Part II Reading Comprehension (30%)
　　Directions: There are 4 reading passages in this part. Each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A), B), C) and D). You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on the Answer Sheet with a single line through the center.
　　Passage I
　　Questions 1 to 4 are based on the following passages:
　　 These days there are so many stories about the criminal activities of athletes that sports pages are beginning to look like police reports. What’s going on? American sports fans ask over their morning toast and coffee, What’s happening to our heroes?
　　It’s not difficult to understand our desire for athletes to be heroes. On the surface, at least, athletes display a vital and indomitable spirit; they are gloriously alive inside their bodies. And sports do allow us to witness acts that can legitimately be described as courageous, thrilling, beautiful, even noble. In an increasingly complicated and disorderly world, sports are still an arena in which we can regularly witness a certain kind of greatness.
　　Yet there’s something of a paradox here, for the very qualities a society tends to seek in its heroes – selflessness, social consciousness, and the like – are precisely the opposite of those needed to transform a talented but otherwise unremarkable neighborhood kid into a Michael Jordan. To become a star athlete, you have to have an extremely competitive outlook and you have to be totally focused on the development of our own physical skills. These qualities may well make a great athlete, but they don’t necessarily make a great person. On top of this, our society reinforces these traits by the system it has created to produce athletes – a system characterized by limited responsibility and enormous privilege.
　　The athletes themselves suffer the costs of this system. Trained to measure themselves perpetually against the achievements of those around them, many young athletes develop a sense of what sociologist Walter Schafer has termed “conditional self-worth”. They learn very quickly that they will be accepted by the important figures in their lives – parents, coaches and peers as long as they are perceived as “winners”. Unfortunately they become conceited and behave as if their athletic success will last forever.
　　1. In paragraph 1, we know that when Americans read the sports pages they ______.
　　A) are able to get information about sports games
　　B) know more about athletes’ private lives
　　C) are like reading police reports.
　　D) are surprised to find that their heroes are committing various crimes.
　　2. The author suggests that people want athletes to be heroes because ______.
　　A) athletes don’t display a vital and indomitable spirit
　　B) athletes stand for success
　　C) in sports we can see a certain kind of greatness
　　D) all athletes are courageous and noble
　　3. The author argues that __________.
　　A) the qualities a society seeks in its heroes are precisely the ones needed to transform a talented child into a great athlete
　　B) the qualities that make a successful athlete don’t necessarily make a great person
　　C) our society has created an effective system to transform athletes into heroes
　　D) our society is responsible for reinforcing the qualities of great athletes
　　4. By saying that young athletes develop a sense of “conditional self-worth” (paragraph 4), the author means that _______.
　　A) they are valued by others as long as they win
　　B) young athletes are easily accepted by their parents, coaches and peers
　　C) young athletes are always perceived as winners
　　D) young athletes lack the sense of self-worth
　　Passage II
　　Questions 5 to 8 are based on the following passage:
　　 On average, American kids ages 3 to 12 spent 29 hours a week in school, eight hours more than they did in 1981. They also did more household work and participated in more of such organized activities as soccer and ballet. Involvement in sports, in particular, rose almost 50% from 1981 to 1997: boy now spend an average of four hours a week playing sports; girls log half that time. All in all, however, children’s leisure time dropped from 40% of the day in 1981 to 25%.
　　“Children are affected by the same time crunch(危机)that affects their parents,” says Sandra Hofferth, who headed the recent study of children’s timetable. A chief reason, she says, is that more mothers are working outside the home. (Nevertheless, children in both double-income and “make breadwinner” households spent comparable amounts of time interacting with their parents, 19 hours and 22 hours respectively. In contrast, children spent only 9 hours with their single mother.)
　　All work and no play could make for some very messed-up kids. “Play is the most powerful way a child explores the world and learns about himself,” says T. Berry Brazelton, professor at Harvard Medical School. Unstructured play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to negotiate their relationships with their peers, but kids ages 3 to 12 spend only 12 hours a week engaged in it.
　　The children sampled spent a quarter of their rapidly decreasing “free time” watching television. But that, believe it or not, was one of the findings parents might regard as good news. If they’re spending less time in front of the TV set, however, kids aren’t replacing it with reading. Despite efforts to get kids more interested in books, the children spent just over an hour a week reading. Let’s face it, who’s got the time?
