You may have your favorite family spots on Long Island where you frequently take the kids.But there may be unexpected places you haven’t explored yet.
Animal Exhibit
Not only will you see fish, reptiles and amphibians here. But you’ll also see baby alligators and other rescued animals. Kids can also learn about science and participate in programs and workshops throughout the year. The Animal Exhibit is also a hotspot for science-themed birthday parties.
The Mattituck Strawberry Festival
The Mattituck Strawberry Festival kicks off the summer season with sweet treats and more. Long Island is known for numerous and extremely popular fairs and festivals that take place throughout the year. Other summer festivals include the Sayville Summer Fest, St. Rocco’s Feast, Brookhaven Fair and more. The fall season offers the largest abundance of fairs and festivals, such as the Pickle Festival, Oyster Festival, Long Island Fall Festival and many Halloween-themed festivals in Nassau and Suffolk.
Home Depot Kids Workshop
Does your kid enjoy making things by hand? You may want to take a trip to Home Depot Kids Workshop. Offered on the first Saturday morning of each month, workshops allow little ones to build and craft items, such as a skateboard pencil box that they can decorate and keep.
Chuck E. Cheeses
As soon as you walk through the doors you’re instantly greeeted by the sounds of other kids laughing as they play arcade games to win prizes and enjoy an animatronic show. After hours of play, check out their restaurant with kid-friendly options.
1.Where will science fans prefer to celebrate their birthday?
A.At Animal Exhibit. B.At Chuck E. Cheese’s.
C.At Home Depot Kids Workshop D.At the Mattituck Strawberry Festival
2.Which sees the most fairs and festivals on Long Island?
A.Spring. B.Summer.
C.Autumn. D.Winter.
3.Who is the text specially targeted at?
A.Kids. B.Parents.
C.Tour guides. D.Students.
请阅读下面文字及图表，并按照要求用英语写一篇150词左右的文章。
The ministry of Human Resources and Social Security released a list of 100 professions that have major demand. Vacancies for sales positions, cashiers, restaurant waiters and security guards topped the list, followed by manufacturing professionals, including lathe (车床) operators, welders (电焊工) and porters, according to the ministry.
“Usually, we believe that sectors closely related to high technology face the toughest situation,” said Yin Baoming, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Labor and Social Security. “But it’s the same with low-killed jobs. They are also key.”
Lin Qing, a 23-year-old from Jiangsu province, who worked as a receptionist for a cybercafe in Beijing, quit last year and is now studying for the test to get into a vocational college.
”I felt hopeless after working for the cybercafe for almost three years,” she said. “I worked for restaurants and cafes, but none of these jobs brought me any respect or sense of dignity. I want to learn some skills through training courses. I don’t want to live a life of hard physical work anymore.”
（写作内容）
1. 用约30个单词概述上述信息的主要内容；
2. 结合上述信息，简要分析低技能工人短缺的原因；
3. 根据你的分析，谈谈解决低技能工人短缺的途径和方法。
（写作要求）
1. 写作过程中不能直接引用原文语句；
2. 作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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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。
Success Takes Focus
You can have a strong desire and really want to achieve your goal but as you’ve experienced, life has its way of knocking us off course. Things come up, and distractions occur.
Success takes a lot of focus. You’ve had the experience of setting a goal and being really excited about achieving it only to have a few weeks or months to go by and realize the goal has dropped down on your list of priorities.
People often get easily side tracked. This doesn’t just happen all at once. You get off track just little by little until one day, you realize you’re completely off track. Keeping your mind focused on your goal can be a constant battle because everything around you is trying to get your attention. It will be your job to keep your goal up high on your priorities list.
So what can you do to keep your focus? There are several things you can try. You can write down your goal and read it each morning and night. You can visualize achieving your goal daily.
One of my favorite methods of keeping focused on a goal is to constantly ask myself, “Is what I’m doing right now bringing me closer to my goal or further away?” Once you answer that question, you’ll know what to do. You can make sure that your daily to-do list includes doing something that will take you closer to your goal.
If you look back at the goals you’ve tried to achieve and realized you haven’t achieved any of your major goals, it may be time to just focus on a single goal. This way, all of your energy and focus can be put towards obtaining that one goal which will increase your chances of getting it. It’s a lot better to just achieve one major goal than to work on a dozen and achieve none of them.
Remember that you’re human and because of this, you’ll make some errors in judgment. Instead of beating yourself up, just be aware that certain things can take your focus away from your goals. Once you’re aware of these things, you can actively reduce the amount of time they take your focus off your goals.
Distractions are like gravity. It’s going to cause us all to fall every now and then. The important thing is that we bounce back up every time we fall. Get your focus back on your goal when you start to realize it’s drifting somewhere else.
