【推荐1】From Art to Zoo, the Smithsonian, the world's largest museum and research complex, has something to interest kids and students of all ages.
Plan ahead online with The Official Kids Guide to the Smithsonian Institution – an interactive guidebook just for kids.
The Last American Dinosaurs: Discovering a Lost World
November 25, 2014 – 2018
Museum: Natural History Museum
Location: 2nd Floor, West
Explore how we learn about past ecosystems and organisms through the study of their fossils and find what goes into making a large-scale fossil exhibition. Watch fossils being prepared in a working fossil preparation lab.
As We Grow: Traditions, Toys, Games
August 22, 2012 – Indefinitely
Museum: American Indian Museum
Location: 1st Floor, near Imaginations Activity Center
All children play. Native American children play like any others, but their toys and games are more than playthings. They are ways of learning about the lives of grown men and women and ways of learning the traditions of their families and their people. The toys, games, and clothing come from all over North, Central, and South America, representing many tribes and many time periods.
The First Ladies
November 19, 2011 – Indefinitely
Museum: American History Museum
Location: 3rd Floor, Rose Gallery
On view are more than two dozen gowns, including those worn by Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, and Jacqueline Kennedy. Four cases provide in-depth looks at Mary Todd Lincoln, Edith Roosevelt, and Lady Bird Johnson and their contributions to their husband's presidential administrations.
Apollo to the Moon
July 1, 1976 – Permanent
Museum: Air and Space Museum
Location: 2nd Floor, East Wing
This gallery traces NASA's manned space program beginning with Project
Mercury's Freedom 7 (1961); then the Gemini Project (1965 – 66); followed by the Apollo Program
(1967 – 1972), with Apollo 17 as the last manned exploration of the moon.
1. The purpose of the text is to ______.

A．promote some scientific projects

B．highlight some children activities

C．release some entertainment videos

D．introduce some museum exhibitions

2. If you are interested in American history and politics, you can go to ______.

A．the 1st Floor	B．the East Wing
C．the Rose Gallery	D．the Natural History Museum

3. Which of the following has been on for the longest time?

A．The First Ladies.

B．Apollo to the Moon.

C．As We Grow: Traditions, Toys, Games.

D．The Last American Dinosaurs: Discovering a Lost World.

4. If you visit all the four locations, you can _______.

A．see gowns once worn by Edith Roosevelt

B．help prepare a dinosaur fossil exhibition

C．learn about Apollo 17's space exploration

D．play with children's toys from Central America

【推荐2】We always hold the view that high levels of intelligence are more the result of nature, rather than cultivation. But that’s just not the case. The truth is, people aren't born smart. People learn how to work with what they've got, and become smart as a result.     1    

Smart people read a lot.

Sure, it's discouraging when you meet someone who can practically download books into their brain and remember every single piece of information.     2     For most people, reading has to be a practice and a habit. Smart people practice reading often. And just like anything else, with practice they get better and better over time.

Smart people hang around other smart people.

Most people hang around other people just like them. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.     3     When you spend time with smart people, their drive, their knowledge, their awareness inherently influence you.

Smart people love making mistakes.

Smart people understand that “mistakes" don't really exist.     4     Because they show you what you need to learn next, refine, and improve upon in order to reach the next level. That's what the growth process really is.

    5    

Dumb people often say, “Oh, that's not relevant to me. I don't need to know that." Smart people always say, "That's interesting. I didn't know that. Tell me more." Knowledge, in itself is subjective. It's relative to your pursuits, your goals, your ambitions, and your current projects.

Smart people work (very, very) hard.

Rome is not built in one day. There is no doubt that hard work is the key to improvement and intelligence in general. It doesn't just happen.

A．Smart people behave modestly in learning.

B．Smart people see value in all types of knowledge.

C．For smart people, it's really a piece of cake.

D．Every misstep is an opportunity to learn a lesson, improve, and move forward.

E．There are some great qualities that smart people share.

F．But that's far from the common standard.

G．If you want to become smarter, you have to spend time around people smarter than yourself.

【推荐3】Many young people are getting creative when it comes to incorporating (包含) their personal interests into their professions. Yi Cheng used to be an engineer at a State-owned company. In 2013, he changed his career path and became a scenario (场景) designer of escape room games, where one has to find secret clues and passwords within physical spaces in order to gain entry into the next room. It is a new entertainment activity for thrill seekers in China and has attracted a large number of young consumers.

