When I lived in Spain, some Spanish friends of mine decided to visit England by car. Before they left, they asked me for advice about how to find accommodation (住所). I suggested that they should stay at “bed and breakfast” houses, because this kind of accommodation gives a foreign visitor a good chance to speak English with the family. My friends listened to my advice, but they came back with some funny stories.
“We didn’t stay at ‘bed and breakfast houses’,” they said, “because we found that most families were away on holiday.”
I thought this was strange. Finally I understood what had happened. My friends spoke little English, and they thought “VACANCIES” meant “holidays”, because the Spanish word for “holidays” is “vacaciones”. So they did not go to the house where the sign outside said “VACANCIES”, which in English means there are free rooms. Then my friends went to the house where the sign said “NO VACANCIES”, because they thought this meant the people who owned the house were not away on holiday. But they found that these houses were all full. As a result, they stayed at hotels!
We laughed about this and about mistakes my friends made in reading other signs. In Spanish, the word” DIVERSION” means fun. In English, it means that workmen are repairing the road, and that you must take a different road. When my friends saw the word “DIVERSION” on a road sign, the thought they were going to have fun. Instead, the road ended in a large hole.
English people have problems too when they learn foreign languages. Once in Paris, when someone offered me some more coffee, I said “Thank you” in French. I meant that I would like some more. However, to my surprise the coffee pot was taken away! Later I found out that ‘Thank you’ in French means “No, thank you.”
1. My Spanish friends wanted advice about ______.| A．driving their car on English roads | B．going to England by car |
| C．finding places to stay in England | D．learning English |
| A．Because it would be much cheaper than staying in hotels |
| B．Because It would be convenient for them to have dinner |
| C．Because they would be able to practice their English. |
| D．Because there would be no problem in finding accommodation there |
| A．Free rooms. | B．No free rooms. |
| C．Not away on holiday. | D．Holidays. |
| A．wanted them to take the coffee pot away |
| B．didn’t really want any more coffee |
| C．wanted to express my politeness |
| D．really wanted some more coffee |
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【推荐1】When I met and married a Japanese man in New York, I thought he would learn a bit more English and we would continue to live our lives there. But in life’s twists and turns, we ended up living in Tokyo! I was the one who needed to learn Japanese and fast ! There is no experience quite as lonely as living in a foreign country without a grasp of the language. Especially to make friends and to break that loneliness, it is the first and foremost goal to attain… always an uphill climb, while totally awkward!
I was a trained English Language teacher, and while I lived abroad I did that work, and when we moved back to America I planned to continue it. The country’s financial difficulties at the time, however, saw deep cuts to the English as a Second Language positions in the schools and to refugee language programs. So I simply took a job in a department store, at its Child Playroom.
But this store was located near a major company that hired some of its workforce from many other countries. Often a preschooler in my playroom could not speak a word of English, and would look so lost and lonely !My heart flew to them! We interacted with each other a lot. We would play English language games and they would teach their language to me.
Years later, when a small girl who had come from South America could speak good English, she said to me, “Teacher, remember when I called you Maestra?” Another child whose language was only Russian originally —we built a robot from blocks and fed it block food and leaned English words that way—would come years afterwards and continue to play that same game! These moments became my life compass—due north is that place where when persons are different, Love Matters !
1. What was the author’s challenge after marriage?| A．She had to give up her job. | B．She lost all her best friends. |
| C．She needed to learn a new language. | D．She was forced to live overseas. |
| A．She set up her own company. | B．She lost interest in teaching. |
| C．Better teachers were needed. | D．Teaching jobs were greatly reduced. |
| A．They learned each other’s languages. | B．They took language tests. |
| C．They cared for each other. | D．They encouraged each other in learning. |
| A．Tiring. | B．Helpful. | C．Simple. | D．Humorous. |
【推荐2】Language is a bridge that connects people. April 20 marks United Nations Chinese Language Day. TEENS has invited three Chinese learners to share stories of their studies!
Mike Fuksman, US: Learning Chinese brings me joy
One thing that I really appreciate about Chinese is that it is usually quite direct and literal. When you break each word down into its individual characters, they make sense together. “Elevator” is dianti — translated character by character, it means “electric stairs”. It’s pretty straightforward.
