If you have ever gone through a toll booth(收费所), you know that your relationship to the person in the booth is not the most intimate you'll ever have. It is one of life's frequent affairs: You hand over some money; you might get change; you drive off.

　　Late one morning in 1984, headed for lunch in San Francisco, I drove toward a booth. I heard loud music. It sounded like a party. I looked around. No other cars with their windows open. No sound trucks. I looked at the toll booth. Inside it, the man was dancing.

　　"What are you doing?" I asked.

　　"I'm having a party," he said.

　　"What about the rest of the people?" I looked at the other toll booths.

　　He said, "What do those look like to you?" He pointed down the row of toll booths.

　　"They look like……toll booths. What do they look like to you?"

　　He said, "Vertical coffins. At 8:30 every morning, live people get in. Then they die for eight hours. At 4:30, like Lazarus from the dead, they reemerge and go home. For eight hours, brain is on hold, dead on the job. Going through the motions."

　　I was amazed. This guy had developed a philosophy, a mythology about his job. Sixteen people dead on the job, and the seventeenth, in precisely the same situation, figures out a way to live. I could not help asking the next question: "Why is it different for you? You're having a good time."

He looked at me. "I knew you were going to ask that. I don't understand why anybody would think my job is boring. I have a corner office, glass on all sides. I can see the Golden Gate, San Francisco, and the Berkeley hills. Half the Western world vacations here……and I just stroll in every day and practice dancing."

1.According to the first paragraph, in most cases, how do you describe the relationship between drivers and toll booth?

A．most intimate      B．very tense         C．pretty ordinary     D．extremely hostile

2.Why did the author go to San Francisco?

A. To attend a party

B. B. To have a meal

C. To dance with the worker in the toll booth

D. To hand in the repair fee of his car

3.The underlined name “Lazarus” mentioned in the eighth paragraph probably refers to a person___________.

A. who was very active in his life

B. B. who was dead and revived from death

C. who was going to San Francisco

D. who liked dancing at work

4.According to the passage, which of the following statements is true?

A．The author passed by the toll booth every day.

B．The worker enjoyed his work very much.

C．Only western people like to spend their holidays in the Berkeley hills.

D．The dancing worker was getting badly along with his colleagues.

5.After hearing what the worker said, the author would probably_________.

A．go to the worker’s senior to complain about his bad attitude towards job.

B．go climbing the Golden Gate and the Berkeley hills to have a vacation.

C．learn to take a positive attitude to job and appreciate valuable things in life.

D．go back home instead of wasting time traveling to San Francisco.

Most mornings, the line begins to form at dawn: scores of silent women with babies on their backs, buckets balanced on their heads, and in each hand a bright-blue plastic jug. On good days, they will wait less than an hour before a water tanker goes across the dirt path that serves as a road in Kesum Purbahari, a slum on the southern edge of New Delhi. On bad days, when there is no electricity for the pumps, the tankers don’t come at all. “That water kills people,” a young mother named Shoba said one recent Saturday morning, pointing to a row of pails filled with thick, caramel (焦糖)-colored liquid. “Whoever drinks it will die.” The water was from a pipe shared by thousands of people in the poor neibourhood. Women often use it to wash clothes and bathe their children, but no­body is desperate enough to drink it.

　　There is no standard for how much water a person needs each day, but ex­perts usually put the minimum at fifty li­tres. The government of India promises (but rarely provides) forty. Most people drink two or three litres—less than it takes to wash a toilet. The rest is typically used for cooking and bathing. Americans consume between four hundred and six hundred litres of water each day, more than any other people on earth. Most Europeans use less than half that. The women of Kesum Purbahari each hoped to drag away a hundred litres that day—two or three buckets’ worth. Shoba has a husband and five children, and that much water doesn’t go far in a family of seven, particularly when the temperature reaches a hundred and ten degrees before noon. She often makes up the difference with bottled water, which costs more than water delivered any other way. Sometimes she just buys milk; it’s cheaper. Like the poorest people every­where, the people of New Delhi’s slums spend a far greater percentage of their incomes on water than anyone lucky enough to live in a house connected to a system of pipes.

