I have been to many places as a news reporter. In India, I visited a city where there were many 1. (home) children. Some were as young as four years old. They lived in the streets 2. survived by begging or stealing. But then a wonderful lady 3. (call) Rosa opened a home for them. Within one year, she was looking after two hundred children. She clothed them, fed them and taught them. She gave them hope.
请阅读下面短文,并按要求用英语写一篇150个词左右的英语短文。
Young Chinese parents embracing e-books for children
Chinese children are spending more time reading digital books as young parents are increasingly open to the idea, research shows.
The amount of time children under 9 spend reading e-books every day increased almost 20 percent to 24. 3 minutes between 2016 and 2017, according to a joint study by e-book company Kada Story and teaching consultancy TAL Education Group.
A three-year study of 6, 030 parents found that almost 70 percent said they are willing to let their children use mobile phones and tablets, while 25 percent of those born in the 1990s or later said they let their children spend more than 40 minutes a day on mobile devices.
Parents in first-tier cities are more likely to let their children use mobile devices, with children in Beijing spending almost 70 minutes a day using the gadgets.
“Digital reading is an important skill for children to master in this age of information explosion, ” said Wang Jing, chief editor of Kada Story.
However, not all parents want their children to read digitally.
“I fear e-books will negatively affect my son’s attention span or expose him to inappropriate content, ” said Xie Wenfeng, mother of a 7-year-old boy in Shanghai.
She said she believed books in print are better for the eyes and do not affect sleep. “I also worry about possible addiction to e-books.” she added.
(写作内容)
1.用约30个单词写出上文概要;
2.用约120个单词发表你的观点,内容包括:
(1)支持或反对家长让孩子读电子书籍;
(2)并用2-3个理由或论据支撑你的观点。
(写作要求)
1. 写作过程中不能直接引用原文中的句子;
2. 文中不能出现真实姓名和学校名称;
3. 不必写标题。
(评分标准)
内容完整,语言规范,语篇连贯,词数适当。
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读下面的句子,根据首字母提示,在横线上填上意思和形式都正确的单词。
1.True eccentrics treat social conventions as unimportant, unconscious that they are doing anything extraordinary.
True eccentrics d_________ social conventions, unconscious that they are doing anything extraordinary.
2.Having received a radio message from the mainland, officially telling him to give up, the ship’s captain decided to pull up anchor and head home.
Having received a radio message from the mainland i_______ him to give up, the ship’s captain decided to pull up anchor and head home.
3.Antique shops have a great appeal for many people, especially bargain hunters.
Antique shops exert a peculiar f_________ on many people, especially bargain hunters.
4.Seeing a thief caught on the premises of a large jewellery store, the shop assistants couldn’t help saying ‘it serves him right’.
Seeing a thief caught on the spot, the shop assistants found it impossible to resist the t________ to say ‘it serves him right’.
5.As is often the case, lots of things happen to go wrong at precisely the same time.
What i______ happens is that a great number of things go wrong at precisely the same time.
请认真阅读下列短文,并根据所读内容在文章后表格中的空格里填入一个最恰当的单词。注意:每个空格只填1个单词。请将答案写在答题卡上相应题号的横线上。
Most people have a list of wishes—things that they think will bring them happiness. Happiness lists are easy to come up with. However, the mechanism behind them is somewhat complicated, since it involves what psychologist Daniel Gilbert calls the greatest achievement of the human brain—the ability to imagine. To imagine what will bring joy to our future selves requires mental time travel, which is a unique human skill resulting from two million years of evolution. We use this skill every day, predicting our future emotions and then making decisions, whether big or small, according to our forecasts of how they'll make our future selves feel.
Yet, our imagination often fails us. When we're lucky enough to get what we wished for, we discover that it doesn’t come with everlasting happiness. And when the things we feared come to pass, we realize that they don't crush us after all. In dozens of studies, Gilbert has shown that we can mispredict emotional consequences of positive events, such as receiving gifts or winning football games, as much as negative events, like breaking up or losing an election. This impact bias(影响偏差) —overestimation of the intensity and duration of our emotional reactions to future events—is significant, because the prediction of the duration of our future emotions is what often shapes our decisions, including those concerning our happiness.
