2017届北京朝阳区高三上期中考试英语试卷

—Yes, she was promoted to president of her company, ________ surprised everyone.

—No, I ________ computer games.

—I was born in New York, but this is ________ I grew up.

    Pooja Dhingra is an Indian chef and businesswoman, the owner of macaroon bakery chain Le 15 Patisserie (西饼店) in Mumbai. She should have been a lawyer. But while studying 1 at university in Mumbai, she decided to 2 her major and do something more creative.

    Dhingra's father and her elder brother are both restaurant owners. Remembering helping her mother in the 3 during her childhood, she decided to work with food instead of legal cases. She 4 her parents to let her attend a hospitality (招待) and management course in Switzerland. Three years later, she went to Paris to learn the 5 of French baking. There her friends took her to one of the best macaroon shops. After just one 6, Dhingra determined that when she returned to Mumbai she would 7 her own shop, the first of its kind in India.

    After graduation, she started making macaroons in her parents' kitchen, 8 it was a complete failure. The hot and wet weather in Mumbai made it 9 to make delicious cakes. It took her around six months of research and 60 failed 10 to finally get a favorite recipe. Yet being both young and female 11 she faced extra challenges. “The biggest problem was to get people to take you 12,” she says. “For example, if I had to buy machinery, I would have to ask my father to make these calls for me.”

    Dhingra eventually opened her first shop in 2010. To 13 sales in a city where very few people knew what a macaroon was, Dhingra gave away some 14 macaroons to customers, which made her cakes popular immediately. She continued 15 new recipes. “Once you know basic techniques, inventing recipes is very 16,” she said. “All you need is an open 17. I get a lot of my ideas and 18 from basic things around me.”

    Dhingra is the author of a best-selling cookery book, The Big Book of Treats. She also started running classes on how to make macaroons and other cakes. In 2016, Dhingra 19 her business, opening a new location called Le 15 Café. Today, as a professional baker, Dhingra 20 up one of India's finest patisseries .

Dear Sir,

    I am writing to express my concern about the plans to build a motorway near our village.

    Haldersham is one of the loveliest villages in England. It is peaceful and quiet, and it is situated in a very attractive valley. There are also several beautiful countryside walks in the surroundings, with a view of many rare trees and plants.

    Most of the people who live in Haldersham have moved here from other places, often from London and other big cities. They have bought houses here to live in a place far away from the noise and the stress of the big city. They paid a lot of money for their houses, but they knew they would get a high quality of life for it.

    If the planned motorway is built, life in Haldersham will change greatly. There will be a lot of noise around us, and nobody will want to go on the walks. House prices will certainly go down, because nobody will want to buy houses in a place close to a motorway. Haldersham will become an ugly place.

    I don't think any of the people living in this beautiful village want that, and we all believe exposure to noise pollution can have a direct influence on our health. So, let's all tell the politicians who support the motorway plans what we think about them!

Yours faithfully,

Hilary Riley

    Most of us have gone away from “mad men” in the street, only to realize that they are in fact using a Bluetooth headset. Now a new University of Pennsylvania study shows that muttering can actually help people find lost objects—in other words, saying the name of an object helps you find it more quickly.

    Previous work has suggested that speaking aloud while performing step-by-step tasks, like tying shoelaces (鞋带), can help kids guide their behavior and let them focus on the job in hand. However, scientists were not sure if speaking aloud when performing tasks could help adults in the same way, especially when looking for particular objects. Professor Gary Lupan and Daniel Swingley, writing for the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, carried out some experiments. They hoped to give the fact that next time you lose your keys, muttering “keys, keys, keys” can in fact help you find them.

    Inspired by viewing people muttering to themselves as they try to find things like peanut butter in a supermarket, the researchers conducted two experiments to see if this actually worked. In the first, participants were shown 20 pictures of various objects and were asked to find a certain one, with some seeing a text label (标签) telling them what they were looking for. These participants were then asked to search for the object again while saying the word to themselves, with results showing that saying it aloud helped people find the object more quickly.

