北京市重点中学2023-2024学年高一上学期12月月考英语试题

—We____ busy with our work for months, so we went to the beach to relax ourselves.

—Sorry, I ____myself clear. We want to return on October 20.

—NO, I ____ the book, so I already knew the story

— Well, I ______ the house and I must finish the work tomorrow.

—No, I____my homework all day yesterday.

—How nice! you ____a different culture then.

—Oh, really? I______. I ______ visit her.

The Party of Their Lives

In Los Angeles's infamous Skid Row, there are hundreds of children living on the streets or in shelters. It's a place where dreams go to die. But one couple is determined to use their own experience with loss to foster a sense of hope.

In 2013, Mary Davis and her husband lost their first unborn kid. Refusing to let the heartbreak break them, they became volunteers in a Skid Row homeless shelter. They found that many of the kids there had never had a single birthday party before, so they decided to throw a birthday party for those homeless kids. They took over a room in the Union Rescue Mission and filled it with streamers, gifts and a cake. The kids were so excited that they made their own music—singing and clapping and, of course, laughing. 

Since then, the couple have thrown a party each and every month. They routinely attract 250 kids and their parents. An hour before each party, volunteers arrive to set up the decorations and activities: face painting, balloon artists, a DJ, cake, and pizza. There are small presents for the kids celebrating their birthdays, but the Davis make sure there are more than enough to go around. 

"I remember a mom came with her kid," Mary says. "It was their first night at the shelter, and her child had a birthday. We had an extra gift for her—pink headphones. The little girl was so excited. And her mom... she's crying. ‘I never imagined we would ever need to be in a shelter. I didn't know what to expect. But I really didn't expect a birthday party for my child.' she cried with happiness."

Doing her best to normalize these kids' lives is both heartwarming and bittersweet, Mary says. "If you look outside, you see homeless person after homeless person on the street, and it reminds you that these kids don't get to leave this area after the party."

It may be why, after throwing 88 parties, she still cries after each one. She credits the kids in the shelter with helping her hold on to hope. "We didn't realize how much joy they were going to bring us," she told CBS News. "And it was so healing for both kids and us."

Bright Nights, Big Problems

Astronomers rate the darkness of our skies on a range of 9 (brightest) to 1 (darkest), and most of us spend our lives in the light of levels 5 to 8. All over the globe our nights are growing brighter, and almost nowhere are they growing darker. Studies increasingly link our overuse of light at night with health concerns such as sleep disorders and diseases. Other studies report the damaging ecological consequences and the big waste of energy. But the steady loss of darkness from our lives is not easily measured, for the true value of darkness is something we are barely aware of.

Since the beginning of time, a sky with stars was part of the common human experience. Everywhere on Earth, on most nights, people came face to face with the universe. This experience influenced their beliefs—their very understanding of their place in the world. Today, many of us live under skies which are polluted by light. We live under a night sky showing much fewer stars. Although our night sky continues to shape us, it is the absence of the universe around us that influences our beliefs to create. We are being shaped by a less experience of darkness, and most of us don't even know what we are missing.

Our Milky Way galaxy is home to several hundred billion stars, and the universe home to several hundred billion other galaxies. A sky with a large number of stars encourages us to emphasize our importance, to imagine humanity as the center of all things. Face to face with the endless size of the universe, we have the chance to know how insignificant we really are. But we also realize the true largeness of our living on this planet, and realize that we have an enormous responsibility to care, that there is no other place to go, that home is here.

"Everyone needs beauty as well as bread," wrote John Muir, American naturalist. Lighting designers understand that without darkness, there is no "city of light", and they work constantly to create their city's atmospheric beauty by mixing artificial light with darkness. And with night's moonlit geographies, its smells of desert rain and autumn fires, its insect symphonies interrupted by a bird's call on a lake, natural darkness has many offerings of its own.

Yet we are completely involved in artificial light. Much of this lighting is wholly unnecessary, born of habit and lack of awareness. So let us become aware: simply by keeping our existing lights we could significantly reduce their negative effects on our body, our mind, our soul. Artificial light at night is a wonder, a quality that enriches our lives. But the same has always been true of darkness, and can be again.

What is a dream?

For centuries, people have wondered about the strange places that they seem to visit in their sleep.  However, they have been valued as necessary to a person's health and happiness. 

Historically people thought dreams contained messages from God. It was only in the twentieth century that people started to study dreams scientifically believing that they tell about a person's character.  He believed that dreams allow a person to express fantasies or fears, which would be socially unacceptable in real life. 

The second theory to become popular was Carl Jung's compensation theory. Jung, a former student of Freud, said that the purpose of a dream is not to hide something, but rather to communicate it to the dreamer.  Thus, people who think too highly of themselves may dream about falling; those who think too little of themselves dream of being heroes. 

Using more recent research, William Domhoff from the University of California found that dreaming is a mental skill that needs time to develop in humans. Until they reach age five, they can't express very well what their dreams are about. Once people become adults, there is little or no change in their dreams. The dreams of men and women differ. For instance, the characters that appear in the dreams of men are often other men, and often involve physical aggression.

The meaning of dreams continues to be difficult to understand.

 If you dream that a loved one is going to die, do not panic. The dream may have meaning, but it does not mean that your loved one is going to die. 

A. Dreams make up for what is lacking in waking life. 

B. However, people should not take their dreams as reality. 

C. They have been considered as meaningless nighttime journeys. 

D. It gives scientists chances to better understand human mind. 

E. Children do not dream as much as adults. 

F. They think their mind is trying to tell them something. 

G. First, there was Sigmund Freud's theory.