Like many other holidays, Halloween has developed and changed throughout history. Over 2,000 years ago people called the Celts lived in what is now Ireland, the UK, and parts of Northern France.
More than a thousand years ago the Christian church named November 1 All Saints Day (also called All Hallows). This was a special day to honor the saints (圣人) and other people who died for their religion. The night before All Hallows was called Hallows Eve.
Like the Celts, the Europeans of that time also believed that the spirits of the dead would visit the earth on Halloween.
The tradition of Halloween was carried to America by the immigrating (移民) Europeans. Some of the traditions changed a little, though. For example, on Halloween in Europe some people would carry lanterns made from turnips (芜菁).
These days Halloween is not usually considered a religious holiday.
| A．It is mainly a fun day for children. |
| B．The lanterns can look funny or scary. |
| C．November I was their New Year's Day. |
| D．Later the name was changed to Halloween. |
| E．In America, pumpkins were more common. |
| F．Wearing costumes was said to be a good way to defeat evils. G They worried that evil spirits would cause problems or hurt them. |
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【推荐1】Four best fall festivals in the United States
Fall might be America’s favorite season, when we celebrate the art of getting together. Here are four fall festivals too good to miss.
Trailing of the Sheep Festival
October 9-13 | Sun Valley, Idaho
This fall, more than 25,000 people from around the world will watch 1,500-plus sheep march down Ketchum’s Main Street. Even if nobody showed, third-generation farm owners would still tend their sheep through town to the grasslands on the Colorado River. It has become a reminder of a 150-year-old way of life.
Apple Butter Festival
October 12-13 | Berkeley Springs, West Virginia
Copper kettles (铜壶) balanced over the fire have been used in Appalachia for centuries. In Berkeley Springs’ town square, the tradition is respected at the Apple Butter Festival: Competing cooks use long wooden sticks to mix the silky apple butter in copper kettles and sell it on site.
Nantucket Cranberry Festival
October 12 | Nantucket Island, Massachusetts
Every October, the island hosts the Nantucket Cranberry Festival, a free outdoor festival where visitors can pick cranberries (蔓越莓) in a traditional way and tour cranberry bogs (沼泽) on foot with local experts. Hourly public buses run directly from the ferry (渡船) landing to the bog, but book ferry tickets to the island ahead of time.
Kona Coffee Cultural Festival
November 3-10 | Kona, Hawaii
Festivities during Kona’s Annual Coffee Cultural Festival tell the 200-year-old story of the Big Island’s multicultural coffee history. The festival includes many coffee-related competitions. Visitors can also tour more than 30 of Kona’s 650 coffee farms.
1. Where can a sheep march be seen?| A．On Kona’s coffee farms. | B．On Ketchum’s Main Street. |
| C．In Nantucket’s cranberry bogs. | D．In Berkeley Springs’ town square. |
| A．Buy silky apple butter. | B．Pick apples on the island. |
| C．Make dishes with apples. | D．Help sell apple butter. |
| A．Apple Butter Festival. | B．Trailing of the Sheep Festival. |
| C．Nantucket Cranberry Festival. | D．Kona Coffee Cultural Festival. |
【推荐2】Literary festivals are held annually in many corners of the globe and attract large numbers of readers, writers, playwrights (剧作家) and publishers.
Miami Book Fair
For eight days each year in November, the campus of Miami Dade College hosts over 500 outstanding authors during the Miami Book Fair. The fair offers young writers a unique opportunity to attend creative writing courses and workshops. Readers can listen to famous international authors talk about their latest books. Most of the events are offered free of charge to encourage a love of literature across all income groups.
Cheltenham Literature Festival
The festival runs for 10 days every autumn in Cheltenham. It’s the world’s first literature festival, leading the way in celebrating the writ- ten and spoken word. The fair offers something to everyone-you can attend reading activities and debates, and bring your children to see their favorite storybook characters brought to life.
Paraty International Literary Festival
It’s held each year in the city of Paraty, Brazil. Visitors can meet many local and international authors, poets and playwrights, and attend literature workshops. As part of the festival, Flipinha is mainly for children where young readers can meet writers and relax with a book in a special space. A further arm of the festival is called FlipMais. A series of free events about live theatre, music and cinema are held throughout the city of Paraty.
