One bright sunny day our class went out to the schoolyard. Miss Brown told us to look for something on
the ground that belonged to us. We looked and looked. Finally Mike cried, "I know! It's my shadow on the
ground." We saw that each girl and boy had a shadow and Miss Brown had a bigger one.
     I found when I moved, my shadow moved. When I ran, my shadow ran, too. But I could not catch it.
Then Jess found a long and thin bamboo pole and stuck it into the ground. Even the pole had a shadow.
     All this set me thinking about the shadow. I did not have a shadow the day before when I walked in the
very dark tunnel (隧道). My shadow is never with me in my room at night when the light is _____.
     I can't stop thinking about me and my shadow and about what makes the shadow. I am going to look for
more shadows because they are very interesting.

1. What is the best title for the passage? (Please answer within 10 words.) 
    ___________________________________________________________________ 
2. Which sentence in the passage can be replaced by the following one?
     I kept thinking about myself and the shadow of mine, and asked myself why I had
     the shadow.
    ___________________________________________________________________
3. Fill in the blank in the third paragraph with a proper word to complete the sentence.
    ___________________________________________________________________
4. Who do you think wrote the passage? Why? (Please answer within 30 words.)
    ___________________________________________________________________
5. Translate the last sentence of the passage into Chinese. 
    ___________________________________________________________________

     Two thieves came to a house to steal something, they dug a hole in the wall of the house.
     There lived many mice in the house. The woman in the moonlight saw a mouse crawl (爬行) into the
house. "Look! In comes one," she said to the man in the house. He was so frightened that he hurriedly
crawled out of the house and said to the one waiting outside, "She found me when I was just in." But the
thief outside didn't believe him, so he said, "Let us two try to crawl into the house together." At that time
two mice happened to crawl into the house, too. The woman saw the mice and shouted, "In come two,
catch them!" The two thieves were terribly frightened. The man in the house said, "You saw them come
in but where are they? I will catch them tonight." The two thieves started running away at once.
     The two thieves wanted to make it clear whether they had been found or not the night before. The
next day they acted as men selling sweet potatoes and came before the house. The man and the woman
were ploughing in their fields. The rein(韁繩)broke and the woman came home for a rope. She saw two
men selling sweet potatoes and wanted to buy some. She picked out two which looked like mice. At the
time the man couldn't wait for her any longer in the fields and he ran back from the fields to hurry her up.
The woman showed the sweet potatoes to the man and said, "How they look like the two of last night."
The man said, "I asked you to fetch a rope, why don't you hurry for it?" The two thieves ran away very
quickly without their sweet potatoes.

1. The two thieves failed to steal anything from the house because______.

A. they were found out
B. they were frightened by what they had heard in the house
C. they didn't work together well with each other
D. mice stopped them from doing so

2. From the last paragraph, we know that ______.

A. the two thieves were famous selling sweet potatoes
B. the woman recognized the two thieves
C. the woman pretended to know nothing about the two thieves and made fun of them
D. the two thieves didn't know that they were not found at all

3. The woman said, "How they look like the two of last night." Here "the two" refers to ______.

A. the two thieves      
B. nothing    
C. the mice    
D. the ropes

     Last month, students from one hundred and three universities in eighty-eight countries took part in an
international computer programming contest, which took place in Harbin, China. Three-person teams
from each school had five hours to solve eleven real world problems.
     The students first listed the problems in order of difficulty. Then they figured out the requirements of
each. They designed ways to test their solutions. And they wrote the needed software systems. Even the
winning team from Shanghai Jiaotong University in China was not able to solve all the problems within the
given limit. Stanford's team solved five problems and finished in fourteenth place. Stanford was one of
twenty-one American universities that took part in the contest this year.
     The official name of the Battle of the Brains is the ACM International Collegiate Contest. The first final competition was held in 1977 at the Association for Computer Machinery Computer Science Conference. Today, a network of universities holds area competitions that send the winners to the world finals, now
organized by IBM.
     Contest spokesman Dong Heintzman says the world champions receive prizes and scholarships. They
are also guaranteed an offer of employment or internship (實習) with IBM. He said, "We have had past
world champions that IBM has gone and employed in our Zurich research laboratory and are now
working on some of the leading edge materials in science and physics. We have a world finalist from
China who's been working on the Watson Supercomputer that in the near future will be playing Jeopardy (一種超級計算機名稱) against the best Jeopardy players in the world. So this competition is an
opportunity to be recognized and to be recruited (招聘) by some of the top technology and research
firms around the world."

