【推荐1】Exercise makes you happier than wealth, a new study says. Regular physical activity is a huge boost to mental well-being, on par with a pay rise.

Instead of logging extra hours at work in hopes of getting a pay rise, maybe you should hit the gym instead, as it could make you just as happy as that extra money. An interesting new study, published in the Lancet, found that people who are physically active have a greater sense of well-being than those who are inactive — and that active individuals feel as good as inactive people who earn $25,000 more per year.

Researchers from Oxford and Yale Universities used data gathered from more than 1.2 million Americans. They were asked, “How many times have you felt mentally unwell in the past 30 days, for example, due to stress, depression, or emotional problems?”

Participants were also asked about their exercise habits and were able to choose from 75 diverse physical activities, including mowing the lawn, doing housework and childcare, running, weightlifting, and cycling. The researchers found that people who exercise regularly feel bad for an average of 35 days per year, whereas inactive people feel bad for an additional 18 days. From the study:

“Individuals who exercised had 43 percent fewer days of poor mental health in the past month than individuals who did not exercise but were otherwise matched for several physical and socio-demographic (社会人口的) characteristics. All exercise types were associated with a lower mental health burden.”

Social physical activities (i.e. team sports) had an even more positive effect, although cycling ranked highly. (I wonder if that’s because it takes place outdoors, which is always a mood booster.)

It is possible to get too much exercise. From Business Insider’s write-up on the study, “The mental health of those participants who exercised for longer than three hours a day suffered more than that of those who weren’t particularly physically active.” The ideal amount seems to be three to five training sessions per week, lasting 30 to 60 minutes each.

But the takeaway should be that any amount helps, so don’t stress about hitting that perfect balance: “All exercise types were associated with a lower mental health burden than not exercising.”

1. Who probably has the greatest sense of well-being?

A．The individual who works out more than three hours a day.

B．The inactive individual who gets better paid than before.

C．The man who is physically active.

D．The man who works out regularly and gets a pay rise.

2. Which of the following statements is true based on the study?

A．Inactive people felt bad for 53 days per season.

B．Active Individuals were 43 percent more likely to suffer from poor mental health.

C．It doesn’t matter what forms of exercise you take.

D．You’d better take exercises three to six days a week, each lasting 30 to 60 minutes.

3. Why does cycling rank highly as far as the author is concerned?

A．Because it has more positive effect than other physical activities like team sports.

B．Because you can build up your body more efficiently.

C．Because you can work out in the open air and lift your spirits.

D．Because it is an exercise which doesn’t exhaust your body too much.

4. What’s the main idea of Paragraph 5-7?

A．The study’s procedure.	B．The study’s application.
C．The study’s significance.	D．The study’s findings.

【推荐2】I recall when I was a young girl back in Canada, I was sitting and watching a baseball game on TV with my father and we started to debate the importance of sports. Different from my father, I argued with all the overconfidence of a teenager that sports is more than just a hobby to keep us physically healthy and went as far as claiming that" There would be more wars if we didn't have sports!"

As an adult, my teenage tendencies of exaggeration(夸张) may have faded but I still firmly believe that sports is more than just a hobby for both participants and audience. The challenging times we are all living through right now with coronavirus is proof to this. The effect of cancelling all sports from professional leagues right down to amateur budding athletic programs, can be felt by millions of people worldwide. To many the social emotional impact is stronger than the physical. The loss of the sense of community, of belonging, and of an extended family is real for many girls, boys, men and women everywhere. Others are feeling physical challenges as well as they are struggling to stay active during these times.

But the human race is incredible and adaptable in tough situations, and sports once again is playing a role. Sports teams are staying in touch online and are a source of much needed support, love and laughter in these times. So many professional athletes are playing vital roles through this crisis by sharing their messages of support and at times, making valuable monetary donations to the cause. Even in areas of isolation(隔离), people are coming out on their balconies and leading their neighbours through a workout programme to help them stay active. Others are turning to online workout programmes to follow. Once again, sports is finding its way.

So, in challenging times such as now, people are still empowered to continue their sports journey and stay strong and healthy.

1. What may the author's father agree about sports?

A．It is a personal hobby.	B．It boosts confidence.
C．It affects social relations.	D．It helps avoid wars.

