All letters were pronounced in Old English.（)

A.with

B.at

C.in

D.of

A．For many years, all books were written by hanD

B．Because it took so long to write one book, there were only a few of them．

C．Most people could never own a book．

D．Then sometime between 1450 and 1460, Johannes Gutenberg got the idea of carving separate letters and moving them to make new words．

E．Gutenberg died at the age of 68．

F．This was the invention of moveable typ

E．G． From then on, the numbers of books printed grew quickly．

Passage Five

Roman soldiers in some places built long rows of signal towers. When they had a message to send, the soldiers shouted it from tower to tower. If there were enough towers and enough soldiers with loud voices, important news could be sent quickly over distance.

In Africa, people learned to send messages by beating on a series of large drums (鼓). Each drum was kept within hearing distance of the next one. The drum beats were sent out in a special way that all the drummers understood. Though the messages were simple, they could be sent at great speed for hundreds of miles.

In the eighteenth century, a French engineer found a new way to send short messages. In this way, a person held a flag in each hand and the arms were moved to various positions representing different letters of the alphabet (字母表). It was like spelling out words with flags and arms.

Over a long period of time, people sent messages by all these different ways. However, not until the telephone was invented in America in the nineteenth century could people send speech sounds over a great distance in just a few seconds.

51. According to this passage, the Roman way of communication depended very much on______.

A. fine weather

B. high tower

C. the spelling system

D. arm movements

完型填空

On May 27, 1995, our life was suddenly changed. It happened a few minutes past three, when my husband, Chris, fell from his horse as it jumped over a fence. Chris was paralyzed (瘫痪) from the chest down, {able; unable; suitable} to breathe normally. As he was thrown from his horse, we entered into a life of disability with lots of unexpected challenges. We went from the “haves” to the “have-nots”. Or so we thought.

Yet what we discovered later were all the gifts that came out of sharing difficulties. We came to learn that something {terrible; practical; wonderful} could happen in a disaster. All over the world people cared for Chris so much that letters and postcards poured in every day. By the end of the third week in a medical center in Virginia, about 35,000 pieces of {news; paper; mail} had been received and sorted. As {patients; a family; nurses}, we opened letter after letter. They gave us comfort and became a source of strength for us. We use them to encourage ourselves. I would go to the pile of letters marked with “funny” if we need a laugh, or to the “disabled” box to find advice from people in wheelchairs or even in bed living happily and {successfully; bitterly; weakly}. These letters, we realized, had to be shared. And so here we offer one of them to you. "

e subjected to an odd-even(单双数的) plan of gas rationing(限额配给). The governor signed a bill(法案) forcing motorists with license plates ending in odd numbers to buy gas only on odd-numbered days, and those ending in even numbers on even-numbered days. Those whose plates were all letters or specially primed had to follow the odd-numbered plan.

Exceptions were made only for emergencies and out-of-state drivers. Those who could not get gas were forced to walk, bike, or skate to work.

This plan was expected to eliminate the long lines at many service stations. Those who tried to purchase more than twenty gallons of gas or tried to fill a more than half filled tank would be fined and possibly imprisoned.

All of the following are true except that ______.

A．officials hoped that this plan would alleviate long gas lines

B．a gas limit was imposed

C．California has 9.9 million drivers

D．the government signed the bill concerning gas rationing

tistics!

The 64,000-dollar question, if you have come up with a device which you believe to be the answer to the energy crisis or you've invented a lawnmower which cuts grass with a jet of water (not so daft, someone has invented one), is how to ensure you're the one to reap the rewards of your ingenuity. How will all you garden shed boffins out there keep others from capitalizing on your ideas and lining their pockets at your expense？

One of the first steps to protect your interest is to patent your invention. That can keep it out of the grasp of the pirates for at least the next 20 years. And for this reason inventors in their droves beat a constant trail from all over the country to the doors of an anonymous grey-fronted building just behind London's Holborn to try and patent their devices.

The building houses the Patent Office. It's an ant heap of corridors, offices and filing rooms—a sorting house and storage depot for one of the world's biggest and most varied collections of technical data. Some ten million patents — English and foreign — are listed there.

File after file, catalogue after catalogue detail the brain-children of inventors down the centuries, from a 1600's machine gun designed to fire square bullets at infidels and round ones at Christians, to present-day laser, nuclear and computer technology.

