A few students hesitated to start. They waited to see what the rest of the class would do. Several others checked the instructions and made something according to one of the model plans provided. Another group built something out of their own imaginations.
Once I had a boy who worked experimentally with Tinkertoys in his free time. His constructions filled a shelf in the art classroom and a good part of his bedroom at home. I was delighted at the presence of such a student. Here was an exceptionally creative mind at work. His presence meant that I had an unexpected teaching assistant in class whose creativity would infect (感染) other students.
Encouraging this kind of thinking has a downside. I ran the risk of losing those students who had a different style of thinking. Without fail one would declare, “But I’m just not creative.”
“Do you dream at night when you’re asleep?”
“Oh, sure.”
“So tell me one of your most interesting dreams.” The student would tell something wildly imaginative. Flying in the sky or in a time machine or growing three heads. “That’s pretty creative. Who does that for you?”
“Nobody. I do it.”
“Really ― at night, when you’re asleep?”
“Sure.”
“Try doing it in the daytime, in class, okay?”
25. The teacher used Tinkertoys in class in order to ________?
A. know more about the students B. make the lessons more exciting
C. raise the students’ interest in art D. teach the students about toy design
26. What do we know about the boy mentioned in Paragraph 3?
A. He liked to help his teacher. B. He preferred to study alone.
C. He was active in class. D. He was imaginative.
27. What does the underlined word “downside” in Paragraph 4 probably mean?
A. Mistake. B. Drawback.
C. Difficulty. D. Burden.
28. Why did the teacher ask the students to talk about their dreams?
A. To help them to see their creativity. B. To find out about their sleeping habits.
C. To help them to improve their memory. D. To find out about their ways of thinking.
C
Reading can be a social activity. Think of the people who belong to book groups. They choose books to read and then meet to discuss them. Now, the website BookCrossing.com turns the page on the traditional idea of a book group.
Members go on the site and register the books they own and would like to share. BookCrossing provides an identification number to stick inside the book. Then the person leaves it in a public place, hoping that the book will have an adventure, traveling far and wide with each new reader who finds it.
Bruce Pederson, the managing director of BookCrossing, says, “The two things that change your life are the people you meet and books you read. BookCrossing combines both.”
Members leave books on park benches and buses, in train stations and coffee shops. Whoever finds their book will go to the site and record where they found it.
People who find a book can also leave a journal entry describing what they thought of it. E-mails are then sent to the BookCrossing to keep them updated about where their books have been found. Bruce Peterson says the idea is for people not to be selfish by keeping a book to gather dust on a shelf at home.
BookCrossing is part of a trend among people who want to get back to the “real” and not the virtual(虚拟). The site now has more than one million members in more than one hundred thirty-five countries.
29. Why does the author mention book groups in the first paragraph?
A. To explain what they are. B. To introduce BookCrossing.
C. To stress the importance of reading. D. To encourage readers to share their ideas.
30. What does the underlined word “it” in Paragraph 2 refer to?
A. The book. B. An adventure.
C. A public place. D. The identification number.
31. What will a BookCrosser do with a book after reading it?
A. Meet other readers to discuss it. B. Keep it safe in his bookcase.
C. Pass it on to another reader. D. Mail it back to its owner.
32. What is the best title for the text?
A. Online Reading: A Virtual Tour B. Electronic Books: A new Trend
C. A Book Group Brings Tradition Back D. A Website Links People through Books
D
A new collection of photos brings an unsuccessful Antarctic voyage back to life.
Frank Hurley’s pictures would be outstanding ― undoubtedly first-rate photo-journalism ― if they had been made last week. In fact, they were shot from **14 through **16, most of them after a disastrous shipwreck (海难), by a cameraman who had no reasonable expectation of survival. Many of the images were stored in an ice chest, under freezing water, in the damaged wooden ship.
The ship was the Endurance, a small, tight, Norwegian-built three-master that was intended to take Sir Ernest Shackleton and a small crew of seamen and scientists, 27 men in all, to the southernmost shore of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. From that point Shackleton wanted to force a passage by dog sled(雪橇) across the continent. The journey was intended to achieve more than what Captain Robert Falcon Scott had done. Captain Scott had reached the South Pole early in **12 but had died with his four companions on the march back.
As writer Caroline Alexander makes clear in her forceful and well-researched story The Endurance, adventuring was even then a thoroughly commercial effort. Scott’s last journey, completed as he lay in a tent dying of cold and hunger, caught the world’s imagination, and a film made in his honor drew crowds. Shackleton, a onetime British merchant-navy officer who had got to within 100 miles of the South Pole in **08, started a business before his **14 voyage to make money from movie and still photography. Frank Hurley, a confident and gifted Australian photographer who knew the Antarctic, was hired to make the images, most of which have never before been published.(责任编辑：haoxuee)
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