If Confucius(孔子) were alive today and could celebrate his September 28 birthday with a big cake, there would be a lot of candles. He’d need a fan or a strong wind to help him put them out.
While many people in China remember Confucius on his special day, few people in the United States will give him a passing thought. It’s nothing personal. Most Americans don’t even remember the birthdays of their own national heroes.
But that doesn’t mean that Americans don’t care about Confucius. In many ways he has become a bridge that foreigners must cross if they want to reach a deeper understanding of China.
In the past two decades, the Chinese studies programs have gained huge popularity in Western universities. More recently, the Chinese government has set up Confucius Institutes in more than 80 countries. These schools teach both Chinese language and culture. The main courses of Chinese culture usually include Chinese art, history and philosophy(哲学). Some social scientists suggest that Westerners should take advantage of the ancient Chinese wisdom to make up the drawbacks of Western philosophy. Students in the United States, at the same time, are racing to learn Chinese. So they will be ready for life in a world where China is an equal power with the United States. Businessmen who hope to make money in China are reading books about Confucius to understand their Chinese customers.
So the old thinker’s ideas are still alive and well.
Today China attracts the West more than ever, and it will need more to introduce Confucius and Chinese culture to the West.
As for the old thinker, he will not be forgotten by people in the West, even if his birthday is.
【小题1】The purpose or the first paragraph is mainly to ________.

A．attract the readers’ interest in the subject

B．provide some key facts about Confucius

C．show great respect for the ancient thinker

D．prove the popularity of modern birthday celebrations

【小题2】We can learn from Paragraph 4 that American students ________.

A．take an active part in Chinese competitions

B．try to get high scores in Chinese exams

C．fight for a chance to learn Chinese

D．show great interest in studying Chinese nowadays

【小题3】What is the best title for this passage?

A．Forgotten Wisdom in America

B．Huge Fans of the Chinese Language

C．Old Thinker with a Big Future

D．Chinese Culture for Westerners

语法填空

Several countries in Asia celebrate the Lunar New Year in their own way. But dragon and lion dances in Chinatowns all over the world have helped to make China's New Year the most famous. These days growing 【小题1】（number）of people who are not of Chinese origin are joining in. In Tokyo window cleaners dress up like the animals of the Chinese shengxiao. America，Canada and New Zealand published memorial stamps for the year of the Rooster. In 2016，New York City made the Lunar New Year 【小题2】 school holiday for the first time.

The spread of the Spring Festival is 【小题3】（part）due to recent immigration from China:about 10million Chinese people 【小题4】（move）abroad since 1978，many of 【小题5】 are far richer than earlier waves of immigrants.

Aware 【小题6】 China's growing economic and political influence，foreign leaders have noticed the occasion. Britain's prime minister，Theresa May，gave a video address，a tradition 【小题7】（start）in 2014 by her predecessor（前任）. The World Economic Forum in Davos in 2017 was held a week earlier than usual 【小题8】（avoid）conflicting with China's New Year.

China hopes the festival will promote 【小题9】（it）cultural soft power abroad. It may give the Chinese people 【小题10】（satisfy）to see foreigners enjoy such festivities.

   Thousands of Burbank students biked to school on Wednesday morning and the children at Community Day School were not going to miss out on the event.

With the help from two local bicycle enthusiast groups，the campus' 25 middle and high school students were able to pedal（骑）down the bikeway for a 10-mile morning bike ride.

Krohn, headmaster of the school，considered having her students participate in Walk/Bike to School Day. But when she found most of her students had no bicycles, she connected the Bike Angels, who donate （捐赠）bicycles to children in Burbank during the holidays.

“The bikes that the Bike Angels get are donated, but so many of them are broken,” said Ernie, one of Krohn's teachers, an eager cyclist with some knowledge of bike repairs. “So we made judgements about what needed to be done. ”

As word spread about their efforts, a member from the WalkBike volunteered to help Ernie, and some students also stepped up to help repair the bikes in time for the event.

One of Ernie's students, 16-year-old Jacob, volunteered on Saturdays to help fix bicycles for his classmates. “I had a bike with a broken tire that I wanted to use to come to school. I asked my teacher if he could help me fix bikes, he taught me everything, and later I started volunteering there. I just started loving fixing bikes. ” He added that he planned to continue volunteering with the Bike Angels to repair bicycles for the community.

Ernie said that the biking event ended up with more students participating in a nationwide event in the US.

【小题1】Why did Krohn connect the Bike Angels?

A．She wanted to get bikes from them for her students.

B．She wanted her students to learn to repair bikes.

C．Her students had old bikes to donate to them.

D．Her students wanted to do voluntary work with them.

【小题2】What did Jacob do on Saturdays?

A．Learn to repair bikes from Ernie.

B．Help the WalkBike hand out bikes.

C．Practice bike-riding with his friends.

D．Repair bikes for his classmates.

【小题3】What can we know from the last paragraph?

A．More and more students in Burbank learned to ride bikes.

B．Students across the whole country began to ride bikes.

C．Experts began to research on the benefit of riding bikes.

