In the new millennium I want to see di...

问答题In the new millennium I want to see disabled people acquiring the same degree of control over their lives that other people have. To be disabled is to be no less human than anyone else, but far too often disabled people still have their lives ruled by others. No able-bodied person would put up with it.
Access to intellectual opportunities and jobs as well as buildings and public transport need to be regarded as rights, not gifts society is generous enough to bestow on disabled people. Institutions are generally willing to adapt their buildings, but only when a disabled person needs them-and afterwards you hear grumbles that the money was wasted because "you never see" a disabled person using the new facilities.
The record is appalling. Even the recent Disability Discrimination ACT fails to cover areas like education and transport, areas that are absolutely crucial if full citizen’s rights are to be extended to the disabled. Until recently people with disabilities were not legally allowed to use the London Underground. Now there are a few stops, but still not remotely enough.

参考答案：在新千年里，愿残疾人能获得与他人一样驾驭自己生活的能力。身有残疾并不等于低人一等，但是残疾人的生活仍受到他人主宰的情况比...

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1.单项选择题For one brief moment, after years of fear and loathing, America seemed ready to make peace with the SAT. When the University of California several years ago threatened to treat the test like a bad batch of cafeteria food and tell applicants not to buy it, the College Board junked the bewildering analogy questions (Warthogs are to pigs as politicians are to what), created a writing section (including producing an essay), added tougher math questions and more reading analysis—and had everybody talking about the new-and-improved SAT.
Then the first students to take SAT: The Sequel were seen stumbling out of the testing centers as if they had just run a marathon, and all the happy talks ended. With the three hours and 45 minutes stretching to five hours with breaks and instructions, it got worse. Nobody is sure how, but moisture in some SAT answer sheets caused pencil marks to bleed or fade, producing more than 5,000 tests with the wrong scores. Even after that was fixed, several universities reported a sharp drop in their applicants’ average scores, which many attributed to exhaustion, and more colleges told applicants they would no longer have to take the SAT.
All of which stoked interest in the ACT, the SAT’s less famous and less feared rival based in lowa City, Iowa. The shorter test is now becoming a welcome alternative for many high schoolers who no longer see a need to endure the usual SAT trauma. "I think the ACT is a true player in the college-admissions game these days, "says Robyn Lady, until recently a college counselor at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Although most Jefferson students still take the SAT, the number of ACTs there has tripled in the last two years. It’s a shift that, if it continues, could change the balance of entrancetest power, since the Fairfax County, Va. ,magnet sends more kids to the Ivy League than almost any other U. S. school.
The SAT, with a maximum 2,400 points, and the ACT, with a maximum 36 points, are scored differently, but otherwise are no more different from each other than American football differs from the Canadian version. Students usually do equally well on each. The SAT’s new 25-minute essay is required, while the ACT’s essay is optional. The SAT is three hours and 45 minutes long. The comparable ACT is three hours and 25 minutes. The SAT has three sections: critical reading, math and writing. The ACT has math, science, reading and English sections, plus optional writing. The ACT with the writing test costs $ 43, more than the SAT’s $ 41.50, but the ACT is only $ 29 without the writing section.
Several high-school guidance counselors say they assume the ACT, with 1.2 million test takers in the class of 2005 compared with 1.5 million for the SAT, will eventually catch up, in part because so many educators are advising their students to try both. Wendy Andreen, counselor at Memorial Senior High School in Houston—where the SAT has been supreme—says she tells students every year they should take both tests to be safe, and many are beginning to listen, with ACTs up 18 percent since 2002. Deb Shaver, director of admissions at Smith College, says counselors are steering students to the ACT "because there is less hysteria surrounding the ACTs, and students feel less stressed about taking the test."
The mistakes made in the scoring of the October 2005 SAT by Pearson Educational Measurement, the College Board’s subcontractor, have not been forgotten, counselors say. The SAT suffered from damaging news stories as details of the errors came out bit by hit. In the end, 4, 411 students had scores reported to colleges that were lower than they actually earned and had to be corrected; 17 percent of the corrections were for more than 40 points. College Board president Gaston Caperton apologized, saying the mishap "brings humility, and humility makes us more aware, empathetic and respectful of others."
But many counselors, who often complain about the New York City-based nonprofit’s influence over their students’ futures, say they have their doubts. "I think the College Board sees this as a purely technical problem that they can solve through purely technical means, "says Scott White, a counselor at Montclair ( N. J. ) High School. "I don’t think they appreciate the damage that was done to their already shaky credibility.\
Many American educators now tend to

