Issues around children learning to read are rarely out of the news, which is hardly surprising—becoming a successful reader is of vital importance in improving a child’s life chances. Nor is it surprising that reading creates a virtuous circle: the more you read the better you become. But what may come as a surprise is that reading to dogs is gaining popularity as a way of addressing concerns about children’s reading.
Underachievement (学业不良) in groups of children in the UK is recognized in international studies—and successive governments have sought to address the issues in a range of ways. Reading to dogs, so far, has not been among them, but it’s time to look at the strategy more seriously.
Many children naturally enjoy reading and need little encouragement, but if they are struggling, their confidence can quickly decrease—and with it, their motivation. This brings about the destructive cycle, and therefore reading ability fails to improve.
So how can dogs help?
A therapeutic (疗法的) presence
Reading to dogs is just that—encouraging children to read alongside a dog. The practice originated in the US in 1999.
The presence of dogs has a calming effect on many people—hence their use in Pets as Therapy schemes (PAT). Many primary schools are becoming increasingly pressurized environments and children (like adults) generally do not respond well to such pressure. A dog creates an environment that immediately feels more relaxing and welcoming. Reading can be an independent activity, but can also be a pleasurable, shared social event. Children who are struggling to read benefit from the simple pleasure of reading to a loyal, loving listener.
Children who are struggling to read, for whatever reason, need to build confidence and rediscover a motivation for reading. A dog is a reassuring, friendly audience who will not mind if mistakes are made. Children can read to the dog, uninterrupted; comments will not be made. Errors can be addressed in other contexts at other times. For more experienced or capable readers, they can experiment with intonation and “voices”, knowing that the dog will respond positively—and building fluency further develops comprehension in readers.
For children who are struggling, reconnecting with the pleasure of reading is very important. As Marylyn Jager-Adams, a literacy (读写) scholar, noted in a seminal review of beginner reading in the US: “If we want children to learn to read well, we must find a way to attract them to read lots.”
Reading to a dog can create a helpful balance, supporting literacy activities which may seem less appealing to a child. Children having difficulty with reading, for example, need focused support to develop their understanding of the alphabetic code (字母代码). But this needs to be balanced with activities which support independent reading and social enjoyment or the child can become less motivated.
Creating a virtuous circle
Breaking a negative cycle will inevitably lead to the creation of a virtuous circle—and sharing a good book with a dog enables children to apply their reading skills in a positive and enjoyable way.
Research evidence in this area is rather limited, despite the growing popularity of the scheme. A 2016 systematic review of 48 studies—“Children Reading to Dogs: A Systematic Review of the Literature” by Hall, Ge and Mills--demonstrated some evidence for improvement in reading, but the evidence was not strong. There clearly is more work to do, but interest in reading to dogs appears to have grown through the evidence of case studies. The example, often given in the media, is that of Tony Nevett and his pet dog Danny. Tony and Danny’s involvement in a number of schools has been transformative, not only in terms of reading but also in promoting general well-being positive behavior among children with a diverse range of needs.
So, reading to dogs could offer many benefits. As with any approach, it is not a cure—but set within a language—rich literacy environment, there appears to be little to lose and much to gain.
