山西省大同市高二英语上学期期中试题.pdfVIP

山西省大同市第一中学 2016-2017 学年高二英语上学期期中试题 第Ⅰ卷 客观卷（共 60 分） 第一部分 阅读理解（共两节，满分 40 分） 第一节 （共15 小题；每小题 2 分，满分 30 分） A Can you imagine that a small stamp should be worth $16,800? Any mistake made in the printing of a stamp raises its value to stamp collectors. A mistake on a two-penny stamp has made it worth a million and a half times its face value. Maybe you think it impossible. But it is true. And this is how it happened. The mistake was made more than a hundred years ago in the former British colony （殖民地）of Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean. In 1847 and order for stamps was sent to London. Mauritius was about to become the fourth country in the world to put out stamps. Before the order was filled and the stamps arrived from England, a big dance was planned by the commander-in-chief of all the armed forces on the island. The dance would be held in his house and letters of invitation would be sent to all the important people in Mauritius. Stamps were badly needed to post the letters. Therefore, an islander, who was a good printer, was told to copy the pattern of the stamps. He carelessly put the word “Post Office ” instead of “Post Paid ”, two words seen on stamps at that time, on the several hundred that he printed. Today, there are only twenty-six of these misprinted stamps left fourteen One-penny Reds and twelve Two-penny Blues. Because there are so few Two-Penny Blues and because of their age, collectors have paid as much as $16,800 for one of them. 1. When a mistake is made in the printing of the stamp, the stamp _____________. A. will become useless and thrown away B. is worth no more than its face