Learning to read the characters themselves has been a challenge, but it has also been fun and made my life more convenient.
Alex Tani, UK: Learning Chinese can be enjoyable
At the age of 13, I started taking Mandarin (普通话) classes at school. It was a subject that could make the classroom deadly silent because of how difficult it was to learn. But when I arrived in China, I found that learning the language could be enjoyable.
After I moved to Beijing, I lived with locals. I tried to chat with them in Chinese, sharing details about our daily lives. Sometimes we would also go to KTV together. This was an environment where I could immerse (使……沉浸) myself in the Chinese language and culture while still expressing myself.
Jennifer Holstein, US: Learning Chinese changed my life path
Since I started learning Chinese at the age of 5, the language has been part of my life. After six years of learning, I could still barely put a sentence together. To improve my Mandarin, I moved to Beijing in high school.
The school day was long and hard. Each day we attended listening, speaking, reading and writing classes. For a 16-year old American girl, this was a shock to the system. Eventually I overcame these difficulties.
Once I had a good grasp of the language, opportunities started presenting themselves everywhere. At that moment, I knew my effort was worth it.
1. How did Mike introduce his learning?| A．By telling a story. | B．By listing the facts. |
| C．By giving an example. | D．By making a comparison. |
| A．5. | B．13. | C．16. | D．21. |
| A．Difficult. | B．Enjoyable. | C．Wonderful. | D．Shameful. |
| A．A letter. | B．A textbook. | C．A storybook. | D．An interview. |
【推荐3】For decades linguists have argued over how children learn language. Some think that babies are born as “blank boards” who pick up language simply from experience — hearing, seeing and playing with the world. Others argue that experience is not enough and that babies’ brains must be hardwired to make acquiring language easy.
AI models such as GPT-4 have done little to settle the debate. The way these models learn language — by collecting lots of text data from millions of web pages—is greatly different to the experiences of babies.
A team of scientists at New York University examined the question by training an AI model on the experiences of a single baby. Between the ages of six and 25 months, a young child called Sam had a head-wearing camera for an hour a week-around one of his waking hours. The camera recorded everything he saw and heard while he played with toys, enjoyed days at the park and interacted with his pet cats. The recordings and audio were fed into an Al, which was set up to know that images and words that appeared at the same time were related, but was otherwise left to make sense of the mess of colors and speech that Sam experienced.
Despite the limited training data, the AI was able to pick out objects and learn the matching words. The researchers tested the model by asking it to identify objects that Sam had seen before, such as a chair from his home or one of his toy balls. Given a list of four options the model picked the correct word 62 of the time, far above the chance level of 25%. To the researchers’ surprise, the model could also identify chairs and balls that Sam had never seen. The AI learned at least 40 different words, but it was far from matching Sam’s vocabulary and language abilities by the end of the experiment.
The researchers recently argue in the journal Science that, to match words to objects, learning from experience may well be enough. Doubters, however, doubt that the AI would be able to learn abstract nouns or verbs, and question how similar the learning processes really are. The mystery of language acquisition lives on.
1. What does the underlined word “hardwired” in Paragraph 1 probably mean?| A．Organic. | B．Average. | C．Born. | D．Reliable. |
| A．AI models can understand babies’ speech. |
| B．AI models can enrich their vocabulary by themselves. |
| C．AI models can remember more objects but can’t pick them out. |
| D．AI models can learn more words but can’t match babies’ abilities. |
| A．Leaning from experience is far from enough. |
| B．Language abilities of babies are born in nature. |
| C．How the AI is developed proves easy for scientists. |
| D．How the AI picks up the language remains unknown. |
| A．Positive. | B．Doubtful. | C．Unclear. | D．Subjective. |
【推荐1】Fifteen years ago, Crystal Wang’s father took a photo of her in the arms of a Harvard University police officer Charles Marren during a campus visit. It turns out that the photo was prophetic. Wang is now a member of Harvard’s Class of 2023. So, of course, she had to recreate the original image with Officer Charles Marren during move-in.
