【推荐1】Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About High School

As a teenager,you get a lot of things shouted at you from all different directions and it's often overwhelming.

1.High school is never like it is in the movies.

As a freshman,everything is so new and you're dealing with the constant feeling of apathy all while caring way too much.It's a delicate balance that I think only teenagers alone ever understand fully.    1    Expect change,but don't try so hard to fantasize it.

2.Make friends with your teachers.

Not all of the teachers will be fair,or even tolerable,and while that may inspire you to want to take your first dignified stand against today's education system,it won't prevent you from failing.    2    Pay attention in class because no,you're not "too cool for school."

3.    3    

You're going to meet people who are dealing with all kinds of problems.Maybe you'll be the one experiencing these things,and in that case,what would you want your friend to do for you?Sometimes you won't feel like being there,maybe you'll be too tired to listen,but it'll be worth it in the end if you really just make yourself reliable.

4.Do not sink in self-pity

Of course,feeling sorry for yourself is okay,it's even healthy!But when you're the person who's always complaining about yourself and your life and questioning all the bad things that happen to you,no one is going to want to talk to you.    4    

5.You are beautiful,intelligent,and worth it.

    5    You're surrounded by hundreds of other people who are even better at the things you thought you were best at.Stop comparing yourself.You're not stupid because you failed a history test.You are yourself and that's all you ever will be.

A．Respect your teachers.

B．Lower your expectations.

C．Have a pity on your friends.

D．Nobody is going to feel sorry for you.

E．Most teenagers experience low self-esteem.

F．Many teens often show emotional moods.

G．Be the kind of friend you would want.

【推荐3】Dormitory management officials in universities say that lately they are noticing something different: students seem to lack the will and skill to address their ordinary conflicts. “We have students who are mad at each other and they text each other in the same room,” says a teacher. “So many of our roommate conflicts are because kids don’t know how to negotiate.”

And as many psychologists will tell you, bottled emotions lead to silent unhappiness that can boil over into frustration and anger. “At Florida University, emotional outbreaks occur about once a week,” the dormitory director says. “It used to be: ‘Let’s sit down and talk about it,’” he says. “Recently, roommate conflicts have increased. The students don’t have the person-to-person discussions and they don’t know how to handle them.” The problem is most impressive among freshmen; dormitory officials say some students even never seem to catch on till graduation, and they worry about how such students will deal with conflicts after college.

Administrators suppose that relying on cell phones and the Internet may have made it easier for young people to avoid uncomfortable meetings. Why express anger in person when you can do it in a text? Facebook makes the situation worse as complaints go public. “Things are posted on someone’s wall on Facebook: ‘Oh, my roommate kept me up all night studying,”’ says Dana Pysz, an assistant director in the housing office at California University. “It’s a different way to express their conflicts to each other.” In recent group discussions at North Carolina State University, students said they would not even accuse the noisy neighbors on their floor face to face.

Administrators also point to parents who have fixed their children’s problems in their entire lives. Now in college, the children lack the skills to attend to even modest conflicts. Would these parents continue to take care of everything on campus?

1. What does the underlined word “address” in Paragraph 1 probably mean?

A．To greet someone with a title or name.	B．To start trying to solve a problem.
C．To put an address on an envelope.	D．To make a formal speech.

2. Which of the following is NOT TRUE according to the passage?

A．Students handled it directly when they were in conflict.

B．Parents are the main factor to make their children lose the skills.

C．Cellphones are to blame in the students’ conflicts in their dormitories.

D．Unhappy and cornered emotions resulted in quarrels between students once a week.

3. What do we learn from the group discussions at North Carolina State University?

A．Students are always angry with each other.

B．Students have to bear noises from neighbors.

C．Students may be not good at negotiating in person.

D．Students are brought up self-centered.