Passage outline | Supporting details |
A common phenomenon | Achieving your goal requires much 1., but distractions are a barrier to your success. |
The way it happens | Getting side tracked is a 2. process, and you have to battle against getting off track 3.. |
4. on solving the problem | ◆You can 5. yourself of your goal by writing it down, reading it every morning and imagining achieving it. ◆ Make sure what you do helps you get 6. to your goal. ◆ Focusing on a single goal makes you more 7. to achieve it. ◆ Don’t blame yourself, as it is 8. for humans to make wrong judgement. ◆ Accept the fact that distractions are 9. to happen and try to reduce the time of getting distracted. |
Summary | Distractions can be compared to 10. causing us all to fall often, in which case we should bounce back to our goal timely. |
One in four children and young people could have problematic smart-phone use, according to research that also suggests such behaviour is associated with poorer mental health.
The amount of time children and teens spend using their devices has become an issue of growing concern, but experts say there is still little evidence as to whether spending time on screens is harmful in itself.
The experts behind the latest study said they wanted to look beyond the time young people were spending on smart-phones and instead explore the type of relationship they had with smart-phones.
The results suggest more than 23% of young people have an abnormal relationship with their smart-phones, and that this appears to be associated with poorer mental health-although the research cannot say whether phone use is driving such problems.
“It seems like only a minority of teenagers and young people from various different countries are self-reporting a pattern of behaviour that we recognise from other addictions,” said Dr Nicola Kalk of King’s College London, co-author of the study. “The quality of the evidence is poor, but it is enough to warrant (保证) further investigation.”
Writing in the journal BMC Psychiatry, the team reported how they looked at data from 41 studies involving a total of almost 42,000 participants across Europe, Asia and America, mainly in their teens or early 20s.
These studies used questionnaires to probe the prevalence (普遍) of problematic smart-phone use-behaviours such as being anxious when the device is not available or neglecting other activities to spend time on the smart-phone.
Taken together, the team said on average these studies suggested as many as one in four children and young people had problematic smart-phone use.
Among the studies that probed mental health, the results suggested people with problematic smart-phone use were also more likely to have depression-for which the odds (可能性) were more than three times worse-anxiety, feelings of stress and poor sleep as well as poorer educational attainment.
While the team said it was too soon to call problematic smart-phone usage an addiction, they noted that it appeared to be linked to similar patterns of behaviour and emotion.
Kalk said further studies were needed to explore if these behaviours were hard to break, or cause harm-other key features of an addiction.
The authors argued that the availability and pervasiveness of smart-phones in everyday life meant problematic use of the devices posed a different and much bigger public health problem than substances of abuse or internet gaming.
Kalk said the team were now looking at whether smart-phones were just delivering addictive content, or whether there was something inherently addictive about using such devices.
Dr Amy Orben, an expert in screen time at the University of Cambridge, raised concerns, noting that the definition of problematic internet use varied considerably across studies, and the measures used were questioned.
She said studies finding little signs of problematic internet use might have been overlooked, while the research could not say whether problematic smart-phone use caused poorer mental health.
Prof Russell Viner, President of Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that parents were navigating unchartered water when it came to technology.
“One of the most critical things for parents to consider is whether screen time is having a harmful impact on other activities like school, relationships or other interests. This study suggests that this is the case for a significant minority of children and young people,” he said.
Viner said in these cases parents should calmly install age-appropriate boundaries on smart-phone use, and ask questions about whether their children were experiencing other problems.
“While screen time is a new problem, part of the solution is tried and tested-open and regular conversations based on respect and trust,” he said.
1.Experts conducted the research to ______.
A.address the concern about adolescent behavior
B.prove spending time on screens is harmful in itself
C.calculate the time young people spent on smart-phones
D.explore young people’s relationship type with smart-phones
2.We can learn from the research that ______.
A.it involved a vast majority of participants across the globe
B.the participants were asked to report their online activities
C.researchers compared different behaviors of the participants
D.problematic smart-phone use is linked to poorer mental health
3.Which of the following might Kalk probably agree?
A.It is hard to break problematic smart-phone use.
B.Internet gaming is problematic smart-phone use.
C.Problematic smart-phone use is an addiction.
D.The research still has some limitations.
4.What’s Dr Amy Orben’s attitude towards the research findings?
A.Supportive. B.Negative.
C.Sceptical. D.Unconcerned.
5.What does the underlined part in Paragraph 16 mean?
A.Screen time is a new challenge to parents.
B.Technology is posing a threat to parents.
C.Parents are lost in the sea of technology.
D.Parents use technology to chart water.
6.According to Viner, what should parents do to solve the problem?
A.Keep track of the screen time of children.
B.Strictly prohibit children from using devices.
C.Have a sincere communication with children.
D.Evaluate the impact of screen time on children.
The brain has a powerful ability to remember and connect events separated in time. And now, in that new study in mice published in Neuron, scientists at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute have cast light on how the brain can form lasting links.
