We might say our products have ______ warm reception everywhere and hope they will be able to you

disbelieved—as if beliefs were like a light switch with only two positions, on or off. My use of the bathtub hoax is intended to illustrate that belief does not have to operate as a simple yes or no choice, all or nothing. Belief can be more conditional; it can be something that we decide to have "up to a point" or "to a degree". And so, the question we might ask ourselves while reading does not have to be "Should I believe 'it or not？" but instead can be "How much should I believe it？" This later question implies that the belief we have in any given fact, or in any given idea, is not determined by whether it sounds right or whether the source is an authority. It means that our beliefs are determined by the reasons that justify them.

Belief is not a mechanical action, brought about by invariable rules of nature. It is a human activity, the exercise of judgment. With this in mind, we might say that we perform. this action better when we know what the reasons are that have led to our belief, and why they are good reasons. These observations do not deprive us of our ability to believe in what we read. They are not intended to transform. you from credulous believers into stubborn doubters.

The process of weighing beliefs against the quality of reasons is one that you already go through all the time, whether you are aware of it or not. We all do. The practice of critical reading is the exercise of this kind of judgment on purpose. By doing it, we protect ourselves from being led into belief for inadequate reasons, but at the same time we open up our minds to the possibility of arriving at belief for adequate ones. If we decide to grant or withhold consent based on the quality of the reasons that we are given, we admit at the same time that two things are possible: We admit that we might consent less in the future if we discover that the reasons are not so good after all; and we admit that we might consent more if we are ever presented with better reasons than we had formerly known. This attitude is not pure skepticism any more than it is pure credulity. It is somewhere in between. It is the attitude of an open-minded thinker, of someone who wishes to be responsible for deciding for herself or himself what to believe.

The author's use of the bathtub hoax is meant to suggest that ______.

A．belief is nothing but a light switch

B．facts must be believed unconditionally

C．nothing should be believed or disbelieved

D．belief is more than a simple yes or no choice

o expensive for most people. If you are invited to a yuppie dinner party, don't be surprised if you are offered freshly -cooked insects as a first course. While the idea of eating fried insects fills most of us with horror, insect eating is becoming highly fashionable. For example, in the media industry, successful executives are often seen to eat fried or boiled insets from time to time while working at their desks. These safe -to-eat insects can be found and ordered on the Internet. And young people are logging on to exotic food websites and ordering samples of prepared insects to serve at their dinner parties. Al- though the idea of eating insects is probably disgusting to most of us, few people would claim that pigs, chickens, and some kinds of seafood we often eat are examples of great duty. One day, insects could be marketed and sold as the food item in supermarkets. According to their fans, they are not only high in protein and low in fat, but also very tasty. But until our attitudes to food change fundamentally, it seems that insect-eaters will remain a selected few.

Why did the speaker say we might be surprised at a yuppie dinner party？

A．Because we might be offered a dish of insects.

B．Because nothing but freshly cooked insects are served

C．Because some yuppies like to horrify guests with insects as food.

D．Because we might meet many successful executives in the media industry.

colors because they make a room feel warmer and the walls nearer to us than they really are. We say that blue and green are cold because they give us the opposite feeling. A neutral color is one that does not seem to affect our feelings. Brown and grey are both neutral，and they may also be mixed with hot or cold colors to reduce their effect on our feelings.

We can begin to see the importance of color selection. Although red might be perfect for a restaurant，it would be wrong for an art exhibition room，where we want to look at the paintings，not at the walls behind. Because of its effect on size，white could be used to make a small room seem larger，or dark blue to make a large one seem smaller.

Another way that we sometimes speak of colors is to say that they are loud or quiet. Again we are talking about the feeling that colors give us. We use sound to express how much colors catch our attention.

16. If a man wants to make a room warmer，which color will he choose for the walls？

A. Green.

B. Yellow.

C. Black.

D. Brown

17. Which color can be used with blue to reduce its effect on our feelings？

A. Yellow

B. Red

C. Grey.

D. Green.

18. According to the second paragraph，red is most suitable for _____________.

A. restaurants

B. paintings

C. an exhibition room

D. the walls in a

living room

19. People would paint a small room into white because ____________.

A. white makes a room brighter

B. white makes a room prettier

C. a room seems larger in white

D. a room seems smaller it white

20. “Loud” and “quiet” colors give people ____________.

A. the cooler feelings

B. the opposite feelings

C. the warmer feelings

D. the similar feelings

rent. For most humans, seeing is believing, although we do occasionally brood about whether we can believe our eyes. The other senses are largely ancillary; most of us do not know how we might go about either doubting or believing our noses. But for dogs, scenting is believing. A dog's nose is to ours as the wrinkled surface of our complex brain is to the surface of an egg. A dog who did comparative psychology might easily worry about our consciousness or lack thereof, just as we worry about the consciousness of a squid.

We who take sight for granted can draw pictures of scent, but we have no language for doing it the other way about, no way to represent something visually familiar by means of actual scent. Most humans cannot know, with their limited noses, what they can imagine about being deaf, blind, mute, or paralyzed. The sighted can, for example, speak if a blind person a "in the darkness," but there is no corollary expression for what it is that we are in relationship to scent. If we tried to coin words, we might come up with something like "scent-blind." But what would it mean？ It couldn't have the sort of meaning that "color-blind" and "tone-deaf' do, because most of us have experienced what "tone" and "color" mean in those expressions "scent-blind." Scent for many of us can be only a theoretical, technical expression that we use because our grammar requires that we have a noun to go in the sentences we are prompted to utter about animals' tracking. We don't have a sense of scent. What we do have is a sense of smell-for Thanksgiving dinner and skunks and a number of things we call chemicals.

