2014高三模拟试题(2)

高三英语 第 4 页 共 12页

阅读下列短文，从每题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中，选出最佳选项。

A

―Indeed,‖ George Washington wrote in his diary in 1785, ―some kind of fly, or bug, had begun to eat the leaves before I left home.‖ But the father of America was not the father of bug. When Washington wrote that, Englishmen had been referring to insects as bugs for more than a century, and Americans had already created lightning-bug(萤火虫). But the English were soon to stop using the bugs in their language, leaving it to the Americans to call a bug a bug in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The American bug could also be a person, referring to someone who was crazy about a particular activity. Although fan became the usual term, sports fans used to be called racing bugs, baseball bugs, and the like.

Or the bug could be a small machine or object, for example, a bug-shaped car. The bug could also be a burglar alarm, from which comes the expression to bug, that is, ―to install (安装) an alarm‖. Now it means a small piece of equipment that people use for listening secretly to others‘ conversation. Since the 1840s, to bug has long meant ―to cheat‖, and since the 1940s it has been annoying.

We also know the bug as a flaw in a computer program or other design. That meaning dates back to the time of Thomas Edison. In 1878 he explained bugs as ―little problems and difficulties‖ that required months of study and labor to overcome in developing a successful product. In 1889 it was recorded that Edison ―had been up the two previous nights discovering ?a bug‘ in his invented record player.‖ 56. We learn from Paragraph 1 that _______.

A. Americans had difficulty in learning to use the word bug

B. George Washington was the first person to call an insect a bug

C. the word bug was still popularly used in English in the nineteenth century D. both Englishman and Americans used the word bug in the eighteenth century 57. What does the word ―flaw‖ in the last paragraph probably mean? A. Explanation. B. Finding. C. Origin. D. Fault. 58. The passage is mainly concerned with______. A. the misunderstanding of the word bug B. the development of the word bug C. the public views of the word bug D. the special characteristics of the word bug

B

When your parents advise you to ―get an education‖ in order to raise your income, they tell you only half the truth. What they really mean is to get just enough education to provide manpower (人力资源) for your society, but not so much that you prove an embarrassment to your society.

Get a high school diploma, at least. Without that, you will be occupationally dead unless your name happens to be George Bernard Shaw or Thomas Alva Edison, and you can successfully drop out in grade school.

Get a college degree, if possible. With a B.A., you are on the launching pad. But now you have to start to put on the brakes. If you go for a master‘s degree, make sure it is an M.B.A., and the famous law of diminishing (逐渐减少的) returns begins to take effect.

Do you know, for instance, that long-haul truck drivers earn more per year than full professors? Yes, the average salary for those truckers was $24,000 while the full professors managed to earn just $23,030.

高三英语 第 5 页 共 12页