A．be in favor of the ACT.
B．be slightly critical of the SAT.
C．sit on the fence in the dispute.
D．be strongly critical of the SAT.

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2.单项选择题You know her—that nice teenager across the street Chloe. There she is, sitting in one of the two captain’s seats in the midsection of her mom’s Toyota Sienna, bopping along to the music on her iPod. Now and then she pulls out one of the ear buds so that she can tell her mom some forgotten bit of news or gossip; Chloe’s mom is up to speed on the dramas that are always unfolding in her daughter’s circle of friends, just as she can tell you the date of her next French test, the topic of her coming history paper and the location and scope of her next community service project. They have a great night planned out: they’re going to pick up Chloe’s best friend and then drive back home for a night of DVDs and popcorn in the family room. Her mom will putter around close by, and her dad will probably sit down and watch one of the movies with the girls.
When I was in high school in the 1970s,we had a name for teenagers like Chloe: losers. If an otherwise normal girl thought that the best way to spend a Saturday night was home with her parents—not just co-existing with them, but actually hanging out with them—we would have been looking for a bucket of pig’s blood.
In my day, we did whatever was necessary to get out on a Saturday night: we climbed out of windows; we jumped on the hack of motorcycles; God help us, we hitchhiked. We needed, on the most basic and physical level, to be out in the dangerous night, with one another, away from our parents and the safety of home. It was no way to live, and some of us didn’t. But it was a drive so elemental and essential that there seemed no way to deny it.
That a profound change has taken place in the relationship between American teenagers and their parents is made clear by statistics from the Federal Highway Administration showing a steady decline in the number of licensed teenage drivers. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third.
The reasons have a great deal to do with the cost of car insurance and driver’s education programs. But among middle-and upper-middle-class young adults, the peer power that created the teenage car culture, the compelling energy that once served to blast an adolescent away from his or her parents has begun to drain away. Teenagers report that they don’t need to drive: their parents are willing to take them where they want to go, and they are content to ride shotgun with Mom, texting and yakking all the way to the mall.
I had not taught high school long before I attended my first funeral: an 18-year-old,loud in the halls one day, dead on the side of the road the next. If you want to improve your daughter’s chances of surviving her teens, don’t give her the car keys. If our generation of parents has done one thing right, it has been to manipulate our children into giving up driving.
How have we managed it Through the very aspect of family life we complain about the most: the extracurricular activities that we pay for and arrange and attend; the risibly involved homework assignments that we are so enmeshed with; the whole annoying side industry of being a "servant" and a "private driver".
These things harass us no end. But they have bound our children to us in complex and powerful ways, and this has been, to some extent, the point of the entire exercise. It means that we can prolong the period of our children’s dependency, to extend the sweet phase of cocooning and protecting well into their adolescence.
An American teenager is part premature and part invalid, able to excel in obscure sports but needing his mother to rush the field with a jacket and thermos of soup when he’s finished. They have been hobbled by our endless meddling; they lack resourcefulness and resilience. They’re like little children, soft and easily wounded.
But for all their fussiness and neediness, they love us; they want to be close to us. They have every reason to believe that we will take care of them, even when they would be better off if we lei them struggle a bit.
Learn to drive Why would they want to do that
The second and the third paragraphs do NOT imply that

A．the author in her teenage years would have considered Chloe as abnormal.
B．teenagers usually spent weekends with their friends in 1970s.
C．teenagers in 1970s were more likely to drive out.
D．teenagers in 1970s had a worse relationship With their parents.

