Will she be available this afternoon? A: easy to get B: sociable C: wishful D: free

When confronted with a decision and unable to believe they can find an acceptable solution, some people remain calm by resorting to wishful thinking or ____(空想).

他的如意算盘是兔子的尾巴——长不了。His wishful thinking is but the tail of a rabbit—won’t last long.

When confronted with a decision and unable to believe they can find an ____(令人满意的) solution, some people remain calm by resorting to wishful thinking or daydreaming.

他的如意算盘是兔子的尾巴——长不了。His wishful thinking is but the tail of a rabbit—won’t last long. A: 正确 B: 错误

I got into a car accident, lost my job and my dog ran away, all in the same week. _________.( ) A: That is wishful thinking. B: That's water under the bridge. C: No need to panic. D: When it rains it pours.

Reading Comprehension Passage One Americans generate about 254 million tons of trash and recycle and compost (制成肥料）about 87 million tons of this material, which adds up to a 34.3 percent national recycling rate. Recycling and composting prevented the release of approximately 186 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2013, comparable to taking over 39 million cars off the road for a year. In recent years, however, recycling companies are struggling with higher processing costs, due in part to newer, larger recycling bins that don’t require user sorting (分类) and thus become increasingly contaminated with garbage. When the District of Columbia replaced residents’ 32-gallon bins with ones that were 50 percent larger last year the extensive amount of non-recyclable material put into the bins drove up the city’s processing cost for recyclables and cut profits from selling recyclables by more than 50 percent. “Our biggest concern and our biggest challenge today is municipal solid waste and contamination in our inbound stream,” said James Delvin, CEO of ReCommunity Recycling, which operates 31 facilities in 14 states. “It’s an economic issue if you think about we go through all this effort to process this material, and roughly 15 to 20 percent of what we process ends up going back to the landfill (垃圾填埋场). It’s incredibly inefficient to do that.” In a 2014 survey by the National Waste and Recycling bins when trash cans were full; one in five said they will place an item in a recycling container even if they are not completely sure it is recyclable. “People refer to this as ‘wishful recycling’, that’s just when in doubt, put this in the bin because there’s an outside chance they might be able to recycle it,” Delvin notes. “So you see styrofoam (聚苯乙烯泡沫塑料). You see PVC. You see batteries and those types of things...” This mixing of waste with recyclables, he says makes it very difficult to extract the true recyclable commodities that have value. Improved education regarding the proper materials to recycle is needed to allow recycling plants to remain economically feasible. The pros and cons of recycling are heavily debated, but there’s never an argument over the environmental benefits of limiting disposable packaging and utilizing more durable reusable goods, like shopping bags, coffee thermoses and water bottles, to name a few, in daily life.

Section B Directions: In this section, you are going to read a passage with ten statements attached to it. Each statement contains information given in one of the paragraphs. Identify the paragraph from which the information is derived. You may choose a paragraph more than once. Why Study History? A)Let's face it, our first experience with history is that it is a course that we have to take in order to graduate. As a junior and senior high school student, we have to study American history and state history, and perhaps even take a general course in western civilization (文明) or world history. We didn't have a choice. And the fact that we are forced to take history puts us on the defensive. We begin to build that splendid brick wall that will prevent us from getting anything important out of history. B)The main problem as I see it, is not history itself. The study of history can be fun. But there's only one thing that can make our first experience with history a horrible thing indeed: and that's a poor instructor. I was fortunate. I managed to have a number of excellent history instructors throughout my high school years and this was at a time when I was leaning toward the physical sciences, geology and biology to be exact. I might not have been an excellent history student, but I do remember having excellent history teachers. C)Fine. That's my experience. But experience aside, why study history in the first place? What could history offer the business major? the student hoping to study web page development? the student taking her first psychology class? or the lawyer? or the worker on the shop floor? Well, simply stated, everything has a history, whether we like it or not. Even history itself has a history. Try hard as we might, we can't escape the past. We can't let go of the past. And we celebrate the past all the time. D)You may have been told that we study history so that we won't repeat the mistakes of the past. This is the wishful thinking (一厢情愿) school of historical interpretation (诠释). It's too clean. If we have learned from the past then over the centuries we ought to have built on so much knowledge that things like war, poverty, injustice and immorality ought not to exist. Of course, we've still got a long way to go along this line. E)You may also have heard that everything repeats itself, so if we study the past, we can be sure to know something of the future. I don't hold to this view either. To insist that the study of the past will help to know something of the future is a nice idea, but what I really want to know about is the present. History cannot "tell" the future. History can, on the other hand, help to understand all that is the present. So, faced as we are with the question "why study history?" I can only hope to answer by telling you why I study history. F)Well first off, it's extremely important for us to be in touch not only with the past of our own country, but also of the world as well. History tells us things about the world in which we live. When we are young, we know little about the world beyond our immediate family and environment. As we grow older we realize that the world extends far beyond those limited surroundings and we are hungry for more knowledge of the wider world. But no matter how much of it we explore, all we see is the world as it is today. However, the way the world works is a result of a very long period of development, and we can never understand it well enough unless we try to learn as much as possible about our past. G)Most of us want to live meaningful lives, and we want to understand more than is enough for our mere survival. In our search for understanding our place in the world, we turn to history. There we find a much larger store of human beliefs and values than we come across in our everyday lives. In doing so, we develop a wiser understanding of who we are, of what we can achieve, and of what dangers put individuals, families, communities and nations at risk. H)Of course, there are also more practical reasons why we should study history. Historians examine facts, compare them, evaluate (评价) them, and reach conclusions. By studying history, our own ability to perform these tasks is increased, and this ability is crucial in many walks of life. If you think about it, it's what managers, journalists, politicians, doctors, lawyers and many other professionals have to do every day -- each in their profession. I)But history is enjoyable, too. We should know something of our past in order to be proud of our achievements and how we may have played our part in the development of civilization. With increasing globalization, individual countries are losing the traditions and customs of their own regions, but knowing our history would mean that these traditions do not entirely disappear. However, we should not feel that only our history is of value to the world. Every country has been important to the development of civilization and we must not be so arrogant (傲慢) as to think only ours counts. ______11.What the world is now has taught us that it has not come true that we study history to avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past.