2016年下半年初中英语学科知识与能力真题

请阅读 Passage1,完成第21~25小题。

Passage 1

Hidden Valley looks a lot like the dozens of other camps that dot the woods of central Maine. There’s a lake, some soccer fields and horses. But the campers make the difference. They’re all American parents who have adopted kids from China. They’re at Hidden Valley to find bridges from their children’s old worlds to the new. Diana Becker watches her 3-year-old daughter Mika dance to a Chinese version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. “Her soul is Chinese,” she says, “but really she’s growing up American.”
Hidden Valley and a handful of other “culture camps” serving families with children from overseas reflect the huge rise in the number of foreign adoptions, from 7093 in 1990 to 5774 last year. Most children come from Russia (4491 last year) and China (4206) but there are also thousands of others adopted annually from South America, Asia and Eastern Europe. After cutting through what can be miles of red tape, parents often come home to find a new predicament. “At first you think, ‘I need a child’,” says Sandy Lachter of Washington, D.C., who with her husband, Steve, adopted Amelia, 5, from China in 1995. “Then you think, ‘What does the child need?’”
The culture camps give families a place to find answers to those kinds of questions. Most grew out of local support groups; Hidden Valley was started last year by the Boston chapter of families with children from China, which includes 650 families. While parents address weighty issues like how to raise kids in a mixed-race family, their children just have fun riding horses, singing Chinese songs or making scallion pancakes. “My philosophy of camping is that they could be doing anything, as long as they see other Chinese kids with white parents,” says the director, Peter Kassen, whose adopted daughters Hope and Lily are 6 and 4.
The camp is a continuation of language and dance classes many of the kids attend during the year. “When we rented out a theater for ‘Mulan,’ it was packed,” says Stephen Chen of Boston, whose adopted daughter Lindsay is 4. Classes in Chinese language, art and calligraphy are taught by experts, like Renne Lu of the Greater Boston Chinese Cultural Center. “Our mission is to preserve the heritage,” Lu says.
Kids who are veteran campers say the experience helps them understand their complex heritage. Sixteen-year-old Alex was born in India and adopted by Kathy and David Brinton of Boulder, Colo., when he was 7. “I went through a stage where I hated India, hated everything about it,” he says. “You just couldn't mention India to me.” But after six sessions at the East India Colorado Heritage Camp, held at Snow Mountain Ranch in Estes Park, Colo., he hopes to travel to India after he graduates from high school next year.

请阅读 Passage2,完成第26~30小题。

Passage 2

Birds are a critical part of our ecological system. But more than ever, birds are threatened by human pollution and climate change.
We need the birds to eat insects, move seeds and pollen around, transfer nutrients from sea to land, clean up after the mass death of the annual Pacific salmon runs, or when a wild animal falls anywhere in a field or forest.
How could we enjoy spring without the birds flitting busily in our garden or dropping by to check out the flowers in our urban window box? Can you contemplate America without the soaring bald eagle, or even those scavengers like the pigeons and gulls that clean up discarded food scraps on our city streets and waterfronts? How diminished our lives would be without them?
Scavenging eagles and condors need hunters to behave responsibly and bury, or remove, the remains of any shot deer peppered with fragments of lead bullets. Loons, ducks and other water birds will be poisoned by lead bullets and lead fishing sinkers if we allow such objects to drop in their feeding space.
All sea and shore birds, even the puffins and guillemots of the otherwise pristine Aleutians, need us to make sure that no other heavy metals, like mercury and cadmium, are dumped in rivers and make their way across the oceans.
Birds like the terns, knots and shearwaters that migrate between the far north and deep south of our planet need people everywhere to cease and desist from filling in their wetland fuel stops and rest stations, and from constructing golfing resorts and factories in their feeding and breeding grounds.
Seabirds are among the most endangered vertebrate species on the planet, with the International Union for Conservation of Nature classifying 97 species as globally threatened, and 17 in the highest category of critically threatened. Of greatest concern are the pelicans of the southern oceans and the spectacular, but slow-breeding albatross.
Plastic bags must be eliminated from natural environments so sea and shore birds don't mistakenly carry such debris back to feed their chicks, with invariably lethal consequences. The albatross, cormorants and herons need us to stop over-fishing and compromising their normal food supply.
The pelicans, penguins and all the birds that inhabit, or visit, our coastlines need us to ensure that we do not dump oil into gulfs and bays, or release so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that the oceans turn acidic and we lose the mussels and oysters, the mass of calcareous plankton that feeds so many creatures, and the coral reefs that nurture enormous numbers of edible species.
Think about it: We share this small green planet. As they fly, feed and nest, the birds monitor the health of the natural world for us, provided that we, in turn, make the effort to access that key information.
The birds and humans are both large, complex and ultimately vulnerable organisms that inhabit the top of the food chain. At the end of the day, their fate will be our fate.