So if Fido and sitting on the terrace, admiring the view, we inhabit worlds with radically different principles of phenomenology. Say that the wind is to our backs. Our world lies all before us, within a 180 degree angle. The dog's-well, we don't know, do we？

He sees roughly the same things that I see but he believes the scents of the garden behind us. He marks the path of the black-and-white cat as she moves among the roses in search of the bits of chicken sandwich I let fall as I walked from the house to our picnic spot. T can show that Fido is alert to the kitty, but not how, for my picture-making modes of thought too easily supply falsifyingly literal representations of the cat and the garden and their modes of being hidden from or revealed to me.

The phrase "other senses are largely ancillary" (paragraph 1) is used by the author to suggest that______.

A．only those events experienced directly can be appreciated by the senses

B．for many human beings the senses of sights is the primary means of knowing about the world

C．smell is in many respects a more powerful sense than sight

D．people rely on at least one of their other senses in order to confirm what they see

What is the 'biggest city in the world？ That is, (21) city has the largest population？ This seems like (22) question to answer, but actually it isn't.

It's actually rather difficult to say which cities (23) the largest. There are two reasons for this difficulty. First of all, it isn't easy to determine a city's boundaries, that is, where a city ends. Nowadays, nearly all cities have a large (24) area around them. So when we talk about the population of a city, we often mean the population of the whole metropolitan area around the city. That means that it's difficult to determine what the population of a city is because it's difficult to define what a city is.

The second reason that it is difficult to 25 the population of different cities is this: it is almost impossible to get (26) about the population of all cities for the same year. For example, we might get an estimate of New York's population in 1979 and an (27) of Mexico City's population in 1981. So we real ly can't compare the numbers because the information is for (28) different years. And the population of cities changes rather quickly, especially in some cases. For example, the population of Jakarta, Indonesia, may increase by 5% each year, so the population figure will change rather quickly.

So we can say that these are our two (29) for comparing the populations of cities: one, it's difficult to determine the (30) of a city, and two, it is difficult to get accurate information.

21. A. what

B. which

C. where

D. how

re errors and difficulties【C1】______ misunderstanding what you've heard, so it's essential to ready yourself to listen with an open mind. Like many of us, you【C2】______ to listen actively, with.【C3】______ for accuracy, feeling, meaning, understanding and mutual creativity. You may never have been trained to【C4】______ the other person's experience of being understood.【C5】______ you may not【C6】______ that others really hear the message you intend to communicate, others don't check to【C7】______ that what you heard is【C8】______ .

What gets in the way of accurate listening？ When we're worried about what we're hearing or might hear next or what we might have to do about what we hear, we may very well receive a【C9】______ message.【C10】______ that we will have to "fix it" or "control it" causes us to listen with "filters". We may want to express our own point of view. We may also want to avoid being【C11】______ or being drawn into a conflict, so we【C12】______ . what we hear, because we're already thinking about what we'll say next. It then becomes impossible to hear the speaker's true meaning. Clearly in our workplaces, families and friendship, if we【C13】______ what we think we heard instead of what was actually said, the【C14】______ of the message we received will result in responses that aren't【C15】______ . On the other side, if others don't hear us accurately, we won't feel valued.

If you want to connect with others and take appropriate actions, you must learn to listen with curiosity, empathy and a deep appreciation for the feelings, reality and creativity of another. You need to ask for【C16】______ and not【C17】______ conclusions. You need to pay close attention and "mirror" back what you hear rather than listening【C18】______ while thinking of other things or listening through filters,【C19】______ or expectations that limit or distort the message's【C20】______ meaning. We build trust when others know we understand and value them.

【C1】

A．result in

B．lead to

C．stem from

D．bring about

Passage One

Shortly after the war, my brother and I were invited to spend a few days' holiday with an uncle who had just returned from abroad. He rented a cottage in the country, although he rarely spent much time there. The cottage, however, had no comfortable furniture in it, many of the windows were broken and the roof leaked, making the whole house damp.

On our first evening, we sat around the fire after supper listening to the stories our uncle had had to tell of his many adventures in distant countries. I was so tired after the long train journey that I would have preferred to go to bed, but I could not bear to miss any of my uncle's exciting tales.

He was just in the middle of describing a rather terrifying experience he had, when there was a loud crash from the bedroom above, the one where my brother and I were going to sleep.

"It sounds as if the roof has fallen in!" shouted my uncle, with a loud laugh.

When we got to the top of the stairs and opened the bedroom door, a strange sight met our eyes. A large part of the ceiling had collapsed (坍塌), falling right on to the pillow of my bed. I was glad that I had stayed up late to listen to my uncle's stories, otherwise I should certainly have been seriously injured, perhaps killed.

That night we all slept on the floor of the sitting room downstairs not wishing to risk our lives by sleeping under a roof which might at any moment collapse on our heads. We left for London the very next morning and my uncle gave up his cottage in the country. This was not the kind of adventure he cared for, either!

What does the writer say about his uncle during the war？

A．He had a lot of adventures.

B．He fought as a soldier.

C．He made a lot of money.

D．He enjoyed many of his adventures.

A.it may be as well

B.we might just as well

C.it was just as well we

D.we might do as well as we

and, divided we fall” -- and if I had to choose a slogan it would be “Unity in our diversity.”

A. With

B. On

C. Because

D. For