If you and your partner love to travel, a destination wedding is a perfect idea! It's important that you plan out what the best location is for you and your future partner, considering your costs and what it will cost your loved ones. Here is a list of the best when it comes to inexpensive destination weddings.
1. St. Petersburg, FL
With pleasant weather nearly year-round and beautiful oceanfront views, St. Pete is a perfect place for a destination wedding. Your loved ones can easily drive or get relatively inexpensive plane tickets and you can get married on the water. The average wedding in St. Pete costs around S5000.
2. Negril, Jamaica
Covered in beautiful resorts, Negril offers not only natural beauty on its beaches, but also excellent elegance if you'd like to stay indoors. The best way to do it is to buy a package through a resort which will cost you between $2500-$10000 depending on the options you choose.
3. Playa del Carmen, Mexico
This is a top destination wedding location because it's inexpensive for both you and your guests. With 30 guests it will cost about $45000 and includes so many amenities(令人愉快的事): decorations, set-up and even a couple's massage(按摩)!Plus, most hotel rooms cost around only $ 100 a night.
4. Newport, RI
Newport is a sleepy, romantic town that has the New England feel without the cost. You can have your weddings on the beach if that suits you, but if you can wait until the off-season, you can buy a package at a satisfying mansion(公馆)for less than $5000.
1.Which destination can you choose to stay indoors?
A.St. Petersburg, FL. B.Negril, Jamaica.
C.Playa del Carmen, Mexico. D.Newport, RI.
2.What can you do in Newport, RI?
A.Have the feel of England. B.Experience a couple's massage.
C.Have a wedding on the water. D.Enjoy a package at a satisfying mansion.
3.Where does the passage most probably come from?
A.A travel journal. B.A news report
C.A science textbook. D.A library guide.
假设你是晨光中学的学生李津，最近你将有机会和当地的一家英文报社记者一起，参加采访报道活动，请根据以下提示给报社组织这项活动的编辑写一封电子邮件：
（1） 你打算参加的栏目组（从社会、文化、体育和人物专栏中任选其一）；
（2） 选择该栏目组的原因及关于该栏目你想采访报道的内容；
（3） 希望从中有何收获。
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） 开头和结尾已给出、不计入总词数。
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阅读短文，并按照题目要求用英语回答问题
Eleven-year-old Ruby Kate has long been close to older folks. Her mother, Amanda Chitsey, works at nursing homes in northwest Arkansas, and Ruby Kate often goes with her in the summer. “I’ve never found them scary at all, so I’m able to just go up to them and ask if they need anything,” she says.
Last May, Ruby Kate noticed a resident named Pearl staring out a window. She seemed sad. “What are you looking at?” Ruby Kate asked. Pearl said she was watching her dog being led away by his new owner after a visit. Pearl didn’t know when she would see her dog again.
Ruby Kate and Amanda asked around and discovered that the nursing home didn’t allow residents to have dogs and Pearl couldn’t afford to pay anyone to look after hers. The Chitseys also learned that many nursing home residents are unable to afford even the smallest luxuries. So Ruby Kate decided to do something about it.
She started by asking residents what three things they wanted most in the world. “That’s a lot simpler than going, ‘Hey, what do you want?’” she explains. “They can understand you better.” Amanda worried that people would ask for cars and other things an 11-year-old wouldn’t be able to provide. Instead, they asked for chocolate bars, McDonald’s fries, pants that fit properly, and even just a prayer.
“It broke me as a human,” Amanda says. “We left the nursing home that day and went straight to a store and bought as many items as we could.” Using their own money, the Chitseys granted the wishes of about 100 people in three months.
Then they started asking for donations, set up a GoFundMe page, Three Wishes for Ruby’s Residents, and raised more than $250,000 in five months. One of their new goals is to set up a communal laptop in one nursing home in each state.Ruby Kate doesn’t plan to stop there. “I consider kindness to be my hobby,” she says, “and I’m very good at it.”
1.What makes Ruby Kate have a close relationship with older people? (No more than 10 words)
2.Why was Pearl’s dog taken away from her? (No more than 15 words)
3.What are paragraphs 4 and 5 mainly about? (No more than 10 words)
4.How do you understand the underlined sentence in the last paragraph? (No more than 10 words)
5.What do you think of Ruby Kate? Give your reasons. (No more than 20 words)
Prosocial behaviors are those intended to help other people. Behaviors that can be described as prosocial include feeling empathy(同感) and concern for others and behaving in ways to help or benefit other people.