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3.单项选择题David Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, credits the world’s economics and social progress over the last thousand years to "Western civilization and its dissemination." The reason, he believes, is that Europeans invented systematic economic development. Landes adds that two unique aspects of Europeans culture were crucial ingredient in EUrope’s economic growth.
First, Landes espouses a generalized form of Max Weber’s thesis that the values of work, initiative, and investment made the difference for Europe. Despite his emphasis on science, Landes does not stress the notion of rationality as such. In his view, "what counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity." The only route to economic success for individuals or states is working hard, spending less than you earn, and investing the rest in productive capacity. This is the fundamental explanation of the problem posed by his book’s subtitle: "Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor." For historical reasons—an emphasis on private property, an experience of political pluralism, a temperate climate, an urban style—Europeans have, on balance, followed those practices and therefore have prospered.
Second, and perhaps most important, Europeans were learners. They "learned rather greedily," as Joel Mokyr put it in a review of Landes’s book. Even if Europeans possessed indigenous technologies that gave them an advantage (spectacles, for example), as Landes believes they did, their most vital asset was the ability to assimilate knowledge from around the world and put it to use—as in borrowing the concept of zero and rediscovering Aristotle’s Logic from the Arabs and taking paper and gunpowder from the Chinese via the Muslim world. Landes argues that a systematic resistance to learning from other cultures had become the greatest handicap of the Chinese by the eighteenth century and remains the greatest handicap of Arab countries today.
Although his analysis of Europeans expansion is almost nonexistent, Landes does not argue that Europeans were beneficent bearers of civilization to a benighted world. Rather, he relies on his own commonsense law: "When one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so." In contrast to the new school of world historians, Landes believes that specific cultural values enabled technological advances that in turn made some Europeans strong enough to dominate people in other parts of the world. Europeans therefore proceeded to do so with great viciousness and cruelty. By focusing on their victimization in this process, Landes holds, some postcolonial states have wasted energy that could have been put into productive work and investment. If one could sum up Landes’s advice to these states in one sentence, it might be "Stop whining and get to work." This is particularly important, indeed hopeful, advice, he would argue, because success is not permanent. Advantages are not fixed, gains from trade are unequal, and different societies react differently to market signals. Therefore, not only is there hope for undeveloped countries, but developed countries have little cause to be complacent, because the current situation "will press hard" on them.
The thrust of studies like Landes’s is to identify those distinctive features of European civilization that lie behind Europe’s rise to power and the creation of modernity more generally. Other historians have placed a greater emphasis on such features as liberty, individualism, and Christianity. In a review essay, the art historian Craig Clunas listed some of the less well known linkages that have been proposed between Western culture and modernity, including the propensities to think quantitatively, enjoy pornography, and consume sugar. All such proposals assume the fundamental aptness of the question: What elements of Europeans civilization led to European success It is a short leap from this assumption to outright triumphalism. The paradigmatic book of this school is, of course, The End of History and the Last Man, in which Francis Fukuyama argues that after the collapse of Nazism in the twentieth century, the only remaining model for human organization in the industrial and communications ages is a combination of market economics and limited, pluralist, democratic government.
It can be inferred from the last paragraph that other historians

A．follow in the footsteps of Nazism and communism.
B．are very cautious in linking Western culture and modernity.
C．focus their attention on relatively specific topics.
D．hold drastically different views from Landes.

