Soldiers returning home from World War II were usually eager to go on with their lives. For most, that meant starting a family

e West was greatly changed.

A．Because of

B．By means of

C．In addition to

D．In spite of

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

an accident in his father's harness shop.His father, determined that Louis should not suffer the usual fate of blind persons at that time and become a beggar, kept him in the village school until he was ten and then entered him in the institution des Jeunes Aveugles in Paris.Louis learned to read from the three books engraved in large raised letters in the Institution library.He did exceptionally well both in academic work and at the piano and the organ, and was soon helping to teach the younger children.

In 1819, the same year that Louis entered the Institution, Charles Barbier, an army captain, reported to the Academy of Sciences on a system of raised dots and dashes which enabled soldiers to read messages in the dark.Later, Barbier brought his invention to the Institution.After experimenting with it, young Braille produced a writing system using only dots, from which he gradually devised 63 separate combinations representing the letters in the French alphabet.At the request of an Englishman, he later added the letter “w”, accents and punctuation marks, and mathematical signs.Although government bureaucracy prevented immediate official adoption, his system was used at the Institution as long as the director, Dr.Pignier, was in office.Pignier’s successor insisted on returning to the officially approved former system, but students continued to use Braille's method secretly.Eventually, its superiority was established and it was adopted throughout France.

(1).Louis-Braille first learned to read with the aid of _________________.

A.his father

B.special books at the Institution

C.the village school teacher

D.Captain Barbier's system of dots and dashes

(2).Louis's father kept him at the village school until he was ten because his father ________________.

A.wanted Louis to help him in the harness shop

B.thought it was not worthwhile to have Louis work when he was young

C.did not want Louis to live the same sort of life as that of other blind people

D.wanted Louis to remain with the family as long as possible

(3).Louis Braille did all of the following things EXCEPT________________.

A.teaching young children at the Institution

B.developing a writing system for the blind

C.learning to play musical instruments well

D.encouraging students to use his method secretly

(4).Charles Barbier originally devised his writing system for________________.

A.the Academy of Sciences

B.blind children

C.military personnel

D.the English government

(5).Braille's method was not adopted officially for some time because________________.

A.the students preferred the former method

B.the large library collection would then have been useless

C.Dr.Pignier's successor disliked Braille's method

D.the government was slow to approve it

and growth, with soldiers returning home by the millions, going off to college on the G. I. Bill and lining up at the marriage bureaus.

But when it came to their houses, it was a time of common sense and a belief that less could truly be more. During the Depression and the war, Americans had learned to live with less, and that restraint, in combination with the postwar confidence in the future, made small, efficient housing positively stylish.

Economic condition was only a stimulus for the trend toward efficient living. The phrase " less is more" was actually first popularized by a German, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who like other people associated with the Bauhaus, a school of design, emigrated to the United States before World War II and took up posts at American architecture schools. These designers came to exert enormous influence on the course of American architecture, but none more so that Mies.

Mies's signature phrase means that less decoration, properly organized, has more impact than a lot. Elegance, he believed, did not derive from abundance. Like other modern architects, he employed metal, glass and laminated wood—materials that we take for granted today buy that in the 1940s symbolized the future. Mies's sophisticated presentation masked the fact that the spaces he designed were small and efficient, rather than big and often empty.

The apartments in the elegant towers Mies built on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive, for example, were smaller—two-bedroom units under 1, 000 square feet—than those in their older neighbors along the city's Gold Coast. But they were popular because of their airy glass walls, the views they afforded and the elegance of the buildings' details and proportions, the architectural equivalent of the abstract art so popular at the time.

The trend toward "less" was not entirely foreign. In the 1930s Frank Lloyd Wright started building more modest and efficient houses—usually around 1, 200 square feet—than the spreading two-story ones he had designed in the 1890s and the early 20th century.

The " Case Study Houses" commissioned from talented modern architects by California Arts & Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1962 were yet another homegrown influence on the "less is more" trend. Aesthetic effect came from the landscape, new materials and forthright detailing. In his Case Study House, Ralph Rapson may have mispredicted just how the mechanical revolution would impact everyday life—few American families acquired helicopters, though most eventually got clothes dryers—but his belief that self-sufficiency was both desirable and inevitable was widely shared.

The postwar American housing style. largely reflected the Americans'_________.

A．prosperity and growth

B．efficiency and practicality

C．restraint and confidence

D．pride and faithfulness

A.to lock; to return

B.to lock; returning

C.locking; returning

D.locking; to return

A.returning

B.coming

C.getting

D.got

A．did everything the other soldiers did

B．did most of the things the other soldiers did

C．did some of the things the other soldiers did

D．took some special training

It is necessary __________ the book immediately.

A、that he returns

B、his returning

C、for him to return

A.very

B.too

C.how

D.what