love charity(慈善) shops and so do lots of other people in Britain because you find quite a few of them on every high street. The charity shop is a British institution, selling everything from clothes to electric goods, all at very good prices. You can get things you won’t find in the shops anymore. The thing I like best about them is that your money is going to a good cause and not into the pockets of profit-driven companies, and you are not damaging the planet, but finding a new home for unwanted goods.
The first charity shop was opened in 1947 by Oxfam. The famous charity’s appeal to aid postwar Greece had been so successful it had been flooded with donations(捐贈(zèng)物). They decided to set up a shop to sell some of these donations to raise money for that appeal. Now there are over 7,000 charity shops in the UK. My favourite charity shop in my hometown is the Red Cross shop, where I always find children’s books, all 10 or 20 pence each.
Most of the people working in the charity shops are volunteers, although there is often a manager who gets paid. Over 90% of the goods in the charity shops are donated by the public. Every morning you see bags of unwanted items outside the front of shops, although they don’t encourage this, rather ask people to bring things in when the shop is open.
The shops have very low running costs: all profits go to charity work. Charity shops raise more than ￡110 million a year, funding（資助）medical research, overseas aid, supporting sick and poor children, homeless and disabled people, and much more. What better place to spend your money? You get something special for a very good price and a good moral sense. You provide funds to a good cause and tread lightly on the environment. （08天津卷）
【小題1】The author loves the charity shop mainly because of _______.

A．its convenient location

B．its great variety of goods

C．its spirit of goodwill

D．its nice shopping environment

【小題2】The first charity shop in the UK was set up to ____.

A．sell cheap products

B．deal with unwanted things

C．raise money for patients

D．help a foreign country

【小題3】 Which of the following is TRUE about charity shops?

A．The operating costs are very low.

B．The staff are usually well paid.

C．90% of the donations are second-hand.

D．They are open twenty-four hours a day.

【小題4】 Which of the following may be the best title for the passage?

A．What to Buy a Charity Shops.

B．Charity Shop: Its Origin & Development.

C．Charity Shop: Where You Buy to Donate.

D．The Public’s Concern about Charity Shops.

 (08·天津E篇)

As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. “The woods” was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend’s house and found him not at home, his mother might say, “Oh, he’s out in the woods, ” with a tone(語氣) of airy acceptance. It’s similar to the tone people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I’m looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even “away from his desk.” For us ten-year-olds, “being out in the woods” was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring(探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though, seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Indian burial mound.

Often we got “l(fā)ost” and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical: the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly—tall beeches, easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us had reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence(青春期). In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.

52. The author and his friends were often out in the woods to _______.

   A. spend their free time                                 B. play golf and other sports

   C. avoid doing their schoolwork                    D. keep away from their parents

53. What can we infer from Paragraph 2?

   A. The activities in the woods were well planned.

   B. Human history is not the result of exploration.

   C. Exploration should be a systematic activity.

   D. The author explored in the woods aimlessly.

54. The underlined word “skeptical” in Paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to ______.

   A. calm                    B. doubtful               C. serious                  D. optimistic

55. How does the author feel about his childhood?

   A. Happy but short.                                     B. Lonely but memorable.

   C. Boring and meaningless.                          D. Long and unforgettable.