2017届江苏苏州高三上期中调研英语试卷

—I just can't help it. I am appointed to interview people ________ to learn about the customers' feedback on our products.

—That's the case. It's hard to accept the fact that over 90% of my classmates ________.

—Really? I suppose it is such bad news ________ most of its former and present students will feel upset about.

    In January 2013,Sam Bloom was on a family holiday with husband,Cameron and their three young boys.After a morning1in the sea they discovered the hotel had a rooftop platform and all went up the2to enjoy their surroundings.Suddenly Cameron heard a tremendous crash.He3around and Sam was gone-as was the safety rail（栏杆）she had been4against.Sam fell into a deep depression after the fall from the roof left her paralyzed（瘫痪的）from the chest the chest down.Doctors said she could never walk again.

    Three months later, as they were heading home from Sam's parents,Noah,her middle son,5a baby bird that had fallen to the ground.So they6it up and took it home.They called her Penguin because she looked like a penguin.She was just very7at two or three weeks old,She would have to be fed every two hours,but they decided rescuing this little bird would be a8thing to do together.

    Penguin brought joy back to the family.Sam loved having Penguin a round because she was like9.Penguin would rest on Sam's lap or on her shoulder,Sam could finally10herself without feeling guilty-she would talk to Penguin; she would11to her behind Cameron and tell her how she was feeling,Some morning Penguin would just run down the hall and jump up into bed,12her way into the quilt and then roll over and sleep. Penguin had some13 —she was not toilet-trained, and the house got quite messy.As she grew older. Penguin did sleep outside,but at six o'clock in the morning she'd be at the door,with a special14that meant,“Let me in”!

    As her15 grew. Penguin stayed away for longer periods.When she was a year old,she disappeared for six weeks.But on the little son's 13th birthday.Penguin made a16visit.a year ago,she left again and hasn't been seen17.The bird has found her freedom and Sam has a freedom of her own. Sam made a new18 —she took up boating and even made the Australia Para-boating Team.she it out of the19and in the water and back in nature.

    Over the two years. Cameron took about 14,000pictures of Penguin.which have been collected in a book called Penguin Bloom,Penguin rescued the family as much as they rescued her.Sam got20it,thanks to her family, exercise and yes,the friendship pf a bird.Angels come in all shapes and sizes!

阅读理解

ESL TEACHER NEEDED IN SHANGHAI

Date updated：Oct 6，2016

Employer：Longman schools, Shanghai

Qualifications

·A genuine interest in children, teaching, and professional development

·Open-minded, an adventurous spirit, and professional flexibility

·4-year bachelor's degree from an accredited university

·Native English speaker

·Passport issued by the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand

·Two years post bachelor degree teaching experience preferred

·Internationally recognized TEFL, CELTA, or TESOL certification

·Experience traveling internationally and / or working abroad preferred

Responsibilities

·Planning and delivering lessons to learners (ages 3.15)

·Using electronic media and courseware to teach English efficiently and effectively

·Evaluating student progress and providing ongoing guidance for improvement

·Participating in social activities with students organized by your school

·Maintaining regular office hours

Employment package

·Salaries：13,000rmb-16,000rmb per month (depending on experience)

·6,000 rmb sign on bonus (after probation — a time of training and testing when you start a new job)

·10，000rmb Accommodation Assistance Loan (overseas applicants only)

·2,000rmb relocation allowance (overseas applicants only)

·16 teaching hours and 10 office hours per week

·2 Day off per week

·Paid overtime for teaching

·Paid holiday & paid Chinese public holiday

·15-month Z working visa (foreign expert certificate)

·5000rmb flight allowance (paid upon contract completion)

·Comprehensive health Insurance & accident Insurance

·Accommodation assistant

·On-going professional teacher development and training program

·15 month contract (including 3 month's probation)

    The plants grown by Wageningen University researchers in Mars-like soil back in March have been analyzed and the results are excellent: at least four of the crops do not contain harmful heavy metal levels and are perfectly safe to eat, the University researchers report.

    If you've seen The Martian, you can remember how much Matt Damon got done living off of his poo-powered crop of potatoes. It just goes to show how important it is for a long-term colony to be able to grow their own food locally. We've taken one step closer to that goal in March, when Netherlands' Wageningen University reported that they've managed to grow ten different crops in Mars-like soil.

    However, growing food doesn't do us much good if eating it kills us, and researchers were worried that these crops contained dangerous heavy metals like lead or cadmium(镉) from the martian soil. But future colonists are delighted, as lab analysis of the crops determined that at least four of them are safe to eat.

    Led by ecologist Wieger Wamelink, the team tested radishes, tomatoes, rye, and peas. They looked at cadmium, lead, aluminium(铝), nickel(镍), copper, chrome(铬), iron, arsenic(砷), manganese(锰), and zinc(锌) contents in the plants, and didn't find any in dangerous levels. In fact, some of these vegetables have lower levels of heavy metals than those grown in regular potting soil. The plants were also tested for vitamins, alkaloids(生物碱), and flavonoids(类黄酮), with good results. While there are six more crops to test, Wamelink himself said that the results up to now are “very promising.”