Just as our immune systems work tirelessly to keep our bodies in good health, our psychological immune systems routinely employ an entire set of cognitive(认知) mechanisms in order to deal with life's habitual attack of less-than-pleasant circumstances. Actually, our psychological immune system has an impressive feature of its own: the ability to produce happiness. Thus, when life disappoints us, we “ignore, transform, and rearrange” information through a variety of creative strategies until the rough edges of negative effects have been dutifully dulled. When we fail to recognize this ability of our psychological immune systems to produce happiness, we're likely to make errors in our affective forecasting.
Happiness, Gilbert points out, is a fast moving target. As passionate as we’re about finding it, we routinely misforecast what will make us happy, and how long our joy will last. In reality, he adds that the best way to make an affective forecast is not to use your imagination, but your eyes. Namely, instead of trying to predict how happy you'll be in a particular future, look closely at those who are already in the future that you’re merely contemplating(冥想) and ask how happy they are. If something makes others happy, it'll likely make you happy as well.
Forecasting Happiness | |
The mechanism behind happiness lists | *It’s a bit complicated because of the involvement of the human ability to 1.. *Mental time travel is a unique human skill we use on a(n) 2. basis to make predictions about our future emotions and then 3. all our decisions on them. |
The 4. with predicting happiness | *We can make wrong predictions about emotional consequences of positive or negative events, which can 5. us from making right decisions. |
The functions of the psychological immune system | *Our psychological immune system routinely help 6. unpleasant circumstances in life. *Our wrong affective forecasting results from our 7. to recognize the power of our psychological immune system. |
An effective 8. to predict happiness | *Use your eyes 9. of your imagination while making affective forecasts. 10. others who are in the future that you’re contemplating and ask how happy they are. |
As long as people have been telling stories, crones(丑陋的老太婆) have been scaring the wits out of children. “Nags(怨妇), witches, evil stepmothers, cannibals(食人妇). It’s quite dreadful,” says Maria Tatar, who teaches a course on folklore and mythology at Harvard. "But old women are also powerful—they're often the ones who can work magic.” In the Disney film Snow White, there’s a scene in which the beautiful, charming, wicked queen turns into an old hag and poisons Snow White so she'll sleep forever. The old lady in Hansel and Gretel wants to roast children in her oven and the witch in The Little Mermaid cuts out Ariel’s tongue.
Tatar says old women villains(恶人) are especially scary because, historically, the most powerful person in a child’s life was the mother. “Children do have a way of splitting the mother figure into...the evil mother—who’s always making rules and regulations, policing your behavior, getting angry at you—and then the kind mother—the one who is giving and protects you, makes sure that you survive.”
Veronique Tadjo, a writer who grew up in the Ivory Coast, thinks there’s a fear of female power in general. She says a common figure in African folk tales is the old witch who destroys people’s souls. Still, they're not all bitter and evil hags. Elderly women in folk tales often use their knowledge and experience of the world to guide the troubled protagonist(主人公). Tadjo points to the Kenyan story Marwe In The Underworld about a girl who commits suicide by drowning herself and enters the Land of the Dead where she meets an old woman. “That old woman teaches her quite a lot of things,” Tadjo says. “And also, when Marwe starts longing for the world of the living, she helps her go back to the surface with a lot of riches. And we understand that Marwe has been rewarded for her goodness.” In other words: Do your chores and you’ll be rewarded. The point of these ancient tales, no matter what continent they come from, may have been to scare children into behaving.
