2013高考英语阅读理解高效训练：新闻类
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LONDON — Britain awoke on Easter Monday to a period of mourning for the Queen Mother, who died over the weekend after a life spanning a century of noisy and evident change. The 101-year-old royal matriarch died in her sleep last Saturday with Queen Elizabeth, her elder and only surviving daughter, at her bedside. For a woman who was one of the best-known figures in Britain for more than 80 years — from the era of tinted portraits on tin biscuit boxes and cigarette cards to the age of the Internet, the Queen Mother remained an enigmatic(不可思议的) and elusive(躲避的) figure.
She achieved such a respect through aeons(永世, 亿万年) of, first, fawning and, later, intrusive media fascination, by remaining almost entirely silent. Her private thoughts were never paraded(炫耀) in public. What the public saw was a charming and benign elderly lady, adept at winning the admiration of press photographers, whom she always favoured with a particular smile.
CHINA’s third unmanned spacecraft, Shenzhou Ⅲ, landed safely in central Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Monday afternoon, after orbiting the earth 108 times in slightly less than a week. The craft, which lifted off from Jiuquan in Gansu Province last Monday night, landed after successfully conducting a chain of flight and scientific experiments over a period of 162 hours.
A powerful earthquake jolted Taiwan, killing five construction workers, authorities(官方) said. Over 200 injuries ware reported across the island, mostly minor, as a result of Sunday’s 7.5-magnitude quake. The quake was centred off Hualien, 180 kilometres east of Taipei. It struck at 2:53 pm and lasted for nearly a minute.
