Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Every year on my birthday, from the time I turned 12, a white gardenia was delivered _ to me at my house. No card or note came with it. Calls to the florist were always in vain ---- it was a cash purchase. After a while I stopped trying to discover the sender's identity. But I never stopped imagining who the anonymous sender might be. My mother often contributed to these imaginings. She'd ask me if there was someone for whom I had done a special kindness who might be showing appreciation. Perhaps the neighbor I'd help when she was unloading a car full of groceries. Or maybe it was the old man across the street whose mail I retrieved during the winter so he wouldn't have to venture down his icy steps. When I was 17, a boy broke my heart. The night he called for me the last time, I cried myself to sleep. When I awoke in the morning, there was a message scribbled on my mirror in red lipstick: "Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive." I thought about that quotation from Emerson for a long time, and I left it where my mother had written it. When I finally went to get the glass cleaner, my mother knew everything was all right again. I don't remember ever slamming my door in anger at her and shouting, "You just don't understand!" because she did understand. One month before my high-school graduation, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. My feelings ranged from grief to abandonment, fear and over-whelming anger that my dad was missing some of the most important events in my life. I became completely uninterested in my upcoming graduation, the senior-class play and the prom-events that I had worked on and looked forward to. But my mother, in the midst of her own grief, would not hear of my missing out any of those things. The day before my father died, she and I had gone shopping for a prom dress and found a spectacular one. Wearing it made me feel like a princess, but it was the wrong size, and when my father died the next day, I forgot all about the dress. My mother didn't. The... Question: Why did Mother try to arouse the author's imagination about the gardenia sender? Options: A: Because she wanted her child to feel cherished and loved not just by her but by the world. B: Because she had a great curiosity like a child. C: Because she was romantic and she once experienced such the same thing at her young age. D: Because she wanted to give her child some tips about the gardenia sender.
A

Read the article and select the best answer. Article: In the 13thcentury, the famous Italian traveler, Marco Polo, traveled a long way to China. During his stay in China, he saw many wonderful things. One of the things he discovered was that the Chinese used paper money. In western countries, people didn't use the paper money until 15thcentury. However, people in China began to use paper money in the 7thcentury. A Chinese man called Cai Lun invented paper almost 2,000 years ago. He took the wood from trees and made it into paper. He then put these pieces of paper together and made them into a book. Now paper still comes from trees. We use a lot of paper every day. If we keep on wasting so much paper, there will not be any trees left on the earth. If there are no trees, there will be no paper. Every day, people throw away about 2,800 tons of paper in our city. It takes 17 trees to make one ton of paper. This means that we are cutting nearly 48,000 trees every day. Since it takes more than 10 years for a tree to grow, we must start using less paper now. So how can we save paper? We can use both sides of every piece of paper, especially when we are making notes. We can use cotton handkerchiefs and not paper ones. When we go shopping, we can use fewer paper bags. If the shop assistant gives us a paper bag, we can save it and reuse it later. Everyone can help to save paper. If we all think carefully, we can help protect trees. But we should do it now, before it is too late. Question: Which of the following is not true? Options: A: If we keep on wasting paper, we will have no paper to use one day. B: The Chinese used paper money much earlier than people in western countries. C: About 48,000 trees can be used to make 2,800 tons of paper. D: It is never too late to plant trees for paper.
D

Q: Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Television will turn 86 years old on September 7, 2013, and it has never looked better. In its youth, television was a piece of furniture with a tiny, round screen showing unclear pictures of lowbudget programs. In spite of its shortcomings, it became well-received. Between 1950 and 1963, the number of American families with a television jumped from 9% to 92% of the population. As the audience got larger, the technology got better. Television sets became more reliable through the 1960s. Both of the reception and the picture improved. The major networks started broadcasting programs in color. Even greater improvements were coming according to Sanford Brown, who wrote an article forthe Postin 1967. Surprisingly, just about every prediction he made in the article became a reality. For example: All sets in the notdistant future will be color instruments. He also predicted that TV sets would become smaller, simpler, more reliable and less expensive and may forever put the TV repairman out of work. Smaller sets do not, of course, mean smaller screens. TV engineers expect screens to get much bigger. However, today's 3D TV is even farther away, if it's coming at all. There is some doubt whether the public would be eager to pay for it, in view of people's cold reception given to 3D movies. But the technology with the greatest potential, according to Brown, was cable television , which was still in its early stages then. As he predicted, the future of cable television was highly interactive. It wasn't cable television that gave Americans their electronic connection to the world, however. It was the Internet. He even foresaw the future office: using picture phones, bigscreen televisions for conferences, and computers providing information, at the touch of a button. Brown ever said, "The future of television is no longer a question of what we can invent. It's a question of what we want." Question: Which of the followings did Sanford Brown fail to predict? Options: A: Television's good quality. B: The invention of 3D TV. C: The more functions of TV. D: The potential of cable TV.
A: B