    The second experiment saw participants performing a shopping task, where they were shown photographs of items (物品) commonly found on supermarket shelves. They were asked to find all examples of a particular item, so if they were asked for apples they had to find all the bags of apples, as quickly as possible. The researchers found that there was also an advantage in saying the name of the product aloud when they were searching for something familiar.

    The University of Pennsylvania study shows that muttering can actually help people reach the target object—in other words, muttering to oneself helps to focus the mind on something. It works more effectively than seeing a written description. Repeating the word over and over again helps even more.

Why I've taken a break from holidays

    It is now close to four years since I last took a holiday. This is because I have come to the conclusion, over the course of my adult life, that I am not very good at it. You might think this sounds like saying you're not very good at drinking tea or listening to music. What could possibly be difficult about the natural act of putting your working life on hold for a couple of weeks and going somewhere warm to do nothing?

    I was a model holidaymaker as a kid. However, the problems started during my twenties. A trip to the south of France was ended after just two days, mainly because I had an urge to check my e-mails. Similarly, my honeymoon was cut short by 48 hours—not because my wife and I weren't enjoying ourselves, but because we were missing our cats.

    So what is my problem? On the surface, I'm probably a bit of a homebody. And I just find the pressure of being on holiday too severe: it always feels like having a gun held to my head and being forced to have fun. Somehow, packing a list of possessions and meeting a scheduled flight has none of the excitement of suddenly deciding to take a day off and driving somewhere for the fun of it.

    Thankfully, I'm not alone. This summer, most of my friends have decided not to have a break. And a recent survey (调查) proved the downside of holidays, with the results showing that nearly two thirds of people found that the calming effects of a holiday wore off within 24 hours, as stress levels returned to normal. And this year The Idler magazine published its Book of Awful Holidays. Here you will find a list of the five most ecologically-damaging vacations it's possible to take, along with 50 painful holiday experiences voted for on The Idler website.

    What interests me is what the concept of a “holiday” says about our lives. For me, the point of living is to have a life you enjoy for 52 weeks a year. The more I like my life and the better I structure it, the less I want to go away. Maybe I'm an unusual person for not liking holidays, but I just feel the time when I'm not working is too valuable to waste on them.

    Recycling is very important and necessary in today's world. The most important reason for this is that human progress and industry have made it possible for people to have lots of things, and when people have many material possessions, they are bound to throw some of them away.

    Recycling is a way for us to keep the world clean as items are broken down and used again, preventing the littering of the environment. Instead of throwing all your garbage into the dustbin, you should separate paper, metal, glass, and plastic into different containers. They can be turned into valuable compost, which is the perfect plant food and soil disease fighter.

    You can see if an item has been made from recycled materials by its label. If it's been recycled, it will say so. Also instead of always buying new clothes, you can arrange to have a clothing exchange with your friends. You bring clothes you don't want and pick items you want from what other people have brought. Not only does this save the environment, but it also saves your money. This saying can be applied to all sorts of things: books, CDs, furniture, etc. Also try shopping at second-hand stores, because they often have lots of items still in good shape for you to choose.

    Many countries have made it easy for people to recycle, as alongside the normal garbage trucks, special garbage trucks come and pick up recyclables. However, in some countries the responsibility is left up to the ordinary people to recycle. Recycling represents just one way in which we can help the environment. But it is an effective one and one that we can actively influence.

注意：1）. 词数不少于50；

2）. 邮件的开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数。

Dear Peter,

……

Yours,

Li Hua

假设你是红星中学高三一班的学生李华。请根据以下四幅图的先后顺序，介绍你和几位同学在“传承非物质文化遗产”活动期间参观毛猴艺术博物馆的完整过程，并以“Visiting the Museum of Hairy Monkeys”为题，给校刊“英语角”写一篇英文稿件。

注意：1. 词数不少于60；2. 稿件的开头已给出，不计入总词数。

提示词：毛猴 hairy monkey

Visiting the Museum of Hairy Monkeys

    Last week my classmates and I went to the museum of hairy monkeys for the activity of promoting intangible cultural heritage.

    ……