1.The underlined word “slum” most likely means ______.

A. a village

B. a small town

C. the part of a town that lacks water badly

D. an area of a town with badly-built, over-crowded buildings

2.Sometimes the water tanker doesn’t come because ______.

A. there is no electricity             B. the weather is bad

C. there is no water            D. people don’t want the dirty water

3.A person needs at least ________ litres of water a day.

A. forty           B. four hundred         C. a hundred      D. fifty

4.The passage mainly tells us ______.

A. how India government manages to solve the problem of water gets their water

B. how women in Kesum Purbahari

C. how much water a day a person deeds

D. that India lacks water badly

阅读理解

　　The dark, narrow streets of London were dangerous places for a lad to wander during the ruling of Charles Ⅱ (1660-1685). Bands of hoodlums(强盗), in the pay of some ships' captains, were found everywhere. Their job was to seize as many boys as they could find and carry them off to waiting ships in the harbor. Many a pale city lad would wake up from a drugged sleep, or a blow on the head, to find himself on the high seas, bound for the New World. There he might become a farmhand, an apprentice, or perhaps a household servant.

　　Thousands of unsuspecting youths were kidnapped who were never to return to the land of their birth. The traffic in young boys became, in time, a great public scandal, and this is the way it had come about.

　　America desperately needed colonists. At first, many people had come willingly, lured by tales of quick wealth and unlimited opportunity. But once they arrived, they found it to be a far rougher place than they had imagined. It was true that, there was opportunity, but hard work was needed to make it pay off. Many of the new colonists, hoping for easy fortuned, were not used to the difficulties of hard manual labour.

　　Nor could they manage the large farms by themselves. They needed help of every sort: for planting, for harvesting, for building their houses, etc. Some few skilled workers had come and set up shops--blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights(修造轮子的工匠) and such--but they, too, were in need of help. Without apprentices and laborers, they could not possibly do all the work that the colonists required.

　　British shipowners offered free transportation to all those who would come, in return for an agreement to work for seven years without wages. Thousands of immigrants accepted the offer. After seven years of service they were farmers in their own right--and needed help. So there was an increasing need for workers. When the captains could not get colonists any other way, they hired hoodlums to seize any young boys they could lay hands on.

　　Over 100000 youngsters were taken to America in this way. Kidnapping became such an open scandal that in 1682 the London Council passed a law forbidding any person under fourteen to be bound into service without the knowledge and consent of his parents.

1．What shocked the London citizens in the late 17th century?

[　　]

A．The British shipowners needed hands in their business.

B．Bands of hoodlums wandered in the dark streets of London.

C．Many young boys turned to drugs and violence.

D．Many young boys were captured and shipped to America.

2．According to the passage, many British people were willing to settle in America because _____.

[　　]

A．they were poor and desperate

B．they thought they could find jobs easily and soon make a fortune

C．they were desperately tired of the bad conditions in London

D．they learned that skilled workers were badly needed there

3．According to the passage, the colonists were in need of hands for the following reasons except that _____.

[　　]

A．many rail tracks had to be built

B．there was a lot of work on the farms

C．many houses had to be built

D．there was a lot of work in various kinds of shops

4．Why did thousands of immigrants sign the agreement to work for seven years without pay?

[　　]

A．Because they had no money to pay for their voyage to the New World.

B．Because they could become farmers in their own right after their seven-year work.

C．Because they had no land of their own when they just arrived in America.

D．Because they were kidnapped and forced to sign it.

5．We can infer from the passage that the British government passed a law in 1682 because _____.

