第一节 （共15小题；每小题2分，满分30分）
阅读下列短文，从每题所给的A、B、C和D四个选项中，选出最佳选项。
A
London Tour and Attraction Pass Tickets
Tickets to Attractions
With this London Attraction Pass, you can benefit from our sightseeing bus tour plus three top London attractions—Madame Tussauds, London Eye and Sea Life London. The best part is that you don’t need to visit all three attractions in one day. Once you have bought your London attractions ticket package, you have 30 days to visit each attraction so you can spread visits out across your trip.
Gallery
So many amazing galleries in London! There are plenty of photo opportunities with the London Tour and Attraction Pass. With so many things to do, you’ll have lots of pictures to share with families and friends.
Plan Your Visit
With our London 72 hour Bus Ticket, you will be able to get to one attraction per day with ease. Your tickets are valid for entry within 30 days after you have bought them and you can use them before, after or on the same day as your bus tour.
Location
Madame Tussauds: Marylebone, next to Baker Street
London Eye: Southbank
Sea Life London: Southbank
Opening Times
Madame Tussauds: Times vary between 9 am—6 pm
London Eye: Times vary between 10 am—9:30 pm
Sea Life London: Opening times vary between 9:30 am—7 pm
Accessibility
Madame Tussauds: Wheelchair friendly but book your seat in advance.
London Eye: Only two wheelchairs per capsule and a maximum of 8 at any one time. You must book a disabled seat in advance.
Sea Life London. Full wheelchairs are accessible.
21. How long can London attractions ticket package be used?
A. 30 days. B. 72 hours. C. 1 week. D. 24 hours.
22. What can you share with your family after visiting galleries?
A. Artworks. B. Books. C. Paintings. D. Photos.
23. What should the disabled do when visiting London Eye?
A. Visit London Eye after 10 pm. B. Book a disabled seat in advance.
C. Buy a London 72 hour Bus Ticket. D. Reach Marylebone as early as possible.
B
When I was 4, our family took the train across the country to visit our grandparents. Because I was so little, I don’t remember much. But I do have a few memories of our stay there.
Grandfather had some tomatoes growing on the north side of his house, just outside the back door to the kitchen. I found a nice green tomato. I picked it and brought it with both hands and came into the kitchen and gave it to Grandpa. “Look, Grandpa, what I found!” He thanked me with a smile, and showed me he was putting it on the window sill （窗台）. I was so happy, and I headed back outside, telling Grandfather I’d bring him some more. But my mom caught me and said, “No, no, no, green tomatoes are bad for health!” Grandmother sat in her wheelchair in the living room by the front door. We played games with her.
Soon, our visit ended and we had to go home. We left Grandmother to go back to the train station. It was several hours’ drive away. We all squeezed into Grandfather’s car.
A few years later, our family was living in Colorado. Grandfather came to visit us! He came by plane to Denver, and after a long drive, my father picked him up. During the weeks Grandfather stayed with us like most children, I’d go out and play in the back yard with him every day. I’m sure it was a precious time for Grandfather and my parents, too. I remember that when he was leaving in the airplane, we could see him in the airplane window, looking grieved. I never saw Grandfather again from then on, because we moved even further away. But we didn’t forget him.
24. How did the grandfather react when the author showed him the green tomatoes?
A. He was angry. B. He looked strange.
C. He praised his grandson. D. He thanked the author.
25. How did the grandfather finally get to his son’s home in Colorado?
A. By plane and car. B. By train and car.
C. By plane and train. D. By car and ship.
26. What does the underlined word “grieved” in the last paragraph probably mean?
A. Curious. B. Sad. C. Cautious. D. Angry.
27. What is the best title for the text?
A. The life of my grandfather B. The tomatoes of my grandparents
C. A lesson from my grandparents D. The memory of my grandfather
C
30 St Mary Axe, commonly known as the Gherkin, was designed by internationally noted architect, Lord Norman Foster. Built in 2004, London’s first environmentally sustainable sky-scrapper was constructed for Swiss-Re, the largest re-insurance company in the world. The Gherkin, which is the sixth tallest building in London, was sold for over ￡600 million in 2007, making it the most expensive location in Britain to have an office. Since its completion, 30 St Mary Axe has won many architectural awards including in 2004 the Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize and in 2006 the BD World Architecture the “most admired new building in the world”.