Edinburgh International Book Festival
The festival lasts for over 16 days every August and usually features around 900 events where you can meet your favorite authors, and bring your children to attend magical story-telling sessions and special workshops for children with learning disabilities. In most years, the festival attracts over 1,000 authors, poets and educators.
1. What can young writers do at Miami Book Fair?| A．Enjoy wonderful live shows. | B．Get the latest books for free. |
| C．Develop their writing skills. | D．Receive training in public speaking. |
| A．It includes different forms of art. | B．It organizes a debate for writers and readers. |
| C．It gives children a chance to make up stories. | D．It allows readers to offer writers suggestions directly. |
| A．Miami Book Fair. | B．Cheltenham Literature Festival. |
| C．Paraty International Literary Festival. | D．Edinburgh International Book Festival. |
【推荐3】The UK's music festivals are world famous but there are plenty more to celebrate in the country.
Burns Night, Scotland
On 25 January, Scots celebrate the life and works of Scotland's national poet Robert Burns by holding a special Burns Supper. This can be a chance for friends to get together with a huge formal dinner. Guests take it in turn to recite Burns' poems or sing one of his songs.
Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye, Wales
For 10 days each May, the small town of Hay on-Wye on the edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales is filled with writers, filmmakers, musicians, and people who come to hear them talk and exchange ideas. The festival celebrates great writing of all genres (体裁) and it all takes place in a village in the town.
Camp Festival, Dorset
As a branch of a festival held in Dorset, it's one of the best family festivals in the UK Held every year in the grounds of the historic Lulworth Castle in Dorset, the festival includes top live music acts, but as the organizer say, “kids are king” at Camp Festival, with a wide variety of entertainment, workshops and fun for kids. The 2020 Camp Festival takes place from 25 to 28 July.
Guy Fawkes Day or “Bonfire Night”
All over the UK on 5 November, the British light bonfires and set off fireworks in their back gardens or, more commonly these days, at organized events in public parks. They celebrate the Catholic Guy Fawkes' failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament (议会院) on 5 November, 1605.
1. Which festivals are related to literature (文学)?| A．Hay Festival and Camp Festival. | B．Bums Night and Hay Festival. |
| C．Burs Night and Guy Fawkes Day. | D．Camp Festival and Guy Fawkes Day. |
| A．In July. | B．In May. | C．In January. | D．In November. |
| A．An impressive building. | B．A successful adventure. |
| C．An organized game. | D．A historical event. |
【推荐1】It may come as a surprise that human beings are not alone in inventing vaccine. Work published in the Journal of Experimental Biology by Gyan Harwood of the University of Illinois, confirms that honeybees got there first.
The scientists discovered in 2015, that queen bees vaccinate their eggs before they are laid. The vaccine is some pieces of proteins from diseasing-causing pathogens. They act as antigens which cause a protective immune response. But it raised the question: how the queen received her antigen? For she is fed purely on royal jelly, a thing produced by nurse bees. Meanwhile, work bees fly out looking for food to feed nurse bees. Dr Harwood therefore wondered if the nurses received the pathogens while eating the food from the outside, and then got them into their royal jelly, as the queen’s food at last.
To find the answer, Dr Harwood collected 150 nurse bees and divided them among six queenless mini boxes equipped with baby bees to look after. They fed the nurses on sugar-water, and for three of the boxes he placed Paenibacillus, a bacterium causing young bees’ death.
In this case, Dr Harwood marked the dead bacteria with a color, to make their footprint easy to track. And, sure enough, microscope confirmed that pieces of Paenibacillus were getting into royal jelly produced by those bees which had been fed with sugar-water, which is thought to help bee develop immune system.
All told, these findings suggest that nurse bees are indeed, via their royal jelly, passing antigens on to the queen for transferring into her eggs. They also mean, because baby bees, too, receive royal jelly for the first few days after the birth, that the nurses are vaccinating the baby bees as well. Each baby bee is therefore being vaccinated twice.
1. What did Dr. Harwood want to prove in Para 2?| A．What causes an immune response. | B．Whether the nurses brought in the antigen. |
| C．Why honeybees have strong immune system. | D．How the queen got the antigen. |
| A．By tracking the colored bacteria. | B．By comparing the boxes. |
| C．By dividing the nurse bees. | D．By feeding sugar water. |
| A．A business website. | B．A lifestyle magazine. |
| C．A Sci-tech textbook. | D．A biology paper. |
| A．The queen passes antigens through sugar water into their eggs. |
| B．The nurses also vaccinate the baby bees through royal jelly. |
| C．The honeybees are the first to invent vaccines in the world. |
| D．The baby bees are vaccinated by the queen twice. |
【推荐2】We have the most friends at the age of 26 after having spent the first quarter of our lives building up our friendship circle, a new research has claimed.
