studying footprints scientists can know the following EXCEPT _______.

A. how big the dinosaur was             B. what color the dinosaur was

C. how fast the dinosaur could run        D. how the dinosaur walked

By working in groups, some meat-eating dinosaurs_______.

   A. made the hunting of large animals easily

   B. could travel a long way without being lost

   C. could protect themselves from being hunted by wolves

   D. could get to a place faster

From the last paragraph we can infer that some human activities like mining_______.

   A. are helpful to the study of dinosaurs

   B. can help scientists solve many mysteries

   C. can lead to the discovery of the footprints

   D. can destroy the footprints of the dinosaur

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 7, 9, 6. Read them loud. Now look away and spend 20 seconds memorizing them in order before saying them out loud again. If you speak English, you have about a 50% chance of remembering those perfectly. If you are Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because we most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within a two-second period. And unlike English, the Chinese language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
That example comes from Stanislas Dahaene’s book The Number Sense. As Dahaene explains: Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be spoken out in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is “si” and 7 “qi”). Their English pronunciations are longer. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length.
It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen. But we don’t. We use a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen and fifteen. For numbers above 20, we put the “decade” first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), while for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.
That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than American children. Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to 40. American children at that age can count only to 15. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian friends in the most fundamental of math skills.
The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to change the words to numbers (37+22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation(等式) is right there, in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: it’s five-tens-nine.
When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have a built-in advantage. For years, students from China, South Korea, and Japan --- outperformed their Western classmates at mathematics, and the typical assumption is that it has something to do with a kind of Asian talent for math. The differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different --- that being good at math may also be rooted in a group’s culture.
【小题1】What does the passage mainly talk about?

A．The Asian number-naming system helps grasp advanced math skills better.

B．Western culture fail to provide their children with adequate number knowledge.

C．Children in Western countries have to learn by heart the learning things.

D．Asian children’s advantage in math may be sourced from their culture.

【小题2】What makes a Chinese easier to remember a list of numbers than an American?

A．Their understanding of numbers.

B．Their mother tongue.

C．Their math education.

D．Their different IQ.

【小题3】Asian children can reach answers in basic math functions more quickly because ____________.

A．they pronounce the numbers in a shorter period

B．they practice math from an early age

C．English speaking children translate language into numbers first

D．American children can only count to 15 at the age of four