好老师教育云南分校有志攀登集训营《公共英语》综合模拟卷一

第三题、阅读理解（请选出正确的选项，共25题，每小题2分，共50分）

Passage 1

    Do you shop online with websites like Taobao? The money you pay doesn’t go directly to the seller. Instead, it goes through Alipay, which keeps your money for a while. After you receive your goods and click the “confirm receipt” button, Alipay then gives the money to the seller.

    The process is called “third party online payment”. There is a transfer station, or a third account, between sellers and buyers to make online shopping safe. Buyers don’t need to worry about paying for goods and then receiving nothing. Sellers also get rid of the risk of receiving no money after sending out goods.

    These transfer stations are usually set up by payment service companies such as Alipay, Tenpay and Yeepay. Among them, Alipay is the biggest in China. It has more than 270 million active users, according to Xinhua.

    While most online sellers and shoppers like the third party online payment system, banks are not very happy. That is because companies like Alipay are fighting over money with the banks. Users can invest in financial products through Alipay and make money.Thus lots of people choose to put money in Alipay rather than in banks.

    But WeChat payment is not the same. WeChat doesn’t have its own account. When paying through WeChat, the buyers money goes directly to the sellers. That’s why so many people are excited about receiving and handing out “red envelopes” or gift money to their friends on WeChat.

    Whether Alipay or WeChat payment, they are all trying to attract more users and make online shopping easier. These two companies are also promoting payments through fingerprints. New payment methods such as quick response codes have become popular too.

Passage 2

    Jack London, one of America’s major writers of adventure tales, was born in California in 1876. During his life, London worked at many jobs. His broad life experiences would become the background for his writing.

    London loved to read. As a teenager, he spent many hours educating himself at the public library. He attended college at the University of California at Berkeley, but he stayed for only six months. He thought Berkeley was “not lively enough” and wanted to do something more exciting.

    London wrote stories about working people and the hard times they had making a living. He knew their problems firsthand. He worked as a sailor, factory employee, and railroad worker, to name just a few of his many jobs.

    Like many people of the time, London caught the Gold Rush Fever. In 1897, he headed for Alaska. He didn’t find gold, but he discovered something even more valuable. He discovered that people enjoyed listening to the stories he made up with his vivid imagination. London entertained the miners with story after story. Later, using his experiences during the Gold Rush, he created many more colorful stories.

    London resolved to live a full, exciting life. He once said that he would rather be a shooting star than a sleepy and permanent planet. Each day, he pushed himself. Once London determined that he was going to be a writer, nothing could stop him. His goal was to write at least one thousand words every day. He refused to stop even when he was sick. In eighteen years, the writer published fifty-one books and hundreds of articles. He was the best-selling and highest-paid author of his day. Many people also considered him to be the best writer.

Passage 3

    “The world’s environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss.” If that were an examination topic, most students would tear it apart. Offering a long list of complaints: from local smog (烟雾) to global climate change, from the felling(砍伐) of forests to the extinction of species. The list would largely be accurate, the concern legitimate. Yet the students who should be given the highest marks would actually be those who agreed with the statement. The surprise is how good things are, not how bad.

    After all, the world’s population has more than tripled during this century, and world output has risen hugely, so you would expect the earth itself to have been affected. But they don’t. The reasons why they don’t, and why the environment has not been ruined. Have to do with prices, technological innovation, social change and government regulation in response to popular pressure. That is why today’s environmental problems in the poor countries ought, in principle, to be solvable.

    Raw materials have not run out, and show no sign of doing so. Logically, one day they must. The planet is a finite place, yet it is also very big, and man is very ingenious. What has happened is chat every time a material seems to be running short, the price has risen and, in response, people have looked for new sources of supply, tried to find ways to use less of the material, or looked for a new substitute. For this reason, prices for energy and for minerals have fallen in real terms during the century.

    It is where prices and markets do not operate properly that this benign (良性的) trend begins to waver, and the genuine problems arise. Markets cannot always keep the environment healthy. If no one owns the resource concerned, no one has an interest in conserving it or fostering it, that’s why fish resources are reducing.

Passage 4

    After a day of work and play, the body needs to rest. Enough sleep is necessary for good health. During this time, the body recovers from the activities of the previous day. The rest that you get while sleeping enables your body to prepare itself for the next day.

    There are four levels of sleep, each being a little deeper than the one before. As you sleep, your muscles relax little by little, your heart beats more slowly, and your brain slows down. After you reach the fourth level, your body shifts back and forth from one level of sleep to another.

    Although your mind slows down, from time to time you will dream. Scientists who study sleep state that when dreaming occurs, your eyeballs begin to move more quickly (Although your eyelids are closed). This stage of sleep is called REM, which stands for rapid eye movement. If you have trouble falling asleep, some people recommend that you breathe very deeply. Other people believe that drinking warm milk will help make you drowsy.

    There is also an old suggestion that counting sheep will help you fall asleep!

Passage 5

    A child who has once been pleased with a tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in almost the same words, but this should not lead parents to treat printed fairy stories as formal texts. It is always much better to tell a story than read it out of a book, and, if a parent can produce what, in the actual situation of the time and the child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better.

    A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or making him sad thinking. To prove the latter, one would have to show in a controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often sorry for cruelty than those who had not. As to fears, there are, I think, some cases of children being dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises(出现) from the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear into the pleasure of a fear faced and mastered.

    There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds that they are not objectively true, that giants, witches, two-headed dragons，magic carpets, etc. do not exist; and that, instead of being fond of the strange side in fairy tales, the child should be taught to learn the reality by studying history. I find such people, I must say so peculiar(奇怪的) that I do not know how to argue with them. If their case were sound, the world should be full of mad men attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on a stick or covering a telephone with kisses in the belief that it was their beloved girl-friend.

    No fairy story ever declared to be a description of the real world and no clever child has ever believed that it was.