【推荐1】After shopping for deals in stores on “Black Friday”, or online on “Cyber Monday”, Americans and people worldwide are preparing for newly popular “Giving Tuesday”. Starting in 2012, now the global event that is celebrated annually on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving is the brainchild of 92^nd Street Y, a cultural center in New York City and the United Nations Foundation.

As the name indicates, “Giving Tuesday” is meant to restart the charitable season and therefore observed by raising funds for local nonprofits and schools, organizing food and clothing drives, and conducting random acts of kindness. In 2015, 700,000 people from 71 countries came together to donate $116.7 million in cash. An additional $1.08 million was spent on gifts.

While the easiest way to participate is by donating to your favorite charity, this day can be celebrated in many other ways too. You can give back by volunteering at your local shelter or food bank, or even by donating blood. If all else fails, a purchase from the growing number of organizations that give a portion of their sales to charity will do the trick.

But perhaps the best way to celebrate the day is by helping those nearest and dearest to you. Assist a family member with a simple chore like folding laundry, cooking dinner, or even reading to a younger sibling. No matter what you do, be sure to share your good deed on social media and inspire others to celebrate “Giving Tuesday” as well!

1. What’s the main purpose of “Giving Tuesday”?

A．To persuade more people to shop online.

B．To make Thanksgiving Day enjoyable.

C．To encourage more people to do charity.

D．To get voluntary work better known.

2. Why does the author advise sharing good deeds on social media?

A．To donate money to local schools.

B．To keep a record of one’s experience.

C．To help people make new friends.

D．To make “Giving Tuesday” more popular.

3. Which section of a website does the text probably come from?

A．Business.

B．Culture.

C．Education.

D．Lifestyle.

【推荐2】The Fallas Festival in Spain

It is sometimes strange how world-famous festivals are started. This is especially true with the Fallas Festival.     1    .

Centuries ago, the city’s carpenters would empty their houses of all the old wood they had saved over the winter and burn it all in the local square. Over time, the carpenters began to use their old wood to carve different images. Sometimes they would create funny images of famous people.     2    , and everything would be burnt.

The Fallas Festival is now one of the most popular festivals in Spain.     3    . Today, 350 communities that make up Valencia work together to design and make two sculptures. These larger-than- life sculptures, often several meters high, are still made of wood, but also include cardboard. On the 15th of March, the sculptures are paraded around the city.

A competition is run where the best sculptures are chosen. These will not be burnt at the end of the festival.     4    , which is open throughout the year. During the festival, there are lots of different community activities. Every activity ends with fireworks being let off during both the day and night.

    5    . On the final night, all the sculptures are collected and put on a bonfire(大火堆) in the main Valencia square. The fire is lit and all the year’s hard work comes to an end in towers of flames. Everyone watching says goodbye to winter and welcome to spring.

A．The Fallas Festival is an exception

B．Everyone would participate in carving

C．It takes place every March in Valencia of Spain

D．They are instead, saved and placed in the local museum

E．It also attracts people from the world to watch and take part

F．Everyone would come to take a look

G．The Fallas Festival always brings communities together

【推荐3】A good joke can be the hardest thing to understand when studying a foreign language. As a recent article in The Guardian newspaper noted, “There’s more to understanding a joke in a foreign language than understanding vocabulary and grammar.”

Being able to understand local jokes is often seen as an unbelievable ice-breaker for a language learner eager to form friendships with native speakers. “I always felt that humor was a ceiling that I could never break through,” Hannah Ashley, a public relations account manager in London, who once studied Spanish in Madrid, told The Guardian, “I could never speak to people on the same level as I would speak to a native English speaker. I almost came across as quite a boring person because all I could talk about was facts.”

In fact, most of the time, jokes are only funny for people who share a cultural background or understand humor in the same way. Chinese-American comedian Joe Wong found this out first-hand. He had achieved huge success in the US, but when he returned to China in 2008 for his first live show in Beijing, he discovered that people didn’t think his. Chinese jokes were as funny as his English ones.

In Australia, meanwhile many foreigners find understanding jokes about sports to be the biggest headache. “The hardest jokes are related to rugby because I know nothing about rugby,” said Melody Cao, who was once a student in Australia. “When I heard jokes I didn’t get, I just laughed along.”

