Text 2 When we think about happiness, we usually think of something extraordinary, a peak of great delight--and those peaks seem to get rarer the older we get. For a child, happiness has a magical quality. I remember making hide outs in newly cut hay, playing cops and robbers in the woods, getting a speaking part in the school play. Of course, kids also experience lows, but their delight at such peaks of pleasure as winning a race or getting a new bike is unreserved. For teenagers, or people under twenty, the concept of happiness changes. Suddenly it’s conditional on such things as excitement, love, and popularity. I can still feel the agony of not being invited to a party that almost everyone else was going to. But I also recall the great happiness of being invited at another event to dance with a very handsome young man. In adulthood the things that bring great joy--birth, love, marriage--also bring responsibility and the risk of loss. Love may not last, sex isn’t always good, and loved ones die. For adults, happiness is complicated. My dictionary explains happy as "lucky" or "fortunate", but I think a better explanation of happiness is "the capacity for enjoyment". The more we can enjoy what we have, the happier we are. It’s easy to overlook the pleasure we get from loving and being loved, the company of friends, the freedom to love where we please, even good health. Nowadays, with so many choices and such pressure to succeed in every area, we have turned happiness into one mode thing we "gotta have". We’re so self-conscious about our "right" to it that it’s making us extremely unhappy. So we chase it and consider it to be the same as wealth and success, without noticing that the people who have those things aren’t necessarily happier. While happiness may be more complex for us, the solution is the same as ever. Happiness isn’t about what happens to us--it’s about how we perceive what happens to us. It’s the ability to find positive for every negative, and view a setback as a challenge. It’s not wishing for what we don’t have, but enjoying what we do possess. The passage aims to tell ______.
A. the constant pursuit of happiness
B. the great importance of happiness
C. the real meaning of happiness
D. the changing concept of happiness
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Text 3 Children in the United States are exposed to many influences other than that of their families. Television is the most significant of these influences, because the habit of watching television usually begins before children start attending school. And, by the time that the average child finishes high school, he or she will have spent 18,000 hours in front of a television set as opposed to 12,000 hours in a classroom. Parents are concerned about these figures. They are also concerned about the lack of quality in television programs for children. The degree of violence in many of these shows also worries them. Even if it is unreal--a cartoon cat beating up a cartoon mouse with a baseball bat--this violence may have a negative effect on the young minds exposed to it. Studies indicate that, when children are exposed to violence, they may become aggressive or insecure. Parents are also concerned about the commercials that their children see on television. Many parents would like to see fewer commercials during programs for children. And some parents feel that these shows should not have any commercials at all because young minds are not mature enough to deal with the claims made by advertisers. Educational television has no commercials and has programs for children that many parents approve of. The most famous of these is "Sesame Street", which tries to give preschool children a head start in learning the alphabet and numbers. It also tries to teach children useful things about the world in which they live. Even though most parents and educators give "Sesame Street" and shows like it high marks for quality, some critics argue that all television, whether educational or not, is harmful to children. These critics feel that the habit of watching hours of television every day turns children into bored and passive consumers of their world rather than encouraging them to become active explorers of it. We still do not know enough about the effects of watching television to be able to say whether or not it is good for children. Until we do, perhaps it would be wise to put a warning on television sets such as the one on cigarette packages: "Caution: Watching Too Much Television May Be Harmful to Your Child’s Developing Mind." We can infer from the text that ______.
A. children may imitate what they have seen on television
B. a cartoon program is not harmful if it is not real
C. parents are strongly opposed to children watching TV
D. the quality of children’s programs is not the parents’ main concern
Where will Mr. Smith be on Saturday
At the party.
B. At home.
C. Still on his trip.
D. Back from his trip.
Text 1 Fourteen-year-old Richie Hawley had spent five years studying violin at the Community School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles when he took part in a violin contest. Ninety-two young people were invited to the contest and Hawley came out first. The contest could have been the perfect setup for fear, worrying about mistakes, and trying to impress the judges. But Hawley says "I did pretty well at staying calm. I couldn’t be thinking about how many mistakes I’d make--it would distract me from playing. "he says. "I don’t even remember trying to impress people while I played. It’s almost as if they weren’t there. I just wanted to make music." Hawley is a winner. But he didn’t become a winner by concentrating on winning. He did it by concentrating on playing well. "The important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part," said the founder of the modem Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin. "The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." New research shows that Coubertin’s philosophy is exactly the path achievers take to win at life’s challenging games. A characteristic of high performers is their intense, pleasurable concentration on work, rather than on their competitors or future glory or money, says Dr. Charles Garfield, who has studied 1,500 achievers in business, science, sports, the arts, and professions. "They are interested in winning, but they’re more interested in self-development, testing their limits." One of the most surprising things about top performers is how many losses they’ve had--and how much they’ve learned from each. "Not one of the 1, 500 I studied defined losing as failing," Garfield says. "They kept calling their losses ’ setbacks’." A healthy attitude toward setbacks is essential to winning, experts agree. "The worst thing you can do if you’ve had a setback is to let yourself get stuck in a prolonged depression. You should analyze carefully what went wrong, identify specific things you did right and give yourself credit for them." Garfield believes that most people don’t give themselves enough praise. He even suggests keeping a diary of all the positive things you’ve done on the way to a goal. According to the passage, successful people concentrate on ______.
A. avoiding setbacks
B. challenging their own limits
C. defeating their opponents
D. learning from others
Questions 19 to 22 are based on the passage you have just heard. What was now the attitude of the department store in this legal case
A. They refused to apologize for having followed her through the town.
B. They regretted having wrongly accused her of stealing.
C. They still suspected that she was a thief.
D. They agreed to pay her $ 3,000 damages.