    “Growing food locally is especially important to our mission of permanent settlement, as we have to ensure sustainable food production on Mars. The results of Dr. Wamelink and his team at Wageningen University & Research are significant progress towards that goal,” said Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp in a press release.

    A crowdfunding campaign is underway (and will be until the end of August) to fund the test of the remaining crops, potatoes included. If all the crops test out safe, with concentrations of heavy metal the FDA and the Dutch Food Agency consider as safe, Wamelink's team will host a “Martian dinner” at the Wageningen greenhouse. But I've seen the movie. Stay clear of the potatoes.

    A biologist from the National Park Service discovered a rare and unusual mammoth(猛犸) skull(颅骨) buried in a 13,000-year-old rock layer on the Santa Rosa Island, the second largest landmass in the Channel Islands, California. The fossil of the extinct giant animal is leaving many paleontologists(古生物学家) scratching their heads. Despite the fact that it's possibly the best preserved mammoth skull ever found and of high scientific importance, the species of the individual it belonged to can't seem to be identified yet—it's too big to be a pygmy(特别矮小的) mammoth and too small to have come from a Columbian mammoth. Some say it's a new species while others believe the truth lies somewhere in between.

    The first mammoths showed up in North America around two million years ago, but it was only during the last two ice ages that the Columbian species, which could grow to be up to 14 feet tall, made its way to the Channel Islands 100 miles west of Los Angeles. Once the ice melted, many populations became trapped on the island and evolved into pygmy mammoths, an endemic species(地方种) to the Channel Islands which grew only to six feet tall.

    Judging from its size, the newly found mammoth skull doesn't seem to fit any of the two species, Columbian or pygmy. To make things even more confusing, one of its two tusks(象牙) is nearly five feet long and coiled in a manner that resembles those of fully grown mammoths but the left tusk is shorter and sloped, more like a juvenile(青少年).

    This has caused some scientists to say the Santa Rose skull may belong to a transitional species. Whatever's the case, a following examination of the mammoth's teeth should put the matter to rest. The analysis will also tell us how old the mammoth was when it died, so we can tell for sure whether it was an adult or juvenile.

    More interesting than the mammoth's lineage, however, might be its story. The giant mammal lived 13,000 years ago or roughly the same timeline of the “Arlington Man”, a 13,000-year-old human skeleton also found on Santa Rosa. Some 3,000 years later humans were already spread throughout the continent and the Channel Islands' mammoth went extinct. The present finding might help reveal a link between the two.

    The remains also seem to confirm a long-held assumption that there were two mammoth migrations to the Channel Islands. “The discovery of this mammoth skull increases the probability that there were at least two migrations of Columbian mammoths to the island: during the most recent ice age 10,000 to 30,000 years ago, as well as the previous ice age that occurred about 150,000 years ago,” said USGS geologist Dan Muhs.

    I look back sometimes at the person I was before I rediscovered my old professor. I want to talk to that person. I want to tell him what to look out for, what mistakes to avoid. I want to tell him to be more open, to ignore the temptation of advertised values, to pay attention when your loved ones are speaking, as if it were the last time you might hear them.

    Mostly I want to tell that person to get on an airplane and visit a gentle old man in West Newton, Massachusetts, sooner rather than later, before that old man gets sick and loses his ability to dance.

    I know I cannot do this. None of us can undo what we've done, or relive a life already recorded. But if Professor Morrie Schwartz taught me anything at all, it was this: there is no such thing as “too late” in life. He was changing until the day he said good-bye.

    Not long after Morrie's death, I reached my brother in Spain. We had a long talk. I told him I respected his distance, and that all I wanted was to be in touch—in the present, not just the past—to hold him in my life as much as he could let me.

    “You're my only brother,” I said. “I don't want to lose you. I love you.”

    I had never said such a thing to him before. A few days later, I received a message on my fax machine. It was typed in the sprawling, poorly punctuated, all-cap-letters fashion that always characterized my brother's words.

    “HI I'VE JOINED THE NINETIES!” it began. He wrote a few little stories, what he'd been doing that week, a couple of jokes. At the end, he signed off this way:

I HAVE HEARTBURN AND DIAHREA(腹泻) AT THE MOMENT—LIFE'S A BITCH. CHAT LATER?

[signed] SORE TUSH.

I laughed until there were tears in my eyes.

    This book was largely Morrie's idea. He called it our “final thesis.” Like the best of work projects, it brought us closer together, and Morrie was delighted when several publishers expressed interest, even though he died before meeting any of them. The advance money helped pay Morrie's enormous medical bills, and for that we were both grateful.

    The title, by the way, we came up with one day in Morrie's office. He liked naming things. He had several ideas. But when I said, “How about Tuesdays with Morrie?” he smiled in an almost blushing way, and I knew that was it.

    After Morrie died, I went through boxes of old college material. And I discovered a final paper I had written for one of his classes. It was twenty years old now. On the front page were my penciled comments scribbled to Morrie, and beneath them were his comments scribbled back.

    Mine began, “Dear Coach . . .”

    His began, “Dear Player . . .”

    For some reason, each time I read that, I miss him more.