Later, he founded his own escape room company – Second World. Now, the brand has eight sites nationwide with stable revenue. His favorite challenge is to design different suspenseful (悬疑的) scenes and passwords for entry to the various secret rooms.

During the May Day holiday break, spending on new types of entertainment increased rapidly. Booking volumes for escape room games in Shanghai surged 264 percent over the pre-holiday level, according to Meituan Dianping, an online consumption service provider.

In recent years, those born in the 1980s and 1990s have taken up 90 percent of the new jobs in China’s emerging services sector. The development of the internet economy, which refers to an economy that is based on the use of digital technologies to conduct business via the world wide web, is also broadening the ambitions and horizons of many young entrepreneurs in China.

One such entrepreneur is Ke Xuan, who turned her passion for design into a career. Noticing the rise of hanfu among young Chinese women, she took a class centered around hanfu hairstyles, makeup and clothing, and became a full-time stylist in 2018 – an industry worth over $141 million (1.09 billion yuan).

“My goal is that more people will be able to accept the traditional culture of hanfu. Sometimes I even wear it when I travel abroad. This shows the confidence of our culture,” she said.

Other groups of new professions, such as online restaurant decorators, pet photographers, and owners of bed-and-breakfast homestays, have sprung up (出现) alongside burgeoning (迅速发展的) industries and digital transformations in China.

Internet-based recruiting (雇佣) platform Meituan Dianping attributes this rise to the increased demand for personalization. Their report said, “The stereotype (刻板印象) of low education, low skills and low income that were associated with those in the service industry is being transformed in new ways.”

So, when considering what classes to take or what major to choose, remember the most lucrative (获利多的) and fun career could be based on your interests.

1. Why is Yi Cheng’s change in career path mentioned in the text?

A．To praise his entrepreneurship.

B．To encourage reader to choose careers carefully.

C．To show a growing trend among young people’s career choices.

D．To prove escape room games are very popular.

2. What does the underlined word “surged” in Paragraph 3 mean?

A．increased sharply

B．remained steady

C．reduced quickly

D．developed slowly

3. Which is true about Ke Xuan?

A．She is passionate about design.	B．She is dreamed of traveling abroad.
C．She taught herself to be a stylist.	D．She started an international business.

4. What has led to the rise of various new professions, according to Meituan Dianping?

A．The lower requirements for these professions.	B．The fun associated with these professions.
C．The growth of personalized needs.	D．The pursuit of a different lifestyle.

【推荐2】Researchers at the University of Alabama in Birmingham suggest that brainwave-sensing headsets (脑电波耳机), also known as EEG headsets, need better safety after a study which shows hackers (黑客) could guess a user’s bank account passwords by monitoring (监测) his brainwaves.

Nitesh Saxena, professor in the UAB, and his team found that a person who stopped a video game and entered into a bank account while wearing an EEG headset was at a risk of having his passwords stolen by a bad software program. Saxena and his team used one EEG headset that could be bought by customers online to show how easily an ill software program could eavesdrop on a user’s brainwaves. While typing, a user’s reaction corresponds with his hand, eye and head muscle (肌肉) movements. All these movements are caught by EEG headsets.

The team asked 12 people to type passwords into a text box as if they were entering into an online account while wearing an EEG headset, in order for the software to train itself on the user’s typing and the corresponding brainwave. The team found that when a user entered passwords, the ill software program could make educated guesses about the passwords by reading the EEG data recorded. And it just increases the chance of guessing a six-letter password from one in 500,000 to one in five.

“With the growing popularity of EEG headsets and all kinds of ways they could be used, they will become part of our daily life,” Saxena said. “It is important to study the possible risks with this new technology to raise users’ awareness to the risks and develop methods of avoiding the bad attacks.” One method suggested by Saxena and his team is to make noise anytime a user types a password while wearing an EEG headset.

1. How do hackers guess passwords of a user’s bank account (账户)?

A．They use a software program.	B．They use a new-type computer.
C．They guess the user’s brainwaves.	D．They talk with the user on the net.

2. The underlined words “eavesdrop on” in Paragraph 2 refer to “________”.

A．recover from

B．depend on

C．connect closely

D．acquire secretly

3. What was the result of the research of Saxena and his team in Paragraph 3?

A．They made a very exact answer.	B．They got close to the passwords.
C．They got a part of the passwords.	D．They failed to get the passwords.