The hippocampus-a small, seahorse-shaped region buried deep in the brain-is an important headquarters for learning and memory. Previous experiments in mice showed that disruption (中断) to the hippocampus leaves the animals with trouble learning to associate two events separated by tens of seconds.
“The traditional view has been that cells in the hippocampus keep up a level of continuous activity to associate such events,” said Dr. Ahmed, co-first author of the study. “Turning these cells off would thus disrupt learning.”
To test this view, the researchers imaged parts of the hippocampus of mice as the animals were exposed to two different stimuli (刺激物): a neutral (神经的) sound followed by a small but unpleasant puff of air. A fifteen-second delay separated the two events. The scientists repeated this experiment across several trials. Over time, the mice learned to associate the sound with the soon-to-follow puff of air. Using advanced microscopy, they recorded the activity of thousands of neurons (神经元) , a type of brain cell, in the animals’ hippocampus over the course of each trial for many days.
“We expected to see continuous neural activity that lasted during the fifteen-second gap, an indication of the hippocampus at work linking the auditory sound and the air puff,” said computational neuroscientist Stefano Fusi, PhD. “But when we began to analyze the data, we saw no such activity.” Instead, the neural activity recorded during the fifteen-second time gap was sparse (稀少的). Only a small number of neurons worked, and they did so seemingly at random.
To understand activity, they had to shift the way they analyzed data and use tools designed to make sense of random processes. Finally, the researchers discovered a complex pattern in the randomness: a style of mental computing that seems to be a remarkably efficient way that neurons store information.
“We were happy to see that the brain doesn’t maintain ongoing activity over all these seconds because that’s not the most efficient way to store information,” said Dr. Ahmed. “The brain seems to have a more efficient way to build this bridge.”
1.What can we learn about the hippocampus?
A.It weakens with the memory decline.
B.It is a brain region crucial for memory.
C.It serves as a tool of learning languages.
D.It is involved in the visual area of the brain.
2.According to the passage, the traditional view is that ______.
A.associations of events require continuous neural activity
B.animals have trouble learning to associate two events
C.neural activity can hardly be replaced by associations
D.a 15-second delay is enough to separate two events
3.The new study in mice indicates that ______.
A.continuous activity happens as expected
B.no neurons stay active at intervals of 15 seconds
C.a complex pattern helps the brain learn associations
D.neuronal information is stored in well-designed tools
4.From the last two paragraphs, we can infer that the findings ______.
A.inspire deeper explorations of disorders
B.provide evidence for language learning
C.build a bridge between different parts of the brain
D.help map some aspects of a person’s experiences
Should you choose time over money, or money over time? This is one of those so-called dilemmas of happiness that isn’t really a dilemma at all, because the answer is so painfully obvious. Money, after all, is just an instrument for obtaining other things, including time-while time is all we’ve got. And to make matters worse, you can’t save it up.
And yet we do choose money over time, again and again, even when basic material well-being doesn’t demand it. Partly, no doubt, that’s because even well-off people fear future poverty. But it’s also because the time/money trade-off rarely presents itself in simple ways. Suppose you’re offered a better-paid job that requires a longer commute (more money in return for less time); but then again, that extra cash could lead to more or better time in future, in the form of nicer holidays, or a more secure retirement. Which choice prioritizes time, and which money? It’s hard to say.
Thankfully, a new study throws a little light on the matter. The researchers surveyed more than 4,000 Americans to determine whether they valued time or money more, and how happy they were. A clear majority preferred money-but those who valued time were happier. Older people, married people and parents were more likely to value time, which makes sense: older people have less time left, while those with spouses and kids probably either value time with them, or feel they steal all their time. Or both.
The crucial finding here is that it’s not having more time that makes you happier, but valuing it more. Economists continue to argue about whether money buys happiness-but few doubt that being comfortably off is more pleasant than struggling to make ends meet. This study makes a different point: it implies that even if you’re scraping by (勉强维持), and thus forced to focus on money, you’ll be happier if deep down you know it’s time that’s most important.
It also contains ironic (讽刺的) good news for those of us who feel basically secure, financially, but horribly pushed for time. If you strongly wish you had more time, as I do, who could accuse you of not valuing it? At least my eagerness for more time shows that my priorities are in order, and maybe that means I’ll enjoy any spare time I do get. We talk about scarce time like it’s a bad thing. But scarcity is what makes us treat things as precious, too.
1.The example in Paragraph 2 suggests that ______.
A.money can be made at the expense of time
B.the time/money trade-off is a complicated issue
C.money is a tool for obtaining material well-being
D.circumstances force one to choose money over time
2.We can know from the findings of the study that ______.
A.valuing time more makes people happier
B.parents regret the time spent on their kids
C.people won’t value time until they’re rich
D.a comfortable life is superior to more time
3.Which of the following best serves as the title of the passage?
A.What you should spend time on
B.What you should trade money for
C.Why you need to value money, not time
D.Why you need to count time, not money