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4.单项选择题In the evenings, they go to the mall. Once a week or more. Sometimes, they even leave the dinner dishes in the sink so they will have enough time to finish all the errands. The father never comes—he hates shopping, especially with his wife. Instead, he stays at home to read the paper and put around his study: To do things that the other dads must be doing in the evenings. To summon the sand to come rushing in and plug up his ears with its roaring silence.
Meanwhile, the mother arms herself with returns from the last trip. Her two young daughters forget games of flashlight tag or favorite TV shows and strap on tennis shoes and seatbelts： and they’re off. On summer nights, when it’s light until after the fireflies arrive, the air is heavy and moist. The daughters unroll their windows and stick the whole of their heads out into the slate blue sky, feeling full force the sweaty, honey suckle air. In the cold mall, their rubber soles squeak on shiny linoleum squares. The younger daughter tries not to step on any cracks. The older daughter keeps a straight-ahead gaze; her sullen eyes count down each errand as it’s done.
It is not until the third or, on a good night, the fourth errand that the trouble begins. The girls have wandered over to examine rainbow beach towels, perhaps, or some kind of pink ruffled bedspread. The mother’s voice finds them from a few aisles away.
Dinner squirms in the daughters’ stomachs. Now comes that what-if-I-threw-up-right-this-second or where-is-a-rabbit-hole-for-me-to-fall-into feeling that they get around this time of evening, at the mall. The older one shakes her ponytails at the younger one. Her blue eyes hiss the careful-don’t-cry warning, but the younger one’s cheeks only get redder. Toe by toe, the daughters edge towards housewares where they finger lace placemats or trace patterns in the store carpet with sneakered soles. The mother’s voice still finds them, shaking with rage. Finally, heels slapping in her sandals, she strides towards them and then keeps going. They follow, catching her word-trail, "Stupid people. Stupid，stupid，stupid. I HATE stupid people." It’s the little skips between steps the younger one takes to keep up with her mother’s tong, angry legs. It’s the car door slamming and the seat belt buckle yanked into place. It’s those things that tell the daughters how the next few hours will go.
In the car, the older one sighs and grinds her back teeth. The younger one feels her face get hotter and her eyes start to swell. She stares at an ice cream stain on the back of the front seat and sees a pony, a flower, and a fairy in that splash of chocolate mint chip. The mother begins on both at once. "And when we get home, if your shoes are still in the TV room, I’m throwing them out. Same for books. No more shit house. No more lazy, ungrateful kids." And so on and so on through the black velvet sky and across the Hershey bar roads. On into the house with a slap or two. "You’ll be happy when I’m in my grave," wails at them as they put on their nightgowns and brush their teeth. The older one sets a stone jaw and the younger one tries not to sob as she opens wide, engulfing her small hand and scrubbing each and every molar.
The father is not spared. The volcanic mother saves some up just for him. "Fucking lousy husband. Do-nothing father. "And on like that for an hour or so more. Then in the darkest part of the night, it’s bare feet and cool hands on a small sweaty forehead. Kisses and caresses and "Sorry Mom got a little mad." Promises for that pink ruffled bedspread or maybe a new stuffed animal. Long fingers rake through the younger one’s curls. "Tomorrow evening, we’ll get you some kind of treat. Right after dinner, we’ll go to the mall.\
Which of the following adjectives does NOT describe the mother

A．Irritable.
B．Remorseful.
C．Amiable.
D．Discontented.

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5.填空题 Some Problems Facing Learners of English
Although many English learners have got high scores in an English test such as IELTS or TOEFL, they still face some problems concerning its learning. Here we’d like to talk about some of the problems and try to come up with suggestions on how to overcome them.
I. Psychological Problems
1. the 1st reason: fear of (1) (1) ______
the solution:
—not to look too far ahead
—concentrate on increasing knowledge and developing ability
2. the 2nd reason: separation from the family and (2) (2) ______
the solution:
—enjoy (3)
—time heals nostalgia (3) ______
II. Cultural Problems
1. practical problems
— (4) (4) ______
—money
—food
—weather
2. problems difficult to define
—the reason: the British way of life (5) , habits and traditions) (5) ______
—the solution: be open-minded and (6) (6) ______
III. Linguistic Problems
1. problems regarding (7)
1) difficulties in understanding English-speaking people (7) ______
3 reasons:
—fast speed of speech
—a variety of accents
—different styles of speech
2) ways of overcoming the difficulties
—attend (8) (8) _____
—use a language laboratory
—listen to English programs
—meet and speak with native speakers of English
2. problems regarding speaking
1) difficulties: knowing what to say but not knowing how to say it in English
2) solutions
— (9) the language (9)______
—think in English instead of translating
—practice speaking as much as possible
—imitate the educated people’s (10) (10) ______

