Studies have shown that the right and left ear ______ sound differently.

Albert Einstein was born in 1879. As a child, few people guessed that he ______ a famous scientist whose theories would change the world.

    Since finishing my studies at Harvard and Oxford, I’ve watched one friend after another land high-ranking, high-paying Wall Street jobs. As executives(高级管理人员) with banks, consulting firms, established law firms, and major corporations, many are now (1) ______ on their way to impressive careers. By society’s (2) ______, they seem to have it made.
    On the surface, these people seem to be very lucky in life. As they left student life behind, many had a (3) ______ drink at their cheap but friendly local bar, shook hands with longtime roommates, and (4) ______ out of small apartments into high buildings. They made reservations at restaurants where the cost of a bottle of wine (5) ______ a college year’s monthly rent. They replaced their beloved old cars with expensive new sports cars.
    The thing is, a number of them have (6) ______ that despite their success, they aren’t happy. Some (7) ______ of unfriendly coworkers and feel sad for eight-hour workweeks devoted to tasks they (8) ______. Some do not respect the companies they work for and talk of feeling tired and (9) ______. However, instead of devoting themselves to their work, they find themselves working to support the (10) ______ to which they have so quickly become (11) ______.
    People often speak of trying a more satisfying path, and (12) ______ in the end the idea of leaving their jobs to work for something they (13) ______ or finding a position that would give them more time with their families almost always leads them to the same conclusion: it’s (14) ______. They have loans, bills, a mortgage(抵押贷款) to (15) ______, retirement to save for. They recognize there’s something (16) ______ in their lives, but it’s (17) ______ to step off the track.
    In a society that tends to (18) ______ everything in terms of dollars and cents, we learn from a young age to consider the costs of our (19) ______ in financial terms. But what about the personal and social costs (20) ______ in pursuing money over meaning? These are exactly the kinds of costs many of us tend to ignore---and the very ones we need to consider most.

    From the very beginning of school we make books and reading a constant source of possible failure and public humiliation. When children are little we make them read aloud, before the teacher and other children, so that we can be sure they “know” all the words they are reading. This means that when they don’t know a word, they are going to make a mistake, right in front of everyone. After having taught fifth-grade classes for four years, I decided to try at all costs to rid them of their fear and dislike of books, and to get them to read oftener and more adventurously.
    One day soon after school had started, I said to them, "Now I’m going to say something about reading that you have probably never heard a teacher say before. I would like you to read a lot of books this year, but I want you to read them only for pleasure. I am not going to ask you questions to find out whether you understand the books or not. If you understand enough of a book to enjoy it and want to go on reading it, that’s enough for me. And I’m not going to ask you what words mean."
    The children sat stunned and silent. Was this a teacher talking? One girl, who had just come to us from a school where she had had a very hard time, looked at me steadily for a long time after I had finished. Then, still looking at me, she said slowly and seriously, "Mr. Holt, do you really mean that?" I said just as seriously, "I mean every word of it."
    During the spring she really astonished me. One day, she was reading at her desk. From a glimpse of the illustrations I thought I knew what the book was. I said to myself, “It can’t be,” and went to take a closer look. Sure enough, she was reading Moby Dick, in the edition with woodcuts. I said, "Don’t you find parts of it rather heavy going?" She answered, "Oh, sure, but I just skip over those parts and go on to the next good part."
    This is exactly what reading should be and in school so seldom is --- an exciting, joyous adventure. Find something, dive into it, take the good parts, skip the bad parts, get what you can out of it, go on to something else. How different is our mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of "understanding" that can be dug out of a book.

    Graphs can be a very useful tool for conveying information, especially numbers, percentages, and other data. A graph gives the reader a picture to interpret. That can be a lot more efficient than pages and pages explaining the data.
    Graphs can seem frightening, but reading a graph is a lot like reading a story. The graph has a title, a main idea, and supporting details. You can use your active reading skills to analyze and understand graphs just like any other text.
    Most graphs have a few basic parts: a caption or introduction paragraph, a title, a legend or key, and labeled axes. An active reader looks at each part of the graph before trying to interpret the data. Captions will usually tell you where the data from(for example, a scientific study of 400 African elephants from 1980 to 2005).Captions usually summarize the author’s main point as well. The title is very important. It tells you the main idea of the graph by stating what kind of information is being shown. A legend, also called a key, is a guide to the symbols and colors used in the graph. Many graphs, including bar graphs and line graphs, have two axes that form a corner. Usually these axes are the left side and the bottom of the graph. Each axis will always have a label tells you what each axis measures.

