Part III Reading Comprehension (25 points)

Section A

Directions:In this section, there are four passages followed by questions or unfinished statements ,each with four suggested answers A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and mark your answer on the Answer Sheet.

Passage One

Sometimes a race is not enough. Sometimes a runner just wants to go further. That’s what happened to Dennis Martin and Brooke Curran.

Martin, 68, a retired detective form New York City,took up running after his first wife died. Curran, 46, a philanthropist(慈善家)from Alexandria, started running to get out of the house and collect her thoughts. Both she and Martin got good at running but felt the desire to do more. “The more I trained,the better I got,”Curran said,”but I would cross the finish line with no sense of accomplishment.”

Eventually , they worked up to running marathons(馬拉松)(and longer races) in other countries, on other countries. Now both have achieved a notable -and increasingly less rate - milestone;running the 26.2-mile race on all seven continents.

They are part of a phenomenon that has grown out of the running culture in the past two decades, at the intersection of athleticism and leisure: “runcations,”which combine distance running with travel to exotic places . There trips ,as expensive as they are physically challenging ,are a growing and competitive market in the travel industry.

“In the beginning,running was enough ,”said Steen Albrechtsen ,a press manager. The classic marathon was the ultimate goal, then came the super marathons ,like London and New York. But when 90,000 people a year can take that challenge,it is no longer exciting and adventurous .Hence, the search for new adventures began.”

“No one could ever have imagined that running would become the lifestyle activity that it is today,”said Thom Gilligan, founder and president of Boston-based Marathon Tours and Travel. Gilligan,who has been in business since 1979, is partly responsible for the seven-continent phenomenon.

It started with a casual talk to an interviewer about his company offering trips to every continent except Antarctica. And then in 1995,Marathon fours hosted its first Antarctica Marathon on King George Island. Off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula;160 runners got to the starting line of a dirt-and ice-trail route via a Russian icebreaker through the Drake Passage.

21. At the beginning, Martin took up running just to .

A. meet requirements of his job

B. win a running race

C. join in a philanthropic activity

D. get away from his sadness

22. Martin and Curran are mentioned as good examples of .

A. winners in the 26.2-mile race on all seven continents

B. people who enjoy long running as a lifestyle activity

C. running racers satisfied with their own performance

D. old people who live an active life after retirement

23. A new trend in the travel industry is the development of .

A. challenging runcations

B. professional races

C. Antarctica travel market

D. expensive tours

24. The classic marathon no longer satisfies some people because .

A. it does not provide enough challenge

B. it may be tough and dangerous

C. it involves too fierce a competition

D. it has attracted too many people

25. The first Antarctica Marathon on King George Island indicates that .

A. international cooperation is a must to such an event

B. runcations are expensive and physically challenging

C. Marathon Tours is a leader of the travel industry

D. adventurous running has become increasingly popular

Passage Two

Before the 1970s, college students were treated as children. So many colleges ran in loco parentissystem. “In loco parentis”is a Latin term meaning “in the place of a parent.”It describes when someone else accepts responsibility to act in the interests of a child.

This idea developed long ago in British common law to define the responsibility of teachers toward their students. For years, American courts upheld in loco parentisin cases such as Gott versus Berea College in 1913.

Gott owned a restaurant off campus. Berea threatened to expel students who ate at places not owned by the school. The Kentucky high court decided that in loco parentisjustified that rule.

In loco parentis meant that male and female college students usually had to live in separate buildings. Women had to be back at their dorms by ten or eleven on school nights.

But in the 1960s, students began to protest rules and restrictions like these. At the same time, courts began to support students who were being punished for political and social dissent.

In 1960, Alabama State College expelled six students who took part in a civil rights demonstration. They sued the school and won. After that it became harder and harder to defend in loco parentis.

At that time, students were not considered adults until 21. Then, in 1971, the 24th amendment to the Constitution set the voting age at eighteen. So in loco parentisno longer really applied.

Slowly, colleges began to treat students not as children, but as adults. Students came to be seen as consumers of educational services.

Gary Dickstein, an assistant vice president at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, says in loco parentisis not really gone. It just looks different. Today’s parents, he says, are often heavily involved in students’lives. They are known as “helicopter parents.”They always seem to hover over their children. Gary Dickstein says these parents are likely to question decisions, especially about safety issues and grades. They want to make sure their financial investment is not being wasted.

26. Before the 1970s, many colleges ran in loco parentissystem because .

A. they could take the place of the students’parents

B. parents asked them to do it for the interests of their children

C. this was a tradition established by British colleges

D. college students were regarded as too young to be treated as adults

27. Who won the case of Gott versus Berea College in 1913?

A. Berea College.B. Gott.

C. It was a win-win case.D. The students.

28. The word “dissent”(Para.5) probably means “”.

A. extreme behaviorsB. violation of laws

C. strong disagreementD. Wrong doings

29. In 1960，the court ruled that Alabama State College_____

A. had no right to expel the students

B. was justified to have expelled the students

C. shouldn’t interfere with students’daily life

D. should support civil rights demonstrations

30. According to Gary Dickstein, today’s “helicopter parents_____

A. don’t set their hearts at rest with college administrators

B. keep a watchful eye on their children’s life and study

C. care less about their children’s education than before

D. have different opinions on their children’s education

Passage Three

We tend to think of plants as the furniture of the naturalword. They don’t move they don’t make sounds, they don’t seem to respond to anything –at least not very quickly. But as is often the case, our human view of the world misses quite a lot. Plants talk to each other all the time. And the language is chemical.