    Have you ever really had a teacher? One who saw you as a raw but precious thing, a jewel that, with wisdom, could be polished to a proud shine? If you are lucky enough to find your way to such teachers, you will always find your way back. Sometimes it is only in your head. Sometimes it is right alongside their beds.

    The last class of my old professor's life took place once a week, in his home, by a window in his study where he could watch a small hibiscus(木槿) plant shed its pink flowers. The class met on Tuesdays. No books were required. The subject was the meaning of life. It was taught from experience.

    The teaching goes on.

Do you think you could learn a language in an hour?

    We know, we know! We would expect you to be skeptical. It's ridiculous to think you can learn a language in 60 minutes. You wouldn't even get through the As in a bilingual dictionary in that amount of time! Best-case situation: in an hour, most of us could probably stuff a few words and ready-made phrases into our short-term memory (with a high likelihood of forgetting it all by the following day). Accomplishing anything more than that in one hour? Impossible. Unless…

    We posed the one-hour language challenge to four polyglots(通晓数种语言的人) who are experts on how to study languages. To keep the challenge from becoming completely impossible, we gave them a bit of a break: to learn Romanian in one hour. Why Romanian? Because it's a Romance language and shares many similarities with the languages that the polyglots already know: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese. And to make sure their hour of learning was as effective as possible, all of them were assigned a personal Romanian tutor to help coach them on their way to success.

    Although each polyglot has a different technique for picking up and remembering a new language, all four methods offer valuable insights to anyone, from casual learners to hard-core language enthusiasts.

Alex Rawlings — UK

    "I'm a bit nervous. This is probably the craziest language-learning thing I've ever done, but learning languages has always been about fun. I expect that, after this, I'll be prepared to have a simple chat over a coffee in Romanian. Is that reasonable?"

    Method: Learn the verbs first

    With only an hour until he had to start demonstrating his grasp of Romanian, Alex knew he had to start talking quickly. He chose to focus first on commonly used verbs and how to conjugate（动词变形） them. Once he had some verbs down, he could start collecting nouns from his tutor and plugging them in to make more interesting and relevant sentences.

Luca Lampariello — Italy

    "Every time I have a conversation with native speakers, it really motivates me. Human contact is really important when learning a language."

Method: Start speaking right away

    Speaking doesn't mean speaking perfectly. Speaking even a little bit is a huge confidence boost. When you can say something in a new language and people actually understand you, it's very motivating. Yes, you'll make mistakes, but you'll also learn faster than if you try to get it all perfect in your head first.

Michael Youlden — UK

    "We all speak a variety of Romance languages which I think will help us get into Romanian quickly."

Method: Write everything down

    Language learning is about recall; there's no use learning something if you don't remember it. Speaking new words aloud is very important, but so is writing them down — after all, words exist as sounds and in written form. Taking notes is a proven way to put new vocabulary and grammar into your memory. Writing supports memorizing which supports speaking... it's a cycle. Plus, you have an easy reference when you want to review what you've learned.

Matthew Youlden — UK

    "I'm going to look for the patterns and similarities with languages I already know. We won't be able to speak fluently after an hour of study, but we should be able to get by with some basic vocabulary and phrases."

Method: Look for cognates

    Cognates are words in different languages that look and sound similar and have the same meaning, due to a common origin. Almost every language combination contains cognates (even if two languages aren't seemingly related), but languages from the same language family have many more. Whichever language you are learning, identify the familiar words and then use them to anchor the new words that aren't so familiar. To use English as an example, because it's a sort of Germanic-Romance hybrid, English already has many words that cognate with German, Dutch and Swedish on one hand, and on the other hand it also has lots of words that cognate with French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and, of course, Romanian!

    Learn a language with courses designed by the experts. Start here, today!

    Pick a language to learn. German, Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, and Swedish.

    The 18-year-old girl from Linyi, Shandong province scored 568 points on her college entrance exam this year and was admitted to Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications.

    On Aug 19, Xu received a phone call from an unknown person telling her that she was due to receive student funding. Following the call, Xu transferred a 9,900-yuan "activation fee" into the man's bank account, hoping the money would appear in her student account, but it never did.

    After discovering they had been cheated, the family immediately reported the incident to the police, but Xu was said to be frustrated. On their way home, she suddenly fainted and despite doctors' best efforts to rescue her, she passed away.

    The death of Xu yuyu immediately caused an outcry over the society, and once again, it fired a public anger towards those who commit heartless fraud(欺诈).

    So how was Xu's private information leaked out?

    Reporters have discovered that there are many people who openly sell the examinee's information online. The information includes the examinee's name, school, phone number, and address. The personal information of examinee has become the target of the online fraud industry.

【写作内容】

1). 用约30个单词写出上文概要；

2). 用约120个词就“Personal information leakage”谈谈你的看法和感受，内容包括：（1）简述个人信息泄露的危害及保护个人信息的重要性；（2）就如何保护个人信息提几点建议（至少两点）。

【写作要求】

1). 阐述观点或提供论据时，不能直接引用原文语句；

2). 作文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称等。

【评分标准】

内容完整，语言规范，语篇连贯，词数适当。