2. How does life without sports affect people?

A．They lack family connection.	B．They have lost their hobbies.
C．They feel bored more than lonely.	D．They suffer both in body and mind.

3. How do isolated people respond to the tough situations?

A．Struggle to be athletes.	B．Try to stay physically active.
C．Make donations to good causes.	D．Design new sports programmes.

4. What is the best title?

A．Sports reduces risks in our lives	B．Sports continues to offer strength
C．Sports makes the impossible possible	D．Sports has new functions in the pandemic

【推荐1】Maurice Druon of the French Academy once proposed that French should be made the principal legal language of the European Union (EU). He argued that its logic and precision made it the excellent judicial language. Others laughed. How very French of him!

The French are hardly alone in believing that their language is especially poetic,emotional. logical,precise,accessible or rich.But it turns out that the things people prize in their own languages can often be the same things foreign learners hate.Take the formal-informal distinction in words for "you". German and French have du and tu for friends and family,and sie and vous for unknown adults and formal speech. Natives of those languages miss that distinction when speaking English. Those whose languages (like English) don't make it in the first place often resent having this choice forced on them in French or German.

Linguists(语言学家）believe that languages differ not in what they can express,but in what they must. Given the time and willingness to explain or invent basic terms,any language could be used to talk about anything. But they vary wildly in what they insist speakers say,with the tu-yous distinction being just the tip of the iceberg Washo,a native language of Nevada,has four past and three future tenses,depending on how distant an event is in time.Tariana,from Brazil,has “evidentiality”：speakers choose one of five verb-endings to show how they know what they state to be true.     Jarawara, also from Brazil, distinguishes “we (including you)"and“we (without you)".

Languages, R M.W. Dixon of James Cook University in Australia says, are like a Western-style house.There are a few rooms you must have (kitchen,bedroom,living room, bathroom), and some optional (office, guest room). On a fixed budget, we can't have all the extras. As to which language is a “best” one, he thinks we should make our own list of desirable features,and then closely examine a few languages to decide whether one has more of them than another.But the list of advantages is itself a matter of judgment.

1. What was others' reaction to Maurice Druon's proposal?

A．They argued fiercely with him.

B．They dismissed it with a laugh.

C．They tried to study French thoroughly.

D．They choose to consult a language expert.

2. The underlined word “resent” in Paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to“

A．consider

B．avoid

C．forget

D．hate

3. Which language speakers use different verb-endings to express their varied certainty?

A．German.

B．Washo.

C．Tariana

D．Jarawara.

4. What is the best title for the passage?

A．Which language is the best?You decide

B．Are European languages superior?You bet

C．Are more complicated languages more precise?

D．Which language should be the judicial language of the EU?

【推荐2】You wake up in the morning. The day is beautiful and the plans for the day are what you have been looking forward to for a long time. Then the telephone rings, you say hello, and the drama starts. The person at the other end has a depressing(令人沮丧的）tone in his voice as he starts to tell you how terrible his morning is and that there is nothing to look forward to . Are you still in a wonderful mood? Impossible!

Communicating with negatice(消极的）people can w out your happiness . It may not change what you think , but communicating long enough with them will make you fee depressed for a moment or a long time.

Life brings ups and downs, but some people are stuck in the wrong idea that life has no happiness to offer . They only feel glad when they make others feel bad . No wonder they can hardly win others' pity or respect.

When you communicate with positive people, your spirit stays happy and therefore more positive things are attracted. When the dagger(匕首）of a negative person is put in you,you have the heavy feeling that all in all, brings you down.

Sometimes we have no choice but to communicate w negative people . He / She could be a co-worker , or a relative . In this case, speak as little as possible. Sometimes it feels good to let out your anger back to the negative person, but that will lower you to the same negative level and they won't feel ashamed of themselves about that.

Negativity often affects happiness without even being realized. The negative words of another at the start of the day can cling to(附着）you throughout the rest of your day,which makes you feel bad and steals your happiness. Life is too short to feel negative.Stay positive and avoid negativity as much as possible.

1. What's the purpose of the first paragraph?

A．To make a comparison .

B．To offer an suggestion.

C．To introduce a topic.

D．To describe a daily scene.

2. How can negative people affect on us?

A．By influencing our emotion .

B．By telling us the nature of life

C．By changing our ways of thinking.

