湖南省娄底市蓝圃学校高三第一次月考英语卷

I wanted to catch   early train, but couldn’t get     ride to the station.

     _______ on the top of the hill is a monument, dating back to hundreds of years ago.

_________ difficult the task may be, we must finish it on time, because we can’t meet such a precious opportunity _______ we have expected．

The number 9.11 is a special number,       , I think, that will be remembered by the Americans forever.

___ that the government can lead them out of the financial crisis, people are optimistic about the future of the country.

---Can I pay the bill by check?
---Sorry, sir. But it is the management rules of our hotel that payment   be made in cash.

—Your mother isn’t a doctor, is she?
----___________. She teaches English in a middle school.

        is known to  us all is that America is a developed country         _________the First World.

Alice is one of the students who I am sure always          best in most difficult situations.

“How could you lose so much money?” Charlie asked his wife, eyeing her angrily from    ________the kitchen table.

―Where did you get to know her?
―It was on the farm      we both once worked in the 1970s.

Can you imagine what difficulty people had this year _______________against thesevere naturaldisasters?

Attention, coffee lovers! We have for you, the best coffee machine _____ invented.

－What are you busy with ? 
－The conference _______ in our city next week.

I’d like to have visited the Palace Museum, but something unexpected _______ to my father.

For each blank in the following passage there are four words or phrases marked A. B. C. and D. Fill in each blank with the word or phrase that best fits the context.
Since my family were not going to be helpful, I decided I would look for one all by myself and not tell them about it till I’d got one.
I had seen an agency （中介机构） advertised in a local newspaper. I rushed out of the __36_ in search of it. I was wildly excited, and as  _37_ as if I were going on the stage. Finding the  38  quite easily, I ran breathlessly through a door which said “Enter without knocking, if you please.”
The simple atmosphere of the office  39  me. The woman looked carefully at me for a while through her glasses, and then questioned me in a low voice. I answered softly. All of a sudden I started to feel rather  40    She wondered why I was looking for this sort of job I felt even more helpless when she told me that it would be  41  to get a job without experience I wondered whether I ought to leave, when the telephone on her desk rang. I heard her say:
“  42 , I’ve got someone in the office at this very moment who might  43  .” She
wrote down a __44  , and held it out to me, saying: “Ring up this lady. She wants a cook    immediately. In fact, you would have to start tomorrow by cooking a dinner for ten people.”
“Oh yes,” said I —  45  having cooked for more than four in my life. I  46  her again and again, and rushed out to the nearest telephone box. I collected my thoughts, took a deep breath, and rang the number. I said confidently that I was just what she was looking for.
I spent the next few hours  47  cook books.
A. bed         B house          C. agency              D. office

A．proud B．please C．nervous D．worried

A．family B．door C．place D．stage

A．calmed B．excited C．frightened D．disturbed

A．encouraged B．dissatisfied C．hopeless D．pleased

A．difficult B．helpless C．possible D．unusual

A．Above all B．As a matter of fact C． As a result D．In spite of that

A．hire B．accept C．suit D．offer

A．letter B．name C．note D．number

A．almost B．never C．nearly D．really

A．answered B．promised C．thanked D．told

A．borrowing B．buying C．reading D．writing

Complete the following passage by filling in each blank with one word that fits the context.
Last month we finally got a chance to have a trip to E’mei Mountain, __48___ we had longed to do for ages. It was there ___49___ I was amazed by the most beautiful scenery I had ever seen!
The weather didn’t seem to welcome us when we got to West China’s Chengdu city --- it was quite wet and cold. On the coach heading to the mountain, I couldn’t help feeling disappointed. “What a bad day!” I said to myself when looking out of the window, “We may not be able to see a lot in the mountain. And ___50___ a pity it will be if we miss the sunrise next morning!”
The guide denied the possibility of a sunny day. “Actually, seldom ___51___ we have bright sunshine here, especially in winter.” he said.
Very early the next morning, amazingly, we got completely satisfied in a totally unexpected way. On the way up the mountain, we found everything was becoming white --- it was snowing! We screamed. Arriving at the top of the mountain, we found ___52___ in a white world that only existed in fairy tales. ___53___ could help describe what we saw. We were jumping, screaming, taking photos, trying to fill our eyes __54_____ everything we could see, because we knew that this was the ___55____ time to see such beauty of the nature, and probably, the only time in our lives.

