探访北京老字号商铺，了解老字号时代变迁, 见证传统工艺与现代创意的结合(explore time-honored businesses in Beijing; follow the businesses’ evolution and witness the combination of traditional craftsmanship and modern designs)
图一：看到“北京印迹•北京老字号探访”活动介绍，积极报名
图二：在大栅栏地区参观老字号商铺，听历史文化研究者讲解老字号的历史（传统）
图三：参观内联升鞋店，感受传统工艺与现代创意的结合（现代）
图四：撰写报告，抒发感想
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假如你是高三（1）班班长李华，请你给曾经在你们班交换学习的英国同学Jim写信，让他录制一段视频为同学们加油，在考前班会上播放。邮件内容包括：
1.此次班会的目的；
2.对视频的要求（时长，内容......）。
注意：1．词数不少于50；
2．开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数。
Dear Jim,
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yours,
Li Hua
Optimism Bias (偏见)
While we often like to think of ourselves as highly rational and logical, researchers have found that the human brain is sometimes too optimistic for its own good. If you were asked to estimate how likely you are to experience illness, job loss, or an accident, you are likely to underestimate the probability that such events will ever impact your life. 1.
This bias leads us to believe that we are less likely to suffer from misfortune and more likely to attain success than reality would suggest. We believe that we will live longer, and that we will be more successful in life than the average. 2.
The optimism bias is essentially a mistaken belief that our chances of experiencing negative events are lower and our chances of experiencing positive events are higher than those of our peers. And this overly positive assumption doesn’t mean that we have an overly sunny outlook on our own lives. 3. People might skip their yearly physical, not wear their seatbelt, or fail to put on sunscreen because they mistakenly believe that they are less likely to get sick, get in an accident, or get skin cancer.
Cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot, author of The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, notes that this bias is widespread and can be seen in cultures all over the world. Sharot also suggests that while this optimism bias can at times lead to negative outcomes like foolishly engaging in risky behaviors or making poor choices about your health, it can also have its benefits. 4. If we expect good things to happen, we are more likely to be happy. This optimism can act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. By believing that we will be successful, people are in fact more likely to be successful.
5. After all, if we didn’t believe that we could achieve success, why would we even bother trying? Optimists are also more likely to take measures to protect their health such as exercising, taking vitamins, and following a nutritious diet.
A.Optimism also motivates us to pursue our goals.
B.But we are also highly motivated to be so optimistic.
C.But definitely not everyone is blessed with such luck.
D.This is because your brain has a built-in optimism bias.
E.It can also lead to poor decision-making, which can sometimes have disastrous results.
F.This optimism enhances well-being by creating a sense of anticipation about the future.
G.Various causes may lead to the optimistic bias, including cognitive and motivational factors.
The first patient who died on my watch was an older man with a faulty heart — the main pump had failed and his heart was beating irregularly and far too fast. We tried to slow it down with treatment, but it suddenly stopped beating completely. Later, whenever I would have a case like that one, I found myself second-guessing my clinical management. However, it turns out that thinking twice may actually cause more harm than good.
In a working paper, Emory University researchers found that when doctors delivering a baby have an adverse outcome, they are more likely to switch to a different delivery method with the next patient, often unnecessarily and sometimes with worse results.
Because doctors make so many decisions that have serious consequences, the fallout from second-guessing looms especially large for us. A 2006 study found that if a patient had a bleed after being prescribed warfarin, the physician was about 20% less likely to prescribe subsequent patients the blood thinner that prevents strokes. However, if a patient had a stroke and was not on warfarin, physicians were still no more likely to prescribe warfarin to their other patients.
These findings highlight interesting behavioral patterns in doctors. In the blood-thinner study, doctors were more affected by the act of doing harm (prescribing a blood thinner that ended up hurting a patient) and less affected by letting harm happen (not prescribing a blood thinner and the patient having a stroke). Yet a stroke is often more permanent and damaging than a bleed.
But this phenomenon is not unique to medicine. “Overreaction to Fearsome Risks” holds true for broader society.
For instance, sensational headlines about shark attacks on humans in Florida in 2001 caused a panic and led the state to prohibit shark feeding expeditions. Yet shark attacks had actually fallen that year and, according to the study, such a change was probably unnecessary given the extremely small risk of such an attack happening.
Humans are susceptible to emotional and often irrational thinking when processing information, adverse events and mistakes. As much as we don’t want to cause an unfortunate event to recur — in a medical setting or in the wider world — we need to be aware that a worst case scenario doesn’t necessarily mean we did anything wrong. When we overthink, we fail to rely on thinking based on what we know or have experienced. Instead, we may inadvertently overanalyze and come to the wrong conclusion.
I have treated dozens of patients who presented with the same illnesses as my first patient, who died more than a year ago. Instead of second guessing myself, I trusted my clinical instinct and stayed the course. Every one of those patients survived. You should trust your instinct in your life, too.
1.The first two paragraphs suggest that ______
A.Bad medical outcomes affect doctors.
