高考英语阅读练习

　　出国留学网高考频道在考试后及时公布各科高考试题答案和高考作文及试卷专家点评。请广大考生家长关注，祝福广大考生在2013年高考中发挥出最佳水平，考出好成绩!同时祝愿决战2014高考的新高三学员能倍加努力，在2014年高考中也能取得优异的成绩。

　　We bet that on cold wintry days, many of you love to stay in your warm home and, every now and then，come out into the kitchen for a snack. Unfortunately, plenty of creepy-crawly critters (爬行生物) like to do the same thing!

　　Winter is the time when bugs (虫子) invade your house without an invitation. The season can be tough for such creatures. In winter the air is cold, the ground is hard and many trees have no leaves. So bugs do what they have to do to survive.

　　Monarch butterflies head south to warmer climates. Ants crowd in deep underground colonies and eat food they have been storing all year. Many insects go into a deep sleep called diapauses. There‟ re different kinds of diapauses, but all are similar to hibernation, a time when bigger animals become inactive in the cold. Insects go into an inactive period, too, but it often isn‟ t when the temperature drops.

　　They rely on more dependable signals in the environment. For example, many insects can tell how much sunlight there‟ s each day. They use that to tell themselves when to shut down. Bugs are cold-blooded, meaning that their inside temperature is the same as the outside. They can‟ t move much when it gets below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So they search for any warm place.

　　They‟ re looking for protection. These guys have been doing this for 300 million years, s...

　　出国留学网高考频道在考试后及时公布各科高考试题答案和高考作文及试卷专家点评。请广大考生家长关注，祝福广大考生在2013年高考中发挥出最佳水平，考出好成绩!同时祝愿决战2014高考的新高三学员能倍加努力，在2014年高考中也能取得优异的成绩。

　　生态环保类

　　The need to feed a growing population is putting much pressure on the world's supply of water. With 97% of the world's water too salty to be drunk or used in

　　agriculture, the worldwide supply of water needs careful management, especially in agriculture. Although the idea of a water shortage(短缺)seems strange to someone fortunate enough to live in a high rainfall country, many of the world's agricultural industries experience constant water shortages.

　　Although dams can be built to store water for agricultural use in dry areas and dry seasons, the costs of water redistribution(重新分配)are very high. Not only is there the

　　cost of the engineering itself, but there is also an environmental cost to be considered. Where valleys(山谷)are flooded to create dams, houses are lost and wildlife homes destroyed. Besides, water may flow easily through pipes to fields, but it cannot be transported from one side of the world to the other. Each country must therefore rely on the management of its own water to supply its farming requirements.

　　This is particularly troubling for countries with agricultural industries in areas dependent on irrigation (灌溉). In Texas, farmers' overuse of irrigation water has resulted in a 25% reduction of the water stores. In the Central Valley area of

　　southwestern USA, a hu...

　　出国留学网高考频道在考试后及时公布各科高考试题答案和高考作文及试卷专家点评。请广大考生家长关注，祝福广大考生在2013年高考中发挥出最佳水平，考出好成绩!同时祝愿决战2014高考的新高三学员能倍加努力，在2014年高考中也能取得优异的成绩。

　　人物传记类

　　Arthur Miller (1915—2005) is universally recognized as one of the greatest dramatists of the 20th century. Miller's father had moved to the USA from Austria??Hungary, drawn like

　　so many others by the “Great American Dream”. However, he experienced severe financial hardship when his family business was ruined in the Great Depression of the early 1930s.

　　Miller's most famous play, Death of a Salesman, is a powerful attack on the American system, with its aggressive way of doing business and its insistence on money and social status as indicators of worth. In Willy Loman, the hero of the play, we see a man who has got into trouble with this system. Willy is “burnt out” and in the cruel world of business there is no room for sentiment: if he can't do the work, then he is no good to his employer, the

　　Wagner Company, and he must go. Willy is painfully aware of this, and at a loss as to what to do with his lack of success. He refuses to face the fact that he has failed and kills himself in the end.

　　When it was first staged in 1949, the play was greeted with enthusiastic reviews, and it won the Tony Award for Best Play, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was the first play to win all three of these major awards.

　　Miller died of heart failure at his ho...