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

A．Students’ Unhappy Life in University	B．Parents’ Attention in Children’s Life
C．Students’ Failure to Deal with Conflicts	D．Teachers’ Concerns about Students

【推荐1】A recent study points out a so-called “gender-equality paradox(性别平等悖论)”: there are more women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) in countries with lower gender equality. Why do women make up 40 percent of engineering majors in Jordan, but only 34 percent in Sweden and 19 percent in the U.S.? The researchers suggest that women are just less interested in STEM, and when liberal Western countries let them choose freely, they freely choose different fields.

We disagree.

From cradle to classroom, a wealth of research shows that the environment has a major influence on girls’ interest and ability in math and science. Early in school, teachers, unconscious prejudice push girls away from STEM. By their preteen years, girls outperform boys in science class and report equal interest in the subject, but parents think that science is harder and less interesting for their daughters than their sons, and these misunderstandings predict their children’s career choices.

Later in life, women get less credit than men for the same math performance. When female STEM majors write to potential PhD advisors, they are less likely to get a response. When STEM professors review applications for research positions, they are less likely to hire “Jennifer” than “John,” even when both applications are otherwise identical—and if they do hire “Jennifer,” they pay her $4,000 less.

These findings make it clear that women in Western countries are not freely expressing their lack of “interest” in STEM. In fact, cultural attitudes and discrimination are shaping women’s interests in a way that is anything but free, even in otherwise free countries.

“Gender-equality paradox” research misses those social factors because it relies on a broad measure of equality called the Gender Gap Index (GGI), which tracks indicators such as wage difference, government representation and health outcomes. These are important markers of progress, but if we want to explain something as complicated as gender representation in STEM, we have to look into people’s heads.

Fortunately, we have ways to do that. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a well-validated tool for measuring how tightly two concepts are tied together in people’s minds. The psychologist Brian Nosek and his colleagues analyzed over 500,000 responses to a version of the IAT that measures mental associations between men/women and science, and compared results from 34 countries. Across the world, people associated science more strongly with men than with women.

But surprisingly, these gendered associations were stronger in supposedly egalitarian (主张平等的) Sweden than they were in the U.S., and the most pro-female scores came from Jordan. We re-analyzed the study’s data and found that the GGI’s assessment of overall gender equality of a country has nothing to do with that country’s scores on the science IAT.

That means the GGI fails to account for cultural attitudes toward women in science and the complicated mix of history and culture that forms those attitudes.

Comparison	A recent study	The author’s idea
Opinions	“Gender-equality paradox”     1     from the personal reason that women are less interested in STEM.	The environment including cultural attitudes and discrimination is     2     women’s interests.
Facts	3     with Jordan and Sweden, America had the least percentage of women majoring in engineering.	• Early in school: Girls perform     4     than boys in science. • Later in life: Female STEM majors are more likely to be     5     by potential PhD advisors.
Tools	It is     6     on GGI.	IAT     7     how tightly two concepts are tied together in people’s minds.
Findings	Women in liberal Western countries tend to     8     STEM.	• The GGFs assessment of overall gender equality is not     9     to that country’s scores on the science IAT. • The GGI can’t     10     people’s cultural attitudes towards women in science, which are formed by a mix of history and culture.

【推荐2】Early or Later Day Care

Many young parents are confused about whether their children should have early day care, and there have always been different views on this subject.

The British psychoanalyst John Bowlby believes that separation from parents during the sensitive “attachment” period from birth to three may scar a child’s personality and lead to psychological problems in later life. Some people have drawn the conclusion from Bowlby’s work that children should not be subjected to day care before three because of the parental separation it causes, and many people do believe this.

According to Bowlby, a great deal of psychological harm can occur when young children are separated from their parents. If they are left without touch for a while, they will have a higher stress level. Parents’ influence on their children’s well-being may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child’s brain is developing rapidly and when nearly all of her or his experiences are shaped by parents and the family environment.

However, there are critics. Some anthropologists (人类学家) point out that the love affair between children and parents found in modern societies does not usually exist in traditional societies. There has been a long history of the fact that father and mother did not bring up their children alone. Plato, around 394 B.C., argued that a system of early child care would free women to participate in society. Results from Israeli and Dutch studies show that child-raising duties are more evenly distributed among a broader group of people.