Lying in the heart of the city, Foster’s building is on the site of London’s historic Baltic Exchange which was severely damaged in 1992. Constructed exactly 100 years before completion of the Gherkin, surviving parts of the Baltic Exchange building were sold and are being re-constructed in Tallinn, the capital of the Baltic country Estonia. The Baltic Exchange, which trades in the sale of merchant vessels and transportation of industrial bulk commodities and originates back to 1744, was started by ship owners and brokers meeting in a coffee house.
At the top of the Gherkin, on the 40th floor, there is a private bar featuring a 360° panoramic view of London. Despite the building being rounded, the “lens”（镜头）shaped glass roof above the bar is the only curved glass in the building, and is similar in design to the glass dome which covered part of the ground floor of the old Baltic Exchange.
The smooth clean lines of the building cover a high tech and environmentally designed interior. To reach the roof bar there is a hydraulic lift, pushed from below, which doesn’t require any machinery above it. Double-glassed gaps in each floor create vertical corridors that help keep warm in the winter and improve air flow in the summer. This, coupled with all the natural light flooding in through the windows, results in the building needing much less energy.
28. What can we know from the first paragraph?
A. Foster isn’t an English architect.
B. The Gherkin is very famous in the world.
C. The Gherkin is the tallest building in London.
D. The Gherkin is the first sky-scrapper in London.
29. When was the Baltic Exchange building constructed?
A. In the mid-19th century. B. In the late 19th century.
C. In the early 20th century. D. In the mid-20th century.
30. What is at the top of the Gherkin?
A. A coffee house. B. The Baltic Exchange.
C. A private bar. D. A private office.
31. How does the Gherkin manage to save energy?
A. By being equipped with double glass.
B. By stopping people using electricity.
C. By opening all the windows in the summer.
D. By asking people to use less air-conditioning.
D
For many people, selfies（自拍照）have been so popular as to be a must. New hairstyle? Snap a selfie. Dining out? Selfie. They’ve even been taken from beyond Earth’s atmosphere. A Japanese astronaut, Aki Hoshide, snapped one while visiting the International Space Station. In what may be one of the coolest selfies of all time, Hoshide caught his likeness alongside the sun, Earth, a robotic arm. a spacesuit and the inky darkness of the universe. In 2013, Oxford Dictionaries even crowned “selfie” as the word of the year.
It isn’t difficult to judge someone’s mood when a selfie is snapped—the images are, by their very nature, mood-driven. Whether you capture yourself with a smile or a fierce facial expression, scientists are figuring out ways to study self-portraits taken by smart phones and analyze what they say about you. Selfie studies will allow them to predict not only the subject’s mood, but also the mood of an entire region. A team of researchers led by Dr. Lev Manovich of the City University of New York has been studying thousands of Instagram self-portraits in select cities, including Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York and Sao Paulo, to analyze how mood affects selfie poses. While many wondered if it was even possible to determine an entire city’s mood based on a smattering of self-portraits, the study has delivered promising results. Among the most interesting findings: People in Moscow smile the least of all the selfie cities that were analyzed, while Bangkok and Sao Paulo selfie subjects looked the happiest. The researchers were even able to uncover data on gender and age differences: On the whole, women were more expressive than men in their self-portraits, but men older than 30 were more likely to post selfies on Instagram than women.
Another study, started by Manovich and researchers from the University of California, San Diego and the City University of New York, studied 1 million selfies posted on Twitter. Is it possible to judge a person’s mood, or even a city’s mood from a selfie? The answer, researchers say, is yes. They posit（断定）the ability to measure “happiness” of geographic regions using selfies and hope to use the method as an alternative to traditional surveys.
32. What does the example of the Japanese astronaut try to show?
A. Snapping selfies isn’t easy.
B. Snapping selfies is a high technology.
C. Snapping selfies has become very popular.
D. Snapping selfies seriously affects people’s life.
33. Why can we easily judge people’s mood by their selfies?
A. Selfies can affect the mood. B. Selfies can reflect the mood.
C. Selfies are supported by technology. D. Selfies may improve the mood.
34. What is the purpose of Dr. Lev Manovich’s study?
A. To know why people love selfies.
B. To know the number of selfie lovers.
C. To know whether selfies predict moods.
D. To know the disadvantages of snapping selfies.
35. What can we learn from the text?
A. Men like selfies more than women.
B. People in Moscow seldom smile at others.
C. Living in Bangkok is the happiest in the world.
D. Selfies may be used as a way of surveying a city’s mood.
