The Mercedes began to ____________ the Porsche to the end of the race. （phrase)

Questions 8 to 10 are based e9n the following conversation. At the end of the conversation, you will be given. 15 seconds to answer the questions.

Now, listen to the conversation.

What are the speakers mainly talking about?

[A] The development of the concept of race.

[B] Three kinds of racial groups.

[C] A running event.

[D] A study report on race.

Yet not all of these races are (intellectual inferior) to the European races, (and) some may even have (a) freshness and vitality that can renew the 9energies) of more advanced race.

A．intellectual inferior

B．and

C．a

D．energies

听力原文：W：I am so impressed that all of your classmates seemed so enthusiastic about running in the race.

M：You know what, in the end only three of them actually took part.

Q：What does the man say about his classmates?

(19)

A．They watched the end of the race.

B．Only three of them didn't finish the race.

C．Most of them didn't nm in the race.

D．They participated in the last three races.

There are faults which age releases us from, and there are virtues which turn to vices with the lapse of years. The worst of these is thrift, which in early and middle life is wisdom and duty to practice for a provision against destitution. As time goes on this virtue is apt to turn into the ugliest, cruelest, shabbiest of the vices. Then the victim of it finds himself storing past all probable need of saying for himself or those next him, m the deprivation of the remoter kin of the race; In the earlier time when gain was symbolized by gold or silver, the miser had a sensual joy in the touch of his riches, in hearing the coins clink in their fall through his fingers, and in gloating upon their increase sensible m the hand and eye. Then the miser had his place among the great figures of misdoing; he was of a dramatic effect, like a murderer or a robber; and something of this bad distinction clung to him even when his coins had changed to paper currency, the clean, white notes of the only English bank, or the greenbacks of our innumerable banks of issue; but when the sense of riches had been transmuted to the balance in his favor at his banker's, or the bonds in his drawer at the safety-deposit vault, all splendor had gone out of his vice. His bad eminence was gone, but he clung to the lust of gain which had ranked him with the picturesque wrong-doers, and which only ruin from without could save him from, unless he gave his remnant of strength to saving himself from it. Most aging men are sensible of all this, but few have the frankness of that aging man who once said that he who died rich died disgraced, and died the other day in the comparative poverty of fifty millions.

This short passage is mainly to tell that ______.

A．man becomes increasingly greedy when getting old

B．a miser can be honest if he does no wrong act

C．age can help convert some virtue into a vice

D．misers all started from trying to be thrifty

听力原文：W: All of your classmates seem so enthusiastic about running in the race.

M: But in the end only three of them actually took part.

Q: What does the man say about his classmates?

(15)

A．They watched the end of the race,

B．only three of them didn't finish the race.

C．Most of them didn't run.

D．They participated in the last three races.

听力原文： In the early days of the railroads, horses pulled the trains. The trains had no power of their own. Richard Trevithik of England invented a steam-powered engine in 1804. Soon people were building railroads and steam engines all over the world. Because the steam engines did the work that animals used to do, people called them "iron horses".

Peter Cooper was a rich American businessman. He owned a lot of land near the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. He wanted the railroad to be successful. He built his own steam engine to drive along the railroad.

Most people traveled in coaches drawn by horses. A coach line challenged Peter Cooper to a race.

The day of the race came. At first the horse was winning the race. Peter Cooper's engine needed time to build up steam. He worked hard to make the train go faster. Soon he was catching up with the horse, he was going to win the race! Suddenly one of the parts of the engine broke. The train stopped. The horse rushed ahead. Peter Cooper lost the race.

Of course, that was not the end of the story. By 1870, railroad extended all across the United States. The "iron horse" had become an important part of American life,

(30)

A．Because they were driven by steam power.

B．Because they did the work that animals used to do.

C．Because they pulled cars full of coal.

D．Because they were made of iron.

A、the evening air

B、darkness

C、hundreds of lights

D、sea of faces

The nuclear age in which the human race is living, and may soon be dying, began for the general public with the dropping of an atom bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. But for nuclear scientists and for certain American authorities, it had been known for some time that such a weapon was possible. Work towards making it had been begun by the United States, Canada and Britain very soon after the beginning of the Second World War. The existence of possibly explosive forces in the nuclei of atoms had been known ever since the structure of atoms was discovered by Rutherford.

An atom consists of a tiny core called the "nucleus" with attendant electrons circling round it. The hydrogen atom, which is the simplest and lightest, has only one electron. Heavier atoms have more and more as they go up the scale. The first discovery that had to do with what goes on in nuclei was radioactivity, which is caused by particles being shot out of the nucleus. It was known that a great deal of energy is locked up in the nucleus, but, until just before the outbreak of the Second World War, there was no way of releasing this energy in any large quantity. A revolutionary discovery was that, in certain circumstances, mass can be transformed into energy in accordance with Einstein's formula which states that the energy generated is equal to the mass lost multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.

The A-bomb, however, used a different process, depending upon radioactivity. In this process, called "fission", a heavier atom splits into two lighter atoms. In general, in radioactive substances this fission proceeds at a constant rate which is slow where substances occurring in nature are concerned. But there is one form. of uranium called "U235" which, when it is pure, sets up a chain reaction which spreads like fire, though with enormously greater rapidity. It is this substance which was used in making the atom bomb.

The political background of the atomic scientists' work was the determination to defeat the Nazis. It was held--I think rightly--that a Nazi victory would be an appalling disaster. It was also held, in Western countries, that German scientists must be well advanced towards making an A-bomb, and that if they succeeded before the West did they would probably win the war. When the war was over, it was discovered, to the complete astonishment of both American and British scientists, that the Germans were nowhere near success, and as everybody knows, the Germans were defeated before any nuclear weapons had been made. But I do not think that nuclear scientists of the West can be blamed for thinking the work urgent and necessary. Even Einstein favored it.

When, however, the German war was finished, the great majority of those scientists who had collaborated towards making the A-bomb considered that it should not be used against the Japanese, who were already on the verge of defeat and, in any case, did not constitute such a menace to the world as Hitler. Many of them made urgent representations to the American Government advocating that, instead of using the bomb as a weapon of war, they should after a public announcement, explode it in a desert, and that future control of nuclear energy should be placed in the hands of an international authority. Seven of the most eminent of nuclear scientists drew up what is known as "The Franck Report" which they presented to the Secretary of War in June 1945. This is a very admirable and far-seeing document, and if it had won the assent of the politicians, none of our subsequent terrors would have arisen.

We may infer that the writer's attitude towards the A-bomb is that ______.

A．it is a necessary evil

B．it is a terrible threat to the whole of mankind

C．it played a vital part in defeating the Japanese

D．it was a wonderful invention