[　　]

A．the shipowners had seized a great fortune of the country apart from the young boys

B．it intended to stop the employment of the young workers under the age of fourteen

C．the public strongly condemned the kidnapping of young boys

D．it did not want to lose a lot of its young residents

完形填空

　　Do you know what kind of things the young people are reading? More and more ___1___ and parents have noticed another kind of pollution which came from the printed papers ___2___ on streets. These printed things ___3___ newspapers but have hardly ___4___ to do with them, you can only find reading materials badly made up there?---some are too strange for anyone to believe; others are ___5___ stories of something ___6___ However, many of the young readers are getting interested in such ___7___ reading, which ___8___ them what they should pay for their breakfast and brings them nightmares and immoral ideas ___9___. Homework was left undone; daily games lost. These sellers shout on streets selling their papers well. The writers, publishers and printers, ___10___ they are, we never know, are ___11___ their silent money. The sheep-skinned wolfs story seems to have been forgotten once again. Why not ___12___ this kind of things? Yes, ___13___ the teachers and parents have asked each other for more strict control of the young readers. Unfortunately, the more you want to forbid it ___14___ they want to have a look at it. ___15___ you may even find out several children, driven by the curious natures, ___16___ one patched paper, which has ___17___ from hand to hand. It really does ___18___ to our society. It has already formed a sort of moral pollution. The ___19___ teachers and parents need more powerful support in their protection of the young generation. At the same time the young readers need more interesting books to help them ___20___ those ugly papers.

　　On Wednesday, the Chinese government, decided to increase its medical subsidies(补贴)  for farmers from 10 Yuan (US$1.23) to 20 Yuan (US$2.47) a head a year from 2006.
　　 As part of the country's healthcare reform programme, the co-operative rural （农村）medical system was first introduced in 2003 to set up self-help among farmers on a voluntary basis.  Due to insufficient government input to finance hospitals that are mostly State-owned, the country's healthcare reform has largely turned out to be a failure, adding hugely to the financial burden on the public.
While everyone complains about quickly-rising medical costs, rural residents are suffering more than their urban(城镇) cousins because of a lack of money, as well as not being able to enjoy high quality health services. At present, farmers earn on average only one-third of what urban residents make. Most of the country's medical resources are located in cities even though rural residents make up two-thirds of the population.
　　Poor health conditions make it more difficult to help farmers get out of poverty; and poverty, in turn, refuses farmers the chance to improve their health.　To end this vicious circle, policy-makers tried the co-operative medical system, with a small sum of central and local financial support for each rural participant. But the system has proved to be less than perfect. Due to the limited financial input, the programme still does not benefit the majority of farmers in a significant way. This has reduced many farmers' enthusiasm for participating. A high percentage of involvement is of course a precondition for such a system.
　　The central government intends to expand the programme into a national medical system by 2008. Increasing government subsidies is a necessary step to make the co-operative medical system more attractive to farmers. But an increase of 10 Yuan for each participant is surely far from enough to perfect the system. The total cost is not particularly heavy compared to the rapid growth in government revenue(财政).
　　 Clearly, policy-makers are becoming increasingly aware of how urgent the narrowing of the development gap between rural and urban areas really is. Besides economic policies to push the rural economy, large amount of government investment on improving rural healthcare and education is badly needed.
1. Compared with that in 2006, what will be the rate of coming increase in China’s medical subsidies for farmers?
A. 100%               B. 50%                 C. 200%                      D. 150%
2. What is the reason for the failure in the country’s healthcare reform?
A. Bad management system.        
B. The government didn’t input enough money to support hospitals that are mostly
state-owned.
C. The health conditions in the country is too bad.
D. There are too many farmers that need medical care.
3. What is needed to narrow the development gap between rural and urban areas?
①. Large amount of government investment in economy.
②. Large amount of government investment on improving rural healthcare and education.
③. Economic policies to push the rural economy
④. A high percentage of farmers’ involvement in the medical system
⑤. A better management system
A. ①②③ B. ②③④             C. ①②③④⑤          D. ②③
4. Why are many farmers not enthusiastic in joining the co-operative medical system?
A. It doesn’t benefit most of the farmers in an effective way.
B. They cannot spare the needed money to join the programme.
C. They don’t believe in the system.
D. They don’t think it necessary.
5. What can be inferred from the last but one paragraph?
A. An increase of 10 Yuan in medical subsidies for each person is not enough.
B. The government can afford to increase the medical subsidies for farmers.
C. The government will get farmers of the whole country involved in a medical system by 2008. 
D. If the government increase subsidies, more farmers are likely to join the medical system.