春居杂兴二首（其一）^①

王禹偁

两株桃杏映篱斜，妆点商州副使家。

何事春风容不得？和莺吹折数枝花。

【注释】①太宗淳化二年（991），因多次上书言事作者被贬官到商州，任团练副使。此诗即作于次年春。

    Keep it in the air: The Chaoyang Theatre is one of the Beijing theatres to present acrobatics(杂技) all year round. Top acrobatic artists invited from all over the country perform for Chinese and foreign tourists. The programme contains trick cycling, leaping through hoops and Chinese magic tricks. Some of the artists have won prizes in international competitions.

    Time: 7:15 pm Daily

    Place: 36, Dongsanhuan Beilu, Chaoyang District

    Tel: 65072421, 65071818

    Use your head: Green Hat is a new drama given by a group of young Chinese actors. It's a rewrite of American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous novel The Scarlet Letter. It describes the heroine's great courage in finding true love against the public disagreement.

    Time: 7:15 pm until March 5, except Mondays

    Place: China Children's Theatre

    Tel: 66037255, 66037265

    Mix and match: Story of Puppets tells of a fairy, Zixia, who looks for true love in the human world. After watching a puppet play Peony Pavilion, she thinks there must be true love in reality, so she uses magic to turn the puppet characters into humans, wanting to fall in love with the puppet hero. But things don't go as she planned. . . Li Liuyi, the director of the play has made several successful attempts to present different traditional operas in one play. This time he combines Peking Opera, Kunqu Opera, Pingju Opera along with a band, using the structure of modern drama.

    Time: 7:30 pm until March 10, except Mondays

    Place: Small Playhouse of Beijing People's Art Theatre

    Tel:6525012

    Peking Opera:The Beijing Peking Opera Troupe will give two performances at the Chang'an Grand Theatre. Each performance includes two classical excerpts(选段). One is wenxi(a kind of play focusing on singing and dancing);the other is wuxi (a kind of a play full of acrobatic dancing). The first night will be The Crossroad and Presenting a Pearl of the Rainbow Bridge. And the second night will see the performance of The Goddess of Heaven Scatters Flowers and Havoc in Heaven.

Time:7:30 pm February 27, 28

    Place: Chang'an Grand Theater

    Tel:86531043

—Of course I did. As a matter of fact,  I had such fun that time seemed to ______ so quickly.

    Country music is one of the most popular kinds of music in the United States today because it is about simple but strong human feelings and events-love, sadness, good times, and bad times. It tells real-life stories and sounds the way people really talk, as life becomes more complicated (复杂的) it is good to hear music about ordinary people.

    Country music, sometimes called country-western, comes from two lands of music. One is the traditional music of the people in. the Appalachian Mountains in the eastern United States. The other is traditional cowboy music from the west. The singers usually play guitars, and in the 1920s they started using electric guitars.

    At first city people said country music was low class. It was popular mostly in the South. But during World War II, thousands of Southerners went to the northeast and Midwest to work in the factories. They took their music with them. Soldiers from the rest of the country went to army camps in the South. They learned country music. Slowly it became popular all over the country.

    Today country music is also popular everywhere in the United States and Canada-in small towns and in New York City, among black and white, and among educated and uneducated people. About 1,200 radio stations broadcast country music twenty-four hours day, English stars sing it in British English, and people in other countries sing it in their own languages. The music that started with cowboys and poor southerners is now popular all over the world.

    Jack threw the papers on my desk. “Next time you want to change anything, ask me first,” he said. I had changed a long sentence and corrected its grammar — something I thought I was paid to do.

    Several days later, he made me angry again. I went to his office, prepared to lose my job if need be, but not before I let the man know how I felt. “What?” he said nervously. Suddenly I knew what I had to do. “Jack, the way you've been treating me is wrong. And it's wrong for me to allow it to continue,” I said. “I want to make you a promise. I will be a friend.” The next day I brought some cakes to Jack's office. Every time I saw Jack in the hall, I smiled at him. After all, that's what friends do.

    One year after our talk, I was told that I had breast cancer (乳腺癌). When I was in hospital, my friends tried to find the right words to say, but no one could. The last day of my hospital stay, the door opened and Jack walked over to my bed. “Tulips (郁金香),” he placed some bulbs (球茎) beside me and said, “If you plant them when you get home, you'll be there to see them when they come up.” Tears filled my eyes. In a moment when I prayed for just the right words, a man with few words said the right thing. After all, that's what friends do. Now, I have seen those tulips push through the soil every spring for over ten years.

阅读下面短文，从短文后各题所给的四个选项中，选出可以填入空白处的最佳选项。

    I went online to check if my pay was in my bank 1. To my amazement I discovered that not only had I been paid, a 2 I'd never worked for had also paid me! I knew I'd have been beside myself if my own salary was not in my account, so I tried to get the money 3 to the right person. Easier said than4 .

    The bank couldn't help as it wasn't a bank 5. The human resources department at the company that paid me was unable to help as I didn't have enough 6 . I rang the bank again. 7, I had a sympathetic call operator who gave me a(n)8 , so I again rang the company “Daniel” worked for.

    I expected the bank would 9 me to arrange to take the money from my account and repay Daniel. I heard 10 for a month and the money remained in my account when Daniel called, 11 he'd tried to get back his money but had been unsuccessful as neither the bank nor his company felt it was their12 . He had rung to ask if I could speak to the bank, but after chatting for a few minutes we realized we could probably 13 this problem ourselves.

    We decided I would take the money from my account and he would14 it up from me. Due to my busy job I was unable to meet Daniel 15 but he left me a lovely bottle of wine 16 what was rightfully his. I never had any 17of keeping Daniel's pay but red tape(繁琐手续) made 18 difficult to do the right thing. It all came down to (归结为) 19 people being able to do what a huge bank and a large company couldn't do— 20 a mistake has occurred and fix it.