Loneliness is a curious thing. Most of us can remember feeling most lonely when we were not in fact alone at all, but when we were surrounded by people. Everyone has experienced, at full of happy laughing people. It suddenly seems to you as if everybody knows everybody else, everybody knows what is going on; everybody, that is, except you.
This feeling of loneliness which can overcome you when you are in a crowd is very difficult to get rid of. People living alone are advised to tackle their loneliness by joining a club or a society, by going out and meeting people.
The passage is mainly about______.
A. loneliness.
B. experience.
C. memory.
D. isolation.
查看答案
As well as (6)_____ back the Spanish plan to invade England by several months, Dr. Aka's daring attack (7)_____ the success of a popular new drink. For among the stores that he (8)_____ from Cadiz were 2,900 large barrels of sack, a wine made in the Jerez region of Spain, and the (9)_____ of today's sherry. The wine makers of Jerez looked for overseas markets, and sack started to take off in England. In 1587, the celebratory drinking of the sack brought back from Cadiz by Dr. Aka gave it a further (10)_____ and made it hugely fashionable, (11)_____ its Spanish origin.
For (12)_____ chemical reasons, sack was an unusually long-lasting and (13)_____ wine. This made it ideal for taking on long sea voyages, (14)_____ which alcoholic drinks acted as a vital social lubricant that (15)_____ the hardship of spending weeks packed into a (16)_____ ship. Columbus took sack with him to the new world in the 1490s, making it the first wine to be (17)_____ into the Americas.
In 1604, sack was (18)_____ official recognition of (19)_____ when James I (20)_____ an ordinance limiting its consumption at court. By this time sack was popularly known as sherris-sack(sherris being a corruption of Jerez), which eventually became the modern word sherry.
A. where
B. when
C. as
D. which
With Christmas Day around the corner, Hong Kong's Provisional Regional Council announced that a Christmas tree decoration competition will be held on Sunday in conjunction with the ongoing Regional Council Festival.
Members of the public are welcome to take part in the competition as families or small groups. Each team should be formed by at least three persons.
A total of 99 Christmas trees of 1.5 metres in height will be available for the participating teams to decorate. Participants can bring along their own decoration materials and to use their imagination and creativity to achieve the best results.
Each participating team can take home the Christmas tree it has decorated as a souvenir. In addition, there will be cash awards for the winners.
Each participating team should at least have __________ members.
A. two
B. three
C. four
D. five
1 Since the early 1930s, Swiss banks had prided themselves on their system of banking secrecy and numbered accounts. Over the years, they had successfully withstood every challenge to this system by their own government who, in turn, had been frequently urged by foreign governments to reveal information about the financial affairs of certain account holders. The result of this policy of secrecy was that a kind of mystique had grown up around Swiss banking. There was a widely-held belief that Switzerland was irresistible to wealthy foreigners, mainly because of its numbered accounts and bankers' reluctance to ask awkward questions of depositors. Contributing to the mystique was the view, carefully propagated by the banks themselves, that if this secrecy was ever given up, foreigners would fall over themselves in the rush to withdraw money, and the Swiss banking system would virtually collapse overnight.
2 To many, therefore, it came like a bolt out of the blue, when, in 1977, the Swiss banks announced they had signed a pact with the Swiss National Bank (the Central Bank). The aim of the agreement was to prevent the improper use of the country's bank secrecy laws, and its effect was to curb severely the system of secrecy.
3 The rules which the banks had agreed to observe made the opening of numbered accounts subject to much closer scrutiny than before. The banks would be required, if necessary, to identify the origin of foreign funds going into numbered and other accounts. The idea was to stop such accounts being used for dubious purposes. Also, they agreed not to accept funds resulting from tax evasion or from crime.
4 The pact represented essentially a tightening up of banking rules. Although the banks agreed to end relations with clients whose identities were unclear or who were performing improper acts, they were still not obliged to inform. on a client to anyone, including the Swiss government. To some extent, therefore, the principle of secrecy had been maintained.
Swiss banks took pride in______.
A. the number of their accounts.
B. withholding client information.
C. being mysterious to the outsiders.
D. attracting wealthy foreign clients.
1 The men and women of Anglo-Saxon England normally bore one name only. Distinguishing epithets were rarely added. These might be patronymic, descriptive or occupational. They were, however, hardly surnames. Heritable names gradually became general in the three centuries following the Norman Conquest in 1066. It was not until the 13th and 14th centuries that surnames became fixed, although for many years after that, the degree of stability in family names varied considerably in different parts of the country.
2 British surnames fall mainly into four broad categories: patronymic, occupational, descriptive and local. A few names, it is true, will remain puzzling: foreign names, perhaps, crudely translated, adapted or abbreviated; or artificial names.
3 In fact, over fifty per cent of genuine British surnames derive from place names of different kinds, and so they belong to the last of our four main categories. Even such a name as Simpson may belong to this last group, and not to the first, had the family once had its home in the ancient village of that name. Otherwise, Simpson means "the son of Simon", as might be expected.
4 Hundreds of occupational surnames are at once familiar to us, or at least recognisable after a little thought: Archer, Carter, Fisher, Mason, Thatcher, Taylor, to name but a few. Hundreds of others are more obscure in their meanings and testify to the amazing specialisation in medieval arts, crafts and functions. Such are "Day", (Old English for breadmaker) and "Walker"(a fuller whose job was to clean and thicken newly made cloth).
5 All these vocational names carry with them a certain gravity and dignity, which descriptive names often lack. Some, it is true, like "Long", "Short" or "Little", are simple. They may be taken quite literally. Others require more thinking, their meanings are slightly different from the modern ones. "Black" and "White" implied dark and fair respectively. "Sharp" meant genuinely discerning, alert, acute rather than quick-witted or clever.
6 Place-names have lasting interest since there is hardly a town or village in all England that has not at some time given its name to a family. They may be picturesque, even poetical; or they may be pedestrian, even trivial. Among the commoner names which survive with relatively little change from old-English times are "Milton" (middle enclosure) and "Hilton"(enclosure on a hill).
Surnames are said to be __________ in Anglo-Saxon England.
A. common
B. vocational
C. unusual
D. descriptive