When I was a kid, my parents sent me to a summer camp in New Hampshire. At the camp we did tons of great things like swimming, sports and archery (射箭), but for me, the most memorable _______ was an overnight trip of mountain climbing. If you’ve ever _______ a mountain, you know it’s a physical challenge, _______when you’re carrying your food and shelter on your back. When campers got _______, they certainly started complaining.
“How much farther is it?”
“I can’t go any further.”
“My _______ is too heavy. Can you carry it for me?”
The reply of the _______was, “Suck it up (不要再抱怨了).” The truth is that the complaining campers were _______ near the point of _______. If they had been, the teachers would have noticed the _______ and given them care. The kids simply weren’t used to the physical challenge. Once they realized they weren’t getting any sympathy they ________ the discomfort, and in most cases ________ having a great time. In my camp days, I don’t ________ a single camper complaining at the ________ of the mountain.
There are two ways to deal with an ________ situation. You can complain, or you can make the best of it. If you complain, you might feel like you’re getting that ________ energy out, but you are probably not going to cause a positive change. It’s much more likely that your complaining will cause the ________ of those around you. No one likes a complainer. They’re ________ and they hurt the group. Complaining makes life ________ for everyone. Instead, if you determine to master your own ________, to move past it and focus on a ________, it’s my experience that you’ll realize it wasn’t bad in the first place.
1.A.experience B.behaviour C.occasion D.situation
2.A.seen B.reached C.climbed D.described
3.A.especially B.normally C.obviously D.naturally
4.A.ashamed B.tired C.puzzled D.shocked
5.A.food B.water C.shelter D.backpack
6.A.parents B.teachers C.guides D.partners
7.A.somewhere B.anywhere C.nowhere D.everywhere
8.A.camp B.exhaustion C.mountain D.destination
9.A.signs B.activities C.gestures D.scenes
10.A.shared B.understood C.suffered D.overcame
11.A.couldn’t help B.ended up C.insisted on D.gave up
12.A.recall B.forget C.disturb D.forgive
13.A.foot B.top C.back D.base
14.A.unbelievable B.unexpected C.unusual D.unpleasant
15.A.great B.spare C.negative D.potential
16.A.dislike B.respect C.sympathy D.enthusiasm
17.A.amazing B.shocking C.worrying D.annoying
18.A.poorer B.harder C.easier D.better
19.A.life B.mind C.suffering D.mistake
20.A.trip B.plan C.solution D.dream
Studies show that people who are happy — truly happy— have deep connections with those around them. 1. They actively try hard to improve these relationships and build quality relationships with others.
Those connections and relationships that we build and that we attempt to develop, create experiences in our lives. Some experiences will be poor, but it is possible for us to create meaningful experiences — experiences that allow us to just be. Studies show that when we create meaningful experiences, we allow ourselves time to relax, to build connections, and to become our best selves 2.
If we want to create meaningful experiences, we need to learn how to create these moments in our lives. Instead of taking many classes and workshops to teach us how to build connections with others, we should experience beSHOPs, which means we learn by being, by observing, and by becoming.
3. It helps define us and motivates us to do good, to step outside of our comfort zone, and to be better. A few of these values that we need to create meaningful experiences include:
● Compassion (同情): Compassion has been thoroughly studied and proven to be a natural human response. 4. When you are compassionate, you don't have to think twice about helping others.
● Gratitude: Showing sincere appreciation to others helps establish strong feelings of gratitude, and build strong connections. You should express appreciation for all the things in your life and make gratefulness just a part of who you are.
● Willingness to learn: 5. Many individuals will find themselves stuck in their own world and never take a step outside of their comfort zones. When we have that desire to learn, to explore, and our curiosity is continually peaked, then we are more likely to have these meaningful experiences.
Remember, true happiness, and meaningful experiences are not things you can learn from a series of worksheets and lectures. It is about being.
A.There is so much in the world around us.
B.“To be” requires key values that shape us.
C.It means service, kindness and love for others.
D.Within the communities, you can work on developing these values.
E.Working with others will help you experience many aspects of life.
F.Creating these experiences is a vital step in the process to achieve full happiness.
G.They value their relationships with family, friends, colleagues and even strangers.