The first letters' patent were granted as long ago as 1449 to a Flemish craftsman by the name of John Utynam. The letters, written in Latin, are still on file at the office. They were granted by King Henry Ⅵ and entitled Utynam to import into this country his knowledge of making stained glass windows in order to install such windows at Eton College.

Present-day patents procedure is a more sophisticated affair than getting a go-ahead note from the monarch. These days the strict procedures governing whether you get a patent for your revolutionary mouse-trap or solar-powered back-scratcher have been reduced to a pretty exact science.

From start to finish it will take around two and a half years and cost ￡ 165 for the inventor to gain patent protection for his brainchild. That's if he's lucky. By no means all who apply to the Patent Office, which is a branch of the Department of Trade, get a patent.

A key man at the Patent Office is Bernard Partridge, Principal Examiner (Administration), who boils down to one word the vital ingredient any inventor needs before he can hope to overcome the many hurdles in the complex procedure of obtaining a patent — "ingenuity".

People take out a patent because they want to______.

A．keep their ideas from being stolen

B．reap the rewards of somebody else's ingenuity

C．visit the patent office building

D．come up with more new devices

听力原文： A person's social prestige seems to be determined mainly by his or her job. Occupations are valued in terms of the incomes associated with them, although other factors can also be relevant—particular the amount of education a given occupation requires and the degree of control over others it pro vides. The holders of political power also tend to have high prestige.

Unlike power and wealth, which do not seem to be becoming more equally shared, the symbols of prestige have become available to an increasing number of Americans. The main reason is the radical change in the nature of jobs over the course of this century. In 1900 nearly 40 percent of the labor force were farm workers and less than 20 percent held white-collar jobs. At the beginning of the 1980s, however, less than 5 percent of the labor force worked on farms and white-collar workers were the largest single occupation al category. Blue-collar workers, the largest category in the mid-fifties, now constitute less than a third of all workers. The increase in the proportion of high-prestige jobs has allowed a much greater number of Americans to enjoy these statuses and the life-styles that go with them.

(33)

A．Power.

B．Academic degree.

C．Wealth.

D．Diligence.

he or she recognized a target letter among a grouping of 96. In this simple test, smokers, deprived smokers and nonsmokers performed equally well.

The next test was more complex, requiring all to scan sequences of 20 identical letters and respond the instant one of letters transformed into a different one. Nonsmokers were faster, but under the stimulation of nicotine active smokers were faster than deprived smokers.

In the third test of short - term memory, nonsmokers made the fewest errors, but deprived smokers committed fewer errors than active smokers.

The fourth test required people to read a passage, then answer questions about it. Nonsmokers remembered 19 percent more of the most important information than active smokers, and deprived smoker bested those who had smoked a cigarette just before testing. Active smokers tended not only to have poorer memories but also had trouble separating important information from insignificant details.

As our tests became more complex, sums up Spilich, "nonsmokers performed better than smokers by wider and wider margins." He predicts, "smokers might perform. adequately at many jobs——until they got complicated. A smoking airline pilot could fly adequately if no problems arose, but if something went wrong, smoking might damage his mental capacity."

The purpose of George Spilich's experiments is _________.

A．to test whether smoking has a positive effect on the mental capacity of smokers

B．to show how smoking damages people's mental capacity

C．to prove that smoking affects people's regular performance

D．to find out whether smoking helps people's short-term memory

tes for the last ten years. Computers used to be large, expensive machines that were very difficult to use. But scientists and technicians have been making them smaller and cheaper while at the same time they have been made easier to use. As a result, their popularity has been increasing as more people have been buying computers for their homes and businesses. Computers have been designed to store information and compute problems that are difficult for human beings to work out. Some have voices that speak with the operators. Stores use computers to keep records of their inventories (库存货物) and to send bills to their customers. Offices use computers to copy letters, record business and keep in touch with other offices. People have been using computers in their homes to keep track of the money they spend. One important new use for computers is for entertainment. Many new games have been designed to be played on the computers. People of all ages have been playing these games. People also have been buying home computers to play computer games, watch movies and listen to concerts at home. They have become very popular indeed. Computers used to _______.

A.work rapidly

B.be large and expensive

C.be easy to use

D.be used for fun

I expect all the letters __________ promptly.

A、being typed

B、to be typed

C、having been typed

D、to have been typed