【推荐1】Work Your Mind
Here’s something to think about the next time you ask your teacher for help: struggling with schoolwork on your own can help you learn. According to a recent study, the more you struggle while you are learning new information, the better you can remember it later.
This theory might surprise you. When teachers are presenting new information, they often give students lots of help. But a new study shows this may not be the best way to support learning. “Don't be too quick to get help when learning something new,” education expert Manu Kapur told TFK. “Try to work on it yourself even if it means trying different ways.”
Kapur came up with the idea that struggling can lead to better learning. Then he tested it out on students in Singapore. He separated students into two groups. In the first group, students were asked to solve math problems with the teacher’s help. In the second group, students were asked to solve the same problems by helping one another, instead of getting help from the teacher.
With the teacher’s help, students in the first group were able to find the correct answers. Students in the second group did not solve the problems correctly. But they did come up with a lot of good ideas. The students were then tested on what they had learned. The group without any help from a teacher scored much higher than the group who had help. Kapur said working to find the answers helped students understand the process, not just the solution.
Kapur’s advice for kids is to put a lot of effort into learning something new rather than going to your teacher for help. “Simply doing a little work or nothing at all won’t work,” says Kapur. “The struggle needs to be a genuine attempt to figure out or solve a problem in as many ways as possible.”
1. When you have doubt on schoolwork, you’d better ____________.

A．ask your teacher for help

B．make it clear by yourself

C．ask your classmates to help you

D．ask your parents for help

2. What’s Manu Kapur educational idea on learning new knowledge?

A．Give students much help as soon as possible.

B．Let students learn it on themselves in one way.

C．Let students learn it by themselves in the same way.

D．Let students learn it for themselves in different ways.

3. How did Kapur check his idea on better learning?

A．By asking questions.

B．By solving art problems.

C．By group comparations.

D．By solving science problems.

4. What is the most important in learning knowledge?

A．Getting the teacher’s help.

B．Getting the student’s help.

C．Grasping the learning course.

D．Receiving the final solution.

【推荐2】Few people doubt the value of developing students' thinking skills. A focus on critical thinking is common in education. In the Australian Curriculum, critical thinking and creative thinking are known as “general capabilities”. The US has a similar focus through their “common core".

Many approaches to developing critical thinking are based on Philosophy for Children. One strategy that has a large impact on students' ability to analyse and evaluate arguments is argument mapping, in which a student's reasoning can be visually displayed by capturing the inferential pathway from assumption to conclusion. This type of argument-based intellectual engagement can show high outcomes in terms of the quality of thinking in any classroom. Research also shows deliberate attention to the practice of reasoning in the context of our everyday lives can be significantly improved through targeted teaching.

Teachers at one high school in Australia, who have much training in critical thinking teaching methods, developed a task that asked students to determine Australia's greatest sports person. Students needed to construct their own criteria for greatness. To do so, they had to analyze the Australian sporting context, create possible evaluative standards, explain and justify why some standards would be more acceptable than others and apply these to their candidates. They then needed to argue their case with their classmates to develop criteria that were solid, defensible, widely applicable and produced a choice that seized significant and relevant aspects of Australian sport.

Researchers looking at the gains made in a single term of teaching critical thinking with argument mapping said the critical thinking gains measured are close to those that could be expected to result from three years of undergraduate education. Students who are taught to think well also do better on subject-based exams and standardized tests than those who do not.

In terms of developing 21st century skills, which includes setting up students for lifelong learning, teaching critical thinking should be core business.

1. Which of the following can explain the underlined word “capturing" in Paragraph 2?

A．Describing.

B．Attracting.

C．Designing.

D．Blocking.

2. What^’s the purpose of Paragraph 3?

A．To construct the criteria for being great.

B．To acknowledge the teachers' outcomes.

C．To present how to teach critical thinking.

D．To emphasize the importance of reasoning.

3. What is the author's attitude toward teaching critical thinking?

A．Objective.

B．Supportive.

C．Doubtful.

D．Cautious.

4. What does this text imply?

A．Teaching methods should vary among schools.

B．Research on education deserves more attention.

C．Critical thinking should be valued in education.

D．Concepts of critical thinking aren't well received.

【推荐3】It’s late in the evening, time to close the book and turn off the computer. You’re done for the day. What you may not realize, however, is that the learning process actually continues in your dreams.

It might sound like science fiction, but researchers are increasingly focusing on the relationship between the knowledge and skills our brains absorb during the day and the often strange imaginings they generate at night. Scientists have found that dreaming about a task we’ve learned improves performance in that activity (suggesting that there’s some truth to the popular idea that we’re “getting” a foreign language once we begin dreaming in it). What’s more, dreaming may be an essential part of understanding, organizing and retaining what we learn.

