【推荐1】As COVID-19 spreads throughout China and the rest of the world, an important question has yet to be answered: where did the virus come from? The latest study indicated that pangolins(穿山甲)may be an intermediate host of the virus, according to Xinhua. However, bats are suspected to be the original cause.

“We don’t know the source yet, but there’s pretty strong evidence that this is a bat origin coronavirus,” said Peter Dazsak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, an environmental nonprofit(非盈利机构), according to The New York Times. “When you look at the genetic sequence(基因序列)of the virus, and you match it up with every known coronavirus, the closest relatives are from bats,” Dazsak also told CNN.

So why are bats the source of so many deadly kinds of viruses but they don’t suffer from any symptoms? As the only flying mammal(哺乳动物)with a long lifespan, bats’ body temperature is high, similar to a fever. It’s the fact that may contribute to bats’ unique immune system in protecting them from the ill effects of viruses.

But are bats truly to blame for the virus-or should we be blaming ourselves? Whether we destroy the forests where bats live or they end up on our plate, it’s the fault of humans for decreasing the distance between us and virus-carrying bats. Bats are an important animal in our ecosystem when it comes to pollinating(授粉)many fruits such as mangos and bananas. We need to allow them to continue pollination and keep them away from our markets and mouths.

【推荐2】Dogs have complex emotions such as jealousy (嫉妒) and pride, according to a scientific research that throws new light on their relations with humans.

Animal psychologists previously believed most animals lacked the “sense of self”, which is needed to experience secondary emotions such as jealousy, embarrassment or guilt. These emotions are more complex than instant reactions such as anger or joy.

Professor Friederike Range, from the University of Vienna, has shown that dogs are jealous when they feel unfairly treated compared with other dogs. “Dogs show a strong reaction to inequity (不公平),” she said. “If one dog gets something, you’d better believe another will demand something as well.”

But, her study points out that it doesn’t matter if one gets a better treat and only that the distribution is fair.

The dog study is the latest into several species, including cows, horses, cats and sheep, which have shown that animals are far more self-aware than they were thought. Paul Morris, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth who studies animal emotions, told The Sunday Times, “We are learning that dogs and horses are far more emotionally complex than we ever realized. They can suffer simple forms of many feelings we once thought only primates (灵长类) could experience.”

In research among dog owners, Morris found almost all of them reported jealous behavior by their pets. The dog often tried to get their owner away from a new lover in the early days of a relationship.

Behavior experts suggest owners keep their dogs away as much as possible from a new partner or child. This helps to prevent jealous activity of the dog such as interruptions with barking or whining (哀号).

【推荐3】In Canada, you can find dogs, cats, horses, etc. in almost every family. These are their pets. People love these pets and have them as their good friends.

Before they keep them in their houses, they take them to animal hospitals to give them injections (注射) so that they won’t carry disease. They have special animal food stores, though they can get animal food in almost every kind of store. Some people spend around two hundred Canadian dollars a month on animal food. When you visit people’s houses, they would be very glad to show you their pets and they are very proud of them. You will also find that almost every family has a bird feeder in their garden. All kinds of birds are welcomed to come and have a good meal. They are free to come and go and nobody is allowed to kill any animal in Canada. They have a law against killing wild animals. If you killed an animal, you would be punished. If an animal happened to get run over by a car, people would be very sad.

People in Canada have many reasons to like animals. One of them might be: Their family ties are not as close as ours. When children grow up, they leave their parents and start their own life. Then the old will feel lonely. But pets can solve this problem. They can be good friends and never leave them alone.

【推荐1】The national college entrance exam, or gaokao, is an Important exam for Chinese students. In the past, students who performed well in the areas of sports or science would receive 20 bonus points (加分) on the test. But starting from this year, this bonus will no longer be available.

On March 21, the Ministry of Education announced it will stop giving bonus points to talented student athletes, winners of academic Olympiads (学科奥林匹克竞赛), winners of science and technology competitions, “provincial excellent students” and those who have performed “righteous and courageous deeds” (思想政治品德突出事迹), the People’s Daily reported. The alm of this change is to make gaokao fairer, said the Ministry of Education.

The bonus point policy was created in 2000 to encourage students to develop both physical and mental talents. But some students were able to obtain the bonus dishonestly, China Youth Daily noted. For example, some students used fake certificates (假证书) to get the point.

The bonus is also being cut to “reverse the trend of more Chinese students studying for Olympiads from an early age just to get the points” Xiong Bingqi, vice-president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, told China Daily.

However, this does not mean students with special talents will not be rewarded for their abilities. They can take part in independent college, admission (高校自主招生)processes. Some colleges use these processes to select talented students and give them bonus points if they apply at those colleges.

Ninety universities are using independent admission processes this year, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Top schools like Peking University and Tsinghua University will give talented students up to 60 bonus points.

【推荐2】An American cancer survivor has become the first person to swim across the English Channel four times on end.

Sarah Thomas, 37, completed the great achievement on Tuesday after over 54 hours of swimming. Her record-breaking achievement came just a year after she completed treatment for breast cancer(乳腺癌).

