[湖北]2012届湖北省八校高三第二次联考英语试卷

There existed an obvious ________ between the accounts of the witnesses, so a judgment was not announced in court.

Our milk powder is especially suitable for children under 6, as it helps a lot to build the body's natural ________.

A best friend is one who can always read your minds when you are at a loss for the ________ words to complete your thoughts.

After six months training, the whole team is ________ in form, and is expected to be able to get through to the final.

The family were enjoying their dinner, so I was wondering if I had arrived at a/an ____ time.

The U.S. government on Wednesday ________ former Commerce Secretary Gary Locke as ambassador to China, making him the first Chinese-American ever to take the post.

Miss Green often said “God helps those who help themselves”, intending to ________ on us the significance of being independent.

With the situation worsening, the army threatens to ________ if a general election is not to be held as scheduled, BBC reports.

The national team’s unexpected 6-2 win on Friday ________ a drunken celebration that lasted well into weekend.

Although police could be seen everywhere, they seemed to be searching the houses almost ________.

What I noticed first about my new parrot, Chico, was that he couldn’t fly. His wings had been cut short and he was stuck on the   1   just like us humans. When the weather turned nice, I took Chico outside. I sat him on a branch of a tree, hoping to make him   2  . At first he seemed   3  . He walked back and forth on the branch looking anxious or nervous. He didn’t even flap his wings in an attempt to fly. Somehow he knew he was   4  .
One day Chico got especially excited . He paced back and forth and made an incredible amount of   5  . Then all of a sudden he stopped and let out an even louder scream. He started   6   flapping his wings for the first time ever － then he lifted off the   7   like a space shuttle! I was amazed and   8   . Little did I know his feathers had been growing back, and Chico had been   9   until the moment was ripe for escape!
Two days later Chico   10   . First I tried to trick him back with food, but he would not come near me. Then I took his   11   and put it away—still he would not come. Finally, I made him a firm promise that I would let him   12   every day the weather was nice if he did come back.   13   , he flew onto my shoulder.
From that day on, whenever the weather was good I would let him out early and he would fly around and be back before dark. The   14   lasted for two months before suddenly Chico became   15  . The vet said that he had been infected with a disease from the pigeons in the neighborhood. Within a few days he died.
I was very sad. The   16   crossed my mind that if I had not set him free to fly, he would be still alive. But what   17   is there in being a bird if you can’t fly?
Chico made his first break for   18  on a late Monday afternoon in April. When will you make yours? You too can take a   19   when the conditions are right, knowing you too, in your own way, were built to fly. If you don’t    20  , what will be the purpose of your life?

A．floor B．earth C．scene D．road

A．smarter B．healthier C．happier D．stronger

A．disappointed B．determined C．frightened D．confused

A．incapable B．disabled C．wrong D．stupid

A．noise B．progress C．energy D．consideration

A．slowly B．gently C．madly D．gracefully

A．ground B．tree C．cage D．branch

A．moved B．shocked C．delighted D．excited

A．struggling B．pacing C．flying D．waiting

A．left B．returned C．survived D．recovered

A．cage B．feather C．chain D．food

A．in B．out C．off D．alone

A．As usually B．At that moment C．Once in a while D．At the same time

A．action B．attempt C．routine D．effort

A．active B．injured C．sad D．ill

A．fact B．concern C．thought D．detail

A．sense B．mistake C．interest D．problem

A．life B．freedom C．fun D．food

A．break B．holiday C．chance D．look

A．keep yourself busy B．cheer yourself up C．let yourself down D．set yourself free

For the past two years, 8-year-old Harli Jordean from Stoke Newington, London, has been selling marbles(弹珠). His successful marble company, Marble King, sells all things marble-related － from affordable tubs of the glass playthings to significantly expensive items like Duke of York solitaire tables － sourced, purchased and processed by the mini-CEO himself.
“I like having my own company. I like being the boss,” Harli told the Mirror.
With profits now in the thousands, “the world’s youngest CEO” has had to get his mother and older brothers to help him meet the growing demand.
Harli launched Marble King after swapping marbles at school led to schoolchildren consuming his marble collection. Yes, he literally “lost his marbles.” Harli and his mother, Tina, turned to the Internet to find replacements.
Harli saw an empty space online: the marbles he wanted were hard to find. Within months, Harli had his own marble-selling website － and orders started pouring in.
Tina says her son's attachment to marbles started when he was just 6.
“His attachment became so passionate that we started calling him the Marble King — so when he wanted to set up a website it was the natural name for it,” she told The Sun.
“I never thought it would become so popular － we are struggling to cope with the number of orders at times.”
The 8-year-old boy has his sights set on expanding his business and launching his own brand of marbles.
“Sometimes his ideas are so grand we have to scale them back a bit. But his dream is still to own Britain's biggest marble shop and open stores around the world,” Tina told The Daily Mail.
“At the moment he is annoying me by creating his own Marble King marbles － so that could well be the next step for him.”
Harli’s Marble Company became popular as soon as he launched it because ______.

How many mass media are mentioned in the passage?

