While you’re grounded and social distancing, you can still travel the world through the pages of these novels whose setting is often the main character. Whether going back in time to Cartegna, Colombia in “Love in the Time of Cholera” or getting lost on a remote volcanic Russian peninsula in “Disappearing Earth”, these books will transport you all around the globe.
1. ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ by David Guterson
Puget Sound, Washington
While San Piedro is a fictional island in the real life San Juan Islands off Washington, the location of this haunting mystery is believed to be based on Bainbridge Island, which is more to the south in Puget Sound. But for anyone who’s been to these Pacific Northwest islands and experienced their pine and cedar forests and quiet harbors, the book’s description of San Piedro rings true: “a brand of green beauty that inclined its residents toward the poetical.”
2. ‘Disappearing Earth’ by Julia Phillips
Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia
This detective fiction’s main character is Kamchatka, the remote Siberian peninsula full of unique
characters who reveal the ethnic and cultural conflicts of the region, all connected by a crime.
3. ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Cartagena, Colombia
Although the location of the book goes unnamed, it’s generally accepted that Marquez’s hometown was the inspiration for this story of unrequited love. The film adaptation was shot within the walls of the Old City.
4. ‘Florida’ by Lauren Groff
Florida
Storms, snakes, sinkholes and stories? Welcome to Florida. The fantastical tales in this collection span centuries, characters and towns, but all take place in the Sunshine State. You’ll be swept up in a wild hurricane of a ride with these lyrical stories of anger and love, loss and hope.
1.The text is especially helpful for those who ________.
A.are fond of traveling B.are afraid of working
C.are eager to read D.are happy to be grounded
2.Which of the following is an imaginary place?
A.San Piedro. B.Puget Sound.
C.San Juan Islands. D.Bainbridge Island.
3.Which book will you choose if you like the stories in the Sunshine State?
A.Snow Falling on Cedars
B.Disappearing Earth
C.Love in the Time of Cholera
D.Florida
假定你是天津晨中学学生会主席李津，你得知英国友好学校的戏剧社在当地很有名气，你的学校正计划成立戏剧社团，请你根据以下提示给对方戏剧社团团长James 写封邮件，向他咨询。
(1)向对方戏剧社团表示敬意；
(2)介绍本校成立戏剧社团的目的和计划；
(3)向对方咨询(如：怎样挑选成员，询问活动内容等)。
注意：(1)词数不少于100；
(2)可适当加入细节，使内容充实、行文连贯；
(3)开头已给出,不计入总词数。
参考词汇：戏剧社团drama club
Dear James,
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yours,
Li Jin
阅读短文，并按照题目要求用英语回答问题。
Kobe Bryant wasn't the first NBA player to visit China. But he was the first player to help China grow into a basketball-crazed nation.
Kobe's first visit was in 1998, and in conducting basketball clinics （篮球训练营），doing business and participating in charity, he was warmly welcomed in the basketball-loving country. Once, nearly 15,000 people showed up at 9 am for an event at which Kobe was scheduled to appear at 4 pm.
USA Basketball chairman Jerry Colangelo saw firsthand Kobe's popularity during Kobe's time with Team USA at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when as captain he led the team to a gold medal. "There were tens of thousands of people on the streets, yelling, 'Kobe! Kobe!' It was unbelievable, just unbelievable," Colangelo said.
"It's harder for me to walk around here than in the United States," Kobe once told reporters in China in 2013. “It's uncontrollable. Fans rush you and surround you, and it gets to the point where you can't go out."
His last visit was in August last year for the 2019 FIBA World Cup. He told reporters, “I watched the country develop from the ground up. I watched Beijing grow. I watched the passion for the game develop. My goal is to develop the country's basketball to a level where they can compete with the best basketball countries in the world,", Kobe said.
Kobe was and perhaps remains China's favourite NBA player, and fans in the country were shocked by his death in a helicopter crash in January this year. Tencent, the NBA's digital partner in China, posted a memorial page that drew more than five million visitors in less than five days.
Just two days before Kobe died, he posted a short video on the Chinese micro-blogging site Weibo, wishing Chinese fans a happy new year. How sorrowful his fans are when they watch the video again!