Over the years scientists have reported that different types of plants, from trees to tomatoes, release compounds into the air to help neighboringplants. These chemical warnings all have the same purpose—to spread information about one plant’s disease so other plants can defend themselves. But exactlyhow plants receive and act on many of these signals is still mysterious.

In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in Japan offer some explanations. They have identified one chemical message and traced it all the way from release to action.

The scientists looked at tomato plants infested(侵害) by common pest, the cutworm caterpillar(毛蟲). To start out, they grew plants in two plastic compartments connected by a tube. One plant was infested and placed upwind and the others were uninfested and placed downwind. The downwind plants were later exposed to the cutworm caterpillar. The results showed that plants that had previously been near sick neighbors were able to defend themselves better against the caterpillar.

The researchers also studied leaves from exposed and unexposed plants. They found one compound showed up more often in the exposed plants. The substance is called Hex Vic. When the scientists fed Hex Vic to cutworms, it knocked down their survival rate by 17%. The scientists identifiedthe source of Hex Vic, and sprayed it lightly over healthy plants. Those plants were then able to start producing the caterpillar-killing Hex Vic. Researchers confirmed that uninfested plants have to build their own weapon to fight off bugs and diseases. How do they know when to play defense? They are warned first by their friendly plant neighbors.

It is a complex tale, and it may be happening in more plant species than tomatoes. It may also be happening with more chemical signals that are still unknown to us. For now though, we know that plants not only communicate, they look out for one another.

31. What does the author try to emphasize Paragraph 1?

A. How plants communicate is still a mystery.

B. Enough attention has been paid to plant talk.

C. Plants are the furniture of the natural world.

D. Plants can communicate with each other.

32. According to Paragraph2, what remains unknown is ______

A. how plats receive and handle the signals from their neighbors

B. why plants spread chemical information to their neighbor

C. how many types of plants release compounds into the air

D. whether plants send chemical warnings to their neighbors

33. The tomato plants in the experiment were ______

A. placed separately but connected through air

B. expose to different kinds of pests

C. exposed to the pest at the same time

D. placed together in a closed compartment

34. The experiment shows that the infested plant helps its neighbors by ______

A. making more Hex Vic to attract the pest

B. releasing Hex Vic into the air to warn them

C. letting them know how to produce Hex Vic

D. producing enough Hex Vic to kill the pest

35.What may be the best title for the passage?

A. Survival of PlantsB. Plant WorldC. Talking PlantsD. Plant Bug Killer

PassageFour

Vancouver is the best place to live in the Americas,according to a quality-of-life ranking published earlier this month .The city regularly tops such indexes as its clean air,spacious homes and weekend possibilities of sailing and skiing. But its status as a liveable city is threatened by worsening congestion(擁擠).Over the next three decades,another I million residents are expected to live in the Greater Vancouver region, adding more cars, bicycles and lorries to roads that arc already struggling to serve the existing 2.3 million residents.

A proposal by Vancouver’s mayorseeks to prevent the worsening conditions.Upgrades would be madeto 2,300 kilometres of road lanes,as well as bus routes and cycle paths. Four hundred new buses would join the fleet of 1,830. There would be more trains and more “seabus”ferry crossings between Vancouver and its wealthy northern suburbs. To get all that, residents must vote to accept an increase in sales tax, from 7% to 7.5%. Polls suggest they will vote no.

Everyone agrees that a more efficient transport system is needed. Confined by mountains to the north, the United States to the south and the Pacific Ocean to the west, Vancouver has spread in the only direction where there is still land, into the Fraser Valley, which just a few decades ago was mostly farmland. The road is often overcrowded.

Yet commuters’suspicion of local bureaucrats may exceed their dislike of congestion. TransLink, which runs public transport in the region, is unloved by taxpayers. Passengers blame it when Skytrain,the light-rail system, comes to a standstill because of mechanical or electrical faults, as happened twice in one week last summer, leaving commuters stuck in carriages with nothing to do but expressing their anger on Twitter. That sort of thing has made voters less willing to pay the C$7.5 billion in capital spending that the ten-year trafficupgrade would involve.

Despite the complaints, Vancouver’s transport system is a decent, well-integrated one on which to build, reckons Todd Litman, a transport consultant who has worked for TransLink. “These upgrades are all-important if Vancouver wants to maintain its reputation for being a destination others want to go to.”He says.

36. The biggest problem threatening Vancouver as a liveable city is .

A. increasing congestionB. climate change

C. shortage of landD. lack of money

37. The upgrade proposal by Vancouver’s mayor may be turned down by residents because.

A. they do not want more people to move in

B. they are reluctant to move to new places

C. upgrades would take away their living space

D. upgrades would add to theirfinancial burdens

38. The only direction for Vancouver to further expand is towards .

A. the eastB. the westC. the southD. the north

39. TransLink is mentioned (Para.4) as an example of .

A. world famous transport companies

B. local residents’complaints about the bureaucrats

C. local effort to improve public transport

D. worsening traffic congestion

40. According to Todd Litman, the upgrade proposal.

A. will solve the traffic problem

B. will benefit local economy

C. satisfies the transport company

D. deserves public support