Title: How Dogs Could Make Children Better 1. ▲
Introduction | •Reading is so important that issues around children learning to remain hot. But 2. ▲, reading to dogs becomes an increasingly popular way to address concerns about it. •Struggling to read will decrease children’s confidence and motivation and gets in the 3. ▲ of their reading ability building. |
Benefits of reading to dogs | •Governments in the UK haven’t employed the strategy of reading to dogs to help underachievers, which needs serious 4. ▲ in the near future. |
| A therapeutic presence •Reading to a dog can help children 5. ▲ down, feel relaxed and get pleasure, for dogs are loyal and loving listeners. Reading to a dog can help children build confidence, as children can read without being interrupted or being 6. ▲ on. •Reading to a dog can also create a helpful balance, making children 7. ▲ to participate in literacy activities. |
Creating a virtuous circle •Sharing a good book with a dog likely enables children to apply their reading skills positively and enjoyably, though more work remains to be done to 8. ▲ it. •More case studies of reading to dogs indicate it might 9. ▲, both promoting children's reading interest and positive life. | |
Conclusion | With so little to lose and so much to gain, it 10. ▲ to read to dogs although it is not a cure-all. |
句子翻译
1.要确保道路安全、避免事故，一切都在于我们道路使用者。
2.这让一些人阅读起来有困难，因此经典文学作品常常被遗忘在书架上。
3.这一时期的诗歌通常关注自由、美丽等概念，往往运用想象触及强烈的情感。
4.想象一下在紫禁城上演这出歌剧吧——不可能有比这儿更令人叹为观止的场景了！
5.来自许多国家的这群人的联袂演出、音乐以及恢弘的场景显然是这场令人惊叹的演出的重要因素。
My father and I have been separated for over two years. He was physically violent and emotionally abusive to me throughout my childhood, and I felt that I couldn’t forgive him. And yet, now he is dying, unconscious and struggling to breathe through an oxygen tube after a major stroke, all I can think of is how much he loved me.
How he would hold my fringe (刘海) back and kiss me on the forehead before school. How he bought me a pottery set and roller skates, although we were struggling by on just his salary, and allowed me to skate to school. How he would play chess and tennis with me, and take me to endless chess and tennis tournaments, even though I never won anything. How he would read the Guardian every day and fill in the quick crossword, but leave a few clues and praise me if I solved them. He kept every one of my Guardian columns, and every article I ever had published, even during our many estranged (疏远) periods. He gave me a lot of his savings to buy a flat after I became a single mum. And he set my date of birth as the passcode on his phone.
Yet I’m ashamed to say I blamed him, often, for everything: my anorexia (厌食症), my cutting, my anxiety, my depression... He was there during the tough times, yet all I could think was that the tough times happened because of him, forgetting that the causes of events are complex, and that plenty of people who had happy childhoods have to deal with mental illness and domestic violence too.
I even stopped him from seeing my daughter, then three, the thing that brought him most happiness, because I was scared he would hurt her, and that her life would be like mine. That decision would mean he never spoke to me again.
When we spent time together in previous years, my father hugged me a lot yet never talked much. Born in 1930s America during the Depression, he was a man of few words, a silent romantic who signed his empty Valentine’s cards to my mother with only his first initial. I know he thought I talked too much; ironically, I never told him what I needed to. Knowing he was old, I tried to get back in touch several times to make things right, but my mother said he didn’t want to hear from me. I understand that. Why would he want to hear from the daughter who was never able to forgive him for his mistakes; who brought them up time after time, unable to accept his apologies? Who prevented him from seeing his granddaughter? Who scolded him for his faults, yet never acknowledged his numerous kindnesses?
It’s much too late now. When I sit by his hospital bed and hold his large wrinkled hand, far too warm, and ask him to squeeze it if he can hear me, he doesn’t. So I tell him a few of the things I should have told him when he was conscious, though it’s hard to say the words: that I love him very much, and that I’m sorry about the estrangement. And it reminds me of what I’ve known for a long time: that my dad didn’t know how to be a father to me when I was young, because his father was abusive to him as a child. His father died estranged from his son; my father is dying estranged from his daughter.
I never thought that I’d feel this broken at losing him. I fantasise that his eyes will open, and that he will be conscious again for just a few days. I will give him a letter thanking him for all the things I have remembered while writing this piece, and apologizing for all the ways I have wronged him. And when I deliver the letter, I will bring my five-year-old daughter with me, so he can see her happiness and sweetness, and learn that the chain of hurt that has been passed down from generation to generation has finally been broken.
1.The separation between Father and the daughter is mainly caused by ______.
