Volunteer Day schedule: 7:30 a.m.: Meet at the Community Center for breakfast. 8-8:30 a.m.: Visit with people from the many participating organizations. Choose which activity you'd like to help with for the day. 8:30-9 a.m.: Board the bus for your chosen activity, and ride with other volunteers to your activity site. 9-12:00 a.m.: Work as a volunteer. 12:00 a.m.-1 p.m.: Share lunch with your volunteer group. Don't forget to bring food for lunch from home! 1-3:30 p.m.: Continue your volunteer work. 3:30 p.m.: Board the bus that will take you back to the Community Center, where you will be able to talk with other volunteers and share your experiences. See below for a list of volunteer opportunities for Volunteer Day so you can begin thinking about which activity you might want to join. Happy Homes: it provides home repairs for needy people in the form of painting. It also provides painters to create beautiful paintings inside schools of community centers. Elder Care: Elder Care sends volunteers into nursing homes to spend time with them, play board games with them, and talk with them. City Parks Association: you can help plant flowers and bushes in city parks or pick up trash around the river banks. These activities are very active, so remember to be prepared with plenty of drinking water! Love and Learning: it provides volunteers to help children with learning disabilities. Read books out loud to groups of children aged four to six, or read one-on-one with struggling readers aged seven to eight. According to the schedule, how long will a volunteer work a day? A) 3 hours B) 5.5 hours C) 7.5 hours. D) 8 hours.
B
The quality of drinking water in Shanghai will meet European Union standard by 2010 and, a decade later, citizens in Shanghai will drink the best water in the world. These were the goals set out by the Shanghai Water Authority. With the city's population expected to increase only slightly and the economy to boom by 2020, Chen Yin, an official in the water authority, said Shanghai's water consumption will not increase from its present amount. Zhang Yue, director of the Urban Construction Division under the Ministry of Construction, said, "Shanghai is the first city in the country to publicize these ambitions. They will not be easy to achieve." He said water saving will help keep the sustainable development of China's economy. Saving one cubic meter of water means saving the city's infrastructure costs by 10,000 Yuan. Last year, Shanghai saved 300 million cubic meters of water either from readjustment of industrial structure or the employment of new technology. "The aim is to arouse public awareness of the seriousness of water shortages," Chen said. "The abundant surface water and amount of rain of the city are so misleading that they result in improper use of water." Shanghai lacks drinkable water. The Huangpu River, which supplies 80 percent of the city's drinkable water, is nearing exhaustion. The city, therefore, has been exploring new sources from the Yangtze River and growing forests along it to conserve quality water. Besides penning regulations, the authority is popularizing technology among the public to efficiently cut the amount of water used. At present, the city has 600,000 family toilets, each using 13 liters of water per flush. These are to be renovated to use only 9 liters of water per flush. The authority is renovating the first 200 toilets for households - at a cost of Yuan each. In three years, all the toilets will be renovated, which saves the city nearly 15 million Yuan every year in water conservation. Another task the city is engaged in is the treatment of sewage to improve the water... People in Shanghai get their daily water mainly from _ now. A) the underground B) the Huangpu River C) the rain D) the Yangtze River
B
Q: Googlefight is a simple service available on the Internet which offers you the chance to compare two different items and see how many hits they get on the Google search engine. The seemingly simple device has proved invaluable to users, especially to help win arguments. For example, imagine that you and your friends are arguing about who are the most popular music or movie stars, you can decide the argument by writing the names in the Googlefight boxes. Let's say that you are arguing about Jackie Chan and Jet Li. You will quickly discover that Jet Li is mentioned 16 million times on Google pages, whereas Jackie Chan is mentioned a mere 12 million times! In this unscientific way, you can claim victory for one Star over another. But teachers have come up with ways of using Googlefight which are much more useful from an academic point of view, particularly when it comes to studying languages. You can, for example, find out the frequency of two words with the same meaning, and deduce from the answers which one is more common. For example, let's take the words "buy" and "purchase", which mean the same thing (although "buy" is only a verb and "purchase" is both a verb and a noun). It is immediately clear from Googlefight that "buy" is much more commonly used, with a massive three and a half billion hits, compared to only one billion occurrences for the more formal word. But the real value of Googlefight to the language learner is in determining which is the more common of two phrases. For example, "raining cats and dogs" is an old-fashioned English expression about the weather. Do English speakers still use it? Or are they more likely to say "pouring down"? Googlefight suggests the latter. "Pouring down" has 898,000 Google hits, whereas "raining cats and dogs" only has 326,000. With phrases, it's important to remember that you need to use quote marks to make the search more accurate. For example, if you type in the similar phrases "look after" and "take care of " without quote marks, the second phrase seems to be... What is Googlefight? A) A fight between two people on Google. B) A way to make sure you win an argument. C) A website showing how many hits two different things have. D) A list of all the websites on Google.
A: C
(Question)
Have you ever done something foolish that made you feel so embarrassed ? Well, that's exactly how I felt. On a Saturday morning last autumn.I had gone to town to do some shopping and as I was on my way home,it suddenly began to rain. I at once ran into a nearby phone box because I didn't have an umbrella.It was raining so heavily that I have to stay in the phone box until it stopped. A few moments later,I saw a young man walk up to the phone box,wearing a yellow raincoat and holding a box. I didn't want to go out into the rain,so I picked up the phone and pretended I was talking to someone. I thought the man would go away,but he didn't. He just waited in the rain,watching me. I had to wave my hands about and acted as if I was deep in conversation. Luckily,it began to stop after about ten minutes."Okay,Mum," I said loudly into the phone,"I'll see you later Bye!" I put the phone down, picked up my shopping bag and walked out of the phone box "I'm sorry I took so long,"I said to the man. "Oh, I don't want to use the phone,"he replied, smiling."I've just come to repair it. It's out of order.you see." I felt myself go red in the face and I hurried away with my head down,feeling a complete fool. That was certainly one of the most embarrassing moments of my life! What did the writer think the young man wanted to do? A) To repair the phone. B) To use the phone. C) To shake hands with her. D) To listen to the phone box.
(Answer)
B