I am a writer. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language—the way it can evoke（唤起） an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.
Born into a Chinese family that had recently arrived in California, I’ve been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as “broken” English. But feel embarrassed to say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than “broken”, as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness. I’ve heard other terms used, “limited English,” for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions（认识）of the limited English speaker.
I know this for a fact, because when I was growing up, my mother’s “limited” English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is ,because she expressed them imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her seriously, did not give her good service, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.
I started writing fiction in 1985. And for reasons I won’t get into today, I began to write stories using all the Englishes I grew up with: the English she used with me, which for lack of a better term might be described as “broken”, and what I imagine to be her translation of her Chinese, her internal（内在的） language, and for that I sought to preserve the essence, but neither an English nor a Chinese structure: I wanted to catch what language ability tests can never show; her intention, her feelings, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts.
By saying “Language is the tool of my trade”, the author means that ______.

The author used to think of her mother’s English as ______.

Which of the following is TRUE according to Paragraph 3?

The author gradually realizes her mother’s English is _____.

What is the passage mainly about?

Ask someone what they have done to help the environment recently and they will almost certainly mention recycling. Recycling in the home is very important of course. However, being forced to recycle often means we already have more material than we need. We are dealing with the results of that over-consumption in the greenest way possible, but it would be far better if we did not need to bring so much material home in the first place.
The total amount of packaging increased by 12% between 1999 and 2005. It now makes up a third of a typical household’s waste in the UK. In many supermarkets nowadays food items are packaged twice with plastic and cardboard.
Too much packaging is doing serious damage to the environment. The UK, for example, is running out of it for carrying this unnecessary waste. If such packaging is burnt, it gives off greenhouse gases which go on to cause the greenhouse effect. Recycling helps, but the process itself uses energy. The solution is not to produce such items in the first place. Food waste is a serious problem, too. Too many supermarkets encourage customers to buy more than they need. However, a few of them are coming round to the idea that this cannot continue, encouraging customers to reuse their plastic bags, for example.
But this is not just about supermarkets. It is about all of us. We have learned to associate packaging with quality. We have learned to think that something unpackaged is of poor quality. This is especially true of food. But is also applies to a wide range of consumer products, which often have far more packaging than necessary.
There are signs of hope. As more of us recycle, we are beginning to realize just how much unnecessary materials are collecting. We need to face the wastefulness of our consumer culture, but we have a mountain to climb.
What does the underlined phrase “over-consumption” refer to?

The author uses figures in Paragraph 2 to show _______.

According to the text, recycling ______.

What can be inferred from Paragraph 4?

What can we learn from the last paragraph?

Batteries can power anything from small sensors to large systems. While scientists are finding ways to make them smaller but even more powerful, problems can arise when these batteries are much larger and heavier than the devices themselves. University of Missouri(MU) researchers are developing a nuclear energy source that is smaller, lighter and more efficient.
“To provide enough power, we need certain methods with high energy density(密度)”，said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. “The radioisotope(放射性同位素) battery can provide power density that is much higher than chemical batteries.”
Kwon and his research team have been working on building a small nuclear battery, presently the size and thickness of a penny, intended to power various micro / nanoelectromechanical systems (M/NEMS). Although nuclear batteries can cause concerns, Kwon said they are safe.
“People hear the word ‘nuclear’ and think of something very dangerous,” he said, “However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pace-makers, space satellites and underwater systems.”
His new idea is not only in the battery’s size, but also in its semiconductor(半导体). Kwon’s battery uses a liquid semiconductor rather than a solid semiconductor.
“The key part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure(晶体结构) of the solid semiconductor,” Kwon said, “By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem.”
Together with J. David Robertson, chemistry professor and associate director of the MU Research Reactor, Kwon is working to build and test the battery. In the future, they hope to increase the battery’s power, shrink its size and try with various other materials. Kwon said that battery could be thinner than the thickness of human hair.
Which of the following is true of Jae Kwon?