　　出国留学网高考频道在考试后及时公布各科高考试题答案和高考作文及试卷专家点评。请广大考生家长关注，祝福广大考生在2013年高考中发挥出最佳水平，考出好成绩!同时祝愿决战2014高考的新高三学员能倍加努力，在2014年高考中也能取得优异的成绩。

　　科普小品类

　　For those who study the development of intelligence (智力) in the animal world，

　　self??awareness is an important measurement. An animal that is aware (意识) of itself has a high level of intelligence.

　　Awareness can be tested by studying whether the animal recognizes itself in the mirror, that is，its own reflected image (反射出的影像). Many animals fail this exercise bitterly, paying very little attention to the reflected image. Only humans, and some intelligent animals

　　like apes and dolphins，have been shown to recognize that the image in the mirror is of themselves.

　　Now another animal has joined the club. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that an Asian elephant has passed the mirror self??reflection test.

　　“We thought that elephants were the next important animal.” said Diana Reiss of the Wildlife Conservation Society, an author of the study with Joshua M. Plotnik and Fans B. M. de Waal of Emory University. With their large brains, Reiss said, elephants “seemed like cousins to apes and dolphins”.

　　The researchers tested Happy, Maxine and Patty, three elephants at the Bronx Zoo. They put an 8??foot??square mirror on a wall of the animals' play area (out of the sight of zoo visitors) and recorded what happened with cameras, including one built ...

　　出国留学网高考频道在考试后及时公布各科高考试题答案和高考作文及试卷专家点评。请广大考生家长关注，祝福广大考生在2013年高考中发挥出最佳水平，考出好成绩!同时祝愿决战2014高考的新高三学员能倍加努力，在2014年高考中也能取得优异的成绩。

　　In business, there's a speed difference: It's the difference between how important a firm's leaders say speed is to their competitive(竞争的) strategy(策略) and how fast the company actually moves.The difference is important regardless of industry and company size. Companies fearful of losing their competitive advantage spend much time and money looking for ways to pick up the speed.

　　In our study of 343 businesses, the companies that chose to go, go, go to try to gain_an_edge ended up with lower sales and operating incomes than those that paused at key moments to make sure they were on the right track.What's more, the firms that “slowed down to speed up” improved their top and bottom lines, averaging 40% higher sales and 52% higher operating incomes over a three??year period.

　　How did they disobey the_laws_of_business_physics,_taking more time than competitors yet performing better? They thought differently about what “slower” and “faster” mean.Firms sometimes fail to understand the difference between operational speed (moving quickly) and strategic speed (reducing the time it takes to deliver value).Simply increasing the speed of production, for example, may be one way to try to reduce the speed difference.But that often leads to reduced value over time, in the form of lower??quality products and services.

　　In our st...

　　出国留学网高考频道在考试后及时公布各科高考试题答案和高考作文及试卷专家点评。请广大考生家长关注，祝福广大考生在2013年高考中发挥出最佳水平，考出好成绩!同时祝愿决战2014高考的新高三学员能倍加努力，在2014年高考中也能取得优异的成绩。

　　A little under one-third of U.S. families have no Internet access and do not plan to survey released on Friday.

　　Park Associates, a Dallas-based technology market research firm, said 29 percent of U.S. families, or 31 million homes, do not have Internet access and do not intend to subscribe(预订)to an Internet service over the next 12 months. The second annual National Technology Scan conducted by Park found that the main reason why potential customers say they do not subscribe to the Internet is because of the low value to their daily lives rather than concerns over cost.

　　Forty-four percent of these families say they are not interested in anything on the Internet, versus just 22 percent who say they cannot afford a computer or the cost of Internet service, the survey showed. The answer ―I’m not sure how to use the Internet‖ came from 17 percent of participants who do not subscribe. The response ―I do all my e-commerce shopping and YouTube-watching at work‖ was cited by 14 percent of Internet-access users. Three percent said the Internet doesn’t reach their homes.

　　The study found U.S. broadband adoption grew to 52 percent over 2006, up from 42 percent in 2005. Roughly half of new subscribers converted(转变)from slower-speed, dial-up Internet access while the other half of families had no prior access.

　　―The indust...