Cliff House has gone through five major constructions and reconstructions since its beginning in 1858. That year, Samuel Brannan, a prosperous man from Maine, bought for $1,500 the lumber from a ship that wrecked on the cliffs below. With this material he built the first Cliff House. The second Cliff House was built for Captain Junius G. Foster, but as it was a long difficult trip from the city, the house hosted mostly horseback riders, small game hunters or picnickers on day outings. With the opening of a toll road a year later, the Cliff House became successful with the Carriage trade for Sunday travel. On weekends, there was little room at the Cliff House for horses and carriages. Soon, omnibus railways and streetcar lines made it to near Lone Mountain where passengers transferred to stagecoach lines to the beach. The growth of Golden Gate Park attracted beach travelers in search of meals and a look at the Sea Lions sunning themselves on Seal Rock, just off the cliffs to visit the area.

    In 1877, the toll road, now Geary Boulevard, was purchased by the City of San Francisco for around $25,000. In 1883, after a few years of downturn, the Cliff House was bought by Adolph Sutro, a multimillionaire who made his fortune from mining. After a few years of quiet management by J. M. Wilkens, the Cliff House was severely damaged by an explosion of the ship, which destroyed the northern part of the house. Seven years later, on Christmas 1894 the repaired old building burned down.

    In 1896, Adolph Sutro built a new Cliff House, a seven-story Victorian style castle, called by some“the Gingerbread Palace.”In the same year, work began on the famous Sutro Baths, which included six of the largest indoor swimming pools north of the restaurant that included a museum, a skating rink and other pleasure grounds. Great throngs of San Franciscans arrived on steam trains, bicycles, carts and horse wagons on Sunday excursions.

    The Cliff House and Sutro Baths survived the 1906 earthquake with little damage but burned to the ground on the evening of September 7, 1907. Rebuilding of the restaurant was completed within two years and, with additions and modern restorations, is the one seen today.

    The building was acquired by the National Park Service in 1977 and it became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The site overlooks the Seal Rock and the former site of the Sutro Baths. More than thirty ships have been pounded to pieces on the southern shore of the Golden Gate below Cliff House.

The story of Cliff House goes back to ______.

A. 1858

B. 1877

C. 1894

D. 1906

The second Cliff House was built for ______.

A. J. M. Wilkens

B. Adolph Sutro

C. Samuel Brannan

D. Junius G.Foster

The Victorian style castle mentioned in the passage (para. 3) was ______.

A. the first Cliff House

B. the second Cliff House

C. the third Cliff House

D. the fourth Cliff House

The Cliff House we see today was completed in ______.

A. 1906

B. 1907

C. 1909

D. 1977

The third Cliff House was eventually destroyed by ______.

A. a fire

B. an earthquake

C. shipwrecks

D. an explosion

Joyce Carol Oates published her first collection of short stories, By the North Gate, in 1963, two years after she had received her master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and became an instructor of English at the University of Detroit. Her productivity since then has been tremendous, accumulating in less than two decades up to nearly thirty titles, including novels, collections of short stories and verse, plays, and literary criticism. In the meantime, she has continued to teach, moving in 1967 from the University of Detroit to the University of Windsor in Ontario, and in 1978, to Princeton University. Reviewers have admired her enormous energy, but they also find such a large body of writing very amazing.

    In a period characterized by the abandonment of so much of the realistic tradition by authors such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon, Joyce Carol Oates has seemed at times determinedly old-fashioned in her insistence on depicting the world as it is. Hers is a world of violence, insanity, fractured love, and hopeless loneliness. Although some of it appears to come from her personal observations, her dreams and her fears, much more is clearly from the experiences of others. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), dealt with stock ear racing, though she had never seen a race. In Them (1964) she focused on Detroit from the Depression through the riots of 1967, drawing much of her material from the deep impression made on her by the problems of one of her students. Whatever the source is and however shocking the events or the motivations are, her fictional world nonetheless remains strikingly related to that real one reflected in the daily newspapers, the television news, talk shows and the popular magazines of our day.