D．By comparing their attitudes to life with ours.

3. What do some negative people base their happiness on?

A．Other people's pity for them

B．Making other people unhappy.

C．Building up a positive attitude

D．Other’s people’s respect for them

【推荐3】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 uproar 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 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 coauthor Justin Kruger, suffer from a “dual burden”: they’re not good at what they do, and their very incapability 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. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was “metacognitive skill”: 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 here, the authors note: “The skills that lead to 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. 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. 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

2. The author thinks the real problem is that ______.

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

B．young people don't know how to assess their abilities realistically

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 usually give themselves high scores in self-evaluations.

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

C．They are intelligently inadequate in tests and exams.

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

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

A．know how to cultivate clear logic and proper grammar

B．tend to underestimate their performance because they know their limits

C．tend to regard themselves as competent due to their strict self-judgement

D．tend to be very competent in judging their performance in their high-scoring fields.

【推荐1】In the college-admissions wars, we parents are the true fighters. We’re pushing our kids to get good grades, take SAT preparatory courses and build resumes so they can get into the college of our first choice. I’ve twice been to the wars, and as I survey the battlefield, something different is happening. We see our kids’ college background as a prize demonstrating how well we’ve raised them. But we can’t acknowledge that our obsession (痴迷) is more about us than them. So we’ve created various justifications (辩解) that turn out to be half-truths, prejudices or myths. It actually doesn’t matter much whether Aaron and Nicole go to Stanford.

We have a full-developed panic; we worry that there won’t be enough prizes to go around. Fearful parents urge their children to apply to more schools than ever. What causes the hysteria (歇斯底里) is the belief that scarce elite (精英) degrees must be highly valuable. Their graduates must enjoy more success because they get a better education and develop better contacts. All seems right but mostly wrong. We haven’t found any convincing evidence that selectivity or prestige matters. Selective schools don’t systematically employ better instructional approaches than less selective schools. On two measures—professors’ feedback and the number of essay exams selective schools do slightly worse.

By some studies, selective schools do enhance (提高) their graduates’ lifetime earnings. The gain is reckoned at 2-4% for every 100-point increase in a school’s average SAT scores. But even this advantage is probably a statistical fluke (偶然). A well-known study examined students who got into highly selective schools and then went elsewhere. They earned just as much as graduates from higher-status schools.

Kids count more than their colleges. Getting into Yale may signify intelligence, talent and ambition. But it’s not the only indicator and, surprisingly, its significance is declining. The reason: so many similar people go elsewhere. Getting into college is not life’s only competition. In the next competition—the job market and graduate school—the results may change. Princeton economist Alan Krueger studied admissions to one top Ph.D. program. High scores on the GRE helped explain who got in; degrees of famous universities didn’t.

So, parents, take it easy(lighten up). The stakes (利害关系) have been vastly exaggerated. Up to a point, we can rationalize our pushiness. America is a competitive society; our kids need to adjust to that. But too much pushiness can be destructive. The very ambition we impose on our children may get some into Harvard but may also set them up for disappointment. One study found that, other things being equal, graduates of highly selective schools experienced more job dissatisfaction. They may have been so conditioned to being on top that anything less disappoints.

1. Why does the author say that parents are the true fighters in the college-admissions wars?

A．They have the final say in which university their children are to attend.

B．They know best which universities are most suitable for their children.

C．They have to carry out intensive surveys of colleges before children make an application.

D．They care more about which college their children go to than the children themselves.

2. Why do parents urge their children to apply to more schools than ever?

A．They want to increase their children’s chances of entering a prestigious college.

B．They hope their children can enter a university that offers attractive scholarships.

C．Their children will have a wider choice of which college to go to.

D．Elite universities now enroll fewer student than they used to.

3. What does the author mean by “kids count more than their colleges” Line1, para.4?

A．Continuing education is more important to a person’s success.

B．A person’s happiness should be valued more than their education.

C．Kids’ actual abilities are more important than their college background.

D．What kids learn at college cannot keep up with job market requirements.

4. What does Krueger’s study tell us?

A．Getting into Ph.D. programs may be more competitive than getting into college.

B．Degrees of prestigious universities do not guarantee entry to graduate programs.

C．Graduates from prestigious universities do not care much about their GRE scores.

D．Connections built in prestigious universities may be kept long after graduation.