The underlined expression “scale them back” is closest in meaning to ______.

What message do the last two paragraphs carry?

Do American children still learn handwriting in school? In the age of the keyboard, some people seem to think handwriting lessons are on the way out. 90% of teachers say they are required to teach handwriting. But studies have yet to answer the question of how well they are teaching it. One study published this year found that about three out of every four teachers say they are not prepared to teach handwriting. Some teachers are teaching handwriting by providing instruction for ten to fifteen minutes a day, and then other teachers who basically teach it for sixty to seventy minutes a day － which really is pretty much for handwriting.
Many adults remember learning that way － by copying letters over and over again. Today’s thinking is that short periods of practice are better. Many experts also think handwriting should not be taught by itself. Instead, they say it should be used as a way to get students to express ideas. After all, that is why we write.
Handwriting involves two skills. One is legibility, which means forming the letters so they can be read. The other is fluency － writing without having to think about it. Fluency continues to develop up until high school.
But not everyone masters these skills. Teachers commonly report that about one fourth of their kids have poor handwriting. Some people might think handwriting is not important any more because of computers and voice recognition programs.
But Steve Graham at Vanderbilt says word processing is rarely done in elementary school, especially in the early years. American children traditionally first learn to print, and then to write in cursive, which connects the letters. But guess what we learned from a spokeswoman for the College Board, which administers the SAT college admission test. More than 75% of students choose to print their essay on the test rather than write in cursive.
We can infer from the first paragraph that ______.

Which of the following about traditional handwriting in the USA is NOT true?

Some American people consider handwriting not important any more because ______.

______ may serve as the best title for the passage.

Many cities in the world are benefiting from the night activities of a group of people who call themselves guerrilla (游击队) gardeners. Armed with trowels, spades and a van full of flowers and plants, guerrilla gardeners turn abandoned urban land into a blaze of color. In city centre locations where there was mud, weeds and empty plastic bottles, residents often wake up to find that the wasted area has been transformed overnight with brightly-colored bedding plants.
In most British cities, local governments and police turn a blind eye to the effort of the gardeners, whose activities are always carried out under cover of nightfall. And so far, there has been nothing but praise from the astonished and delighted local residents when they find their neighborhood transformed in such a striking fashion.
Not only do the guerrilla gardeners beautify neglected places, they also return regularly to water the plants and weed the flower beds. They also make sure that at least some of the plants they bring are evergreens, which means that the area doesn’t look depressing in the winter months.
The first guerrilla gardener in London was Richard Reynolds, whose day job is at an advertising agency. Mr. Reynolds, a graduate of Oxford University, began his efforts two years ago when he moved to a flat in a tower block in South London. From his balcony, he could see several empty concrete pots, placed by the local governments to contain plants but never used. He went out after midnight and filled the pots with plants, and then planted more flowers in the path leading to the entrance to the block.
He then set up a website to explain his plan and called upon more gardeners to join him. Cash donations flooded in and, more importantly, volunteers rushed to be part of the campaign. Within six months, there were five hundred people in London prepared to come out at very short notice to restore neglected parts of the urban landscape. There are now unofficial but carefully-organized groups in many cities in Britain and North America and there is also a website where would-be urban gardeners can find out the location of the next expedition.
These guerrilla gardeners do their work ______.

Richard Reynolds decided to fill the pots with plants in order to ______.

The guerrilla gardeners often return to their night working places with the purpose of ______.

It can be inferred from the text that these guerrilla gardeners ______.

There are plenty of creams etc on the market that help you look younger, but today, Dr Oz is going to show how some people are actually living longer.
“We are going to talk about extreme life extension,” he says. “I am talking in details about allowing us to go into our second century of life with the energy that you have when you are a young person.”
Owing to advances in technology and research on how diet affect the aging process, Dr Oz says it might be possible for some people to live to see their 120th birthdays.
There’s one man in Oprah’s audience who Dr Oz says may become the first man in history to live to be 150 years old. Joe Cordell is one of thousands around the world who believe they’ve found the key to an extreme long life --- calorie restriction leads to a longer, healthier life.
At 59 Joe weighs 130 pounds. He may not look like a person who needs to count calories, but as part of his life extension program, he inspects every mouth of food that passes through his system.
Every day for the past seven years, Joe has limited himself to about 1,950 calories.
He believes that by eating less and restricting his caloric intake, he will trigger a genetic switch that slows the aging process.
Joe doesn’t take away himself of food. Instead, the then 52-year-old father filled up on natural fruits, vegetables and lean proteins(瘦蛋白) that were packed with necessary vitamins and nutrients. “Whenever you are thinking about calorie restriction, you should continually think about getting the most nutritional amount per calorie,” Joe says.
In keeping with this principle, Joe starts every morning with three apples…but he only eats the peels. “Most of the fiber is in the peel, and more importantly, most of the nutrients are in the peel,” he says.
“It is important to eat some nuts with breakfast so that you do take in some fat, some healthy fats,” he says. “I think it helps the absorption of the nutrients, and it is very filling.”
For lunch, Joe usually eats a large salad, loaded with vegetables. At dinnertime, he and his family enjoy lean meat or fish and more vegetables.
When Joe started practicing calorie restriction, he weighed 175 pounds. Since then, he has lost 45 pounds, and he says he hasn’t had a cold in seven years. Though he is in his “golden years”, researchers studying Joe say he has the body of a 20-year-old athlete.
According to Joe, the appropriate fat intake may help ______?

