【推荐1】Our Favorite Productivity Apps for iOS and Android

Google Docs Productivity Apps

Free, available for iOS: Docs, Slides, Sheets

Free, available for Android: Docs, Slides, Sheets

Google Docs is an excellent document editor that’s completely free - all you need to use it is a Google account. Available for both iOS and Android, the app features a powerful set of editing tools, as well as support for all major text file formats. Your work will be saved automatically in the cloud, so you can access it anywhere.

You can use Google Docs in a web browser as well. In case you need to edit presentations or spreadsheets, Google also offers Sheets and Slides for iOS and Android.

Apple iWork Productivity Apps

Free, available for iOS: Pages, Keynote, Numbers

Apple’s iWork productivity suite consists of a Pages app for editing text, Numbers for working with spreadsheets, and Keynote for creating presentations. All three apps are free not only for iOS, but also for macOS. All three apps have a sleek user interface and a great number of tools to help you with your tasks.

The apps are also compatible(兼容) with the Apple Pencil for the iPad and iPad Pro. You can sync your work with your iCloud storage and seamlessly access it from all of your Apple devices.

Microsoft Office Productivity Apps

Free, available for iOS: Word, Excel, PowerPoint

Free, available for Android: Word, Excel, PowerPoint

Microsoft Office has been considered to be productive for decades, and you can naturally use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as mobile apps for iOS and Android. All three options feature a familiar user interface and a great selection of tools to work with. You can save your work locally on your device or save them in the cloud via Microsoft OneDrive.

If you're using an iPhone, a 9.7-inch iPad, and Android phone, or an Android tablet with a screen smaller than 10.1 inches in diagonal, you can access and use the core Office features for free.

1. These apps are mainly for ________.

A．using an iPhone	B．watching videos
C．editing text	D．playing games

2. Which statement is not true according to the passage?

A．These apps are all free to use.

B．These apps can all be available for iOS and Android

C．These apps can be used in smart phones and iPads.

D．These apps can save your work in the cloud.

3. If you need to prepare a speech on product description, which one will you choose to finish your task productivity on an iPad Pro?

A．Apple iWork Productivity Apps	B．Microsoft Office Productivity Apps
C．Google Docs Productivity Apps	D．Anyone is ok.

【推荐3】It takes a lot of training and experience to become a public speaker. However, there are slight differences when it comes to presenting to a virtual audience.

Maintaining eye contact is one of the most important skills you need to master as a public speaker.     1     Instead, you are required to look directly into the camera.     2    

There is no room for small talks when making an online presentation.     3     Ensure that your speech or presentation has a flow that the audience can follow without getting lost. You should also note that audience members are not prohibited from leaving and there’s no social pressure to keep them there. So be sure not to bore them with too many irrelevant stories.

At times, especially during bigger events, there may be many tools and software features that you need to enable to be at your best.     4     During such situations, you can talk through the disturbance as you work to get the problem fixed. The audience might be more willing to wait for you as you work on your technical problem, unlike when you decide to just go quiet without letting them know why.

    5     This is all thanks to the convenience virtual events have brought to us. Nevertheless, you will still need to stay ahead of the trends to boost your online presentation skills.

A．If it is a virtual event, you need to be precise and to the point.

B．Now more and more people continue following the new trend.

C．This way, your eyes will appear to be looking directly at your viewers.

D．However, we all know how technology is, and the fact is that it might fail us.

E．Furthermore, adapting your delivery to audience reaction was also demanded.

F．So it will help to get familiar with the tools and software before the presentation.

G．When presenting online, however, you are not always able to see your audience.

【推荐2】“The dangerous thing about lying is people don't understand how the act changes us,” says Dan Ariely, behavioral psychologist and Duke university. Psychologists have documented children lying as early as the age of two. Some experts even consider lying a developmental milestone, like crawling and walking, because it requires sophisticated planning, attention and ability to see a situation from someone else's perspective to manipulate them. But, for most people, lying gets limited as we develop a sense of morality and the ability to self-regulate.

Harvard cognitive neuroscientist Joshua Greene says, for most of us, lying takes work. In studies, he gave subjects a chance to deceive for monetary gain while examining their brains in a functional MRI machine, which maps blood flow to active parts of the brain. Some people told the truth instantly and instinctively. But others opted to lie, and they showed increased activity in their frontal perietal (颅腔壁的) control network, which is involved in difficult or complex thinking. This suggests that they were deciding between truth and dishonesty — and ultimately opting for the latter. For a follow-up analysis, he found that people whose neural rewards centers were more active when they won money were also more likely to be among the group of liars — suggesting that suggesting that lying may have to do with the inability to resist temptation.

