2010年12月英语四六级考试阅读专项练习(2)

　　Passage 2 Reading Comprehension (Reading in Depth) (25 minutes)

　　Directions: In this passage there are ten blanks. You are required to select one word for each blank from a list of choices given in a word bank following the passage. Read the passage through carefully before making your choices. Each choice in the bank is identified by a letter. Please mark the corresponding letter for each item on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre. You may not use any of the words in the bank more than once.

　　Questions 1 to 10 are based on the following passage.

　　Looking back on years of living in a working-class home in the North of England, I should say that a good living room must 11 three principal things: homeliness, warmth and plenty of good food. The living-room is the warm heart of the family and 12 often slightly stuffy to a middle-class visitor. It is not a social centre but a family center; little entertaining goes on there or in the front room, if there 13 to be one; you do not entertain in anything approaching the middle-class 14 The wife's social life outside her 15 family is found over the washing-line, at the little shop on the corner, visiting relatives at a moderate 16 occasionally, and perhaps now and again a visit with her husband to his pub or club. Apart from these two places, he has just his work and his football matches. They will have, each of them, friends at all these places, who may well not know what the inside of their house is like, having never "stepped across the threshold," as the old 17 phrase has it. The family hearth is 18 for the family itself, and those who are "something to us"(another favorite formula) and who look in for a talk or just to sit. Much of the free time of a man and his wife will 19 be passed at that hearth. Just staying in is still one of the most common leisure-time 20

　　A. happens B. professions C. sense D. nevertheless

　　E. fashioned F. distance G. immediate H. usually

　　I. occupations J. preserved K. imitate L. provide

　　M. therefore N reserved 0. contribute

　　Passage 3

　　Directions; The passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. For each of them there are four choices marked A, B, C, D. You should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.

　　The medical world is gradually realizing that the quality of the environment in hospitals may play a significant role in the process of recovery from illness.

　　As part of a nationwide effort in Britain to bring art out of the galleries and into public places, some of the country's most talented artists have been called in to transform older hospitals and to soften the hard edges of modern buildings. Of the 2,500 National Health Service hospitals in Britain, almost 100 now have significant collections of contemporary art in corridors, waiting areas and treatment rooms.

　　These recent initiatives owe a great deal to one artist, Peter Senior, who set up his studio at a Manchester hospital in northeastern England during the early 1970s. He felt the artist had lost his place in modern society, and that art should be enjoyed by a wider audience.

　　A typical hospital waiting room might have as many as 500 visitors each week. What better place to hold regular exhibitions of art? Senior held the first exhibition of his own paintings in the out-patients waiting area of the Manchester Royal Hospital in 1975. Believed to be Britain's first hospital artist, Senior was so much in demand that he was soon joined by a team of six young art school graduates.

　　The effect is striking. Now in the corridors and waiting rooms the visitor experiences a full view of fresh colors, playful images and restful courtyards.

　　The quality of the environment may reduce the need for expensive drugs when a patient is recovering from an illness. A study has shown that patients who had a view onto a garden needed half the number of strong pain killers compared with patients who had no view at all or only a brick wall to look at.