Passage Four
More than 6,000 children were expelled (开除) from US school last year for bringing guns and bombs to school, the US Department of Education said on May 8.
The department gave a report to the expulsions (开除) as saying handguns accounted for 58 percent of the 6,093 expulsions in 1996 and 1997, against 7 percent for rifles (步枪) or shotguns and 35 percent for other types of firearms.
"The report is a clear sign that out nation's public schools are cracking down (严惩) on students who bring guns to school," Education Secretary Richard Riley said in a statement. "We need to be tough-minded about keeping guns out of our schools and do everything to keep our children safe."
In March 1997, an 11 years old boy and 13 years old boy using handguns and rifles shot dead four children and a teacher at a school in Jonesboro, Arkansas. In October, two were killed and seven wounded in a shooting at a Mississippi school. Two months later, a 14 years old boy killed three high school students and wounded five in Dasucah, Kentucky.
Most of the expulsions, 56 percent, were from high school, which have students from about age 13.34 percent were from junior high schools and 9 percent were from elementary schools, the report said.
46. From the first paragraph we can infer that in the US schools ______.
A. students enjoy shooting
B. students are eager to be solider
C. safety is a problem
D. students can make guns
Ⅳ. Reading Comprehension (75 points)
Directions: There are five reading passages in this part. Each passage is followed by five questions. For each question there are four suggested answers marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and blackening the corresponding letter on the answer sheet.
Passage One
In the 1940s, urban Americans began a mass move to the suburbs in search of fresh air, elbow room and privacy. Suburbs began to sprawl out across the countryside, since most of those making the move were middleclass, they took with them the tax money the cities needed to maintain the neighborhood, in which they had lived. The people left in the cities were often those who were too old or too poor to move. Thus many cities began to fall into disrepair. Crime began to soar, and public transportation was neglected. (In the past sixty years, San Francisco is the only city in the United States to have completed a new mass transit system.) Meanwhile, housing construction costs continued to rise higher and higher. Middle-class housing was allowed to decay, and little new housing was constructed.
Eventually, many downtown areas existed for business only. During the day they would be filled with people working in the offices and at night they would be deserted. Given these circumstances, some business executives began asking, "Why bother with going downtown at all? Why not move the offices to the suburbs go that we can live and work in the same area?" Gradually some of the larger companies began to move out of the cities, with the result that urban centers declined even further and the suburbs expanded still more. This movement of business to the suburbs is not confined to the United States. Businesses have also been moving to the suburbs in Stockholm, Sweden, in Bonn, Germany, and in Brussels, Belgium as well.
31. What did the city lose when those people moved out to the suburbs?
A. Houses
B. Cars.
C. Jobs.
D. Tax money.
Passage Five
In America, every student in his or her second year of high school is required to take a class in driver's education.
The course is divided up into two parts: class time for learning laws and regulations and driving time to practice driving. Each student is required to drive a total of six hours. The students are divided up into groups of four. The students and the instructor go out driving for two hour blocks of time. Thus, each student gets half an hour driving time per outing. Drivers Ed cars are unlike other cars in which they have two sets of brakes, one on the driver's side and one on the other side where the instructor sits. Thus, if the student driver should run into difficulties the instructor can take over.
After a student has passed the driver's education course and reached the appropriate age to drive (this age differs in every state but in most cases the person must be 16 years old), he must take his driver's test. The person must pass all three tests in order to be given a driver's license. If the person does well in his or her driver's education class, he or she will pass the test with flying colors and get a driver's license.
51. In America, the driver's course mentioned above______.
A. is considered as part of the advanced education
B. is given to anyone wanting to get a driver's license
C. is carried on after students graduate from high school
D. is offered to all the students of Grade 2 in high school
Passage Three
No one knows exactly how many disabled (残废的) people there are in the world, but estimates suggest the figure is over 450 million. The number of disabled people in India alone is probably more than double the total population of Canada.
In the United Kingdom, about one in ten people have some disability. Disability is not just something that happens to other people. As we get older, many of us will become less mobile (可动的), hard of hearing or have failing eyesight.
Disablement can take many forms and occur at any time of life. Some people are born with disabilities. Many others become disabled as they get older. There are many progressive disabling diseases. The longer time goes on, the worse they become. Some people are disabled in accidents. Many others may have a period of disability in the form. of a mental illness. All are affected by people's attitude towards them.
Disabled people face many physical barriers. Next time you go shopping or to work or visit friends, imagine how you would manage if you could not get up steps, or on to buses and trains. How would you cope if you could not see where you were going or could not hear the traffic? But there are other barriers: prejudice can be even harder to break down and ignorance inevitably represents by far the greatest barrier of all. It is almost impossible for the able-bodied to fully appreciate what the severely disabled go through, so it is important to draw attention to these barriers and show that it is the individual person and their ability, not their disability, which counts.
41. The first paragraph points out that ______.
A. it is possible to get an exact figure of the world's disabled people
B. there are many disabled people in the world
C. the number of disabled people in India is the greatest
D. India has not much more disabled people than Canada