B.Delivering babies can be difficult work.
C.Some doctors are not very experienced.
D.Doctors sometimes make silly mistakes.
2.In the blood-thinner study, doctors ______.
A.tend to prescribe less effective medicine
B.are more concerned about the patients’ safety
C.believe a stroke is more treatable than a bleeding
D.become less confident in writing certain prescriptions
3.The author develops his idea mainly by ______.
A.giving examples B.making comparisons
C.using metaphors D.quoting famous sayings
4.The author will probably agree that ______.
A.we shouldn’t doubt our own decisions
B.our experience will pave way for our future
C.humans are emotional and irrational on the whole
D.instincts don’t necessarily lead to wrong directions
Although it has been revealed in recent years that plants are capable of seeing, hearing and smelling, they are still usually thought of as silent. But now, for the first time, they have been recorded making ultrasonic cries when stressed, which researchers say could open up a new field of precision agriculture where farmers listen for water-starved crops.
Itzhak Khait and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University in Israel found that tomato and tobacco plants made cries at frequencies humans cannot hear when stressed by a lack of water or when their stem is cut.
Microphones placed 10 centimetres from the plants picked up sounds in the ultrasonic range of 20 to 100 kilohertz, which the team says insects and some mammals would be capable of hearing and responding to from as far as 5 metres away. A moth may decide against laying eggs on a plant that sounds water-stressed, the researchers suggest. Plants could even hear that other plants are short of water and react accordingly, they speculate.
On average, drought-stressed tomato plants made 35 sounds an hour, while tobacco plants made 11. When plant stems were cut, tomato plants made an average of 25 sounds in the following hour, and tobacco plants 15. Unstressed plants produced fewer than one sound per hour, on average.
It is even possible to distinguish between the sounds to know what the stress is. The researchers trained a machine-learning model to discriminate between the plants’ sounds and the wind, rain and other noises of the greenhouse, correctly identifying in most cases whether the stress was caused by dryness or a cut, based on the sound’s intensity and frequency. Water-hungry tobacco appears to make louder sounds than cut tobacco, for example.
Enabling farmers to listen for water-stressed plants could “open a new direction in the field of precision agriculture”, the researchers suggest. They add that such an ability will be increasingly important as climate change exposes more areas to drought.
“The suggestion that the sounds that drought-stressed plants make could be used in precision agriculture seems feasible if it is not too costly to set up the recording in a field situation,” says Anne Visscher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK.
She warns that the results can’t yet be broadened out to other stresses, such as salt or temperature, because these may not lead to sounds. In addition, there have been no experiments to show whether moths or any other animal can hear and respond to the sounds the plants make, so that idea remains speculative（推测的）for now, she says.
1.The experiment by researchers at Tel Aviv University shows that_______.
A.tobacco plants make louder sounds than tomato plants when hurt
B.water-hungry tomato plants are more sensible than tobacco plants
C.unstressed plants produced sounds of laughter when being watered
D.plants respond to the sounds the plants make and protect themselves
2.What is Anne Visscher’s attitude towards the finding of the experiment?
A.Appreciative B.Doubtful
C.Cautious D.Optimistic
3.It can be learnt from the research that ________.
A.greenhouse effects can be avoided
B.soil condition can be adjusted in time.
C.plant condition can be diagnosed faster.
D.insects can be detected and removed easily.
4.What is the best title for the article?
A.Plants Get Stressed Just Like Us
B.Plants Scream in Presence of Stress
C.Sounds of Plants Detected Far Away
D.Sounds of Plants Break Farmers’ Hearts
THE OLD FISHERMAN
Our house was directly across a popular hospital. We rented the upstairs rooms to outpatients at the clinic. One summer evening, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man, his face lopsided from swelling, red and raw. He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon but he had no success. “I guess it’s my face. I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments…”
For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: “I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.” I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch. It didn’t take a long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury. He didn’t tell it by way of complaint. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease.
At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch. Before he left for his bus, haltingly, he said, “Could I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment? I can sleep fine in a chair.” He paused a moment and then added, “Your children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don’t seem to mind.” I told him he was welcome to come again.
In the years he came to stay overnight with us. There was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden. When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning. “You can lose roomers by putting up such people!”
Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could have known him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear. I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude.
1.When the old fisherman stayed overnight, the author’s children ________________.
A.were bothered B.were terrified
C.felt normal D.felt at home
2.Which of the following statement is true about the fisherman?
A.He is both tall and strong.
B.He has five grandchildren.
C.He is pessimistic about life.
D.He suffers from a back injury.
3.The old fisherman gave the author fishes and oysters because he________.
A.wanted the author to buy them.
B.wanted to pay the rent with them.
C.had fished too many fishes and oysters.
D.wanted to show his thankfulness to the author.
4.What can we learn from the story?
A.Never judge a book by its cover.
B.Little strokes fell great oaks.
C.Stay positive, stay grateful.
D.Honesty is the best policy.
