全国2007年1月高等教育自学考试
英语写作试题
课程代码：00603
Ⅰ. Supply the missing paragraph. (20 points)
The following passage is incomplete with the introduction missing. Study the passage carefully and write the paragraph in no more than 100 words. Make sure your tone and the vocabulary you use are in unity with the passage provided.
Undesirable Produce Market Customers
“Sammy Squeezer” is the least annoying of these undesirables. He wants to make sure that everything he buys is “just right”. He pokes his thumbs into the top of a cantaloupe. If they penetrate very deeply, he won’t buy this particular specimen, considering it to be overripe. He squeezes the peaches, plums, nectarines and any other fruit he can get his hands on. After ten of these people squeeze one piece of fruit, it will surely be soft, even if it wasn’t originally. Moving on to the corn, Sammy carefully peels back the husk to examine the kernels inside. If they don’t suit him, he doesn’t bother to fold the husk back to protect the kernels; he simply tosses the ear back into the basket. The problems he creates for the employees are primarily physical——removing the damaged items after he leaves.
A more annoying customer is “Betty Bitcher”. She is never satisfied with the quality of the produce: the bananas are too green, the lettuce has brown spots, the berries are too ripe, and the potatoes have green spots. Sometimes you wonder if Betty would have been satisfied with the fruit grown in the Garden of Eden.
Perhaps the most annoying customers of all is “Charlie Cheater”. You have to keep your eye on him constantly because he knows all the tricks of cheating. He will add berries to an already full basket. He will take six 79 cents oranges and tell you they are the 59 cents ones. He will put expensive grapes at the bottom of a sack and add cheaper ones on top. Then he will tell you that they are all the cheaper variety. Likewise, he will put expensive nectars in a sack, place a few cheaper peaches on top, and try to pass them all off as peaches. If he is caught, he usually says, I don’t know how that happened. My little girl (or boy) must have put them there. The child usually looks dumbfounded.
Did you recognize any of these customers? If you didn’t and would like to see some of them in action, stop at Steve’s Produce Market. That’s where I work, and that’s where I meet them.
Ⅱ. Write an outline. (20 points)
Read the following passage carefully and compose a “sentence outline” for it.
A Winter to Remember
According to the weather men, last winter was one of the worst in living memory.
We live in the depths of the country, and my whole family agree that it is certainly a winter we shall never forget. Snow began to fall at round about the beginning of the New Year and continued on and off for approximately ten days.
At first we were all thrilled to see it. It fell silently and relentlessly in large soft flakes until every ugly patch and corner of our rather rambling garden was smoothed over and had become a spotless white canopy. The children soon spoilt its beauty by having snowball fights and leaving their footprints all over it. Hungry birds too, in search of scraps of food, made delicate impressions on its surface. It was now, the garden was all churned up and of a dirty grey color, that a severe frost set in, hardening the snow into ugly lumps of grimy concrete. For the next three months the whole countryside lay in a grip of iron.
Every day the birds grew tamer, often waiting hopefully almost on our backdoor step. We fed them with bits of cheese, chopped up meat and any left-overs we had. We also put out bowls of water, which unfortunately within an hour had frozen solid.
Indoors it was pretty cold too. Our central heating system proved both inadequate and uncooperative; inadequate partly because it needed overhauling and partly because the poor state of the doors and most of the windows made a whistling stream of cold air come through; uncooperative because occasionally it simply went on strike. To make matters worse there were tiny holes in the brickwork of many of the rooms. As a result the water pipes froze so that for several weeks our water supply had to be brought in buckets from a nearby farm. We tried to buy a number of oil stoves to keep these rooms warm, but other people had thought of doing this too——when we called at the village shop the shop-keeper told us she had sold out and that although there were more on order they were unlikely to be delivered until the spring which, of course, was a great comfort.
Throughout January and February and much of March we sat about in our overcoats and warmed ourselves by tramping to and from the farm, lugging buckets of water.
On one occasion the water actually froze before it reached the house, and our youngest son——not the most intelligent of youth——promptly took it all the way back to the farm.
However, the good thing did happen. One of the children dropped a container with a dozen eggs in it. I stooped down furiously to pick up what I thought would be the messy remains only to discover the eggs had come to no harm——they were as solid as if they had been hard-boiled.
Late in March, it finally thawed. Water squirted from pipes in at least half a dozen places. Instead of carting buckets of water into the kitchen from the farm we now brought them in from different parts of the house. Eventually we found a plumber. The plumber undoubtedly, saved us from drowning. I have been devoted to plumbers ever since.
Ⅲ. Compose an essay. (60 points)
We all work or will work in our jobs with many different kinds of people. In your opinion ,what are some important characteristics of a co-worker (someone you work closely with)? Write an essay (about 300 words) to explain why these characteristics are important.
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