A month after Hurricane Katrina, I returned home in New Orleans. There lay my house, reduced to waist-high ruins, smelly and dirty.

Before the trip, I’d had my car fixed. When the office employee of the garage was writing up the bill, she noticed my Louisiana license plate. “You from New Orleans?” she asked. I said I was. “No charge,” she said, and firmly shook her head when I reached for my wallet. The next day I went for a haircut, and the same thing happened.

As my wife was studying in Florida, we decided to move there and tried to find a rental house that we could afford while also paying off a mortgage(抵押貸款) on our ruined house. We looked at many places, but none was satisfactory. We’d begun to accept that we’d have to live in extremely reduced circumstances for a while, when I got a very curious e-mail from a James Kennedy in California. He’d read some pieces I’d written about our sufferings for Slate, the online magazine, and wanted to give us (“no conditions attached”) a new house across the lake from New Orleans.

It sounded too good to be true, but I replied, thanking him for his exceptional generosity, that we had no plans to go back. Then a poet at the University of Florida offered to let his house to me while he went to England on his one-year paid leave. The rent was rather reasonable. I mentioned the poet’s offer to James Kennedy, and the next day he sent a check covering our entire rent for eight months.

Throughout this painful experience, the kindness of strangers has done much to bring back my faith in humanity. It’s almost worth losing your worldly possessions to be reminded that people are really nice when given half a chance.

The garage employee’s attitude toward the author was that of ____.

A. unconcern    B. sympathy    C. doubt    D. tolerance

What do we know about James Kennedy?

A. He was a writer of an online magazine.

B. He was a poet at the University of Florida.

C. He offered the author a new house free of charge.

D. He learned about the author’s sufferings via e-mail.

It can be inferred from the text that____.

A. the author’s family was in financial difficulty.

B. rents were comparatively reasonable despite the disaster.

C. houses were difficult to find in the hurricane-stricken area.

D. the mortgage on the ruined house was paid off by the bank.

The author learned from his experience that ____.

A. worldly possessions can be given up when necessary.

B. generosity should be encouraged in some cases.

C. people benefit from their sad stories.

D. human beings are kind after all.

【小題1】B

【小題2】C

【小題3】A

【小題4】D


解析:

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科目：高中英語 來源：北京高考真題 題型：閱讀理解

In the following article, some sentences or paragraphs have been removed. For questions 1 to 5, choose the
most suitable one from the list AF to fit into each of the numbered gaps. There is ONE which does not fit in
any of the gaps.
     Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great conquerors
and generals, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward are often never mentioned at all. We
do not know who first set a broken leg, or launched a seagoing boat, or calculated the length of the year?
but we know all about the killers and destroyers. People think a great deal of them, so much so that on all the
highest pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror or a general.
     1. It is just possible they are, but they are not the most civilized. Animals fight? so do savages? hence to
be good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to be civilized.
     2. People fight to settle quarrels. Fighting means killing, and civilized peoples ought to be able to find some
way of settling their disputes other than by seeing which side can kill off the greater number of the other side,
and then saying that that side which has killed most has won.
     3. That is what the story of mankind has on the whole been like. Even our own age has fought the two
greatest wars in history, in which millions of people were killed. And while today it is true that people do not
fight and kill each other in the streets, nations and countries have not learnt to do this yet, and still behave like
savages. But we must not expect too much. After all, the race of men has only just started. From the point of
view of evolution, human beings are very young children indeed, babies, in fact, of a few months old.
     4. These figures are difficult to grasp? so let us scale them down. Suppose that we reckon the whole past
of living creatures on the earth as one hundred years? then the whole past of man works out at about one
month, and during that month there have been civilizations for between seven and eight hours.
     5. Taking man' civilized past at about seven or eight hours, we may estimate his future at about one hundred
thousand years. Thus mankind is only at the beginning of its civilized life, and as I say, we must not expect
too much. The past of 8 man has been on the whole a pretty beastly business, a business of fighting and killing.
We must not expect even civilized peoples not to have done these things. All we can ask is that they will
sometimes have done something else.
     [A] Even being good at getting other people to fight for you and telling them how to do it most efficiently-
this, after all, is what conquerors and generals have done-is not being civilized.
     [B] And I think most people believe that the greatest countries are those that have beaten in battle the
greatest number of other countries and ruled over them as conquerors.
     [C] We have got to the stage of keeping the rules and behaving properly in daily life. However, every year
conflicts between countries and nations are still claiming thousands of lives.
     [D] And not only has won, but, because it has won, has been in the right. For that is what going to war
means? it means saying that might is right.
     [E] So you see there has been little time to learn in, but there will be oceans of time in which to learn better.
     [F] Scientists reckon that there has been life of some sort on the earth in the form of jellyfish and that kind
of creature for about twelve hundred million years? but there have been men for only one million years, and
there have been civilized men for about eight thousand years at the outside.
1-(     )     2-(     )     3-(     )     4-(     )     5-(     )

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