A.Father’s cruelty towards the daughter
B.Father’s irresponsibility for the family
C.the daughter’s protection of her kid from harm
D.the daughter’s misunderstanding of her father
2.Father rejected his daughter’s offer to get in touch with him because ______.
A.he was too ashamed to face his daughter
B.he couldn’t support his daughter any more
C.he couldn’t pardon his daughter’s ignorance
D.he was content to live away from his daughter
3.The author’s father can be described as ______.
A.generous, cold and stubborn B.strict, caring and stubborn
C.generous, strict and inconsiderate D.caring, cold and inconsiderate
4.What message does the author want to convey in the underlined part?
A.The granddaughter will break the family chain to live freely.
B.The previous way of family education will no longer continue.
C.There will be no restriction in the family from that moment on.
D.Father will leave the world without any regrets and sufferings.
5.What might be the best title of the passage?
A.East or west, home is best B.A good medicine tastes bitter
C.It’s no use crying over spilt milk D.Where there is life, there is hope
Edgar Alan Poe was and is an abnormal figure among the major American writers of his period. It seems to have been true of Poe that no one could look at him without seeing more than they would wish.
Poe published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in 1838,his only novel. Its importance is suggested by the fact that his major work comes after it. The Narrative’s shortcomings are sometimes considered to be the fact that it was written for money, as it surely was, and as almost everything else Poe wrote was also. This is not exceptional among writers anywhere, though in the case of Poe it is often treated as if his having done so were disgraceful. Be that as it may, the Narrative makes its way to a peak as strange and powerful as anything to be found in his greatest tales.
The word that reoccurs most importantly in Poe's fictions is horror. His stories are often shaped to bring the narrator and the reader to a place where the use of the word is reasonable, where the word and the experience it arouses are explored or by implication defined. Perhaps it is because Poe's tales test the limits of mental health and good manners that he is both popular and criticized.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym has the grand scale of the nineteenth-century voyage of discovery, and a different and larger scale in the suggestions that appear as the voyage goes on. The Narrative is frequently compared with Moby-Dick, published thirteen years later, after Poe’s death. Poe uses whiteness as a highly ambiguous symbol, by no means to be interpreted as purity or holiness or by association with any other positive value. There is blackness, too, in The Narrative, specifically associated with the populations that live in the regions nearest the South Pole. The native people in Tasmania, the island south of Australia, were said by explorers and settlers to be black, and were in any case, with the word “black,” swept into the large category of those related to displacement, exploitation, and worse.
Something very like the occupation of Kentucky by white settlers lies behind the events that bring Pym to the far-sighted conclusion of his narrative. In the early years of the nineteenth century the British began what made the native people of Tasmania die out, who had tried to resist white invasion of their island. Such occupations were, of course, a major business of Europeans, or whites, almost everywhere in the world at the time Poe wrote. They, were boasted of as progress. It would have required unusual sensibility in Poe to have taken a different, very dark view of the phenomenon. But he was an unusual man. And the horror that fascinated him and gave such dreadful unity to his tales is often the unavoidable, conflict of the self by a perfect justice, the exposure of a guilty act in a form that makes its reveal a falling back of the mind against itself.
Young Pym is simply telling a story of a kind popular at the time, a voyage adventure lived out beyond the farthest reaches of exploration. The story is disturbed by its own deeper tendencies, the rising through this surface of the kind of recognition that must find expression in another form of literature. As his ship approaches the region of the South Pole, Pym notes the mildness of the climate, coolly listing the resources of the islands, which were assumed by such voyagers to be there for the taking.
If The Narrative were a conventional story, the immense roar and the towering flames might attract the notice of a passing sail—and there would be no need for a note explaining its lacking an ending. But the force of the narrative carries it beyond the fate of individuals, toward an engagement with a reality beyond any temporary human drama.
1.What does the underlined part in Paragraph 1 mean?
A. Allan Poe was a famous America writer of his period.
B. People expect too much of the American writer—Alan Poe.
C. Unlike other writers, Allan Poe is a unique and unusual writer.
D. People think Poe is a popular novelist like other famous writers.
2.Where is the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym probably set?