Bar Graphs   A bar graph has two axes and uses bars to show amounts. In Graph 1, we see that the x-axis shows grades students earned, and the y-axis shows how many students earned each grade. You can see that 6 students earned an A because the bar for A stretches up to 6 on the vertical measurement. There is a lot of information we can get from a simple graph like this (See Graph 1)

Line Graphs     A line graph looks similar to a bar graph, but instead of bars, it plots points and connects them with a line. It has the same parts as a bar graph-two labeled axes-and can be read the same way. To read a line graph, it’s important to focus on the points of intersection rather than the line segments between the points. This type of graph is most commonly used to show how something changes over time. Here is a graph that charts how far a bird flies during the first five days of its spring migration (See Graph 2).

    The unit of measurement for the x-axis is days. The unit of measurement for the y-axis is kilometers. Thus we can see that, on the first day, the pipit flew 20 kilometers. The line segment goes up between Day 1 and Day 2, which means that the bird flew farther on Day 2. If the line segment angled down, as between Day 4 and Day 5, it would mean that the bird flew fewer kilometers than the day before. This line graph is a quick, visual way to tell the reader about the bird’s migration.

Pie Graphs

    A typical pie graph looks like a circular pie. The circle is divided into sections, and each section represents a fraction of the data. The graph is commonly used to show percentages; the whole pie represents 100 percent, so each piece is a fraction of the whole.
    A pie graph might include a legend, or it might use icons or labels within each slice. This pie graph shows one month’s expenses(See Graph 3).
    Food $25
    Movies $12
    Clothing $36
    Savings $20
    Books $7

    If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal(夜间活动的）species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.
    The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequences-called light pollution-whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels-and light rhythms-to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.
    In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze(霾) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night-dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadows on Earth-is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.
    We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet(磁铁). The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.
    Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.
    Living in a glare of our own making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage-the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way-the edge of our galaxy-arching overhead.

    In 2004, when my daughter Becky was ten, she and my husband, Joe, were united in their desire for a dog. As for me, I shared none of their canine lust.
    But why, they pleaded. “Because I don’t have tine to take care of a dog.” But we’ll do it. “Really? You’re going to walk the dog? Feed the dog? Bathe the dog?” Yes,yes and yes.”I don’t believe you.” We will. We promise.
    They didn’t. From day two (everyone wanted to walk the cute puppy that first day), neither thought to walk the dog. While I was slow to accept that I would be the one to keep track of her shots, to schedule her vet appointments, to feed and clean her, Misty knew this on day one. As she looked up at the three new humans in her life (small, medium, and large), she calculated, "The medium one is the sucker in the pack."
    Quickly, she and I developed something very similar to a Vulcan mind meld(心灵融合). She’d look at me with those sad brown eyes of hers, beam her need, and then wait, trusting I would understand---which, strangely, I almost always did. In no time, she became my fifth appendage(附肢), snoring on my stomach as I watched television.
    Even so, part of me continued to resent walking duty. Joe and Becky had promised. Not fair, I’d balk(不心甘情愿地做) silently as she and I walked.“Not fair,” I’d loudly remind anyone within earshot upon our return home.
    Then one day-January 1, 2007, to be exact-my husband’s doctor uttered an unthinkable word: leukemia (白血病). With that, I spent eight to ten hours a day with Joe in the hospital, doing anything and everything I could to ease his discomfort. During those six months of hospitalizations, Becky, 12 at that time, adjusted to other adults being in the house when she returned from school. My work colleagues adjusted to my taking off at a moment’s notice for medical emergencies. Every part of my life changed; no part of my old routine remained.
    Save one: Misty still needed walking. At the beginning, when friends offered to take her through her paces, I declined because I knew they had their own households to deal with.
    As the months went by, I began to realize that I actually wanted to walk Misty. The walk in the morning before I headed to the hospital was a quiet, peaceful time to gather my thoughts or to just be before the day’s medical drama unfolded. The evening walk was a time to shake off the day’s upsets and let the worry tracks in my head go to white noise.
    When serious illness visits your household, it’s not just your daily routine and your assumptions about the future that are no longer familiar. Pretty much everyone you know acts differently.
    Not Misty. Take her for a walk, and she had no interest in Joe’s blood or bone marrow test results. On the street or in the park, she had only one thing on her mind: squirrels! She was so joyful that even on the worst days, she could make me smile. On a daily basis, she reminded me that life goes on.
    After Joe died in 2009, Misty slept on his pillow.
    I’m grateful-to a point. The truth is, after years of balking, I’ve come to enjoy my walks with Misty. As I watch her chase a squirrel, throwing her whole being into the here-and-now of an exercise that has never once ended in victory, she reminded me, too, that no matter how harsh the present or unpredictable the future, there’s almost always some measure of joy to be extracted from the moment.

