新课标2016年高三寒假作业 英语（3）
第二部分 阅读理解（共两节，满分60分）
第一节 （共15小题；每小题3分，满分45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
The world’s premier spelling bee ended Thursday in the U．S．for a second year in a row after an in-tense lo-round showdown between two young competitors to deal with some of the English language’s most obscure（生僻的）words.
Vanya }hlvaShankar，13，and Gokul Venkatachalam，14，together raised the gold trophy（奖杯）in the 88th Scripps National Spelling Bee．
Shivashankar，the sister of 2009 champion Kavya Shivashankar，initially gathered confidence as she went easily through such words as cytopoiesis，bouquetiere and thamakau．Venkatachalam，a basketball fan，also managed such tongue-twisters as poblacion，caudillismo and nixtamal．
But as their eight fellow finalists failed one by one，the tension grew until they stood alone on stage•
When Shivashankar，in the fourteenth round，correctly spelled scherenschnitte，the German一derived（源自德语的）word for artistic paper cutting, official bee pronouncer Jacques Bailly, broke the news to．
Venkatachalam . contest，Bailly said，was about to run out of words，and if Venkatachalam spelled his next word correctly，he and his rival（对手）would be declared joint winners一a repeat of last year’s surprise．
The winning word came so easily to the eighth-grader from the branch St．Louis，Missouri suburb of Chesterfield that he skipped the bee contestant’s routine of asking for the word’s origin，meaning and usage in a sentence•“N一u一n一a一t一a一k，”the devoted LeBron James fan said，spelling the Inuit-derived word for an icy island as easily as if he was spelling d一。-g or c-a-t．
Asked afterwards what went through his mind upon hearing the word，Venkatachalam frankly replied：“Me and Vanya are going to be champions．”
24 ．How many contestants took part in the final？
A. Only two.
B. Four.
C. Eight.
D. Ten.
