Sunglasses will _____ your eyes from sunlight.
A. guard B. prevent
C. protect D. stop
Don’t mention that at the beginning of the story, or it may _____ the shocking end.
A. give out B. give away
C. give up D. give off
I was standing in the checkout line behind a woman who looked to be in her 60s. When it was her turn to pay, the cashier(收银员) ______ her by name and asked her how she was doing. The woman looked down, shook her hand, and said, “Not so good. My husband just lost his job and my ______ son is up to his old tricks again. The truth is, I don’t know how I’m going to ______ the holidays. ”Then she gave the cashier food stamps.
My heart ______. I wanted to help but didn’t know how. Should I offer to ______ her groceries or ask for her husband’s situation?
____ I walked into the parking lot, I spotted the woman returning her shopping cart. I remembered something in my purse that I thought might help her. It wasn’t a handful of cash or an ______ of a job for her husband, but maybe it would make her life ______.
My heart beat faster as I ______ the woman. “Excuse me,” I said, my voice trembling a bit. “I couldn’t help overhearing what you said to the cashier. It sounds like you’re going through a really ______ time right now. I’m so sorry, but I’d like to give you something.”
I took a small card out of my purse and ______ it to her.
When the woman read the only two words on the card, she began to cry. And through her ______, she said, “You have no idea how much this ______ to me.”
I was a little ______ by her reply. Having never done anything like this before, I didn’t know what kind of ______ I might receive. All I could think to respond was, “Oh! Would it be OK to give you a ______?
After we hugged ______,I walked back to my car and began to cry, too.
The words on the card?
“You Matter.”
A few weeks earlier, a colleague gave a similar card as ______ for a project I was working on. When I read the card, I felt a ______ glow(光辉，喜悦)spread inside of me. Deeply touched, I came home and ordered my own box of You Matter cards and started ______ them.
1.A. charged B. greeted C. blame D. heard
2.A. confident B. independent C. hopeless D. stubborn
3.A. think about B. give up C. lead to D. get through
4.A. ached B. failed C. beat D. paused
5.A. send for B. provide for C. pay for D. beg for
6.A. As B. Though C. Unless D. Since
7.A. excuse B. offer C. experience D. anecdote
8.A. harder B. wealthier C. simpler D. better
9.A. touched B. found C. balanced D. approached
10.A. happy B. tough C. regular D. long
11.A. handed B. obsessed C. spread D. explained
12.A. reliability B. fears C. tears D. beliefs
13.A. brings B. means C. values D. contains
14.A. worried B. excited C. moved D. shocked
15.A. reaction B. feeling C. expression D. answer
16.A. present B. promise C. hug D. ride
17.A. wildly B. tightly C. anxiously D. eagerly
18.A. progress B. effort C. encouragement D. praise
19.A. warm B. rich C. soft D. fierce
20.A. gathering B. enjoying C. preparing D. sharing
Most people have practiced some form of hobby at a point in their lives, whether it is some form of sports, playing a musical instrument, creating art, cooking or something else. There are many different reasons and skills for taking up a hobby.
Realize you have more time than you think.
This is probably the one thing that keeps most people back from practicing a hobby. 1. But we waste so much time on social media, television commercials and worrying about life which we could have used to practice a hobby. Schedule some time for a hobby into your day. Plan ahead and just do it.
Involve other people.
Why? Well, have you ever noticed that you stick to something longer when you feel that you cannot let another person down? So, get someone to jog with you, or make music with you, or share recipes with you. Plus, you will inspire them to keep on practicing their hobby.2.
Put your money where your mouth is.
3. So give out a bit of your budget lo your hobby of choice so that you cannot blame a lack of “materials” for not doing anything.
4.
For me, this has been the most important step in going out and doing a hobby. If you jog, decide which races you want to do this year. If you practice music, organize a concert.
Find the pleasure in what you do.
As with most things, starting of getting something ready to start can be difficult. But don’t give up.5.
A. It is a total win-win.
B. Work towards something.
C. Think of a hobby that might interest you.
D. Others’ help will definitely do you good.
E. You think that you don’t have enough time to even start.
F. The fact is that people spend money where their heart is.
G. Once you have started you’ll find the beauty and relaxation in it.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making it possible for companies to monitor workers’ behavior in great detail and in real time. Start to slack off (懈怠), and AI could talk to your boss.
