【推荐1】I’ve been in poor health this year, and it got me thinking: What if I can’t be with my daughter? Who is going to help her along life’s journey? Life is so long and she is so little. I can’t offer her all the answers because I am still learning every day myself. But I still have two lessons to make her know before I leave her.

The first is that we can’t control other people’s behavior but we can control how we react to it. There are always some disputes (纷争) in our life, where we may feel angry and lose our minds to say something. Can you imagine how different the world would be if every person took a step back, and didn’t automatically react to something? Instead of mirroring some bad behaviors, we should choose to behave in a way that befits our values, or a way that’s more thought through.

It’s not always easy to think wisely about something on the spur of the moment. However, afterwards when we still feel angry at something that someone said or did, we can choose how we want it to affect us. We can choose our behavior.

The second is that we should be grateful each day. Try to find the joy in the small things. Have fun now. Easier said than done, but practice helps. When I’m feeling sad, I try to drag myself out of it by being grateful for small things. I will feel grateful that the traffic lights are all green and give me a clear run. I will feel grateful that it doesn’t rain when I’m pushing the baby carrier into town. Acknowledging the small things can help lift my mood.

We should remember that we still have dreams and things we would like to have and that nothing can stop us from being grateful for what we have now and trying to find happiness now.

I hope my dear daughter can remember the two lessons whether I will be around her or not and lead a happy life.

1. Why does the author decide to write the article?

A．She has two valuable lessons to share with the readers.

B．She is a devoted mother who is expert at guiding people.

C．She hopes to offer advice to her daughter on dealing with life.

D．Her daughter is too young to understand her.

2. What can infer from Paragraphs 2 & 3?

A．It’s easy to lose our temper in our life.

B．Everybody should take a step back.

C．We should think twice before our action.

D．We should react properly to others.

3. What does the underlined phrase “on the spur of the moment” in Paragraph 3 mean?

A．When something suddenly happens.

B．When somebody takes a step back.

C．When something has been done before.

D．When somebody has done it in advance.

4. The author mentions the green lights and rain in Paragraph 4 to ________.

A．show the importance of small things

B．show the things that she likes

C．prove that they are worth thanks

D．prove that being thankful can make her happy

5. Which of the following words can best describe the mother?

A．Desperate, concerned and patient.

B．Hard-working, thoughtful and pessimistic.

C．Pessimistic, calm and grateful.

D．Concerned, wise and grateful.

【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 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 stringently. 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 ineptness 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 12th percentile, they guessed they were in the 62nd . 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 engender 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．don’t know how well they perform due to their stringent self-judgement

C．don’t view themselves as competent because they know their limits

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