New App Helps People Remember Faces
Large gatherings such as weddings and conferences can be socially overwhelming. Pressure to learn people’s names only adds to the stress. A new facial-recognition app could come to the rescue, but privacy experts recommend proceeding with caution.
The app, called SocialRecall, connects names with faces via smartphone cameras and facial recognition, potentially avoiding the need for formal introductions. “It breaks down these social barriers we all have when meeting somebody,” says Barry Sandrew, who created the app and tested it at an event attended by about 1,000 people.
After receiving an invitation to download SocialRecall from an event organizer, the user is asked to take two selfies and sign in via social media. At the event, the app is active within a previously defined geographical area. When a user points his or her phone camera at an attendee’s face, the app identifies the individual, displays the person’s name, and links to his or her social media profile. To protect privacy, it recognizes only those who have agreed to participate. And the app's creators say it automatically deletes users’ data after an event.
Ann Cavoukian, a privacy expert who runs the Privacy by Design Center of Excellence praises the app’s creators for these protective measures. She cautions, however, that when people choose to share their personal information with the app, they should know that “there may be unintended consequences down the road with that information being used in another context that might come back to bite you.”
The start-up has also developed a version of the app for individuals who suffer from prosopagnosia, or “face blindness,” a condition that prevents people from recognizing individuals they have met. To use this app, a person first acquires an image of someone’s face, from either the smartphone’s camera or a photograph, and then tags it with a name. When the camera spots that same face in real life, the previously entered information is displayed. The collected data are stored only on a user’s phone, according to the team behind the app.
1.SocialRecall is used to ________.
A.take photos B.identify people
C.organize events D.make friends
2.Paragraph 3 is mainly about ________.
A.how the app works
B.how the app was created
C.what makes the app popular
D.what people can do with the app
3.SocialRecall helps people with prosopagnosia by ________.
A.giving names to the photos kept in their smartphones
B.collecting information previously entered in the phone
C.providing the information of a person when they first meet
D.showing the person’s information when it spots a stored face
4.What can we learn about SocialRecall from the passage?
A.It may put people’s privacy at risk.
B.It has caused unintended consequences.
C.It can prevent some communication disorders.
D.It is praised by users for its protective measures.
Most of the new diseases we humans have faced in the past several decades have come from animals. The more we come into contact with wild animals, the more we risk a so-called disease “spillover” from animals to humans.
“As people move and wildlife move in response to a changing environment, humans and wildlife and animals will come in contact more regularly,” said Jeanne Fair from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Fair argues that by shifting animal habitats, climate change will also make the opportunities for disease spillover more frequent. “Everything is sort of shifting and will shift into the future as the environment changes through climate change,” Fair said.
Scientists, including climatologists and epidemiologists on Fair’s team at Los Alamos, are beginning to model how changes to the climate will impact the spread of infectious diseases. It’s early days for this kind of research, but previous studies suggest that extreme weather has already played a role in at least one outbreak. Scientists say drought and deforestation have combined to force bats out of rainforests and into orchards（果园）in Malaysia to find food. Those bats, a common disease reservoir, then passed the Nipah virus through pigs to humans for the first time in the late 1990s.
“We’re going by the past data to really predict what’s going to happen in the future,” Fair said, “And so, anytime you increase that wildlife-human interface, that’s sort of an emerging disease hot spot. And so, that’s just increasing as we go forward.”
Jeffrey Shaman, head of the climate and health program at Columbia University’s public health school, argues we don’t yet know whether climate change will cause a net increase in infectious disease rates globally. For example, mosquitoes carry disease that affects millions of people across the world every year. As their habitats expand in some parts of the world, they might contract diseases elsewhere. Shaman says what we know for certain about climate change is that it will make it harder to predict where disease outbreaks will pop up.
1.How does climate change affect the spread of disease according to Fair?
A.By breaking animals’ habits.
B.By increasing animals’ varieties.
C.By promoting animals’ breeding.
D.By changing animals’ living environment.
2.What is the example of bats for in paragraph 3?
A.Explaining the influence of Nipah virus.
B.Proving the harm of bats to human beings.
C.Showing the effects of climate change on disease.
D.Presenting scientists’ early study about the cause of disease.
3.What can we infer from Fair’s words in paragraph 4?
A.Humans should give up studying animals.
B.Past data can solve the problems in the future.
