试题库在线考试题库-历年真题模拟试题及答案-考博英语在线试题测试中心-希赛网

西北农林科技大学

Directions: Write a short essay of about 300 words on the following topic. Do remember to provide a title for your essay, Write your essay on the ANSWER SHEET.Nowadays, more and more young people prefer online shopping. Have you ever had such experiences? Comment on this trend by analyzing its advantages and disadvantages.

I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity can do strange things to people. It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if hadn't been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise, I don't mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me---a potential to live, you might call it ― which I didn't see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If 1 hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball, I thought he was mocking me and I was hurt. ‘I can't use this.’ I said. ‘Take it with you’, he urged me, ‘and roll it around’. The words stuck in my head. ‘Roll it around?’. By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia's Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.1.The author of the story lost his eyesight by accident when he was four years old. T/F2.The author thinks that he is very lucky to have become blind because he can do something more meaningful now. T/F3.The author began to adjust himself to the reality of being blind with the help of his parents and teachers. T/F4.The author was never afraid of making any adjustments and his private world thus became more meaningful. T/F5.The author would have become a useless person if he had not learned to believe in himself. T/F6.As a blind man, the author was very nervous every time he went down an unfamiliar staircase alone. T/F7.Once the author was given an indoor baseball, and he felt deeply hurt and became suspicious of people around. T/F8.Learning to play ground ball is just one of the most elementary things that helped strengthen his assurance. T/F9.Whatever goal he set ahead of himself, he was always successful. T/F10.The story tells us that a person can always do something meaningful despite some imperfections in himself or herself. T/F

The "standard of living" of any country means the average person's share of the goods and services which the country produces.（1） , "Wealth" in this sense is not money, for we do not live on money but on things that money can buy: "goods" such as food and clothing, and "services" such as transport and entertainment.A country's capacity to produce wealth depends upon many factors, most of which have an effect on one another. （2） . Some regions of the world are well supplied with coal and minerals, and have a fertile soil and a favorable climate; other regions possess none of them. （3） Some countries are perhaps well off in natural resources, but suffered for many years from civil and external wars, and for this and other reasons have been unable to develop their resources. Sound and stable political conditions, and freedom from foreign invasion, enable a country to develop its natural resources peacefully and steadily, and to produce more wealth than another country equally well served by nature but less well ordered. Another important factor is the technical efficiency of a country’s people. （4） . A country's standard of living does not only depend upon the wealth that is produced and consumed within its own borders, but also upon what is indirectly produced through international trade. （5） .Trade makes it possible for her surplus manufactured goods to be traded abroad for the agricultural products that would otherwise be lacking. A country’s wealth is, therefore, much influenced by its manufacturing capacity, provided that other countries can be found ready to accept its manufactures.

While the mission of public schools has expanded beyond education to include social support and extra-curricular activities, the academic schedule has changed little in more than a century.Reclaiming the school day for academic instruction and escaping the time-bound traditions of education are vital steps in the school-reform process, says a report released today by the National Education Commission on Time and Learning.The commission's report, titled "Prisoners of Time," calls the fixed clock and calendar in American education a "fundamental design flaw” in desperate need of change. "Time should serve children instead of children serving time," the report says.The two-year commission found that holding American students to "world-class standards" will require more time for classroom instruction. "We have been asking the impassible of our students---that they learn as much as their foreign peers while spending half as much as in core academic subjects," it states.The Commission compared the relationships between time and learning in Japan, Germany, and the United States and found that American students receive less than half the basic academic instruction that Japanese and German students are provided. On average, American students can earn a high school diploma if they spend only 41 percent of their school time on academics, says the report.American students spend an average of three hours a day on “core” academics such as English, math, science, and history, the commission found. Their report recommends offering a minimum of 5.5 hours of academics every school day.The nine-member commission also recommends lengthening the school day beyond the traditional six hours."If schools want to continue offering important activities outside the academic core, as well as serving as a hub for family and community services, they should keep school doors open longer each day and each year," says John Hodge Jones, superintendent of schools in Murfreesboro, Tenn., and chairman of the commission.The typical school year in American public schools is 180 days. Eleven states allow school years of 175 days or less, and only one state requires more than 180 days."For over a decade, education reform advocates have been working feverishly to improve our schools," says Milton Goldberg, executive director of the commission. “But…if reform is to truly take hold, the six-hour, 180-day school year should be relegated to museums—an exhibit from our education past"1.Compared with the academic courses more than a hundred years ago, the academic courses now（）.2.The researches by the commission mentioned in the passage are most concerned about（）.3.As is mentioned in the passage, schools in the United States do the following EXCEPT（）.4.American students differ from those in Japan, Germany in that（）.5.Executive director of the commission Milton Goldberg would most probably agree that（）.

How we look and how we appear to others probably worries us more when we are in our teens or early twenties than at any other time in our life. Few of us are content to accept ourselves as we are, and few are brave enough to ignore the trends of fashion. Most fashion magazines or TV advertisements try to persuade us that we should dress in a certain way or behave in a certain manner. If we do, they tell us, we will be able to meet new people with confidence and deal with every situation confidently and without embarrassment. Changing fashion, of course, does not apply just to dress. A barber today does not cut a boy's hair in the same way as he used to, and girls do not make up in the same way as their mothers and grandmothers did. The advertisers show us the latest fashionable styles and we are constantly under pressure to follow the fashion in case our friends think we are odd or dull.What causes fashions to change? Sometimes convenience or practical necessity or just the fancy of an influential person can establish a fashion. Take hats, for example. In cold climates, early buildings were cold inside, so people wore hats indoors as well as outside. In recent times; the late President Kennedy caused a depression in the American hat industry by not wearing hats: more American men followed his example.There is also a cyclical pattern in fashion. In the 1920s in Europe and America, short skirts became fashionable. After World War Two, they dropped to ankle length. Then they got shorter and shorter until the miniskirt was in fashion. After a few more years, skirts became longer again.Today, society is much freer and easier than it used to be. It is no longer necessary to dress like everyone else. Within reason, you can dress as you like or do your hair the way you like instead of the way you should because it is the fashion. The popularity of jeans and the "untidy" look seems to be a reaction against the increasingly expensive fashions of the top fashion house.At the same time, appearance is still important in certain circumstances and then we must choose our clothes carefully. It would be foolish to go to an interview for a job in a law firm wearing jeans and a sweater, and it would be discourteous to visit some distinguished scholar looking as if we were going to the beach or a night club. However, you need never feel depressed if you don't look like the latest fashion photo. Look around you and you’ll see that no one else does either!1.The author thinks that people are（）. 2.Fashion magazines and TV advertisements seem to link fashion to（） .3. Causes of fashions are（） .4.Present day society is much freer and easier because it emphasizes（） .5.Which is the main idea of the last paragraph?

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