A. In the South Pacific. B. In Australia.
C. At the South Pole. D. In Kentucky.
3.Which of the following can describe the characteristic of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym?
A. Poverty is the main theme of the novel.
B. The novel is full of justice elements.
C. Blackness can possibly be felt in the novel.
D. Whiteness is the obvious symbol of the novel.
4.Which of the following might be taken from the novel The Narrative?
A. “One of these adventures was related by way of introduction to a longer narrative.”
B. “Gordon Pym’s father was a respectable trader at Nantucket, where Pym was born.”
C. “The wind, as I before said, blew freshly from the southwest. The night was very cold.”
D. “Pym at length hit upon the idea of working on the terrors and guilty conscience of the mate.”
5.Which of the following statements is True according to the passage?
A. The Narrative is an adventurous story written in a conventional way.
B. The Narrative is considered one of Alan Poe's famous novels.
C. Allan Poe was misunderstood to write The Narrative for money.
D. Readers might not understand why The Narrative ended so abruptly.
Supermarket shelves are filled with plant-based alternatives to cow milk, including soy, nut, and coconut milk. These products are popular with consumers who cannot drink cows’ milk for health reasons, as well as with those concerned about animal welfare and environmental sustainability. While the dairy-free(非乳制的) options work well with cereal or in coffee, they fail miserably when it comes to making milk-based products like cheese or yogurt. However, these shortcomings may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a new company in California, which has figured out how to create animal-free milk in a laboratory!
Perumal Gandhi and Ryan Pandya founded the company in 2014 after becoming increasingly annoyed with the lack of cows’ milk-free alternatives, particularly for cheese. For Gandhi, who stopped consuming animal products five years earlier due to environmental and animal welfare concerns, the motivation to create a better alternative stemmed from his love of cheesy pizza. Pandya was spurred into taking action after being forced to eat some “really bad” dairy-free cream cheese on his sandwich.
The two MIT biomedical engineering scientists decided to join forces to create a more realistic alternative to dairy-based products. In their university lab, the pair spent nine months first isolating(分离) cow DNA then inserting it into yeast. This genetic modification enabled the yeast to produce the necessary milk proteins. The final step of the process involved mixing the proteins with some plant nutrients and fats.
The dairy-free milk not only tastes like the real thing but is also healthier, has a longer shelf life and, most important of all, is Earth friendly. According to the company’s website, when compared to conventional（传统的） milk production, their process uses 65% less energy, creates 84%o less greenhouse gas emissions and requires 91% less land and an amazing 98% less water! Best of all, since it contains real milk proteins, the product behaves like the cow-produced version, which means vegetarian consumers will no longer have to deal with soggy cheese on their sandwiches and pizzas.
The company plans to bring their creation to market later this year and their first product will most likely be cheese since there are already numerous good cows’ milk alternatives available to consumers.
1.The underlined word "those" in paragraph 1 refers to_______.
A. alternatives B. people
C. products D. reasons
2.What can be inferred from paragraph 4?
A. The dairy-free products cannot be stored for a long time.
B. The new products will taste better than dairy-based ones.
C. Cow farming causes considerable environmental damage.
D. The dairy-free milk will be more expensive than cow’s milk.
3.Which of the following can be the best title for the text?
A. Healthier Cheese B. New Milk Saves Planet
C. Fresher Milk, Better Future D. Making Milk without Cows
The following ads come from UW (University of Washington) newspaper called The Daily.
1.If you are looking for a job only for the summer, how many choices do you have?
A.One. B.Two.
C.Three. D.Four.
2.Which of the following is TRUE according to the ads?
A.If you are good at swimming, you can try a job at 206-555-3989.
B.All the companies advertising on the Daily are trustworthy.
C.As a student, you don't need to pay a deposit when renting rooms.
D.The fees for parking near University of Washington are the same.