　　5. According to the author, the reason given by Sandra Hofferth for the time crunch is _______..
　　A) quite convincing C) partially true
　　B) rather confusing D) totally groudless
　　6. According to the author a child develops better if _______.
　　A) he has plenty of time reading and studying
　　B) he is left to play with his peers in his own way
　　C) he has more time participating in school activities
　　D) he is free to interact with his working parents
　　7. The author is concerned about the fact that American kids ______.
　　A) are engaged in more and more structured activities
　　B) are increasingly neglected by their working mothers
　　C) are spending more and more time watching TV
　　D) are involved less and less in household work
　　8. We can infer from the passage that ______.
　　A) extracurricular activities promote children’s intelligence
　　B) most children will turn to reading with TV sets switched off
　　C) efforts to get kids interested in reading have been fruitful
　　D) most parents believe reading to be beneficial to children
　　Passage III
　　Questions 9 to 12 are based on the following passage:
　　There is a popular belief among parents that schools are no longer interested in spelling. No school I have taught in has ever ignored spelling or considered it unimportant as a basic skill. There are, however, vastly different ideas about how to teach it, or how much priority it must be given over general language development and writing ability. The problem is, how to encourage a child to express himself freely and confidently in writing without holding him back with the complexities of spelling?
　　If spelling becomes the only focal point of his teacher’s interest, clearly a bright child will be likely to “play safe”. He will tend to write only words within his spelling range, choosing to avoid adventurous language. That’s why teachers often encourage the early use of dictionaries and pay attention to content rather than technical ability.
　　I was once shocked to read on the bottom of a sensitive piece of writing about a personal experience: “This work is terrible! There are far too many spelling errors and your writing is illegible.” It may have been a sharp criticism of the pupil’s technical abilities in writing, but it was also a sad reflection on the teacher who had omitted to read the essay, which contained some beautiful expressions of the child’s deep feelings. The teacher was not wrong to draw attention to the error, but if his priorities had centered on the child’s ideas, an expression his disappointment with the presentation would have given the pupil more motivation to seek improvement.
　　9. Teachers differ in their opinions about _____.
　　A) the difficulties in teaching spelling
　　B) the role of spelling in general language development
　　C) the complexities of the basic writing skills
　　D) the necessity of teaching spelling
　　10. The expression “play safe” probably means _____.
　　A) to write carefully
　　B) to do as teachers say
　　C) to use dictionaries frequently
　　D)to avoid using words one is not sure of
　　11. Teachers encourage the use of dictionaries so that _____.
　　A) students will be able to express their ideas more freely
　　B) teachers will have less trouble in correcting mistakes
　　C) students will have more confidence in writing
　　D) students will learn to be independent of teachers
　　12. The major point discussed in the passage is ______.
　　A) the importance of developing writing skills
　　B) the complexities of spelling
　　C) the correct way making compositions
　　D) the relationship between spelling and the content of a composition
　　 Passage IV
　　 Questions 13 to 15 are based on the following passage:
　　 Humanity’s primal efforts to systematize the concepts of size, shape, and number are usually regarded as the earliest mathematics. However, the concept of number and the counting process developed so long before the time of recorded history ( there is archaeological evidence that counting was employed by humans as far back as 50,000 years ago) that the manner of this development is largely conjectural. Imagining how it probably came about is not difficult. The argument that humans, even in prehistoric times, had some number sense, at least to the extent of recognizing the concepts of more and less when some objects were added to or taken away from a small group, seems fair, for studies have shown that some animals possess such a sense.
　　With the gradual evolution of society, simply counting became imperative. A tribe had to know how many members it had and how many enemies, and a shepherd needed to know if the flock of sheep was decreasing in size. Probably the earliest way of keeping a count was by some simple tally method, employing the principle of one-to-one correspondence. In keeping a count of sheep, for example, one finger per sheep could be turned under, counts could also be maintained by making scratches in the dirt or on a stone, by cutting notches in a piece of wood, or by tying knots in a string.
　　Then, perhaps later, an assortment of vocal sounds was developed as a word tally against the number of objects in a small group. And still late, with the refinement of writing, a set of sighs was devised to stand for these numbers. Such an imagined development is supported by reports of anthropologists in their studies of present-day societies that are thought to be similar to those of early humans.
　　 13. What does the passage mainly discuss?＿＿＿
　　A) The efforts of early humans to care for herds of animals.
　　B) The development of writing.
　　C) The beginnings of mathematics.
　　D) Similarities in number sense between humans and animals.
　　14. The word “ conjectural” in line 4 is closest in meaning to ＿＿＿.
　　A. complex B. based on guessing
　　C. unbelievable D. supported by careful research
　　15. What is the basic principle of the tally method described in the second paragraph?
　　A) The count is recorded permanently.
　　B) Calculations provide the total count.
　　C) Large quantities are represented by symbols.
　　D) Each marker represents a single object.