Prosocial behavior has long posed a challenge to social scientists seeking to understand why people engage in helping behaviors that are beneficial to others, but costly to the individual performing the action. Why would people do something that benefits someone else but offers no immediate benefit to the doer?
Psychologists suggest that there are a number of reasons why people engage in prosocial behavior. In many cases, such behaviors are fostered during childhood and adolescence as adults encourage children to share, act kindly, and help others. Prosocial behaviors are often seen as being compelled by a number of factors including egoistic reasons (doing things to improve one's self-image), reciprocal benefits (doing something nice for someone so that they may one day return the favor), and more altruistic reasons (performing actions purely out of empathy for another individual).
Characteristics of the situation can also have a powerful impact on whether or not people engage in prosocial actions. For example, if you drop your purse and several items fall out on the ground, the likelihood that someone will stop and help you decreases if there are many other people present. This same sort of thing can happen in cases where someone is in serious danger, such as when someone is involved in a car accident. In some cases, witnesses might assume that since there are so many other present, someone else will have surely already called for help. All the examples are what we call the bystander effect, the tendency for people to become less likely to assist a person in distress when there are a number of other people also present.
Why do people help in some situations but not in others? Experts have discovered a number of different situational variables that contribute to (and sometimes interfere with) prosocial behaviors. First, the more people that are present decreases the amount of personal responsibility people feel in a situation. People also tend to look to others for how to respond in such situations, particularly if the event contains some level of ambiguity. Fear of being judged by other members of the group also plays a role. People sometimes fear leaping to assistance, only to discover that their help was unwanted or unwarranted. In order to avoid being judged by other bystanders, people simply take no action.
Experts have suggested that some key things must happen in order for a person to take action.
1.What can we learn from paragraph 2?
A.Social scientists feel it hard to understand why helping behaviors exist.
B.Helping behaviors are costly to people who receive the action.
C.Social scientists have been researching on prosocial behavior for quite long.
D.It is quite challenging for people to perform helping behaviors.
2.Prosocial behaviors are motivated for all the following reasons EXCEPT ______.
A.empathy for another individual B.instant benefits of helping others
C.parental influences in the early life D.the desire to better one's self-image
3.Why does the author use the examples in paragraph 4?
A.To show that some people are in need of immediate help.
B.To indicate that some people think their help is not needed.
C.To suggest that some people perform helping behaviors quickly.
D.To demonstrate how the situation can impact helping behaviors.
4.Which situation can be described as the bystander effect?
A.When hearing an injured lady crying for help, the neighbors didn't take action.
B.Seeing an old man slipping on the icy road, many people volunteered to help.
C.A woman had a heart attack on the train and you were the only doctor there.
D.On the scene of your colleague's traffic accident, you called the police for help.
5.After the last paragraph, the most possible topic could be ______.
A.possible benefits of prosocial behavior
B.various reasons for prosocial behavior
C.situational influences on prosocial behavior
D.skills and knowledge to provide assistance
Sometimes just when we need the power of miracles, they arise in the places we would least expect.
On a cold January afternoon in 1989, I was climbing Egypt’s Mt. Horeb, hoping to get to the peak by sunset to see the valley below. As I was winding up the narrow path, I’d sometimes see other hikers who were coming down. While they would generally pass with simply a nod or a greeting in another language, there was one man who did neither.
I saw him coming and as he got closer, I could see that, unlike other hikers, he was wearing traditional Egyptian galabia( 长 袍 ). What made his appearance so strange was that the man didn’t even appear to be Egyptian, but was a small-framed Asian man with little hair and round glasses.
As we neared one another, I said Hello, but not a sound came from him. I thought maybe he hadn’t heard me. Suddenly he stopped directly in front of me, looked up from the ground, and spoke a single sentence to me in English, “Sometimes you don’t know what you have lost until you’ve lost it.” As I took in what I had just heard, he simply stepped around me and continued his going down.
That moment in my life was a small miracle. The reason is less about what the man said but more about the timing and the context. The year was 1989, and it was during my Egyptian pilgrimage (朝圣), and specifically during my hike to Mt. Horeb, that I’d set the time aside to make decisions that would affect my career, my friends, my family, and ultimately, my life.
