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A. It has seats in the open air. B. It gives shows all year round. C. It offers membership discounts. D. It presents famous musical works. B On one of her trips to New York several years ago, Eudora Welty decided to take a couple of New York friends out to dinner. They settled in at a comfortable East Side cafe and within minutes, another customer was approaching their table. “Hey, aren’t you from Mississippi?” the elegant, white-haired writer remembered being asked by the stranger. “I’m from Mississippi too.” Without a second thought, the woman joined the Welty party. When her dinner partner showed up, she also pulled up a chair. “They began telling me all the news of Mississippi,” Welty said. “I didn’t know what my New York friends were thinking.” Taxis on a rainy New York night are rarer than sunshine. By the time the group got up to leave, it was pouring outside. Welty’s new friends immediately sent a waiter to find a cab. Heading back downtown toward her hotel, her big-city friends were amazed at the turn of events that had changed their Big Apple dinner into a Mississippi state reunion (团聚). “My friends said: ‘Now we believe your stories,’” Welty added. “And I said: ‘Now you know. These are the people that make me write them.’” Sitting on a sofa in her room, Welty, a slim figure in a simple gray dress, looked pleased with this explanation. “I don’t make them up,” she said of the characters in her fiction these last 50 or so years. “I don’t have to.” Beauticians, bartenders, piano players and people with purple hats, Welty’s people come from afternoons spent visiting with old friends, from walks through the streets of her native Jackson, Miss., from conversations overheard on a bus. It annoys Welty that, at 78, her left ear has now given out. Sometimes, sitting on a bus or a train, she hears only a fragment(片段) of a particularly interesting story. 25. What happened when Welty was with her friends at the cafe? A. Two strangers joined her. B. Her childhood friends came in. C. A heavy rain ruined the dinner. D. Some people held a party there. 26. The underlined word “them” in Paragraph 6 refers to Welty’s . A. readers B. parties C. friends D. stories 27. What can we learn about the characters in Welty’s fiction? A. They live in big cities. B. They are mostly women. C. They come from real life. D. They are pleasure seekers. C If you are a fruit grower — or would like to become one — take advantage of Apple Day to see what’s around. It’s called Apple Day but in practice it’s more like Apple Month. The day itself is on October 21, but since it has caught on, events now spread out over most of October around Britain. Visiting an apple event is a good chance to see, and often taste, a wide variety of apples. To people who are used to the limited choice of apples such as Golden Delicious and Royal Gala in supermarkets, it can be quite an eye opener to see the range of classical apples still in existence, such as Decio which was grown by the Romans. Although it doesn’t taste of anything special, it’s still worth a try, as is the knobbly (多疙瘩的) Cat’s Head which is more of a curiosity than anything else. There are also varieties developed to suit specific local conditions. One of the very best varieties for eating quality is Orleans Reinette, but you’ll need a warm, sheltered place with perfect soil to grow it, so it’s a pipe dream for most apple lovers who fall for it. At the events, you can meet expert growers and discuss which ones will best suit your conditions, and because these are family affairs, children are well catered for with apple-themed fun and games. Apple Days are being held at all sorts of places with an interest in fruit, including stately gardens and commercial orchards (果园). If you want to have a real orchard experience, try visiting the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale, near Faversham in Kent. 28. What can people do at the apple events? A. Attend experts’ lectures. B. Visit fruit-loving families. C. Plant fruit trees in an orchard. D. Taste many kinds of apples. 29. What can we learn about Decio? A. It is a new variety. B. It has a strange look. C. It is rarely seen now. D. It has a special taste. 30. What does the underlined phrase “a pipe dream” in Paragraph 3 mean? A. A practical idea. B. A vain hope. C. A brilliant plan. D. A selfish desire. 31. What is the author’s purpose in writing the text? A. To show how to grow apples. B .To introduce an apple festival. C. To help people select apples. D. To promote apple research. D Bad news sells. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news. Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers. But now that information is being spread and monitored (监控) in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By tracking people’s e-mails and online posts, scientists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories. “The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media,” says Jonah Berger, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.” Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication—e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations—found that it tended to be more positive than negative(消极的), but that didn’t necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things? To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times’ website. He and a Penn colleague analyzed the “most e-mailed” list for six months. One of his first findings was that articles in the science section were much more likely to make the list than non-science articles. He found that science amazed Times’ readers and made them want to share this positive feeling with others.(责任编辑：haoxuee) 学友请微信搜索好学网，或加公众号 haoxueecom 获取更多学习资讯！ |