1. From the first paragraph we can figure out there were____ programmers taking part in the contest.

A. 3                
B. 88                
C. 246              
D. a lot of

2. From the last paragraph we know that ____.

A. the winners will be offered a job in IBM
B. this contest provides a chance for the universities
C. this competition is held every four years
D. many big companies are short of programmers

3. What is the best title of this passage?

A. The Best Top Contest                      
B. The Battle of the Brains
C. The Difficult Competition                  
D. Courage and Wisdom Needed

     After graduation I returned home to my small town in Indiana. I didn't have a job yet. Mr. Hobbs, a
friend of my father's, owned a small shirt factory in town. Within the past five years it had grown from
twenty to eighty workers. Mr. Hobbs was worried that his plant was getting too big and inefficient, so he
asked me to come in on a short-term basis as a consultant.
    I went to the plant and spent about a week looking around and making notes. I was really a mazed at
what I saw.
    Most curious of all, there was no quality control at all. No one inspected the final product of the factory. As a result some of the shirts that were put in boxes for shipment were missing one or two buttons, the
collar, and even a sleeve sometimes!
    The working conditions were poor. The tables where the workers sat were very high and
uncomfortable. Except for a half hour at lunchtime, there were no breaks in the day to relieve the boring
work. There was no music. The walls of the workrooms were a dull gray color. I was amazed that the
workers hadn't gone on strike.
    Furthermore, the work flow was irregular. There was one especially absent-minded young man in the
assembly (組裝) line who sewed on buttons. After a while I recognized him as "Big Jim", who used to sit
behind me in math class in high school. He was very slow and all the shifts were held up at his position.
Workers beyond him in line on his shift had to wait with nothing to do; therefore, a great deal of time and
efficiency were lost as Big Jim daydreamed while he worked. All week I wondered why he wasn't fired.
    After I made observations for a week, Mr. Hobbs asked me for an oral report of my findings.

1. The shirts from Mr. Hobbs' factory can be described as ____.

A. of low quality    
B. of high quality  
C. fashionable  
D. unfashionable

2. Why did Mr. Hobbs ask the writer to the factory?

A. The factory was too big.
B. The factory was not producing fast enough.ks5u
C. The factory was not big enough.
D. The writer was a college graduate.

3. Which is not likely to happen in the factory?

A. The workers will have more rest in the day.    
B. Someone will examine the final product.
C. New machines will be bought.             
D. The factory will be repainted.

4. Big Jim may get fired mainly because ____.

A. he was slow                                  
B. he wasted much time
C. he was absent-minded                  
D. the work flow was irregular

     A jobless man applied for the position of "office boy" at Microsoft. The HR manager interviewed him
and then watched him cleaning the floor as a test.
   "You are employed," he said. "Give me your e-mail address and I'll send you the application to fill in,
as well as date when you may start."
   The man replied, "But I don't have a computer, neither an e-mail."
   "I'm sorry," said the HR manager. "If you don't have an e-mail, that means you do not exist. And
whoever doesn't exist cannot have the job."
    The man left with no hope at all. He didn't know what to do, with only ten dollars in his pocket. He
then decided to go to the supermarket and buy 10kg tomatoes. He then sold the tomatoes from door to
door. In less than two hours, he succeeded to double his capital. He repeated the operation three times,
and returned home happily with 60 dollars.
    The man realized that he can survive in this way, and started to go every day earlier, and return late.
Thus, his money doubled or tripled every day. Shortly, he bought a cart, then a truck, and then he had
his own fleet of delivery vehicles. Five years later, the man is one of the biggest food retailers in the US.
     He started to plan his family's future and decided to have a life insurance. He called an insurance
broker and chose a protection plan.
     When the conversation was concluded the broker asked him his e-mail. The man replied, "I don't
have an e-mail."
   The broker answered curiously, "You don't have an e-mail, and yet have succeeded to build an
empire.  Can you imagine what you could have been if you had an e-mail?" The man thought for a while
and replied, "Yes, I'd be an office boy at Microsoft!"

1.Why can't the man have the job at Microsoft?

A. Because he was lazy.            
B. Because he didn't pass the test.
C. Because he didn't have an e-mail.      
D. Because he didn't have a computer.

2.The underlined word "triple" can be replaced by ______.

A. become large      
B. become 3 times    
C. increase quickly    
D. decrease quickly

3. According to the passage, which of the following is TRUE?

A. The man is one of the biggest food retailers in the world.
B. The man didn't give up though he failed the interview.
C. He started his career by selling tomatoes in the supermarket.
D. Those who have e-mails can work at Microsoft.

4. The man can be described as _______.

A. helpful and considerate            
B. positive and generous
C. smart and hardworking             
D. stubborn and unselfish

5. Which proverb can best describe the story?

A. Misfortune may be an actual blessing.
B. Where there is a will, there is a way.
C. Accidents will happen.        
D. No pains , no gains.