C.Disease hot spots will disappear if animals die out.
D.Frequent contact with animals can cause disease outbreaks.
4.What could be the best title for the text?
A.Climate Change and Disease Spillover
B.Animals’ Interaction with Humans
C.Scientists’ Prediction for Disease Outbreaks
D.Early Studies about Extreme Weather
Devon Gallagher, a college graduate from Philadelphia, wants the world to know exactly where she’s been while she’s on her worldwide vacation in a special way. The traveler, who was born with a bone disease, had her right leg amputated (截肢) at the age of four. Although the amputation caused inconvenience for Gallagher early on, she now sees it as nothing short of inspiration for living her best life.
To spread that message. Gallagher has gone to social media, where she shares photos of her travels across the world, but instead of simply using a geo-tag(地理位置标签), she writes her location on her artificial leg before taking a picture.
Now she has been taking pictures across the Continent, which show her cycling over the canal in Amsterdam relaxing on a wall overlooking the city of Barcelona, posing with a waffle in Brussels, taking in the beautiful Parthenon temple in Athens and enjoying a river ride in Budapest, all with the well-known locations written on her artificial leg.
“I get a new leg every two years and I can choose the design on it. One day I had a sudden thought to get a chalk-board,” Gallagher said. “My mum and grandmother didn’t like the idea, but my friends thought it was great and told me to go for it, so I did.”
Gallagher said people often stare when she’s writing on her leg, but once she shares the photos, she receives only positive feedback(反馈), “My leg hasn’t stopped me from doing anything I’ve wanted to do,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s my determination to prove to myself that I can do it, anyway, I’ve been able to keep up with people at my age and lead a pretty great life.”
Gallagher shows us that you should never let anything stand in the way of your dreams. And if life gives you an artificial leg, make art.
1.What message did Gallapher want to spread in her special way?
A.She enjoys her travelling across the globe.
B.She suffers little from her leg’s amputation.
C.she looks on her misfortune as another form of blessing.
D.She has exactly fallen in love with posting photos online.
2.What does the word “which” underlined in paragraph 3 refer to?
A.the continent B.the pictures C.the leg D.the location
3.Gallapher can best be described as ________.
A.helpful and ambitious B.friendly and generous
C.determined and creative D.independent and sensible
4.Which of the following might be the best title for the text?
A.Never Too Late to share B.A Special Artificial Leg
C.An Outstanding Photographer D.Gallagher’s Summer Holidays
1. TrueCar.com
Top dealers compete for your business by offering lower prices. TrueCar spends a lot of money and resources on making sure the entire car renting experience is simple and straightforward. If you’re in the market for a new car, give this site a try first.
TrueCar’s network checks many of the prices in your area and gets you the best price for the car you’re looking for.
2. Carvoy.com
It offers more control by allowing you to “build your car” and select your rental plan. The “build your car” option is one of the better options for those looking to add on features to their car. If you’re looking for cars with options like a sunroof or navigation (导航), it’s Carvoy that makes it very easy to get started with the process.
3. CarsDirect.com
They have a large collection of new and used cars, and also provide resources for car comparisons. In the business for many years, they are one of the first online car outlets. They have a staff that can usually help you if you give them a call. Their phone support is very good and they are mostly located in the United States.
4. CarRent.com
It delivers your rental car to the door, which is actually a huge selling point. Many people don’t like to go to a dealership or even drive somewhere to pick up a car. Imagine renting a car and having it delivered right to your doorstep, no driving necessary!
5. CostcoAuto.com
It offers member-only savings, many car selections and an easy sign-up process. The deals through Costco are great and unique. Many times they have deals with General Motors cars like Chevrolet. There are a lot of deals to be done, but the one thing that Costco does not do is negotiate the price.
1.What’s the selling point of TrueCar.com?
A. Its most reasonable prices for cars.
B. The diversity of its used cars.
C. Its delivery service to your door.
D. The special offers to its members.
2.What is the special service that Carvoy.com provides?
A. You can have other functions added to your car.
B. You can rent a car more easily than elsewhere.
C. You can design the whole car by yourself.
D. You can have better operation over your car.
3.If you are a good bargainer, it’s wise to avoid dealing with _______.
A. CarsDirect.com B. Carvoy.com
C. CarRent.com D. CostcoAuto.com