I had to ask myself what the chances were of an Asian man dressed in an Egyptian galabia coming down from the top of this historic mountain just when I was walking up, stopping before me, and offering his wisdom, seemingly from out of nowhere. My answer to my own question was easy: nearly no chance! In a meet that lasted less than two minutes, a total stranger had brought something clear and something of a warning, regarding the huge changes that I would make within a matter of days. In my way of thinking, that’s a miracle.
Miracles are everywhere and occur every day for different reasons, in response to the different needs that we may have in the moment. Our job may be less about questioning the extraordinary things that happen in our daily lives and more about accepting the gifts they bring.
1.Before the Asian man spoke, how did the author think about him?
A.He was very rude and strange.
B.He was different from others.
C.He was shy and nod to strangers.
D.He looked ordinary and was talkative.
2.Why did the author make a pilgrimage to Mt Horeb in Egypt ?
A.He was in search of a miracle in his life.
B.It was a place for a religious person to head for.
C.He intended to make arrangements for his future life.
D.He waited patiently in expectation of meeting a wise person.
3.What does the underlined part “my own question” refer to in paragraph 6 ?
A.For what reason did the man stop before me ?
B.Why did the Asian man go to the mountain ?
C.What change would I make within a matter of days ?
D.What was the probability that others told us the right words ?
4.Why did the author view the meet with the Asian man as a miracle in his life?
A.Because the Asian man’s appearance had a deciding effect on his future life.
B.Because his words were in perfect response to the need he had at that moment.
C.Because what the Asian man said was meaningful in the philosophy of life.
D.Because the Asian man impressed on him the worth of what he had possessed.
5.What might be the best title for the passage ?
A.Can you recognize a miracle? B.Is a miracle significant to us?
C.When might a miracle occur? D.Why do we need a miracle?
Every year migratory（迁徙的） bats travel from Mexico to Bracken Cave, where they spend the summer consuming insects that would otherwise hungrily eat common food crops. But the bats have been showing up far earlier than they did two decades ago.
In a study, scientists at Rothamsted Research, used radar data from 160 U.S. weather stations to analyze activity in the Texas bat colony from 1995 through 2017. They discovered the creatures were leaving their winter quarters in Mexico earlier and reproducing sooner. They were also astonished to find increasing numbers of bats overwintering（过冬）at Bracken Cave instead of heading back to their cold weather quarters in Mexico. Overwintering is a sign that warmer temperatures change the bats' annual rhythms, Rothamsted biologist Phillip Stepanian says.
A separate study of migratory bats in Indiana, published last year, found that temperature variations affected arrival and departure times-likewise hinting at the potential influence of climate change. Joy O'Keefe, a biology professor and co-author of that study, says early arrival at their summer habitats could expose these bats to cold snaps（寒流）, and they could freeze to death.
Joy O’Keefe and her colleagues also found that changing bat migration times can also clash with rainfall patterns. Many insects that bats eat breed in seasonal lakes and puddles. If the bats arrive too early to benefit from summer rainfall and the resulting abundance of insects, they may struggle to feed their pups（幼崽） or skip reproduction altogether, O’Keefe says. She fears this shift could cause Midwestern bats to decrease toward extinction, which would be bad news for humans. “Declines in bat populations could have severe effects for crop success,” she says, adding that bats also “control significant disease vectors, such as mosquitoes.”
However, scientists are not certain that climate change alone is causing the Bracken Cave bat colony to migrate earlier. They have found a direct link between seasonal temperatures and bird migration, but bats are also influenced by factors such as changes in wind speed and direction. And there are other complications. “Bats are mysterious little animals that move mostly at night and are difficult to observe and track ,” Stepanian says. “We have this conceptual picture of what might be happening, but really tying it to the cause is the next step.”
1.What is the best title for the passage?
A.Bats’ habitants B.Endangered bats
C.Bats’ migration D.Bats, our good friends
2.Scientists at Rothamsted Research found that ______.
A.bats prefer heading back to Mexico B.bats delay their reproduction
C.warming affects bat migration D.radar can be used to observe bats
3.Joy O’Keefe discovered that ______.
A.bats are used to living in rainfall seasons
B.bats’ earlier migration might harm farming
C.insects' reproduction helps to spread disease
D.insects shortage makes bats reproduce earlier
4.What does the underlined word they refer to?
A.Insects. B.migration times.
C.Bats. D.lakes and puddles.
5.What does the last paragraph want to tell us?
A.Wind speed and direction affect bats.
B.It is difficult to observe and track bats.
C.Climate change makes bats migrate earlier.
D.Further research on the cause is necessary.