1.Apart from being an excellent NBA players, what else makes Kobe Bryant special to Chinese fans? (no more than 15 words)
2.What does the author want to prove, telling us what Jerry Colangelo saw at the 2008 Beijing Olympics? (no more than 10 words)
3.What does the underlined phrase "from the ground up" mean in paragraph 5? (no more than 8 words)
4.What made Kobe Bryant confident that China's basketball can be one of the best in the world? (no more than 15 words)
5.How do you find Kobe Bryant? Please give your reason, (no more than 20 words)
Many parents worry that showing negative emotions in front of their children will cause them to suffer. For example, children may end up thinking it's their fault or simply "catch" the emotion. Indeed, this worry has a sound basis — the phenomenon of “emotional contagion"（情绪感染）is real, and one recent study found that parents can transfer their fear of going to the dentist, for example, to their children.
On the other hand, there is the natural idea that we should “be real" with our children, and that they will benefit from watching a parent who struggles and eventually deals with their negative emotions like any other human being.
There are three concepts to consider when it comes to emotional display in front of children: suppression （压抑），"uncontained" expression, and talking about emotions. Suppression of emotion is when you hide the outward signs of an emotion. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well — the act of suppressing your emotion actually increases your blood pressure. Observers can pick up on your distress despite your efforts to hide it, making them feel stressed. The recent research has also found that when parents feel negative emotions and keep them from their children, they experience lower relationship quality and decreased responsiveness to their child's needs.
On the other hand, “uncontained" expression of anger and sadness by the parent is also not salutary for the child. Uncontained means high intensity emotion, with no attempts to regulate or take ownership of it. Shouting, smashing （摔）things and blaming someone else for "making you angry" are all example of this .
So, what is the middle ground? That would be talking about emotion taking ownership of them and showing your child that you are trying to deal with them. Classic research found that six-year-old kids had better emotional understanding and perspective-taking skills if their mothers had talked to them about their emotions at the age of three. In fact, the more the mothers had talked, the better the outcome would be.
So next time you feel sad, angry or frustrated and your child is watching you expressing emotion, do explain what's going on in terms they can understand.
1.The author uses the example of going to the dentist mainly to _______.
A.explain parents' common fear
B.introduce the topic of negative emotions
C.show children may catch parents' emotions
D.present the consequences of transferring negative emotions
2.If a mother suppresses （(压抑)）her emotions, .
A.she will not make her kids feel stressed
B.she can hide her emotions from her kids
C.she will often shout at her kids for no reasons
D.she can't respond effectively to her kids' needs
3.What does the underlined word "salutary" in Paragraph 4 probably mean?
A.Enough. B.Beneficial.
C.Necessary. D.Reliable.
4.What is the author's intention of writing this text?
A.To encourage parents to "be real" with our children.
B.To call on parents to develop a positive attitude to life.
C.To inform parents of the consequences of negative emotions.
D.To recommend parents to talk about negative emotions with children.
5.What's the structure of the text?
A.
B.
C.
D.
Average age is rising around the world——a demographic （人口统计）change that may pose a significant challenge to efforts to slow down climate change.
Hossein Estiri at Harvard University and Emilio Zagheni of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany, have found that energy use increases as we get older, and not just because we tend to get wealthier. An ageing population could mean a greater proportion of society with higher energy use, their study suggests.
They combined two decades, worth of data from thousands of US households and used this to build a model to reveal how energy use varied across 17 age groups between 1987 and 2009. They found that, on average, children's energy consumption （肖耗）climbs as they grow up, before dipping slightly when they leave home. Consumption then rises again when people hit their 30s, before briefly dropping after 55, and then beginning to climb again. The study involved factors such as income, local climate and the age, type and size of a person's home. The increase in energy use at various points in our lifespan （寿命）seems to be the result of life style and how our needs change as we age.
Why does demand grow so much in our 30s? “We need more of everything. More space, a bigger TV two fridges," says Estiri. The study found that, in warmer parts of the US, energy use increases in people over the age of 65—probably as a result of increased use of air conditioning, This suggests that there is a feedback effect between climate change and an ageing population that will only make matters worse.
Heat waves have become more common in the US in recent years and are expected to become more frequent due to global warming. More older people using more electrical energy to keep cool as temperatures rise could add to emissions （排放），and thus drive more warming until our energy supply becomes entirely fossil fuel-free.
“This confluence （汇集）of population, ageing and climate change on energy demand is really important to start thin king about," says Estiri. Benjamin Sovacool at the University of Sussex, UK, says the work shows the importance of demographics when it comes to cutting carbon emissions. Most modelling of climate change mitigation （减缓气候变化的模型） assumes people's energy consumption either stays the same or only changes by a small amount over time.