The passage is mainly an introduction to Oates’s ______.

A. career

B. childhood

C. By the North Gate

D. contemporary writers

The passage tells us that Joyce Carol Oates’s first publication was ______.

A. unsuccessful

B. published in 1965

C. a volume of short fictions

D. about an English instructor

The most striking feature of Joyce Carol Oates’s work is her ______.

A. realism

B. radicalism

C. imagination

D. conservatism

The subject of Joyce Carol Oates’s first novel is ______.

A. teaching

B. loneliness

C. car racing

D. hopelessness

The author mentions Oates’s book Them because it is ______.

A. an autobiography

B. her best piece of nonfiction

C. a typical novel of the 1960s 

D. not based on her experiences

If you are looking for an explanation of why we don’t get tough with criminals, you need only look at the numbers. Each year almost a third of the households in America are victims of violence or theft. This amounts to more than 41 million crimes, many more than we are able to punish. There are also too many criminals. We don’t have room for any more!

    The painful fact is that the more crime there is, the less we are able to punish it. We think that punishment prevents crime, but it just might be the other way around. When there is so much crime it is simply impossible to deal with it or punish it. This is the situation we find ourselves in today: the gradual increase in the criminal population has made it more difficult to get into prison. Some of the most exclusive prisons now require about five serious crimes before a criminal is accepted.

    These features show that it makes little sense to blame the police or judges for being soft on criminals. There is not much else they can do. The police can’t find most criminals and those they do find are difficult and costly to convict. Those convicted can’t all be sent to prison. The public demands that we do everything we can against crime. The practical reality is that there is very little the police, courts or prisons can do about the crime problem.

    We could, of course, get tough with the people we already have in prison and keep them locked up for longer periods of time. Yet when measured against the lower crime rates this would probably produce, longer prison sentences are not worth the cost to states and local governments. Besides, those states that have tried to gain voters’ approval for building new prisons often discover that the public is unwilling to pay for prison constructions. And if it were willing to pay,

long prison sentences may not be effective in reducing crime.

    More time spent in prison is also more expensive. The best estimates are that it costs an average of $13,000 to keep a person in prison for one year. If we had a place to keep the 124,000 released prisoners, it would have cost us $1.6 billion to prevent 15,000 crimes. This works out to more than $100,000 per crime prevented. But there is more. With the average cost of prison construction running around $50,000 per bed, it would cost more than $6 billion to build the necessary cells. The first-year operating cost would be $150,000 per crime prevented, worth it if

the victim were you or me, but much too expensive to be feasible as a national policy.

    Faced with the reality of the numbers, I will not be so foolish as to suggest a solution to the crime problem. My contribution to the public debate begins and ends with this simple observation: getting tough with criminals is not the answer.

By saying“it just might be the other way around”(para. 2), the writer means ______.

A. severe punishment lowers crime rates

B. soft measures lead to the rise of crime rates

C. easy policies are more effective than strict ones

D. the increase in crime makes punishment difficult

It is wrong to blame the police or judges for not being hard on criminals partly because ______.

A. trials are expensive

B. criminals are very dangerous

C. the police force is weak

D. the public fill to support the court

The cost for constructing prisons is ______.

A. $13,000 per bed 

B. $50,000 per bed

C. $100,000 per bed

D. $150,000 per bed

The writer of the passage bases his argument mainly upon ______.

A. statistical evidence

B. public opinions

C. criminal psychology

D. personal experience

The tone of the passage is

A. playful

B. serious

C. satirical

D. angry

The universities from which today’s universities are descendents were founded in the Middle Ages. They were established either by corporations of students wanting to learn, as in Italy, or by teachers wanting to teach, as in France. Corporations that had special legal or customary privileges for the purpose of carrying out the intentions of the incorporators were common in those days. The university corporations of the Middle Ages at the height of their power were not

responsible to anybody, and could not be punished by any authorities. They claimed, and made good their claim, complete independence of all religious and nonreligious control. The American university was, however, at first a corporation formed by a religious group or by the state for the purposes of the group.