External conditions also matter in terms of when and how often we lie. We are more likely to lie, research shows, when we are able to rationalize it, when we are stressed and fatigued to see others being dishonest. And we are less likely to lie when we have moral reminders or when we think others are watching. “We as a society need to understand that, when we don't punish lying, we increase the probability it will happen again,” Ariely says.

In a 2016 study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience Ariely and colleagues showed how dishonesty alters people's brains, making it easier to tell lies in the future. When people uttered a falsehood, the scientists noticed a burst of activity in their amygdala. The amygdala is a crucial part of the brain that produces fear, anxiety and emotional response — including that sinking, guilty feeling you get when you lie. But when scientists had their subjects play a game in which they won many by deceiving their partner, they noticed the negative signals from the amygdala began to decrease. Not only that, but when people faced no consequences for dishonesty, their falsehoods tended to get even more sensational. This means that if you give people multiple opportunities to lie for their own benefit, they start with little lie which get bigger over time.

1. Why do some experts consider lying a milestone in a child’s development?

A．It shows they have the ability to view complex situations from different angles.

B．It indicates they have an ability more remarkable than crawling and walking.

C．It represents their ability to actively interact with people around them.

D．It involves the coordination of both their mental and physical abilities.

2. Why does the Harvard neuroscientist say that lying takes work?

A．It is hard to choose from several options.	B．It is difficult to sound natural or plausible.
C．It requires speedy blood flow into one’s brain.	D．It involves lots of complex mental activity.

3. Under what circumstances do people tend to lie?

A．When they become too emotional.	B．When they face too much peer pressure.
C．When the temptation is too strong.	D．When the consequences are not to happen soon.

4. What does they author say will happen when a liar does not get punished?

A．They may feel justified.	B．They will tell big lies.
C．They will become satisfied with themselves.	D．They will confuse lies and truths.

【推荐1】Loss aversion, the idea that losses are more psychologically influential than gains, is widely considered the most important idea of behavioral decision-making and its sister field of behavioral economics. To illustrate the significance attached to loss aversion, Kahneman, winner of Nobel Prize in economics, wrote in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, that “the concept of loss aversion is certainly the greatest contribution of psychology to behavioral economics. ”

Why has such profound importance been attributed to loss aversion? Largely because it is thought to reflect a fundamental truth about human beings—that we are more motivated by our fears than by our aspirations. This conclusion has implications for almost every aspect of how we live our lives.

However, as documented in a recent critical review of loss aversion by Rucker of Northwestern University, there is no general cognitive prejudice that leads people to avoid losses more strongly than to pursue gains. Contrary to claims based on loss aversion, price increases do not affect consumer behavior more than price decreases.

If losing $10,000 means giving up the roof over your head whereas gaining $10,000 means going on an extra vacation, it is perfectly reasonable to be more concerned with the loss than the gain.

Why has belief in loss aversion been held so strong for so long? An idealized view of science is that theories are accepted or rejected based solely on evidence from experiments. In fact, science is not simply an impersonal search for truth, but also a social process, in which supporters of a theory must convince other scientists, through logic and argumentation, of how evidence should be interpreted.

In sum, our critical review of loss aversion highlights that, even in contemporary times, wrong ideas can continue to exist for a long time despite contrary evidence, and therefore, that there is a need to critically assess accepted beliefs. While loss aversion has frequently been used to explain why people are prejudiced toward the current situation, perhaps fittingly, the case of loss aversion illustrates the importance of challenging the present state of science.

1. Why did Daniel Kahneman write Thinking Fast and Slow?

A．To record the process of our thinking.	B．To test the contribution of loss aversion.
C．To show loss aversion is viewed important.	D．To figure out how loss aversion comes about.

2. Which situation worried people most according to Kahneman?

A．Rising price.

B．An extra holiday.

C．Decreasing price.

D．Pursuing gains.

3. What does the author think of science?

A．It is solely based on experiments.	B．It bears little relation to evidence.
C．It interprets logic and argumentation.	D．Its research process is objective and social.

4. What can be a suitable title for this passage?

A．Why Is An Important Idea False?	B．How Can Loss Aversion Be Defined?
C．Is An Accepted Idea Really Objective?	D．Can We Take Loss Aversion for Granted?

【推荐2】Austria took a striking step to combat the coronavirus pandemic when its government announced that people would not be allowed to enter places such as supermarkets without wearing a face mask.

Some might roll their eyes at this, including many scientists. There is disagreement over whether wearing low-quality masks prevents people from inhaling (吸入) the virus, even if it does reduce the chances of them spreading it by sneezing or coughing.

Austria will only be distributing regular masks free to shoppers at shop entrances, not the N95 respirators (which do reduce inhalation risks). Some US and European doctors believe mask-wearing is so pointless for those who do not usually face the direct risks medical staff are exposed to that they have urged consumers to donate any masks they have bought to hospitals instead.