Besides, studies have reported that early day care has a neutral or slightly positive effect on children’s development. They learn the benefits of being socially smart, understanding the concept of sharing and caring. They promote concentration skills, which is very important in their learning. There are games where children are taught basic language and mathematical skills through stories and everyday examples.

Common sense tells us that early day care would not be so widespread if children had problems with it. But Bowlby’s analysis raises the possibility that it has delayed effects. The possibility that such care might lead to more mental illness 15 or 20 years later can only be explored by the use of statistics. Whatever the long-term effects, parents sometimes find the immediate effects difficult to deal with. Children under three dislike leaving their parents and show unhappiness. At the age of three almost all children find it easy to go to the nursery. The matter, then, is far from being clearly known, though experience and available evidence indicate that early day care is reasonable for young children.

1. The passage mainly argues whether ______.

A．children over three will accept school education

B．children under three should be sent to nursery schools

C．the family relationship is different in traditional societies

D．early day care should be totally replaced in modern societies

2. Which of the following supports Bowlby’s theory?

A．Early day care wouldn’t be so popular if it had negative effects.

B．Separation from parents for young children is common in history.

C．Parents find the immediate effects of early day care difficult to deal with.

D．Studies show early day care has a positive effect on children’s development.

3. The author’s attitude towards early day care is that ______.

A．children under three should stay with their parents

B．it has potential benefits for both children and parents

C．the bad effect of it on children will disappear as they grow up

D．it is controversial and the settlement calls for the use of statistics

4. Which of the following shows the development of ideas in the passage?
I: Introduction       P: Point       Sp: Sub-point (次要点)       C: Conclusion

A．	B．
C．	D．

【推荐3】       For years we have been told that encouraging a child’s self-respect is important to his or her success in life. But child experts are now learning that too much praise can lead to the opposite effect. Praise-aholic kids who expect it at every turn may become teens who seek the same kind of approval from their friends when asked if they want to go in the backseat of the car.
       The implication(含义) of saying “You are the prettiest girl in class,” or talking about the goals she scored but not her overall effort, is that you love her only when she looks the best, scores the highest, achieves the most. And this carries over to the classroom.

Social psychologist Carol Dweck, PHD, tested the effects of over-praise on 400 fifth graders while she was at Columbia University. She found that kids praised for “trying hard” did better on tests and were more likely to take on difficult assignments than those praised for being “smart”.

“Praising attributes(品质) or abilities makes a false promise that success will come to you because you have that quality, and it devalues effort, so children are afraid to take on challenges,” says Dweck, now at Stanford University, “They figure they’d better quit while they’re ahead.”
1. The underlined words “Praise-aholic kids” refer to kids who are ______.

A．tired of being praised	B．worthy of being praised
C．very proud of being praised	D．extremely fond of being praised

2. The author quoted Dr.Dweck’s words in the last paragraph in order to make the article ______.

A．better-known	B．better-organized
C．more persuasive	D．more interesting

3. We can infer from the passage that _______.

A．praise for efforts should be more encouraged

B．praise for results works better than praise for efforts

C．praising a child’s achievements benefits his or her success in life

D．praising a child’s abilities encourages him or her to take on challenges

【推荐1】Plants cannot run or hide, so they need other strategies to avoid being eaten. Some curl up their leaves, others produce chemicals to make themselves taste bad if they sense animals drooling on them, chewing them up or laying eggs on them—all signals of an attack. New research now shows some flora can feel a plant-eating animal well before it launches an attack, letting a plant prepare a preemptive（先发制人的）defense that even works against other pest species.

When ecologist John Orrock of the University of Wisconsin-Madison sprayed snail slime—a liquid the animals release as they slide along—onto soil, nearby tomato plants appeared to notice. They increased their levels of an enzyme（酶）, which is known to prevent plant-eating animals. “None of the plants were ever actually attacked,” Orrock says. “We just gave them cues that suggested an attack was coming, and that was enough to cause big changes in their chemistry.”