In a video on Facebook, a small group of people could be seen cheering on the swimmer from Colorado as she made her final arrival to beach at Dover. Supporters congratulated Mrs. Thomas on her non-stop swim, handing her chocolate and other gifts. In the video, Mrs. Thomas admitted to feeling “a little sick” but said she had been encouraged to keep going by her husband and her team.

Before the start of her challenge, Mrs. Thomas wrote that she was “fearful” and admitted she was “going to need some luck”.

In a Facebook post made on Saturday, she dedicated(奉献) the swim “to all the survivors out there”, adding, “This is for those of us who have wondered hopelessly about what comes next, and have overcome the pain bravely.”

After her swim, Mrs. Thomas said, “I’m really tired and I’m losing my voice from all the salt water.” Asked what the worst part of her challenge was, she said, “Probably dealing with the salt water over two days. It really hurts your throat, your mouth and your tongue.” She praised her support team for helping her stay strong, adding that she was very prepared for the weather, currents(k it) and cold water. “I feel just mostly stunned right now. I just can’t believe that we did it.”

【推荐1】A primary school art teacher has received a good deal of praise since her daughter posted photos of her special school project online.

Rebecca Bonner teaches at Mcauliffe Elementary School in Highland Village, Texas. In total, she hosts art classes for about 580 students who are aged from 3 to 11 years old. Bonner always tries to encourage her students to be creative by telling them to ''turn their mess-up into a dress-up''. So as a way of giving an example of her words, she invited all of her students to draw freely on a white dress that she brought to school. For two weeks, the young students used their pens to add their own little designs (设计) to the dress. The art teacher then showed their work by proudly wearing the dress for a school art show.

Her students were not the only ones happy to see their art come to life-Bonner's 20-year-old daughter Charlece Lake was so moved by her mother's project. Charlece took some photos of Bonner wearing the dress and posted them to Twitter, saying that her mom was ''the cutest art teacher ever''. Since posting the pictures, they have been shared thousands of times.

Though Bonner was surprised that her project had been widely known, she said that she was happy for the chance to serve as a good role model for art. ''I'm not worried about being famous of anything like that but I do think it's great to promote(推广) the arts, because art is not common among primary schools, '' Bonner said. ''I think it's really important for kids to have that place to create, and that freedom(自由) to create, '' she added.

【推荐2】NEW YORK—Gordon Parks, who experienced the struggles and victories of black America as a photographer for Life magazine and then became Hollywood's first major black director with " The Learning Tree" and the hit "Shaft," died Tuesday, his family said.

Parks, who also wrote fiction and was a gifted composer, died at his home in New York, according to a former wife, and nephew Charles Parks.

"Nothing came easy," Parks wrote in his autobiography(自传)."I was just born with a need to explore every tool shop of my mind, and with long searching and hard work, I became devoted to my restlessness. "

He covered everything from fashion to politics to sports at Life from 1948 to 1968.

But as a photographer, he was perhaps best known for his photo essays on the effects of poverty in the United States and abroad and on the spirit of the civil rights movement.

He went through a series of jobs as a teen and young man, including piano player and railroad dining car waiter. The breakthrough came when he was about 25 , when he bought a used camera in a pawn shop (典当行) for $7.50. He became a freelance (自由投稿的)fashion photographer, went on to Vogue magazine and then to Life in 1948.

" Reflecting now, I realize that, even within the limits of my childhood vision, I was on a search for pride, meanwhile taking measurable glimpses of how certain blacks, who suffered from racism, were against it," he wrote.

When he accepted an award from Wichita Stale University in May 1991, he said it was "another step forward in my making peace with Kansas and Kansas making peace with me."

【推荐3】(A)

Ten Chinese students are demanding that Beijing Normal University Professor Yu Dan be away from her television show on CCTV­10. They argue that her on-­air explanations of Confucius's Analects(孔子《论语》) are “incorrect and misleading”.

Yu is known for explaining Confucius's Analects to a TV audience. But some complain that her explanations are unfaithful to Chinese tradition.

But Yu doesn't seem to worry about her critics, saying, “It's a matter of personal choice. Some like KFC, while others like McDonalds.”

(B)

“Stealing an online gamer's password might seem less harmful than credit card theft. It does keep the victim from wearing himself out all night playing. But it is not all that nice，” says 19-­year-­old Zhang Qiwen, in Shanghai.

Last August, Zhang accidentally downloaded a Trojan while playing Warcraft. The Trojan is a type of virus used by hackers to steal people's passwords. Overnight the Trojan transferred all the “gold” (game credits) from Zhang's private account to an unknown account. Zhang hopes the police will find and punish the thief, who can also pocket some cash since the stolen “gold” can go on sale online.

(C)

New England's largest indoor public garden has opened here in a historic park, and officials expect it to become a centre for learning about plants as well as a top attraction for visitors.