参考答案：accommodation

6.填空题A lot of people believe that television has a harmful
effect on children. A few years ago, the same criticisms were
made of the cinema. But despite child psychologists have spent a (1) ______
great deal of time studying this problem, there is not many evidence (2) ______
that television brings up juvenile delinquency. (3) ______
Few people in the modern world share the views of parents
a hundred years ago. In those days, writers for children
carefully avoided any reference on sex in their books but had (4) ______
no inhibitions abut including scenes of violence.
These days children are often brought up to think freely
about sex but violence is discouraged. Nevertheless, television
companies receive a large amount of letters every week (5) ______
complaining about programs with adult themes being shown
at times which a few young children may be awake. Strangely (6) ______
enough, the parents who complain about these programs see
no harm in cartoon films for children in which the villain, usually
either an animal or a monster, but in some cases a human
being, suffers one cruel punishment after the other. (7)______
The fact is that, which every parent knows, different (8) ______
things frighten different children. One child can read a ghost
story without having bad dreams while another can not bear
to have the book in his bedroom. In the same way, there is
little consistency about the things that terrify adults. Almost
everyone has a irrational private fear but while some of us (9) ______
can not stand the sight of spiders, for example, others are
frightened from snakes or rats. (10)______

参考答案：many→much

7.单项选择题 Questions 1 to 5 are based on an interview. At the end of the interview you will be given 10 seconds to answer each of the following five questions. Now listen to the interview. Parents should be aware of the hidden stress of their daughters when

A．the girls are irritable sometimes.
B．the girls are exhausted someday.
C．the girls say they hate school.
D．the girls lie and play truant.

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8.单项选择题For one brief moment, after years of fear and loathing, America seemed ready to make peace with the SAT. When the University of California several years ago threatened to treat the test like a bad batch of cafeteria food and tell applicants not to buy it, the College Board junked the bewildering analogy questions (Warthogs are to pigs as politicians are to what), created a writing section (including producing an essay), added tougher math questions and more reading analysis—and had everybody talking about the new-and-improved SAT.
Then the first students to take SAT: The Sequel were seen stumbling out of the testing centers as if they had just run a marathon, and all the happy talks ended. With the three hours and 45 minutes stretching to five hours with breaks and instructions, it got worse. Nobody is sure how, but moisture in some SAT answer sheets caused pencil marks to bleed or fade, producing more than 5,000 tests with the wrong scores. Even after that was fixed, several universities reported a sharp drop in their applicants’ average scores, which many attributed to exhaustion, and more colleges told applicants they would no longer have to take the SAT.
All of which stoked interest in the ACT, the SAT’s less famous and less feared rival based in lowa City, Iowa. The shorter test is now becoming a welcome alternative for many high schoolers who no longer see a need to endure the usual SAT trauma. "I think the ACT is a true player in the college-admissions game these days, "says Robyn Lady, until recently a college counselor at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Although most Jefferson students still take the SAT, the number of ACTs there has tripled in the last two years. It’s a shift that, if it continues, could change the balance of entrancetest power, since the Fairfax County, Va. ,magnet sends more kids to the Ivy League than almost any other U. S. school.
The SAT, with a maximum 2,400 points, and the ACT, with a maximum 36 points, are scored differently, but otherwise are no more different from each other than American football differs from the Canadian version. Students usually do equally well on each. The SAT’s new 25-minute essay is required, while the ACT’s essay is optional. The SAT is three hours and 45 minutes long. The comparable ACT is three hours and 25 minutes. The SAT has three sections: critical reading, math and writing. The ACT has math, science, reading and English sections, plus optional writing. The ACT with the writing test costs $ 43, more than the SAT’s $ 41.50, but the ACT is only $ 29 without the writing section.
Several high-school guidance counselors say they assume the ACT, with 1.2 million test takers in the class of 2005 compared with 1.5 million for the SAT, will eventually catch up, in part because so many educators are advising their students to try both. Wendy Andreen, counselor at Memorial Senior High School in Houston—where the SAT has been supreme—says she tells students every year they should take both tests to be safe, and many are beginning to listen, with ACTs up 18 percent since 2002. Deb Shaver, director of admissions at Smith College, says counselors are steering students to the ACT "because there is less hysteria surrounding the ACTs, and students feel less stressed about taking the test."
The mistakes made in the scoring of the October 2005 SAT by Pearson Educational Measurement, the College Board’s subcontractor, have not been forgotten, counselors say. The SAT suffered from damaging news stories as details of the errors came out bit by hit. In the end, 4, 411 students had scores reported to colleges that were lower than they actually earned and had to be corrected; 17 percent of the corrections were for more than 40 points. College Board president Gaston Caperton apologized, saying the mishap "brings humility, and humility makes us more aware, empathetic and respectful of others."
But many counselors, who often complain about the New York City-based nonprofit’s influence over their students’ futures, say they have their doubts. "I think the College Board sees this as a purely technical problem that they can solve through purely technical means, "says Scott White, a counselor at Montclair ( N. J. ) High School. "I don’t think they appreciate the damage that was done to their already shaky credibility.\
Which of the following statements is NOT true about the ACT