While we sleep, research indicates, the brain replays the patterns of activity it experienced during waking hours, allowing us to enter what one psychologist calls a neural (神经的) virtual reality. A vivid example of such replay can be seen in a video researchers made recently about sleep disorders. They taught a series of dance moves to patients suffering from sleepwalking and related conditions. They then videotaped the subjects as they slept. Lying in bed, eyes closed, one female patient on the tape performs the dance moves she learned earlier.

This shows that while our bodies are at rest, our brains are drawing what’s important from the information and events we’ve recently encountered, then integrating that material into the vast store of what we already know. In a 2010 study, researchers reported that college students who dreamed about a computer maze (迷宫) task they had learned showed a 10-fold improvement in their ability to find their way through the maze compared with participants who did not dream about the task.

That study’s chief researcher Herbert Smith suggested that studying right before bedtime or taking a nap following a study session in the afternoon might increase the probability of dreaming about the material. Think about that as you go to sleep tonight.

1. What happens when one enters a dream state?

A．The body continues to act as if the sleeper were awake.

B．The neural activity of the brain will become intensified.

C．The brain once again experiences the learning activities of the day.

D．The brain behaves as if it were playing a virtual reality video game.

2. What does the brain do while we are sleeping?

A．It replaces old information with new material.

B．It processes and absorbs newly acquired information.

C．It regroups information and places it in different files.

D．It systematizes all the information collected during the day.

3. How can learning be enhanced according to Herbert Smith?

A．Staying up late before finally going to bed.

B．Having a period of sleep right after studying.

C．Having a dream about anything you are interested in.

D．Thinking about the chances of dreaming about the material.

4. What is the research discussed in the passage mainly about?

A．How study affects people’s dreams.

B．Why people learn more after sleeping.

C．What time students should study and sleep.

D．How dreaming may lead to improved learning outcomes.

【推荐1】Nineteen Eighty-Four, a dystopian novel by George Orwell, was set in a totalitarian state where even the language they use is controlled. Adjectives are forbidden and instead they use phrases such as “ungood”, “plus good” and “double plus good” to express emotions. As I first read this I thought how impossible it would be in our society to have such vocabulary. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised in its own way it's already happening. I type messages to my friends and alongside each is the obligatory (惯用的) emoji. I often use them to emphasise something, or to not seem too serious, or because this specific GIF conveys my emotions much better than I ever could using just words. And I wonder, with our too much use of emojis, are we losing the beauty and diversity of our vocabulary?

English has the largest vocabulary in the world, with over one million words, but who's to say what it'll be like in the future? Perhaps we will have a shorter language, full of saying “cry face” if something sad happens or using abbreviations like LOL (laugh out loud) or BRB (be right back) instead of saying the full phrase. So does this mean our vocabulary will shrink? Is it the start of an exciting new era? Will they look back on us in the future and say this is where it all began—the new language? Or is this a classic case of the older generations saying, “Things weren't like that when I was younger. We didn't use emoticons to show our emotions?”

Yet when you look back over time, the power of image has always been there. Even in the prehistoric era they used imagery to communicate, and what's even more incredible is that we are able to analyse those drawings and understand the meaning of them thousands of years later. Pictures have the ability to go beyond the usual limits of time and language. Images, be it cave paintings or emojis, allow us to convey a message that's not restrictive but rather universal.

1. Why does the author mention Nineteen Eight Four?

A．To introduce the topic.	B．To show an example.
C．To give the reason.	D．To describe a phenomenon

2. Why does the author like using emojis?

A．To reduce the use of words.	B．To save time of typing.
C．To express naturally and casually.	D．To make fun of friends.

3. Which of the following can best replace the underlined word “shrink” in Para 2?

A．Disappear.	B．Lower.
C．Reform.	D．Change.

4. Why can we figure out the meaning of the pictures drawn long time ago?

A．We can recognise the pictures' time period with technology.

B．We have kept the same vocabulary since the prehistoric era.

C．Pictures is an only way to record history.

D．Pictures can express human feelings accurately and vividly.

【推荐2】By now you’ve probably heard about the “you’re not special” speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing words. But lost in the anger and protest was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.

Such inflated (膨胀的) self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it's often exactly when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously. In a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with co-author Justin Kruger, suffer from a "dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and their wry ineptness (笨拙) prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.

In Dunning and Kruger's study, subjects scoring at the bottom of the heap on tests of logic, grammar and humor "extremely overestimated" their talents. Although their test scores put them in the 12^th percentile, they guessed they were in the 62^nd. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was "metacognitive skill" (元认知技巧): the capacity to monitor how well they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox (悖论) here, the authors note: “The skills that develop competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain. "In other words, to get better at judging how well we’re doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.

