河南省台前一高2015-2016学年高二上学期期中考试 英语试题
第一部分：听力（1----20题）略
第二部分：阅读理解 （共10小题;每小题2分，满分20分）
阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项 （A 、B 、C 和 D ）中 ，选出最佳选项，并在答题卡上将该项涂黑。
A
Did you know the meaning of a word may change over time? Many English words we know now had different meanings a long time ago. One example is the word nice.
Around the year 1300, nice was first used in English to mean “stupid”. Two hundred years later, nice began to carry a “better” meaning. If people said a book was written nicely, they meant the book was written “clearly” or “carefully”, not “stupidly”. After 1800, nice began to take its meaning like “kind” or “friendly”. Since then, people have thought of nice as a word with good meanings.
A good change of a word’s meaning like this example of nice is called AMELIORATION. Though we don’t use nice to mean “stupid” any more, it is fun to know how much a word’s meaning can change from its start!
For more examples of AMELIORATION, see next page.
21. 1300 years ago, a “nice person” was believed to be_________.
A. carefully B. friendly C. clever D. stupid
22. What is the second paragraph mainly about?
A. What nice used to mean. B. How the meaning of nice changed over time.
C. How long nice has been used . D. Why the meaning of nice changed.