"This study directly challenges that entire body of research by forcing it to fight with the temporality and complexity of the consumption of energy, says Sovacool.
Catherine Mitchell at the University of Exeter, UK, says the research could have an important influence on policy makers. "What the paper says is that there is a lot of work about how buildings use energy, but probably not enough about how the people in them use energy," she says.
1.By saying “not just because we tend to get wealthier" in Paragraph 2, the writer probably means that .
A.poor people can't bring down the high demand for energy
B.a comfortable life is not the main cause of in creased energy use
C.there are some other reasons leading to the increase in energy consumption
D.people being wealthy or not has nothing to do with the rise of energy consumption
2.What does the author intend to tell us in Paragraph 3?
A.Children consumes more energy when they leave home.
B.Energy consumption drops briefly before people hit 55.
C.The researchers built a model to study the data from US households.
D.Energy consumption varies with the change of lifestyle and demand at different ages.
3.Which of the following statements is Hossein Estiri most likely to support?
A.Energy will stop increasing when people get older.
B.His research could inspire policymakers to change current polices.
C.Various factors influencing energy consumption should be considered.
D.Old people should use fossil fuel-free rather than electrical energy to keep cool.
4.What is the shortcoming of most modeling of climate change mitigation?
A.It is expensive and difficult to promote.
B.It overestimates the household energy consumption.
C.It did not take climate change adaptation into account.
D.It regards energy consumption as stable or as only slightly changing.
5.What can we learn from the last paragraph?
A.More emphasis should be put on people's energy use.
B.The government can't do much without the support of the study.
C.It is the buildings, not the people in side, that consume the majority of the energy.
D.Policymakers have been working on how to cut down people's energy use.
6.Which column may the article be taken from on the Internet?
A.Health. B.Environment.
C.Human. D.Technology.
eXp Realty is one of the world's fastest-growing and most successful real estate （房地产） companies. It has become famous not for investing in actual real estate, but for focusing on
virtual reality offices that allow its agents and brokers （中间商）to interact and socialize from anywhere around the globe.
Glenn Sanford, eXp Realty's founder and CEO, founded the company a decade ago, soon after the real estate market collapse of 2007. He couldn't afford to buy or rent office space. What's more important, he figured that focusing on a system that allowed his team to work remotely would help the company avoid possible real estate crises in the future. So eXp Realty relied on services like Google Docs, project management solutions like Trello, and communications app Slack to help its workforce work together in virtual reality. "The virtual campus is a big part of our growth engine. If we were limited to actual offices, the growth we've had simply wouldn't be possible," Scott Petronis, chief technology officer of eXp Realty said.
Having a virtual campus in the virtual world rather than in the real one apparently has several major advantages. For the most important one, eXp Realty can hire whatever talent they like, no matter where they are. As long as they have Internet connection, they can interact with their colleagues and the company management like avatars （虚拟人）because they can walk around the campus, enter various virtual facilities, and interact with each other. While the main focus is on work and brainstorming, eXp Realty is constantly adding fun stuff as well, like riding on a virtual lake and enjoying a drink at the bar.
At the beginning of 2018, eXp Realty had around 6,500 brokers, but till today that number has increased to over 12,000. They are operating in 300 markets across the US and Canada. If that isn't enough to convince you, the company was recently listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market, with first-day market capitalization of over $1 billion. But it doesn't own or lease any more physical space than what is required by law.
1.What do we know about eXp Realty?
A.It relies much on technology.
B.It was founded by accident.
C.It's famous for its large offices.
D.It's a branch company of Google.
2.What mainly inspired Glenn Sanford to adopt virtual offices?
A.He could work closely with famous online services.
B.He is quite professional in the field of information technology.
C.Virtual offices can enable him to avoid potential real estate crises.
D.The starting base for the virtual real estate market was low at that time.
3.What's the biggest advantage of having a virtual campus?
A.Agents and brokers can communicate timely.
B.It helps attract talents regardless of their location.
C.Companies can cooperate with high-tech avatars.
D.Employees can have a relaxing work environment.
4.We can infer from the last paragraph that eXp .
A.is really a success
B.has some illegal businesses
C.is expanding its business worldwide
D.has poor performance in the stock market
5.What might be the best title of the passage?
A.Why Does Real Estate Industry Grow So Quickly?
B.Billion Dollar Real Estate Company一eXp Realty
C.Virtual Reality Office Vs. Physical Office Space
D.What Can Virtual Reality Do to Our Business?