A．Many students now prefer to take the ACT.
B．The ACT could hardly be the SAT’s adversary.
C．The ACT has taken the lead over the SAT.
D．Some people think highly of the ACT.

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9.单项选择题David Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, credits the world’s economics and social progress over the last thousand years to "Western civilization and its dissemination." The reason, he believes, is that Europeans invented systematic economic development. Landes adds that two unique aspects of Europeans culture were crucial ingredient in EUrope’s economic growth.
First, Landes espouses a generalized form of Max Weber’s thesis that the values of work, initiative, and investment made the difference for Europe. Despite his emphasis on science, Landes does not stress the notion of rationality as such. In his view, "what counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity." The only route to economic success for individuals or states is working hard, spending less than you earn, and investing the rest in productive capacity. This is the fundamental explanation of the problem posed by his book’s subtitle: "Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor." For historical reasons—an emphasis on private property, an experience of political pluralism, a temperate climate, an urban style—Europeans have, on balance, followed those practices and therefore have prospered.
Second, and perhaps most important, Europeans were learners. They "learned rather greedily," as Joel Mokyr put it in a review of Landes’s book. Even if Europeans possessed indigenous technologies that gave them an advantage (spectacles, for example), as Landes believes they did, their most vital asset was the ability to assimilate knowledge from around the world and put it to use—as in borrowing the concept of zero and rediscovering Aristotle’s Logic from the Arabs and taking paper and gunpowder from the Chinese via the Muslim world. Landes argues that a systematic resistance to learning from other cultures had become the greatest handicap of the Chinese by the eighteenth century and remains the greatest handicap of Arab countries today.
Although his analysis of Europeans expansion is almost nonexistent, Landes does not argue that Europeans were beneficent bearers of civilization to a benighted world. Rather, he relies on his own commonsense law: "When one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so." In contrast to the new school of world historians, Landes believes that specific cultural values enabled technological advances that in turn made some Europeans strong enough to dominate people in other parts of the world. Europeans therefore proceeded to do so with great viciousness and cruelty. By focusing on their victimization in this process, Landes holds, some postcolonial states have wasted energy that could have been put into productive work and investment. If one could sum up Landes’s advice to these states in one sentence, it might be "Stop whining and get to work." This is particularly important, indeed hopeful, advice, he would argue, because success is not permanent. Advantages are not fixed, gains from trade are unequal, and different societies react differently to market signals. Therefore, not only is there hope for undeveloped countries, but developed countries have little cause to be complacent, because the current situation "will press hard" on them.
The thrust of studies like Landes’s is to identify those distinctive features of European civilization that lie behind Europe’s rise to power and the creation of modernity more generally. Other historians have placed a greater emphasis on such features as liberty, individualism, and Christianity. In a review essay, the art historian Craig Clunas listed some of the less well known linkages that have been proposed between Western culture and modernity, including the propensities to think quantitatively, enjoy pornography, and consume sugar. All such proposals assume the fundamental aptness of the question: What elements of Europeans civilization led to European success It is a short leap from this assumption to outright triumphalism. The paradigmatic book of this school is, of course, The End of History and the Last Man, in which Francis Fukuyama argues that after the collapse of Nazism in the twentieth century, the only remaining model for human organization in the industrial and communications ages is a combination of market economics and limited, pluralist, democratic government.
The cultural elements identified by Landes ______those identified by other historians.