What can we learn about Joe since he started the calorie restriction program?

The underlined word “trigger” in paragraph 7 can probably be replaced by ______.

According to the passage, the extreme life extension refers to _______.

The concept of solar power satellites, or SPS, first put forward in the 1960s, is still not widely known by the general public. For example, at many public exhibitions about energy, SPS is not even mentioned. This is mainly because very little money has been spent on SPS research
There are people who claim that SPS is unrealistic － because launch costs are much too high today; or because it is too far away. So why do we believe that it is important to continue to do researches on SPS? The reason is very simple.
Humans are going to need huge amounts of electric power in coming decades. Within 50 years the world population is expected to double, while economic growth will continue around the world, especially in the poorer countries. But existing energy sources already face serious problems. They are limited; they are polluted; they are dangerous. So 50 or 100 years from now, where is our power going to come from? Nobody knows. And so we believe that new large-scale possibilities should be studied further.
We must remember that humans have some choices concerning our future. To some extent we can choose the direction in which our civilization develops. And choices that are made in the coming decades － such as the energy sources that we will or will not use, will have major, long-term meaning for human life on earth. We believe that if research continues to show that SPS is environmentally and economically attractive, SPS will open the door to a much more attractive future for human civilization than any ground-based energy source, and one that the public will support and that young people will find challenging and exciting. Furthermore energy from SPS can be readily used in developing countries, as the SPS 2000 project will show, thus aiding economic development worldwide. In addition, by creating large commercial fund for space engineering, SPS will open the frontier of space to economic development, thus creating a limitless new field for the growth of the world economy.
Which of the following may be the best title for the passage?

Which of the following statements about SPS is TRUE?

Paragraph 3 mainly talks about ______.

The writer’s attitude towards the research can best be summarized by the saying “______”.

阅读下列各小题，根据汉语译文及句末括号内的英语单词完成句子
We had a very pleasant chat yesterday, reviewing those young and innocent days spent together. You know, we ________________ for nearly 20 years. (meet)
昨天我们相谈甚欢，回顾了一起度过的青葱岁月。要知道，我们几乎20年没见面了。
Jenny happened ________________ my phone number in the directory when I dropped in at her house. (look)
当我偶然到珍妮家串门时，她正巧在电话簿上查我的号码。
You can hardly imagine ________________ he has made in such a short time! (progress)
你简直难以想象他在这么短的时间内取得了多么大的进步！
The number of people infected with HIV may reach 50 million by 2020 ________________ to prevent the spread of the disease. (measure)
除非采取有效措施来遏制传播，否则到2020年，感染HIV病毒的人数可能达到五千万。
We treasured very much the chance of ________________ by the GM face to face. (interview)
我们非常珍惜这次由总经理亲自面试的机会。
The better prepared you are for the performance, ________________ for you to suffer from a stage fright. (possible)
你为表演准备得越充分，怯场的可能就会越小。
In those rough times mistakes, which ________________, were crowding in at the same time and my life was totally messed up. (avoid)
在那些诸事不顺的日子里，本可以避免的错误全都同时发生了，我的生活完全一团糟。
From the point of experts, it is not advertising’s use of the housewife role ________________ women, but the way it is handled. (bother)
从专家的角度看，令女性不快的不是广告使用了家庭主妇这一角色，而是对待这一角色的方式。
This grand theater, part of ________________ a field hospital for 3 years during the war, is expected to be restored to its original splendor. (serve)
这座大剧院有望得以修复，重塑昔日风华。它的一部分在战争期间还曾作过三年的战地医院呢。
________________ a red card, which reads “For Your 18^th Birthday”. (attach)
附在盒子上的是一张红色卡片，写着“祝贺你18岁生日”。

假如你叫李华，是一名正在澳大利亚某中学交流的学生，在当地报纸上读到以下报道中国高考的文章：
Gaokao, China’s college entry test, is considered to be the most difficult academic test in the world. Only a lucky few are able to cross the “single-log bridge”, standing out from thousands of candidates. It is gaokao that largely determines Chinese students’ future success.
你不太赞同这种理解。请你用英语给该报编辑写一封信，谈一谈不上大学也有自己的优势，亦可有所作为。
注意：
①无须写标题，不得照抄英语提示语；
②除诗歌外，文体不限；
③开头和结尾已给出，不得再抄写，不计入总词数；
④文中不得透露个人姓名和学校名称；
⑤词数为120左右。
Dear Sir or Madam,
I appreciate your interest in China’ gaokao. However, as a young man from China, I’m afraid I don’t quite agree with the definition given.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thanks for your consideration.
Yours Sincerely
Li Hu