    One of the best things you can do any time in the semester is go see the professor. So hoof on over to an office hour and have some one-on-one face time with someone who’ll help you master the material and improve your grade, to boot. But how should you have this conversation with the professor?Here are five insider tips about how to make that office hour really count:.   
    (1) ______ No need to get all bent out of shape about going to see the professor. The professor would actually like to see you and answer your questions. Believe it or not, he or she is on your side and is eager to see you do well. And besides, he or she has seen many students stupider than you, so nothing you’re going to ask will set the record for stupidity.
    (2) ______ Even though you might feel more comfortable going with a friend or partner, the office hour will go better if it’s just you and the professor. You’ll get in more questions, the discussion will be tailored to what you need most help on, and two-party communication is almost always more productive than committee work. Your friend can wait outside for the discussion.
    (3) ______ If you can’t make the official office hours, most professors are willing to make individual appointments to help you out. If you’re lucky enough to land such an accommodation, though, be sure you’re 100 percent on time. There’s nothing that ticks off a professor more than making him-or herself available for a custom office hour only to find that you don’t care enough to come on time. And besides, the professor might leave after ten minutes, which would make your trip a total loss.
    (4) ______ If you’re meeting with the professor to go over a paper or test, or to ask questions about a particular lecture or reading,make sure you bring that paper or test, or your lecture notes or a copy of the article. The professor doesn’t remember the comments he or she wrote on your individual piece of work---though he or she will be able to recall them after just a brief glance at your work. And if you have your lecture notes or the article in hand, you and the professor will be able to examine specific points that are confusing to you, rather than just talking in a general way about the contents.
    (5) ______ Office hours almost always go better if you bring a few specific questions to the meeting. It’s almost never good to start a meeting with general comments such as“I didn’t understand what you said about [main topic of the course]” or“I couldn’t understand any of your lectures last week.” Much better is to come in with two or three conversation-starters about a specific concept, point, or problem you didn’t understand. Keep in mind that in a fifteen-minute office hour (which is how long these things usually last), two or three questions are usually the most you’ll have time to discuss.

    下面短文中有10处语言错误。请在有错误的地方增加、删除或修改某个单词。
增加：在缺词处加一个漏字符号（∧），并在其下面写上该加的词。
删除：把多余的词用斜线（\）划掉。
修改：在错的词下划一横线，并在该词下面写上修改后的词。
注意：
(1) 每处错误及修改均仅限一词；
(2) 只允许修改10处，多者（从第11处起）不计分。


    My old classroom was interesting because three side of the classroom were made from glass. I enjoyed sit close to the windows and looking at the view. On the left-hand side of the class, I could easy see the football field. In the morning ,it was full of the students exercising. The view from the back of the classroom is also splendid. Close to the school there was a beautiful park with many trees around them. Farther in the distance, I could not enjoy the view of snowy mountains. On the right side of the class was the road ,I was always interested to see the drivers in hurry in the morning. Theposition of the classroom with its view made me felt like I was dreaming. If I was only a child when I studied in that classroom, I will never forget it.

    在班级活动中，当你的想法与大多数同学不一致时，你是坚持自己的观点并说服别人，还是尊重大多数同学的意见？请你以 When I Have Different Opinion 为题，用英语写一篇100~120个词的短文。
要求如下：
(1) 以上两种做法中选择一种；
(2) 以具体的实例阐述你选择的理由。  
注意：短文中，不得以任何形式透露地区、学校、同学姓名等真实信息。否则按考试作弊行为认定。

When I Have Different Opinion