Jae Kwon gave examples in Paragraph 4_________.

Liquid semiconductor is used to _________.

According to Jae Kwon, his nuclear battery _______.

The text is most probably a ________.

PART FOUR  WRITING (45%)

Read the following passage. Complete the diagram by using the information from the passage.
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.
Most scientists are now certain that global warming is taking place. Gases such as carbon dioxide produced by burning of coal, oil, wood, together with industrial pollution, are creating a warm blanket around the earth. This blanket is trapping heat in the atmosphere and so raising the temperature of the earth.
The evidence for global warming can now be seen in the world’s changing climate statistics. In Europe, eight of the last ten years have seen record high temperature. For northern Europe, this has generally been a change for the better. Gardens can now even grow tropical plants in England, though London may never see a “White Christmas” again. On the other hand, the countries around the Mediterranean Sea, and those south of the Sahara desert are receiving even less rain than before. In sub-Saharan Africa the crops are drying out in the fields and people are dying of starvation. In the Americans, the climate is becoming more extreme—the summers are getting hotter and the storms are becoming more violent. In 1999 the southern United States was struck by a series of destructive hurricanes, while the end of 1999 saw the worst floods ever in Venezuela. Meteorologists expect such trends to continue, and indeed to worsen, if global warming cannot be stopped.
In addition to worrying about rising global temperatures and more extreme weather conditions, scientists are closely monitoring sea levels around the world. These are slowly rising, as the northern and southern polar ice-caps start to melt. This will have serious consequences for low-lying countries near the sea, such as the coral islands in the Pacific, and Bangladesh where the River Ganges already floods the delta（三角洲） every year. Already parts of these places are disappearing under the rising tides.
Title: 71._______________.

Read the following passage. Answer the questions according to the information given in the passage and the required words limit. Write your answers on your answer sheet.
Almost everybody in America will spend a part of his or her life behind a shopping cart（购物手推车）. They will, in a lifetime, push the chrome-plated contraptions many miles. But few will know—or even think to ask—who it was that invented them.
Sylvan N. Goldman invented the shopping cart in 1937. At that time he was in the supermarket business. Every day he would see shoppers lugging（吃力地携带） groceries around in baskets they had to carry.
One day Goldman suddenly had the idea of putting baskets on wheels. The wheeled baskets would make shopping much easier for his customers, and would help to attract more business.
On June 4, 1937, Goldman’s first carts were ready for use in his market. He was terribly excited on the morning of that day as customers began arriving. He couldn’t wait to see them using his invention.
But Goldman was disappointed. Most shoppers gave the carts a long look, but hardly anybody would give them a try.
After a while, Goldman decided to ask customers why they weren’t using his carts. “Don’t you think this arm is strong enough to carry a shopping basket?” one shopper replied.
But Goldman wasn’t beaten yet. He knew his carts would be a great success if only he could persuade people to give them a try. To this end, Goldman hired a group of people to push carts around his market and pretend they were shopping! Seeing this, the real customers gradually began copying the phony（假冒的） customers.
As Goldman had hoped, the carts were soon attracting larger and larger numbers of customers to his market. But not only did more people come—those who came bought more. With larger, easier-to-handle baskets, customers unconsciously bought a greater number of items than before.
Today’s shopping carts are five times larger than Goldman’s original model. Perhaps that’s one reason Americans today spend more than five times as much money on food each year as they did before 1937—before the coming of the shopping cart.
81. What do the underlined words “chrome-plate contraptions” in Paragraph 1 refer to?（No more than 3 words）
82. What was the purpose of Goldman’s invention? （No more than 8 words）
83. Why was Goldman disappointed at first? （No more than 8 words）
84. Why did Goldman hire people to push carts around his market? （No more than 10 words）

Write an English letter according to the instructions given below in Chinese.
假定你所在的城市面临严重的交通问题。请从现象、原因及措施方面着手，以Traffic In Our City Needs Improvement 为题，写一篇不少120词的文章。
Traffic In Our City Needs Improvement