     The American university in the seventeenth century was much closer to the American university today than to the university in the Middle Ages. The Puritan communities needed ministers and professional men and so they established universities to provide them. Later, religious groups built universities in order to extend their own influence. For example, the University of Chicago was founded by devout (虔诚的) Baptists to combat the rising tide of Methodism in the Middle West and Shakers in the East. The president and the trustees of the University were required to have the proper religious relations in order to keep the University on the right path. Fortunately, the combination of John D, Rockefeller, William Rainey Harper, and the enlightened wing of the Baptist Church preserved the university from too narrow an interpretation of its purpose.

French universities in the Middle Ages were founded by ______.

A. the government 

B. groups of scholars

C. the Catholic Church

D. students wanting to learn

Puritans set up universities primarily for the purpose of ______.

A. training school teachers

B. influencing the government

C. providing ministers and professionals

D. supplying professionals for corporations

The University of Chicago was established by ______.

A. Shakers

B. Puritans

C. Methodists

D. Baptists

The writer mentions John D. Rockefeller and William Rainey Harper to show that ______.

A. they were important founders of the university

B. they were extremely faithful in their religious beliefs

C. they broadened the original goal of the university

D. they stuck to the founding principles of the university

Early universities in the U.S. were founded mostly for ______.

A. economic reasons

B. political reasons

C. religious purposes

D. academic purposes

Seventeenth-century houses in colonial North America were simple structures that were primarily functional, carrying over traditional designs that went back to the Middle Ages. During the first half of the eighteenth century, however, houses began to show a new elegance. As wealth increased, more and more colonists built fine houses.

     Since architecture was not yet a specialized profession in the colonies, the design of buildings was left to carpenters who undertook to interpret architectural manuals imported from England. There are an astonishing number of these handbooks for builders in colonial libraries, and the houses erected during the eighteenth century show their influence. Most domestic architecture of the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century displayed a wide range of taste and freedom of application of the rules laid down in these books.

    Increasing wealth throughout the colonies resulted in houses of improved design, whether the material was wood, stone or brick. New England still favored wood, though brick houses became common in Boston and other towns, where the danger of fire forced people to use more durable material. A few houses in New England were built of stone, but only in Pennsylvania and its neighboring areas was stone widely used in dwellings. An increased use of bricks is noticeable in

Virginia and Maryland, but wood remained the most popular material even in houses built by wealthy landowners. In the Carolinas, even in the crowded town of Charleston, wooden houses were much more common than brick houses.

    Eighteenth-century houses showed great interior improvements over their predecessors. Windows were made larger and shutters removed. Large, clear panes replaced the gray glass of the seventeenth century. Doorways were larger and more decorative. Fireplaces became decorative features of rooms. Walls were sometimes elaborately decorated. White paint began to take the place of blue, yellow, green and gray colors, which had been popular for walls in the earlier years. After about 1730, advertisements for wallpaper styles in scenic patterns began to appear in colonial newspapers.

The passage mainly discusses ______.

A. the improved design of the 18th century colonial houses

B. the role of carpenters in building the 18th century houses

C. the varieties of decorations used in the 18th century houses

D. a comparison of the 18th century houses and modern houses

Those responsible for designing houses in the 18th century North America were ______.

A. customers

B. carpenters

C. interior decorators

D. professional architects

Stones were commonly used to build houses in ______.

A. Virginia 

B. Boston       

C. Charleston

D. Pennsylvania

The word“predecessors”(para. 4) refers to ______.

A. colonists in the 17th century

B. wooden houses in Charleston

C. houses before the 18th century

D. interior improvements in houses

It can be inferred from the 4th paragraph that before 1730 ______.

A. patterned wallpaper was not widely used

B. pattemed wallpaper was not used in stone houses

C. wallpaper samples could be found in libraries

D. wallpaper was the same color as the wall paints