One company offering such services is London-based start-up Status Today. Its AI platform relies on a regular supply of employee data, including everything from the files you access to when you use a key card. From this, it builds a picture of how employees normally function and signals any unusual performance. The idea is to spot when someone might become a security risk by doing something different from their usual behavioral patterns. “All of this gives us fingerprint of a user, so if we think the fingerprint doesn’t match, we raise a warning”, says Mircea Dumitrescu, the company’s chief technology officer.
The system also aims to catch employee actions that could accidentally cause a security breach (漏洞), like opening malware (恶意软件).“We’re not monitoring if your computer has a virus.” says Dumitrescu. “We’re monitoring human behaviors.”
But catching the security breach means monitoring everyone, and the AI can also be used to track employee productivity. “It seems like they are just using the reputation of AI to give an air of lawfulness to old-fashioned workplace surveillance (监视),” says Javier Ruiz Diaz of digital campaigning organization the Open Rights Group. “You have a right to privacy and you shouldn’t be expected to give that up at work.”
Exactly how companies use the system will be up to them, but it’s hard to shake the picture of an AI constantly looking over employees’ shoulders. “It will bother people, and that could be counterproductive if it affects their behavior,” says Paul Bemal at the University of East Anglia.
Phil Legg at the University of the West of England says it will never catch every security risk. “If people know they’re being monitored, they can change their behavior,” he says.
1.According to the text, AI monitors employees by ________.
A. taking pictures of them B. getting access to their data
C. signaling their usual performance D. catching their actions
2.What’s Javier Ruiz Diaz’s attitude towards the system?
A. Doubtful. B. Supportive.
C. Uncaring. D. Negative.
3.What does the underlined word “that” in paragraph 4 refer to?
A. Security breach. B. Employees’ productivity.
C. The right to privacy. D. Workplace surveillance.
4.Phil Legg’s concern about the system suggests that ________.
A. it is too risky to be used at work
B. it will affect employees’ emotions
C. it may not be so effective as expected
D. it will encourage employee, productivity
Environmentalists said our planet was bound to die. Now one man says they are wrong. “Everyone knows the planet is in bad shape,” thundered a magazine article last year. “Species are being driven to die out at record rates, and the rivers are so poisonous that fish are floating on the surface, dead.”
But there’s growing belief that what everyone takes for granted is wrong: Things are actually getting better. A new book is about to overturn our most basic assumptions about the world’s environment. Rivers, seas, rain and the atmosphere are all getting better.
The total amount of forests in the world is not declining. The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, is an attack on the misleading claims of environmental groups, and the “bad news” culture that makes people believe everything is getting worse.
Now the attacks are increasingly coming from left-wing environmentalists such as Lomborg, a former member of Greenpeace. The accusation is that, although the environment is improving, green groups — with profits of hundreds of millions of pounds a year — are using scare tactics (战术) to gain donations. Lomborg’s book doesn’t deny global warming — probably the biggest environmental threat — but destroys almost every other environmental claim with many official statistics.
The Worldwatch Institute claims that deforestation(采伐森林) has been speeding over the last 30 years. Buy Lomborg says that is simply rubbish. Since the dawn of agriculture the world has lost about 20% of its forest cover, but in recent decades the forest area’s depleting has come to a stop. According to UN figures, the area of forests has remained almost steady, at about 30% of total land area, since 1940s. Forests in countries such as the US, UK and Canada have actually been expanding over the past 40 years. Despite all the warnings the Amazon rainforest has only shrunk by about 15%.
Nor are all our species dying out. Some campaigners claim that 50% of all species will have died out within 50 years. But other studies show only 0.08% of species are dying out each year. Conservation efforts have been successful. Whales are no longer threatened and the bald eagle is off the endangered list.
Environmental groups claim that many of the improvements are the results of their campaigns. Stephen Tindale, director of Greenpeace UK, said, “There are important examples, such as acid rain and ozone, where things weren’t as bad as predicted, and that’s because our behavior changed.”
1.What is Lomborg’s main argument in The Skeptical Environmentalist?
A. Our planet is in bad shape.
B. The world’s environment is improving.
C. The total amount of forests is declining.
D. Conservation efforts have been successful.
2.What is Lomborg’s main accusation of environmentalists?
A. They changed their behavior toward the environment.
B. They only told people bad news about the environment.
C. They scared people into making donations.
D. They overturned our basic assumption about the world’s environment.
3.The underlined word “depleting” is close in meaning to “_______”.
A. speeding B. limiting
C. expanding D. reducing
4.Which of the following can be the best title for the passage?
A. Are all species dying out? B. Isn’t conservation powerful?
C. Is Our Planet Bound to Die? D. Aren’t environmentalists wrong?