Initially Orrock found this defense worked against snails; in the latest study, his team measured the slimy warning’s impact on another potential threat. The investigators found that hungry caterpillars（毛虫）, which usually eat tomato leaves greedily, had no appetite for them after the plants were exposed to snail slime and activated their chemical resistance. This nonspecific defense may be a strategy that benefits the plants by further improving their overall possibilities of survival, says Orrock, who reported the results with his colleagues in March in Oecologia.

The finding that a snail’s approach can cause a plant response that affects a different animal made Richard Karban curious, a plant communications expert, who was not involved in the study. “It is significant that the plants are responding before being damaged and that these cues are having such far-ranging effects, ” Karban says. The research was comprehensive, he adds, but he wonders how the tomato plants felt chemicals in snail slime that never actually touched them.

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Orrock says. He hopes future research will make out the mechanisms that enable plants to sense these relatively distant cues.

1. John Orrock sprayed a liquid onto soil near tomato plants to ________.

A．make them grow better

B．give them a warning

C．keep plant-eating animals away

D．inform plant-eating animals of danger

2. Why is the example of “caterpillars” mentioned in Paragraph 3?

A．To introduce another animal.

B．To confirm the result of the study.

C．To appeal to people to protect animals.

D．To analyze different resistance chemicals.

3. What does Richard Karban really want to know?

A．How tomato plants become aware of danger.

B．What the chemicals in the snail slime are.

C．Whether the research is of practical value.

D．What the finding of the research is.

4. What can be a suitable title for the text?

A．Watchful Plants.	B．Greedy Animals.
C．A Snail’s Approach.	D．A Defense Attack.

【推荐2】Average humans can consume 15 or more drinks in plastic bottles a month. If you were born after 1998, and live until 80 years old, you will leave behind a minimum of 14, 4000 plastic bottles on this planet. These bottles take hundreds of years to break down into tiny pieces of plastic, never to completely disappear. Most of the waste is consumed by fish and birds, which has shortened their lifespans greatly.

The Plastic Bottle Village is just a great idea that might finally save us from being buried in plastic. It5s a community in Panama that is going to be made of used bottles. The design process begins with building steel frames, which are then filled with these bottles. Once this step is complete, and electrical and plumping lines are put inside, the plastic walls are covered with concrete (混凝土)—both inside and outside. So no one will actually be able to tell that the walls are made of plastic. Besides, the material will keep the house 17℃ cooler than the outside, which is the biggest benefit to people living inside.

The village is the idea of Robert Bezeau with the intention of setting up several environmental projects. Having started a recycling program four years ago, during which a number of plastic bottles were collected, he started to think of how they could be put to use. Soon enough, he decided to use them to build houses, and came up with a basic idea for the construction process.

The project hopes to make people conscious of the waste that these bottles create so that they can do more to protect the environment. The village will also create an education center that will teach individuals from the world how to reuse plastic bottles as construction materials for shelter. Recycled bottles could neutralize (使……无效) the negative effect of your passage on this planet, and move closer to leaving only your “footprints”.

1. What do the figures in the first paragraph show?

A．The reason for buying fewer drinks.	B．The seriousness of plastic pollution.
C．The amount of plastic waste.	D．The difficult situation of wildlife.

2. Why are the homes in the village special?

A．They’re green buildings.	B．They’re 17℃ warmer inside.
C．They stop plastic pollution.	D．They’re entirely made of plastic bottles.

3. What can we know from the passage?

A．Plastic bottles are difficult to break down so that they are liked by fish and birds.

B．Robert Bezeau is leader of a community in, Panama responsible for the project.

C．The project of the Plastic Bottle Village can raise peopled environmental awareness.

D．Individuals can learn how to produce plastic bottles without polluting the environment.

4. What would be the best title for the passage?

A．An Eco-Friendly Plastic Bottle Village

B．The Negative Effects of Plastic Bottles

C．How to Collect Deserted Plastic Bottles

D．How to Popularize the Use of Plastic Bottles