第三篇 Faster Effective Reading A higher reading rate, with no loss of comprehension, will help you in other subjects as well as in English, and the general principles apply to any language. Naturally, you will not read every book at the same speed. You would expect to read a newspaper, for example, much more rapidly than a physics or economics textbook-but you can raise your average reading speed over the whole range of materials you wish to cover so that the percentage (百分比) gained will be the same whatever kind of reading you are concerned with. The reading passages which follow are all of an average level of difficulty for your stage of instruction. They are all about five hundred words long. They are about topics of general interest which do not require a great deal of specialized knowledge. Thus they fall between the kind of reading you might find in your textbooks and the much less demanding kind you will find in a newspaper or light novel. If you read this kind of English, with understanding at, say, four hundred words per minute, you might drop to two hundred or two hundred and fifty. Perhaps you would like to know what reading speeds are common among native English-speaking university students and how those speeds can be improved. Tests in Minnesota, U. S. A, for example, have shown that students without special training can read English of average difficulty, for example, Tolstoy’s War and Peace in translation, at speeds of between 240 and 250 words per minute with about seventy percent comprehension. Students in Minnesota claim that after twelve half-hour lessons, one a week, the reading speed can be increased, with no loss of comprehension, to around five hundred words per minute. Which of the following does not describe the types of reading materials mentioned in the second paragraph
A. Those beyond one ’s reading comprehension.
B. Those concerning with common knowledge.
C. Those without the demand for specialized knowledge.
D. Those with the length of about five hundred words.
第二篇 On Being a Matchmaker The first thing I do when I wake up is to make a mental list of all things I have to do that day. I’m very organized! Then I get up and have my bath. Often my best matchmaking (媒人) ideas come while I’m in the bath. Sometimes I have a really good idea about who might be good with whom. Before I did matchmaking, I was a social worker, but I knew I wanted to do something without bosses telling me what to do and that I am good at dealing with people. Also I had seen too many broken marriages and too many people go downhill because they were so lonely. So I gave up my job, did a bit of research and started the matchmaking business in 1970. Over the last few years we’ve been doing introductions throughout Europe as well as here in Britain. Europeans want to meet British people. For every 100 people who come to us, about 65 will settle down. We keep going until clients (委托人) find someone that they get on very well with. We’re great triers. Of course there are impossible people, those who will never settle... Sometimes I end up giving advice to clients. A few months ago, we had a highly paid scientist with a very nice face, but every woman refused to meet him a second time. It soon became clear that he did not like changing his shirts. So I had to be very honest and frank and told him, "But a woman can’t start to love you if your shirt smells." The job is most satisfying when I get a call from a couple telling me they have fallen in love. Who are those people who are "impossible" and "will never settle"
A. Those who make things impossible for themselves.
B. Those who always travel around.
C. Those who find it hard to live in one place.
D. Those who can never find a partner for marriage.