There are a couple of ways out of this double bind (两难). First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.

If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need parents, or a commencement(毕业典礼) speaker, to tell them that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.

1. The underlined phrase "took issue with" in paragraph 1 most probably means      .

A．totally approved of	B．disagreed with
C．fully understood	D．held discussion about

2. The author thinks the problem that shouldn't be overlooked is that      .

A．we don’t know whether our young people are talented or not

B．young people can't reasonably define themselves

C．no requirement is set up for young people to get better

D．we always tend to consider ourselves to be privileged

3. Which is NOT mentioned about poor students according to the passage?

A．They lack the capacity to monitor how well they are performing.

B．They usually give themselves high scores in self-evaluations.

C．They tend to be unable to know exactly how bad they are.

D．They are intelligently inadequate in tests and exams.

4. We can infer from the passage that those high-scoring students      .

A．are not confident about their logic and grammar

B．tend to be very competent in their high-scoring fields

C．don't know how well they perform due to their stringent self-judgment

D．is very careful about their self-evaluations because they have their own limits

5. The strategies of becoming special suggest that      .

A．the best way to recognize excellence is to study past success and failure

B．through comparison with others, one will know where and when he fails

C．we need internal honesty with ourselves and external honesty from others

D．neither parents nor a commencement speaker can tell whether one is special

6. Which can be the best title of this passage?

A．Special or Not? Teach Kids To Figure It Out

B．Let's Admit That We Are Not That Special

C．Tips On Making Ourselves More Special

D．Tell The Truth: Kids Overestimate their Talents

【推荐3】Are you aware that every single person on this planet who has ever lived, lives now or will live, has a different perception of reality? The way each of us perceives the world is to some degree different than any other person's perception of reality. __①__ What is absolutely real and right for you may be an illusion, or nonexistent, or completely false for another!

It's important to know this. __②__ For example, the news media loves to create drama, and one of their favorite methods is to elicit(引起) fear: fear of other people, fear of the weather, fear of the economy, etc. The news media tells us how to perceive the world—and if a person takes the newscasters at their word, they perceive the world to be very dangerous and hostile. To that person，the mental images and emotions suggested by other people create a version of reality that is completely different from the reality perceived by someone who does not watch the news.

Things are not always what they seem. For most people, seeing is believing, which is why magicians, artists and marketers are so successful. Just like the TV news, they show you only what they want you to see and it is perceived as reality. But how would that reality change if you saw what went on behind the scenes or what was left out?

What's your story?

We all have a story. Over time, your story takes on a life of its own and you become your story. But who's the author and why did him put so much crap in there? All that unnecessary suffering, struggle, heartache, worry and pain... wouldn't it be better to live a story without all that? Who wants to live in a story with that much boredom and unfulfilled longings?

The story got its start when you were born, and was co­authored by you along with the influences in your life. __③__ Anytime you were influenced by someone or something, you unconsciously handed your pen over and said “Here, you write this about me.” So you are not even writing your OWN story! No one does—until they recognize that fact, and make a conscious decision to take control of the pen. You CAN write your story the way you want it to play out.

________________

It is helpful to understand how the brain takes reality and filters it to create your unique perception of reality. It's an automatic unconscious action that is based on：

● Physical experiences (which is why some optical illusions are extremely unsettling)

● Past conditioning (how you are programmed to see the world)

__④__ When you become aware of the fact that you are constructing your own reality, you can take charge and build one that is more pleasing. If you change your mind, your vibration and your intentions, you can change your circumstances! Instead of, “I am a victim of circumstance，” imprint in your mind,   “I am the co­creator of my life”； Instead of, “I am sick and tired of...” imprint in your mind，“I am in control and enthusiastic about what I do”．

Raise your vibration by thinking, talking and acting more positively. As positiveness becomes a mental habit，that change will become your new inner reality, which will soon manifest in your outer reality.

The power of perception is immense. Choose to see more good than bad, more abundance than lack, more love than indifference and more success than struggle.

1. How does the author present his viewpoints in the first three paragraphs?

A．By answering questions.	B．By giving examples.
C．By making comparisons.	D．By drawing conclusions.

2. The sentence “Because if you are not aware, your perception, world view and reality are created by other people.” should be put in ________．

A．①

B．②

C．③

D．④

3. Which of the following subtitles can be filled in the blank?

A．Seeing is not believing

B．Live up to your expectations

C．Change your perception and create a new reality

D．Physical experiences and past conditioning really count

4. What is the tone of the passage?

A．Instructive.	B．Humorous.
C．Critical.	D．Ironic.