Perhaps the scariest old woman character—the ugly Baba Yaga—comes from Russia. She’s bony with a hooked nose and long, iron teeth. Her hut(小屋) stands on chicken legs and she kidnaps children and eats them. Safe to say Baba Yaga has been making Eastern European children sleepless for centuries. In one interpretation, a mean stepmother sends the young girl Vasilisa to Baba Yaga's hut in the woods to get a candle. The girl is sure she’s being sent to her death. Baba Yaga forces her to cook and clean, and Vasilisa does everything she's told. In the end, the old crone gives her what she needs and sends her home. “You see this kind of double face of the hag,”Maria Tatar says. “On the one hand: aggressive, threatening. And on the other hand: sometimes to make sure that there is a happily ever after.”
There's that power again. In Japanese folklore, the Yama Uba(山姥) is an equally ambiguous old woman. She’s a mountain witch who, like Baba Yaga, lures people into her hut and eats them. But she'll also help a lost traveler. Noriko Reider is a professor at Miami University of Ohio who's done extensive research on Yama Uba stories. “She brings fortune and happiness,” Reider says. “She can also bring death and destruction for those who are not very good.”
According to Cuban-American writer Alma Flor Ada, in Hispanic(拉美地区的) culture old women are multi-talented. Ada is co-author of Tales Our Grandmas Told, which includes a story about Caliph’s son who becomes seriously ill. After “all of the best physicians in the land” fail to cure him, Caliph sends his messengers searching for help. Then one morning, an old woman arrives with this advice: To get well, the prince must wear the overcoat of a man who is truly happy. And of course it works.
1.What does the underlined phrase in Para 1 “scaring the wits out of children” mean?
A. making children frightened B. making children stupid
C. making children interested D. making children confused
2.Among all the characters mentioned, ________ is terribly treated by an old woman.
A. Caliph B. Marwe C. Ariel D. Vasilisa
3.The images of ________ show double faces of a hag by doing both good and evil things.
A. Snow White and The Little Mermaid B. Hansel and Gretel
C. Veronique Tadjo and Noriko Reider D. Baba Yaga and Yama Uba
4.About the cultural images of an old woman, ________ has a different view from others.
A. Maria Tatar B. Veronique Tadjo C. Noriko Reider D. Alma Flor Ada
5.All the following words can be used to describe Baba Yaga EXCEPT ________.
A. aggressive B. sensitive C. dreadful D. merciful
6.According to the passage, why are old women often the face of evil in fairy tales and folklore?
A. Because they are always nags, witches, evil stepmothers and cannibals.
B. Because they are scary by recalling the general fear of female power.
C. Because they are intended to scare children into behaving well.
D. Because they are multi-talented with the ability to work magic.
The human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is vital to the formation of complex societies. So is the face’s ability to send emotional signals, whether through an unconscious red face or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives reading faces, for signs of attraction, hatred, trust and fraud. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide true feelings or intentions.
Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers’ attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. In China, it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple’s new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the home screen.
Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental(增值的). Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the Internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode(编码) them. Although faces are unique to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, interfere with something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyze images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to opinions of privacy, fairness and trust.
Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. Facebook's bank of facial images cannot be used by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens’ privacy.
The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analyzing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic(孤独症的) people a grasp of social signals they find difficult.
1.Which of the following statement about facial recognition is true according to the passage?
A. It is widely applied by Chinese in many fields.
B. It is applied to track worshippers by American churches.
C. It has been applied by Apple to unlock home screen.
D. It is applied to catch thieves by police.
2.What does the third paragraph mainly talk about?
A. Flight and the Internet surely transform human abilities.
B. Facial recognition will cause fundamental changes to minds.
C. Facial expressions are not only unique but also public.
D. Facial recognition has just the same effects as other breakthroughs.
3.From the last two paragraphs, we can infer that __________.
A. the face is superior to other biometric data
B. people can keep a balance between face and privacy
C. the face has shown many benefits especially in medicine
D. fingerprints is a powerful weapon in tracking criminals
4.What is the best title of the passage?
A. Human facial expressions B. Reading faces
C. Scientific breakthroughs D. Nowhere to hide