Help 國中基測 試卷練習

One evening, my dad asked me to buy some bread for dinner. It was dark and cold outside. I rode a bike to a store near my school. When I left the store, it got even darker, so I got on my bike right away. Then I found a woman in a white dress riding a motorcycle after me. She followed me for a long time. I rode very fast and started to cry for help, but no one was there. I was too scared and too tired to ride any faster. At last, I gave up. The woman stopped in front of me and said, "Why were you riding so fast, Ken? It's dangerous!" I looked at the woman. "Oh! It's you, Mom! You really scared me. Dad said you wouldn't be back for dinner tonight!"

I saw this picture in this week’s Time magazine. A photographer named Gregory Heisler sent the picture to Time. The boys in the picture are all wearing different clothes, but they all share the same face. They do not just look like each other. In fact, they are the same person. Heisler ‘made” this funny picture on the computer. But in the future, with the science of ‘cloning’ (copying living things), a picture like this one may not just be a computer trick.

The idea of cloning began a long time ago. It became real when some animals like frogs were successfully cloned. At first, I didn’t care much about these studies. However, when some studies showed that even “people” could be cloned, I felt the studies had gone too far.

I don’t know much about science, but I do know I would hate to live on a planet full of copies of me. I found myself scared by the smiles of the copied boys when I looked at the picture again. To me, a world of cloned people is a world where the rules of nature are broken, which may bring a lot of problems we’ve never thought of.

Englishman Robert Scott is known for leading two trips to Antarctica. The first one made him a star; the second 42.

After his first successful trip, Scott decided to be the first person to stand on the South Pole. However, 43. He would be in a race with Roald Amundsen, from Norway. Both left their countries by ship in June of 1910 and arrived in Antarctica in January of 1911.

About ten months later, both teams started their trips down to the South Pole. 44. Amundsen’s team used dogs, and Scott’s team used horses. Because horses weren’t good at traveling on snow, it took Scott’s team 77 days to arrive at the South Pole. They got there on January 17, 1912, and were surprised to find that Amundsen was ahead of them. The news hit Scott very hard, but what he didn’t know was that 45. His team began their long trip home with broken hearts. After days of terrible weather and little food, Scott lost his men one after another, and he himself was the last one to meet the end of his life. No one on his team lived to go back home and tell their story. It was only learned through Scott’s diary.