4. Why do EEG headsets need to do more to develop solutions?

A．More and more hackers come about.	B．More people use online bank accounts.
C．EEG headsets will become more popular.	D．EEG headsets still have problems in quality.

【推荐2】It has been around for centuries, but up until very recently, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) wasn’t fully accepted abroad. Proof of this can be found in The Treatment (《刮痧》), a 2001 film that tells the story of a Chinese man in the US who’s accused of abuse after he uses guasha, a form of TCM treatment, to cure his grandson’s disease.

During the last 10 years or so, however, TCM has been getting increasingly popular all over the world. A report released by the State Council Information Office on Dec. 6 says this style of health care, which includes different forms like herbal medicine and exercise, has spread to 183 countries and regions.

“We have set up 10 TCM centers outside China, and all of them are popular among locals,” Wang Guoqiang, head of the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said at a news conference on Dec 6. “Governments of 86 countries and regions have signed agreements with the Chinese government on TCM corporation.”

One of the reasons behind the growing popularity of TCM is the increase of scientific research into it. And after Tu Youyou-the Chinese scientist who discovered the anti-malaria (抗疟疾) drug qinghaosu (青蒿素)-won the Nobel Prize last year, TCM became even more famous internationally.

However, all these achievements in TCM don’t mean that it’s problem-free. Over the years, TCM has faced challenges in being able to prove that it has certain effects.

Some researchers have suggested TCM should be more exact and work together with Western medicine.

“Bringing together with Western medicine and TCM, rather than being in competition, is where the potential for great effects is,” said Bernhard Schwartlander, the China representative of the World Health Organization.

1. The film The Treatment is mentioned in the first paragraph is to         .

A．introduce the film to readers

B．show TCM is increasingly popular

C．arouse readers’ interest in Western medicine

D．prove that TCM is not fully accepted in western countries

2. We can learn from the passage that         .

A．TCM is not exact in curing diseases

B．10 TCM centers abroad are all set up by locals

C．86 countries have cooperated with China on TCM

D．Tu Youyou’s success contributes to the popularity of TCM

3. According to Bernhard Schwartlander, TCM should         .

A．combine western medicine

B．face no challenge at all

C．give an exact description of its effects

D．complete with western medicine

4. Which of the following can be the best title of the passage?

A．A report on TCM

B．Opinions about TCM

C．TCM & Western Medicine

D．Traditional healing spreads

【推荐3】How is it that siblings (兄弟姐妹) can turn out so differently? One answer is that in fact each sibling grows up in a different family. The firstborn is, for a while, an only child, and therefore has a completely different experience of the parents than those born later. The next child is, for a while, the youngest, until the situation is changed by a new arrival. The mother and father themselves are changing and growing up too. One sibling might live in a stable and close family in the first few years; another might be raised in a family crisis, with a disappointed mother or an angry father.

Sibling competition was identified as an important shaping force as early as in 1918. But more recently, researchers have found many ways in which brothers and sisters are a lasting force in each others’ lives. Dr. Annette Henderson says firstborn children pick up vocabulary more quickly than their siblings. The reason for this might be that the later children aren’t getting the same one-on-one time with parents. But that doesn’t mean that the younger children have problems with language development. Later-borns don’t enjoy that much talking time with parents, but instead they harvest lessons from bigger brothers and sisters, learning entire phrases and getting an understanding of social concepts such as the difference between “I” and “me”.

A Cambridge University study of 140 children found that siblings created a rich world of play that helped them grow socially. Love-hate relationships were common among the children. Even those siblings who fought the most had just as much positive communication as the other sibling pairs.

One way children seek more attention from parents is by making themselves different from their siblings, particularly if they are close in age. Researchers have found that the first two children in a family are typically more different from each other than the second and third. Girls with brothers show their differences to a maximum degree by being more feminine than girls with sisters. A 2003 research paper studied adolescents from 185 families over two years, finding that those who changed to make themselves different from their siblings were successful in increasing the amount of warmth they gained from their parents.

1. In terms of language development, later-borns ________.

A．get their parents’ individual guidance	B．learn a lot from their elder siblings
C．experience a lot of difficulties	D．pick up words more quickly

2. What was found about fights among siblings?

A．Siblings hated fighting and loved playing.	B．Siblings in some families fought frequently.
C．Sibling fights led to bad sibling relationships.	D．Siblings learned to get on together from fights.

3. The word “feminine” (in Para. 4) means “_______”.

A．having qualities of parents	B．having qualities of women
C．having defensive qualities	D．having extraordinary qualities