In the other two major English-speaking countries, the sense of humor is also different. British comedian Simon Pegg believes that while British people use irony — basically, saying something they don’t mean to make a joke—every day, people in the US don’t see the point of using it so often. “British jokes tend to be more subtle and dark, while American jokes are more obvious with their meanings, a bit like Americans themselves,” he wrote in The Guardian.

1. What can we guess about Hannah Ashley?

A．She thinks that Spanish people generally do not have much of a sense of humor.

B．She believes that one had better rely on facts when speaking a foreign language.

C．She found that humor was a barrier to her getting along well with Spanish people.

D．She had a better command of the Spanish language than of the English language.

2. Joe Wong is used as an example to _______.

A．suggest that there are cultural differences in humor

B．show that it’s hard to put jokes into another language

C．prove that local people have different taste in humor

D．show that expressing ability affects the sense of humor

3. From the article we can learn that _______.

A．jokes about sports are difficult for foreigners to understand

B．Americans are generally more humorous than British people

C．not all English native speakers can understand English jokes easily

D．British people’s dark jokes often make people uncomfortable

【推荐2】Search engines have changed the way we use the Internet, putting vast sources of information just a few clicks away. But Harvard professor of psychology Line Daniel Wegner’s recent research proves that websites and the Internet are changing much more than technology itself. They are changing the way our memories function. Wegner’s latest study shows that when people have access to search engines, they remember fewer facts and less information because they know they can rely on “search” as a readily available shortcut.

Wegner believes the new findings show that the Internet has become part of a transactive memory source, a method by which our brains divide information. Transactive memory exists in many forms, as when a husband relies on his wife to remember a relative’s birthday. You don’t have to remember everything in the world yourself. You just have to remember who knows it. Now computers and technology are becoming virtual extensions of our memory.

Wegner conducted several experiments to demonstrate the phenomenon, using various forms of memory recall to test reliance on computers. In one experiment, participants demonstrated that they were more likely to think of computer terms like “Yahoo” or “Google” after being asked a set of difficult trivia questions. In another experiment, participants typed some statements into a computer and they were told the statements would be saved in specific folders. Next, they were asked to recall the statements. Finally, they were given cues to the wording and asked to name the folders where the statements were stored. The participants proved better able to recall the folder locations than the statements themselves.

Wegner admits that questions remain about whether dependence on computers will affect memories negatively: “Nobody knows now what the effects of these tools are on logical thinking.” Students who have trouble remembering distinct facts, for example, may struggle to employ those facts in critical thinking. But he believes that the situation overall is beneficial, comparing dependence on computers to dependence on a mechanical hand or other prosthetic device.

And even though we may not be using our memories to recall distinct facts, we are still using them to consider where the facts are located and how to access them. “We still have to remember things,” Wegner explains. “We’re just remembering a different range of things.” He believes his study will lead to further research into understanding computer dependence, and looks forward to tracing the extent of human interdependence with the computer world — pinpointing the “movable dividing line between us and our computers in cyber networks.”

1. The example of remembering a relative’s birthday in the second paragraph is used to ________.

A．showcase that people who are closely related tend to have shared memories

B．demonstrate how people initially developed external sources of memory

C．illustrate the concept of a transactive memory source using a familiar situation

D．emphasize the effectiveness and accuracy of transactive memory sources

2. From the experiment ,when asked to provide facts that are not familiar to them, people tend to ________.

A．think of specific information sources

B．type into computer and remember them

C．recall them from their deep memories

D．link the unfamiliar facts to their experiences

3. Which of the following can be inferred from the last paragraph?

A．Computer dependence affects our thinking capacities in other distinct fields.

B．Reliance on computers does not necessarily reduce human memory.

C．Computers have helped people to understand the memory system better.

D．Researches should be done to reveal the side effect of computer dependence.

4. Which of the following can serve as the best title?

A．Wegner’s Research Has Pinpointed The Dividing Line

B．Heavy Reliance On Computer For Storing More Information

C．Human’s Memory Capability Becoming Inevitably Weaker

D．Technological Networks Reshaping Our Brain Functions