Sure, Wang, now 18, looks a lot different. But Marren? He hasn’t aged a day.
Wang had just turned 3 years old when her father, Jin, took the original photo while in the area for a business trip. She said she didn’t even know the photo existed until her dad showed her after she was accepted into Harvard’s dual degree program with Berklee College of Music.
Her dad told her she should try and see if Marren still worked there, but not even knowing his name at the time, Wang was not sure. She pushed the idea to the back of her mind.
But destiny had other plans. When she posted the original photo on Instagram announcing her college decision, a reporter working for the Harvard Gazette saw it and recognized Marren. She got in touch and set a date for the two to meet again.
When the two reunited, Wang said the connection was true. Marren even gave her his personal cell phone number and told her to call if she ever needed anything.
“It was just a really, really good time,” she said. “I really connected with him.”
1. Where did Crystal Wang meet Charles Marren when she was 3?| A．On campus. | B．On the street. | C．At the airport. | D．At the police station. |
| A．Marren looks as old as before. |
| B．Marren wears the same uniform. |
| C．Marren seems the same as fifteen years ago. |
| D．Marren hasn’t changed in his body and mind. |
| A．A reporter. | B．Jin. | C．A police officer. | D．Marren’s father. |
| A．Doubtful. | B．Unwilling. | C．Sure. | D．Curious. |
| A．Wang’s father didn’t want to meet Marren again. |
| B．Wang left her phone number on Instagram. |
| C．Marren found Wang’s information and got in touch with her. |
| D．Wang finally met Marren with the help of a reporter. |
【推荐2】Ottens was busy with a reel-to-reel tape recorder(盘式磁带录音机) one night in the early 1960s, trying to listen to a work of classical music. He still remembered the hours he eventually spent on the machine because the loose tape would endlessly unravel(散开) from its reel. At the time, Ottens was head of product development at Philips's electronics factory in Belgium. The next morning, he gathered his team and insisted that they create something foolproof: The tape had to be enclosed, and the player had to fit in his jacket pocket.
Trying to imagine something that did not yet exist, Ottens used a small wooden block as the target for what the future of tape recording and playback should be. The “compact cassette” was made public to the world in 1963, and he advocated for Philips to license(批准) this new design to other producers for free, paving the way for cassettes to become a worldwide standard. Billions of cassettes were sold before his team jointly introduced the compact disc (CD) with Sony in 1982.
Ottens was an extraordinary man. As a child, he managed to build a radio that enabled his family to tune in to a London broadcaster that delivered speeches from exiled(流亡的) political leaders during the German occupation of the Netherlands in the 1940s.
Despite the remaking of the music industry in the digital and streaming age, the public's interest in cassettes has quickly grown in recent years. The return and growth of its popularity is believed to be driven by a mix of nostalgia(怀旧) and an appreciation for tapes' unique status as a format, which is flexible yet is also easily seen and touched.
In the 2017 film Cassette: a Documentary Mixtape, Ottens still seems surprised by the impact of the little device. “We knew it would be a success,” he says, “but not a revolution.”
1. What does the word “foolproof” in paragraph l refer to?| A．User-friendly. | B．Foolish. | C．Typical. | D．All-round. |
| A．They were warm-hearted to help others. |
| B．They could sell more cassettes worldwide. |
| C．They could get international help for CDs. |
| D．They would spare time for other advances. |
| A．The digital music players have completely taken the place of cassettes. |
| B．The invention of cassette once had great effects on the music industry. |
| C．People now enjoy mixing digital music with nostalgic music. |
| D．Ottens knew the 2017 film about cassette would be successful. |
| A．He is extraordinary and sceptical. |
| B．He is self-confident and withdrawn. |
| C．He is proud and has a strong hands-on ability. |
| D．He is creative and gifted for electronics. |
【推荐3】Not so long ago, most people didn’t know who Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce was going to become. She was just an average high athlete. There was every indication that she was just another Jamaican teenager without much of a future. However, one person wanted to change this. Stephen Francis observed then eighteen-year-old Shelly-Ann at a track meet and was convinced that he had seen the beginnings of true greatness. Her times were not exactly impressive, but even so, he sensed there was something trying to get out, something the other coaches had overlooked when they had assessed her and found her lacking. He decided to offer Shelly-Ann a place in his very strict training sessions. Their cooperation quickly produced results, and a few years later at Jamaica’s Olympic trials in early 2008, Shelly-Ann, who at that time only ranked number 70 in the world, beat Jamaica’s unchallenged queen of the sprint.