D．Volunteers appeared to repair bikes in the whole country.

【小题4】What's the best title for the passage?

A．An Environmentally Friendly Event

B．Ride a Bike to School

C．Raise Money for Bikes

D．Learn a Practical Skill

   Pop stars today enjoy what once only belonged to royalty. Wherever they go, people turn out in their thousands to greet them. The crowds go wild trying to catch a brief glimpse of their smiling, or colorfully dressed idols. The stars are transported by Rolls- Royces, private helicopters or executive aeroplanes. They are surrounded by managers,press agents and bodyguards. Photographs of them appear regularly in the press and all their comings and goings are reported. If they enjoy many of the privileges of royalty, they certainly share many of the inconveniences as well. They are no longer private individuals, but public property. The financial rewards they receive for this sacrifice cannot be calculated, for their rates of pay are great.
And why not? Society has always rewarded its top entertainers generously. The great days of Hollywood have become legendary:famous stars enjoy fame, wealth and adulation(奉承). According to today's standards, the excesses of Hollywood do not seem quite so surprising. A single record nowadays may earn much more in royalties(版税) than the films of the past ever did. The competition for the title"Top of the Pops"is fierce, and the rewards are truly huge.
It is only right that the stars should be paid in this way. Don't the top men in industry earn enormous salaries for the service they perform to their companies and their countries? Pop stars earn vast sums in foreign currency-often more than large industrial companies-and the taxman can only be grateful for their massive annual contributions to the exchequer(国库). So who would begrudge them their rewards?
It's all very well for people in boring jobs to complain about the successes and rewards of others. People who make envious remarks should remember that the most famous stars represent only the tip of the iceberg. For every famous star, there are hundreds of people struggling to earn a living. A man working in a steady job and looking forward to a pension at the end of it has no right to expect very high rewards. He has chosen security and peace of mind, so there will always be a limit to what he can earn. But a man who attempts to become a star is taking enormous risks. He knows at the very beginning that only a handful of competitors can get to the very top. He knows that years of concentrated effort may be rewarded with complete failure. But he knows, too, that the rewards for success are very high indeed: they are the payback for the huge risks involved and once he makes it, he will certainly earn them. That's the essence of private enterprise.
【小题1】The underlined word "begrudge"in the third paragraph is closest in meaning to "________".

A．be jealous of	B．be satisfied with
C．be anxious about	D．be crazy about

【小题2】According to the passage, which of the following can match the view of the author?

A．He who laughs last laughs best.

B．Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

C．He who makes no mistakes makes nothing.

D．Success belongs to the persevering.

【小题3】The author holds a(n) ______ attitude towards the high income of pop stars.

A．critical	B．indifferent
C．optimistic	D．supportive

【小题4】Which of the following is true according to the passage?

A．People are blind in idolizing stars.

B．There is fierce competition in becoming pop stars.

C．The government taxes pop stars very little.

D．Pop stars' life is more luxurious than that of royalty.

   Ask someone what they have done to help the environment recently and they will almost certainly mention recycling. Recycling in the home is very important of course. However, being forced to recycle often means we already have more material than we need. We are dealing with the results of that over-consumption in the greenest way possible, but it would be far better if we did not bring so much material home in the first place.

The total amount of packaging increased by 12% between 1999 and 2005. It now makes up a third of a typical household’s waste in the UK. In many supermarkets nowadays food items are packaged twice with plastic and cardboard.

Too much packaging is doing serious damage to the environment. The UK, for example, is running out of it for carrying this unnecessary waste. If such packaging is burnt, it gives off greenhouse gases which go on to cause the greenhouse effect. Recycling helps, but the process itself uses energy. The solution is not to produce such items in the first place. Food waste is a serious problem, too. Too many supermarkets encourage customers to buy more than they need. However, a few of them are coming round to the idea that this cannot continue, encouraging customers to reuse their plastic bags, for example.

But this is not just about supermarkets. It is about all of us. We have learned to associate packaging with quality. We have learned to think that something unpackaged is of poor quality. This is especially true of food. But it also applies to a wide range of consumer products, which often have far more packaging than necessary.

There are signs of hope. As more of us recycle, we are beginning to realize just how much unnecessary material we are collecting. We need to face the wastefulness of our consumer culture, but we have a mountain to climb.

【小题1】What does the underlined word “over-consumption” refer to?

A．Using too much packaging.

B．Recycling too much waste.

C．Making more products than necessary.

D．Having more material than is needed.

【小题2】The author uses figures in Paragraph 2 to show ________.

A．the tendency of cutting household waste

B．the increase of packaging recycling

C．the rapid growth of supermarkets

D．the fact of packaging overuse

【小题3】What can be inferred from Paragraph 4?

A．Unpackaged products are of bad quality.

B．Supermarkets care more about packaging.

C．It is improper to judge quality by packaging.

D．Other products are better packaged than food.

【小题4】What can we learn from the last paragraph?

A．Fighting wastefulness is difficult.

B．Needless material is mostly recycled.

C．People like collecting recyclable waste.

D．The author is proud of his consumer culture.