Yet I think it would be a mistake to sneer at Austria’s move-for two reasons. First, wearing masks has one practical personal benefit: it reminds you to avoid touching your face. This matters.

The second reason is that mask-wearing is not just about individual psychology or behavior; it has social implications as well. As Christos Lynteris, a medical anthropologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, put it in an opinion column for The New York Times: “Members of a community wear masks not only to fight off disease in a pandemic. They wear masks also to show that they want to stick, and cope, together under the threat of pandemic.”

Some Europeans and Americans will scoff. Anglo-Saxon culture tends to prize individualism, not the type of collectivism that has often been valued in Asia. And in a city such as New York, mask-wearing has been such a minority practice that it has almost been associated with a sense of shame －in recent times especially, since some view it as a sign of sickness.

The point about mass mask-wearing is that this shame tends to disappear if everyone puts one on. In fact, not wearing a mask is now almost a source of shame in places such as Japan. And while it might be hard to imagine this becoming the case in the US, nothing should be ruled out, given how quickly the shock of COVID-19 is reshaping our ideas of risk, and leading to a rising appreciation in the west for collectivist values.

As Lynteris notes, epidemics should be understood not just as “biological events but also as social processes”, since this “is key to their successful containment (抑制)”. If rituals or symbols-like masks-help us to realize this, then so much the better.

To put it another way, beating COVID- 19 will not just require medical science, but a dose of social science too.

1. Some Western scientists and doctors roll their eyes at Austria’s move because they think_______.

A．medical staff are short of face masks in hospitals

B．low-quality face masks can’t stop people sneezing

C．wearing a face mask won’t reduce the risk of infection

D．donation should be more stressed and encouraged

2. The author thinks it a mistake to sneer at wearing masks in public because_______.

A．it has both personal and social benefits

B．it helps people practice to not touch their face

C．it proves people’s psychological and behavioral well-being

D．it implies people can finally solve the problem

3. The underlined word “scoff” in para. 6 implies that some Europeans and Americans_______.

A．doubt the social effectiveness of wearing face masks

B．view minority practices in public as a sign of sickness

C．value individualism so much that they hate collectivism

D．don’t take the social implications of face masks seriously

4. The author will probably agree that_______.

A．the social sciences are unnecessary for beating COVID- 19

B．holding collectivist values can help contain COVID- 19

C．COVID- 19 can be eliminated through social processes

D．mass mask-wearing is impossible in the United States

【推荐3】Do kids really need to go to school to learn? For most people it is obvious that school is the right place where real learning takes place, and for them real learning takes place.

The social theorist Ivan Illich believes the idea that learning is the result of teaching is ridiculous. Most learning happens without the person being taught consciously. We learn to speak, to think, to walk and to do many things without teachers. People who learn a second language well are much more likely to develop better because of interests outside the classroom-interests in movies, music, magazines, foreign friends, games or computers which give these people the motivation that keeps them learning

Ivan Illich also says, “an academic education favors only the minority of students who want to go to university. As for the majority, their needs and interests and talents are not provided by an educational system.”

On the other hand, most people agree that school teaches everyone a valuable lesson. It teaches kids that life must be organized. It helps students to develop good habits, to behave in public, to follow certain rules, which is important for a comfortable life for everyone. School also helps them to make friends, work in a team and learn to help others to build up social relations, so that they will acquire the habits and attitudes needed by the future public life.

In addition, there are exams during the pupils’ study, and the real importance of exams is not only to check your subject but also to encourage you to make progress step by step. If you get a good grade, it means you can go to a better school. So every successful exam opens more doors in life for the students. If you fail in exams, school offers the pupils an instruction in their failure to make them stronger, which is beneficial to their future life.

Undoubtedly schools are necessity in our modern and highly organized society. It is a nice idea that education takes place in groups, which is provided by professional teachers. But educational system needs to be up-to-date so that the experience of school is much more positive for all students.

1. According to Ivan Illich,       .

A．learning is the result of conscious teaching

B．academic education benefits the majority of students

C．real learning happens unconsciously without being taught.

D．schools help to develop students’ interests

2. What can we infer from paragraph 4&5?

A．Schools offer kids little training for social life

B．Schools ignore an instruction in kids’ failure

C．Exams only function as a checking tool of subjects.

D．Exams help students get improved gradually.

3. The last paragraph intends to tell us       .

A．Schools are highly organized societies

B．Schooling plays an important role and will develop better

C．Schooling are short of professional teachers

D．Current educational system is already perfect for all students

4. What is the author’s attitude towards schooling?

A．Supportive.	B．Neutral(中立的).
C．Critical.	D．Disapproving. (不赞成的)