The research into friendship shows that our social circle peaks at 26 years and 7 months, at which we typically have five close friends. Women are the most popular at 25 years and 10 months, with men hitting the highest friendship point a little later at 27 years and 3 months.
The research, by Forever Friends, shows that about a third of adults meet their closest friends while at school, with about a fifth saying they meet them at work.
Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter now also play a major role in building new friendship. The research points out that 25 to 34-year-olds make 22 friends via Facebook, compared to 18 to 24-year-olds who make 12, and 35 to 44-year-olds who make just four.
Forever Friends’ relationship coach Sam Owen says, “It is no coincidence that over a third of us meet our best friends at school. It is a key time in our lives when friendship is growing through sharing notes, giving gifts, seeing each other regularly and laughing a lot. As adults we can often forget how powerful these small things are and how the little things can make a difference. ”
Later in life we find ourselves losing friends. Over half of us lose friendship through moving, while 36% say that over time they grow apart from close pals. Having children also causes 19% to drift away from childhood friends.
With growing pressures being put on friendship these days, it’s important to make time for our friendship.
1. How many friends can a 20-year-old college student make via Facebook?| A．4. | B．18. |
| C．12. | D．22. |
| A．how important making friends is |
| B．that friendship is not easy to keep |
| C．how much has been done to keep friendship |
| D．that friendship at school is important |
| A．make sense of | B．lose contact with |
| C．feel sorry for | D．make up with |
| A．a brochure | B．an advertisement |
| C．a textbook | D．a newspaper |
【推荐3】Time travel is a familiar subject of science fiction, fantasy stories and movies, from movies The Time Machine (1960), The Time Shifters (1999), The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009) and Smaragdgrün (2016) to books The Time Travel Trap (2008), A Wrinkle in Time (2012) and Time Travel (2017). But could time travel ever be possible in real life? And, if so, how would humans even handle so advanced a technology?
Some scientists say time travel is theoretically possible, at least if you want to jump ahead to the future, but don’t start saving up for a time machine just yet. As physicist Paul Davies explained for CNN, "Over a century ago, Albert Einstein showed that time is actually flexible. That is, it can be either stretched or shrunk by motion."
In general, the closer you’re going to the speed of light, the slower time moves. "Fly to the star Vega, 25 light years away, and back again at 99% of the speed of light, and when you return to Earth in 2062, you will have experienced only seven years’ travel time in the spacecraft (宇宙飞船). In fact, you will have jumped 42 years into Earth’s future," Paul Davies wrote.
So if you were to, theoretically, take a trip in a super-fast spaceship, you might feel (and look) as though only a few years have passed, but when you arrive back on Earth, decades would pass and all your friends and family would be dead and gone. Time travel!
But what about going backwards? Could it ever be possible to pop back in time and stop bad things from happening and good people from dying? Theoretically, if you were to travel faster than the speed of light, you would be moving backwards in time.
But most scientists believe that nothing can actually travel faster than light, and, if you could go back in time, messing with the past would create all kinds of unsolvable problems, like the grandfather paradox(what if you went back in time and killed your grandpa).
Although some theories have attempted to propose solutions to these inconvenient time travel problems, it remains a pretty widely held belief that traveling backwards in time isn’t allowed for us humans. After all, as physicist Stephen Hawking said in his book A Brief History of Time, "If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?"
1. Why does the author mention the movies and books?| A．To stress the power of knowledge. |
| B．To explain the history of time travel. |
| C．To use some cultural events to attract readers. |
| D．To show people’s constant interest in time travel. |
| A．Traveling backwards in time is kind of difficult. |
| B．Traveling backwards is both unnecessary and wrong. |
| C．Traveling backwards in time is achievable. |
| D．Traveling backwards is not without scientific reason. |
| A．Favorable. |
| B．Negative. |
| C．Objective. |
| D．Indifferent. |
| A．Time travel is indeed appealing. |
| B．If time travel could be possible. |
| C．Man is fascinated by time travel. |
| D．How we can turn time travel into a reality. |