5. One possible result of pushing children into elite universities is that______

A．they earn less than their peers from other institutions

B．they turn out to be less competitive in the job market

C．they experience more job dissatisfaction after graduation

D．they overemphasize their qualifications in job application

【推荐2】When Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was asked to give an address at a graduation ceremony at Harvard, he asked for advice from Bill Gates. Zuckerberg said. “They know we didn’t actually graduate, right?” Gates replied, “Oh, that is the best part! They actually give you a degree!”

This exchange between the two famous Harvard dropouts (中途退学者) might lead you to think that college doesn’t matter. While it’s true there are successful college dropouts, they are not the norm (准则).

Recently, we did research on how many of the wealthiest and most influential people graduated from college. We studied 11, 745 U.S. successful people, including CEOS, politicians, business leaders and the most globally powerful men and women.

We also examined how many people graduated from an “elite school (精英学校)” We found about 94% of these U.S. successful people attended college, and that about 50% attended an elite school. The research suggests there is no difference in adult earnings between students who attended highly selective schools and students with similar SAT scores who attended less selective schools. At least for long-term earnings, where you go may not be the key, as long as you attend and graduate. Yet, our research findings show that for students with talent and determination (决心) to make it to the top of U.S. society, an elite college might just help you got there.

The educational path may not be suitable for every person. However, if you’re a student thinking about not going to college or considering dropping out, remember that even Gates and Zuckerberg got into college. Even if you’re not planning to achieve great success, doing the work to get into and graduate from college today may open important doors.

1. What do we know about Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates?

A．They were invited to the same graduation ceremony.

B．They thought highly of college degrees.

C．They often had an exchange of views.

D．They didn’t finish college.

2. What’s the research done by the author mainly about?

A．What U.S. successful people think of college education.

B．What kind of colleges U.S. successful people attended.

C．Whether college education influences one’s success.

D．Whether successful people have a great influence.

3. How does attending an elite school help students?

A．It may help them gain a high social position.

B．It can help them have determination.

C．It enables them to graduate easily.

D．it means nigh earnings.

4. What does the author advise students to do in the last paragraph?

A．Follow Gates’ and Zuckerberg’s examples.

B．Choose and complete college studies.

C．Try to make great achievements.

D．Attend the best college.

【推荐3】Physical education, or PE, isn’t required for all high school students. In some schools, it isn’t offered for some different reasons. But should high school students have physical education? The answer is certainly “yes”.

Today many people don’t do sports. But as is known to all, doing sports is essential for an adult. Teaching teens the significance of a healthy lifestyle and making fitness plans now can help teens make exercise their priority as an adult.

High school isn’t that easy. Many students are under a lot of stress. Stress can be harmful to a student’s studies and life. Doing sports can help them deal with stress better, helping them live a happier life at school.

The American Heart Association says that 10 million kids and teens suffer from obesity. Teens should get 60 minutes of physical activity per day to control their weight and to help their bones get stronger. The increase in activities that don’t get teens to move around, such as computer games, means many teens don’t get their required exercise. PE classes act as a public health measureto encourage physical activities and help teens have healthy weights.

Not doing sports increases teens’ hazard of developing many diseases. An active lifestyle offers a good way of protection from these health problems. As much as 75 percent of health-care spending goes toward treating medical conditions that can be prevented by lifestyle changes, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.

According to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition(PCFSN), students who performed five hours of physical activities each week improved their academic performance. Students from programs with no physical activity, who used the extra time for classroom study, did not perform better on tests than those who gave up some study time in support of physical education.

1. According to Paragraph 2, what does physical education in high school mean?

A．Making teens attach importance to exercise later	B．Removing the stress faced by teens at school
C．Getting teens to encourage adults to exercise	D．Helping teens learn to make good plans

2. What does the underlined word “hazard” in Paragraph 5 mean?

A．Wellness.

B．Risk.

C．Limit.

D．Influence.

3. According to the PCFSN, doing sport________.

A．means making students choose between sports and studies

B．helps students make good use of all their time

C．means students adjust to their new surroundings better

D．helps students do better in their studies

4. What is the text mainly about?

A．Why high school students should receive physical education.

B．Why some schools consider physical education important.

C．How schools can help students love doing sports.

D．How high school students can lead a better life.