A．embrace
B．contradict
C．glorify
D．complicate

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10.单项选择题In the evenings, they go to the mall. Once a week or more. Sometimes, they even leave the dinner dishes in the sink so they will have enough time to finish all the errands. The father never comes—he hates shopping, especially with his wife. Instead, he stays at home to read the paper and put around his study: To do things that the other dads must be doing in the evenings. To summon the sand to come rushing in and plug up his ears with its roaring silence.
Meanwhile, the mother arms herself with returns from the last trip. Her two young daughters forget games of flashlight tag or favorite TV shows and strap on tennis shoes and seatbelts： and they’re off. On summer nights, when it’s light until after the fireflies arrive, the air is heavy and moist. The daughters unroll their windows and stick the whole of their heads out into the slate blue sky, feeling full force the sweaty, honey suckle air. In the cold mall, their rubber soles squeak on shiny linoleum squares. The younger daughter tries not to step on any cracks. The older daughter keeps a straight-ahead gaze; her sullen eyes count down each errand as it’s done.
It is not until the third or, on a good night, the fourth errand that the trouble begins. The girls have wandered over to examine rainbow beach towels, perhaps, or some kind of pink ruffled bedspread. The mother’s voice finds them from a few aisles away.
Dinner squirms in the daughters’ stomachs. Now comes that what-if-I-threw-up-right-this-second or where-is-a-rabbit-hole-for-me-to-fall-into feeling that they get around this time of evening, at the mall. The older one shakes her ponytails at the younger one. Her blue eyes hiss the careful-don’t-cry warning, but the younger one’s cheeks only get redder. Toe by toe, the daughters edge towards housewares where they finger lace placemats or trace patterns in the store carpet with sneakered soles. The mother’s voice still finds them, shaking with rage. Finally, heels slapping in her sandals, she strides towards them and then keeps going. They follow, catching her word-trail, "Stupid people. Stupid，stupid，stupid. I HATE stupid people." It’s the little skips between steps the younger one takes to keep up with her mother’s tong, angry legs. It’s the car door slamming and the seat belt buckle yanked into place. It’s those things that tell the daughters how the next few hours will go.
In the car, the older one sighs and grinds her back teeth. The younger one feels her face get hotter and her eyes start to swell. She stares at an ice cream stain on the back of the front seat and sees a pony, a flower, and a fairy in that splash of chocolate mint chip. The mother begins on both at once. "And when we get home, if your shoes are still in the TV room, I’m throwing them out. Same for books. No more shit house. No more lazy, ungrateful kids." And so on and so on through the black velvet sky and across the Hershey bar roads. On into the house with a slap or two. "You’ll be happy when I’m in my grave," wails at them as they put on their nightgowns and brush their teeth. The older one sets a stone jaw and the younger one tries not to sob as she opens wide, engulfing her small hand and scrubbing each and every molar.
The father is not spared. The volcanic mother saves some up just for him. "Fucking lousy husband. Do-nothing father. "And on like that for an hour or so more. Then in the darkest part of the night, it’s bare feet and cool hands on a small sweaty forehead. Kisses and caresses and "Sorry Mom got a little mad." Promises for that pink ruffled bedspread or maybe a new stuffed animal. Long fingers rake through the younger one’s curls. "Tomorrow evening, we’ll get you some kind of treat. Right after dinner, we’ll go to the mall.\
The word "squirms’ in the fourth paragraph probably means

A．moves.
B．squirts.
C．wriggles.
D．digests.

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