“Where did she come from?” asked an astonished sprinting world, before concluding that she must be one of those one-hit wonders that spring up from time to time, only to disappear again without signs. But Shelly-Ann was to prove that she was anything but a one-hit wonder. At the Beijing Olympics she swept away any doubts about her ability to perform consistently by becoming the first Jamaican woman ever to win the 100 metres Olympic gold. She did it again one year on at the World Championships in Berlin, becoming world champion with a time of 10.73 — the fourth fastest time ever.
Shelly-Ann is a little woman with a big smile. She has a mental toughness that did not come about by chance. Her journey to becoming the fastest woman on earth has been anything but smooth and effortless. She grew up in one of Jamaica’s toughest inner-city communities known as Waterhouse, where she lived in a one-room apartment, sleeping four in a bed with her mother and two brothers. Waterhouse, one of the poorest communities in Jamaica, is a really violent and overpopulated place. Several of Shelly-Ann’s friends and family were caught up in the killings; one of her cousins was shot dead only a few streets away from where she lived. Sometimes her family didn’t have enough to eat. She ran at the school championships barefooted because she couldn’t afford shoes. Her mother Maxime, one of a family of fourteen, had been an athlete herself as a young girl but, like so many other girls in Waterhouse, had to stop after she had her first baby. Maxime’s early entry into the adult world with its responsibilities gave her the determination to ensure that her kids would not end up in Waterhouse’s roundabout of poverty. One of the first things Maxime used to do with Shelly-Ann was taking her to the track, and she was ready to sacrifice everything.
It didn’t take long for Shelly-Ann to realize that sports could be her way out of Waterhouse. On a summer evening in Beijing in 2008, all those long, hard hours of work and commitment finally bore fruit. The barefoot kid who just a few years previously had been living in poverty, surrounded by criminals and violence, had written a new chapter in the history of sports.
But Shelly-Ann’s victory was far greater than that. The night she won Olympic gold in Beijing, the routine murders in Waterhouse and the drug wars in the neighbouring streets stopped. The dark cloud above one of the world’s toughest criminal neighbourhoods simply disappeared for a few days. “I have so much fire burning for my country,” Shelly said. She plans to start a foundation for homeless children and wants to build a community centre in Waterhouse. She hopes to inspire the Jamaicans to lay down their weapons. She intends to fight to make it a woman’s as well as a man’s world.
As Muhammad Ali puts it, “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them. A desire, a dream, a vision.” One of the things Shelly-Ann can be proud of is her understanding of this truth.
1. Why did Stephen Francis decide to coach Shelly-Ann?| A．He had a strong desire to free her family from trouble. |
| B．He sensed a great potential in her despite her weaknesses. |
| C．She had big problems maintaining her performance. |
| D．She suffered a lot of defeats at the previous track meets. |
| A．She would become a promising star. | B．She badly needed to set higher goals. |
| C．Her sprinting career would not last long. | D．Her talent for sprinting was known to all. |
| A．Her success and lessons in her career. | B．Her interest in Shelly-Ann’s quick profit. |
| C．Her wish to get Shelly-Ann out of poverty. | D．Her early entrance into the sprinting world. |
| A．She was highly rewarded for her efforts. | B．She was eager to do more for her country. |
| C．She became an athletic star in her country. | D．She was the envy of the whole community. |
| A．players should be highly inspired by coaches | B．great athletes need to concentrate on patience |
| C．hard work is necessary in one’s achievements | D．motivation allows great athletes to be on the top |
| A．The Making of a Great Athlete | B．The Dream for Championship |
| C．The Key to High Performance | D．The Power of Full Responsibility |