The glass­walled Roger Williams Park Botanical Centre, which opened on March 2, offers a tropical garden, an orchid garden, and a Mediterranean room with a collection of citrus trees. The centre also has two classrooms and will offer gardening classes provided by the University of Rhode Island.

Roger Williams Park, named for the city's 17th­century founder, also has a zoo. The park attracts more than 2 million visitors a year, and Providence Mayor said that he expects the new centre will attract more and more visitors to Providence.

【推荐1】A customer stands on the other side of the counter at my work, eyeing the menu. “The food here is so caloric,” she complains, and then looks at me. “You don’t eat here, do you? It certainly doesn’t look like it.” My face turned red.

I’m not quite used to how others see me. Since June 2018, I’ve lost almost 50 pounds. When I made the choice to change my body physically, everyone around me told me that I would be happier: Skinny meant pretty, and pretty meant happy and satisfied. After looking through dozens of before-and-after changes on Instagram and other social media, I was more eager to make myself smaller, to better fit into the world. But none of that happened. I didn’t feel more whole, or more peaceful. More than anything, I felt lied to.

Human health is unbelievably complex, and there’s so much more to our well-being than caloric balance. For several months, I often felt very tired and got angry easily, convinced that my body was a machine and I had to hard-wire it to look as physically perfect as possible. But at the end of the day, I realized that saying no to my body’s natural desire only left me feeling upset.

Our world is filled with losing weight. Nearly every time I listen to the radio, I hear some ads criticizing empty promises of giving you a better body, achieved only by this gym membership/ this prepackaged Keto shake/ this waist trainer. These all live by the same message: That food is dangerous, and the less we eat, the better off we are. In extreme cases, this message can lead to eating disorders, which will affect over 30 million people in their lifetimes, according to the Body Image Therapy Center.

These ideas could not be further from the truth. We eat food for a reason: It gives us energy, it keeps our body functioning, and it makes us human. I urge everybody to adopt a diet based on sustainability (可持续发展), to eat for energy, based on what makes us happy. We all deserve healthy relationships with food and mindful eating is the best place to start.

【推荐2】Although it has been shown in recent years that plants can see, hear and smell, they are still usually thought of as silent. But now, for the first time, they have been recorded making ultrasonic (超声的) cries when stressed, which researchers say could open up a new field of precision agriculture where farmers listen for water-starved crops.

Itzhak Khait and his colleagues at Tel Aviv University in Israel found that tomato and tobacco plants made cries at frequencies humans cannot hear when stressed by not having enough water or when their stem is cut.

Microphones placed 10 centimetres from the plants picked up sounds in the ultrasonic range of 20 to 100 kilohertz, which the team says insects and some mammals would be able to hear and respond to from as far as 5 metres away. A moth may decide against laying eggs on a plant that sounds water-stressed, the researchers suggest. Plants could even hear that other plants are short of water and react accordingly, they speculate (推断).

On average, drought-stressed tomato plants made 35 sounds an hour, while tobacco plants made 11. When plant stems were cut, tomato plants made an average of 25 sounds in the following hour, and tobacco plants 15. Unstressed plants produced fewer than one sound per hour, on average.

Enabling farmers to listen for water-stressed plants could “open a new direction in the field of precision agriculture”, the researchers suggest. They add that such an ability will be increasingly important as climate change exposes more areas to drought.

“The suggestion that the sounds that drought-stressed plants make could be used in precision agriculture seems feasible (可行的) if it is not too costly to set up the recording in a field situation,” says Anne Visscher at the royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK.

She warns that the results can’t yet be broadened out to other stresses, such as salt or temperature, because these may not cause sounds. Besides, there have been no experiments to show whether moths or any other animal can hear and respond to the sounds the plants make, so that idea is still based on guesses for now, she says.

【推荐3】It’s really true what people say about English politeness: it’s everywhere. When squeezing(挤) past someone or passing through a crowd in a narrow place, people say “sorry”. When getting off a bus, English passengers say “thank you” rather than the driver. In Germany, people would never dream of doing these things. After all, squeezing past others is sometimes unavoidable(不可避免的), and the bus driver is only doing his job. I used to think the same way, without questioning it, until I started traveling to the British Isles and came to appreciate(欣赏) some more polite ways of communicating with people, and here are some more polite ways of interacting with people in UK.

People thank each other everywhere in England, all the time. When people buy something in a shop, customer and shop assistant in most cases thank each other twice or more. In Germany, it would be surprising to hear more than one thank you in such a conversation. British students thank their lecturers when leaving the room. English employers thank their employees for doing their jobs, which is different from Germans, who would normally think that paying their workers money is already enough.

Another thing I observed during my stay was that English people rarely criticize(批评) others. Even when I was working and mistakes were pointed out to me, my employers repeated several times but none of their explanations were intended as scolding me. It has been my impression that by avoiding scolding, English people are making an effort to make others feel comfortable. This also is showed in other ways. British men still open doors for women, and British men are more likely to treat(请客) women to a meal than German men. However, I do need to point out here that this applies(适用于) to English men a bit more than it would to Scottish men! Yes, the latter are a bit mean(吝啬的).