【推荐1】"Some secrets are hidden from health," wrote John Updike in his poem "Fever".
I have experienced the truth of Updike's observation. My excellent health kept me from seeing some things—things that became secrets of sort.
One relates to my son Chris. When I lost my health in March, I discovered something I had missed about him.
Christopher has been a scholar and athlete through high school. He has behaved responsibly, engaged in community service. He has had an impressive peer group of serious students.
While I saw these things, I had missed before what I experienced while in hospital. Early on, Christopher offered the clearest and most forceful words about my need to be positive and to fight acute leukemia(急性白血病). He never left the room after a visit without making me promise that I would be mentally tough and positive.
During the first week, he showed his own mental toughness, researching leukemia and learning what the chances were. He even stopped my doctor outside the room, introduced himself and asked directly what he thought of my chances. He processed the answer without overreaction.
Christopher did admonish(劝告) me against my choice of words the first week at home. I had moved back into my room from weighing myself, discovering a thin figure I did not know. I announced to him and my wife, “dead man walking”. I thought it was a way to lighten the obvious. He saw it as negativity and was strongly against such thinking and talking.
When I resisted taking medicine sometimes, Christopher formed a “good-cop-bad-cop” team with his mother. Betsy gently and patiently encouraged. He directly and forcefully insisted. He always made the logical arguments for why I needed to take some awful pills.
My health had hidden something from me; my ill-health helped me to see it.
1. The underlined sentence in Paragraph 5 indicates that the author ________.

A．got to know more about his son while in hospital

B．knew little about his son until in hospital

C．had no chance of knowing more about his son

D．hardly remembers what happened in the hospital

2. What did Christopher do when the author was in hospital?

A．He told the author not to say anything wrong.

B．He offered some suggestions to the doctor.

C．He always encouraged the author to be confident.

D．He tried to get help from community service.

3. What does “good-cop-bad-cop” in the text refer to?

A．A trick to force the author to obey.

B．A measure to keep the author happy.

C．A friendly way to make the author see what was good for him.

D．A joint effort to persuade the author both kindly and forcefully.

4. What may be the best title for the text?

A．Lessons from Ill-health	B．Unexpected Love
C．Secrets Hidden from Health	D．Discovery Made in Hospital

【推荐2】She was moved to hospice (临终安养院) a week ago. I stayed with her for a week and then flew back home.

Her dying process is anything but “peaceful”, making me physically ill. I had some “quiet time” with her to say my goodbyes and try to let her know it was time for her to be at pace, but as time wore on, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I feel like I would be changed forever if I continued to witness this. However, I also feel extremely guilty about “abandoning” her during her last days.

More background: my mom went through treatment up to a few days before she was admitted to a hospital. After a month, she was moved to hospice once we finally realized she was dying. This last step has been a blow to us because she was so “normal” up until her fall, so although we knew we would eventually be in this place, we didn’t expect it NOW. I am the youngest of 3 kids, but my mom and I have always had a very close relationship, although we live 2,000 miles away from each other.

The problem I have is that I hear so many people say that there is “no way” they would leave their mother’s side on her deathbed and I thought I would be the same way, but I just lost it and came home. I feel like I am justifying coming back, even though nobody is judging me!

I have contemplated flying back to her, just so I can be there ... but in reality, I’m torn. I want to be there, but I don’t want to see or hear death.

Please ... help me figure out a way to reduce my guilt.

1. The main reason why the writer left her mother alone was that ______.

A．she had something urgent to deal with

B．she preferred to live a quiet life with her kids

C．she couldn’t tolerate witnessing her mother dying

D．her siblings would come to look after her mother soon

2. The underlined word “contemplated” can be replaced by “______”.

A．remembered	B．avoided
C．rejected	D．considered

3. The passage is written in a tone of ______.

A．disappointment	B．guilt
C．sympathy	D．regret

4. The best title for the passage should be “______”.

A．Who is to blame?

B．Is it my fault?

C．How can I forgive myself?

D．To leave or to stay?

【推荐3】The more hours that young children spend in child care, the more likely they are to turn out aggressive and disobedient by the time they are in kindergarten, according to the largest study of child care and development ever conducted. Researchers said this correlation (相关性) held true regardless of whether the children came from rich or poor homes, were looked after by a relative or at a center, and whether they were girls or boys.

What is uncertain, however, is whether the child care actually causes the problem or whether children likely to turn out aggressive happen to be those who spend more hours in child care. It also remains unclear whether reducing the amount of time in child care will reduce the risk that a child will turn into a mean person. What’s more, quality child care is associated with increased skills in intellectual ability such as language and memory, leading some academics to suggest that child care turns out children who are “smart and naughty”.

The government-sponsored research, which has tracked more than 1,300 children at 10 sites across the country since 1991, is bound to cause the debate over child care again: How should people balance work and family? And how should parents, especially mothers. Resolve the demands that are placed on them to be both breadwinners and supermoms?

That debate was already on display at a news briefing yesterday, where researchers themselves had different opinions about the data and its implications (含义). “There is a constant relationship between time in care and problem behavior, especially those involving aggression and behavior,” said Jay Belsky of Birkbeck College in London, one of the lead investigators of the study who has previously annoyed women’s groups because of his criticisms of child care. “On behalf of fathers or mothers?” interrupted Sarah Friedman, a developmental psychologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and one of the other lead scientists on the study. “On behalf of parents and families,” responded Belsky.

“NICHD is not willing to get into policy recommendations.” said Friedman, contradicting her colleague. “There are other possibilities that can be entertained. Yes it is a quick solution—more hours in child care is associated with more problems. The easy solution is to cut the number of hours but that may have implications for the family that may not be beneficial for the development of the children in terms of economics.” In an interview after the briefing, Friedman said that asking parents to work fewer hours and spend more time with their children usually meant a loss of family income, which adversely(不利地) affects children.

Scientists said that the study was highly reliable. But the researchers said they had no idea whether the behavioral difficulties persisted as the children moved to higher grades.

1. Children who spend more time in quality child care will ________.

A．develop greater ability in language	B．be easy to manage and less naughty
C．possess great risk-taking spirit	D．be greedy and mean to their classmates

2. What is still unknown about higher level of aggressiveness in kindergarten children?

A．Whether higher level of aggressiveness can be avoided with longer child care.

B．Where longer child care equally affects children from different families.

C．Whether aggressiveness is a direct result of longer child care.

D．Whether longer child care improves intellectual ability in children.

3. In the fifth paragraph the word “it” probably means ________.

A．NICHD is unwilling to give parents recommendations

B．NICHD is willing to give policy advice concerning child care

C．the number of hours in child care should be reduced significantly

D．parents should discipline the behavior of their children more strictly

4. According to Friedman, Cutting the number of hours in child care ________.

A．may prevent families from having the necessary financial sources

B．will make families unable to enjoy much of the social benefits

C．will result in subsequent behavioral difficulties in children

D．should be accompanied with the improvement in the quality of child care

【推荐1】We’ve all heard the dangers of helicopter parenting. Remaining too involved in a kid's life, especially throughout college, can lead to depression, lack of self-reliance and some other mental problems.

This wisdom seems sound. But some academics and educators now say they see signs of a troubling resistance. The concern: that too much of warnings and horror stories — the cover of Julie Lythcott-Haims’ bestseller How to Raise an Adult instructs moms and dads to avoid “the overparenting trap” — is discouraging parents from getting involved at all.

“Yes, parents can be intruders（unpopular people）,” says Marjorie Savage, a researcher in the University of Minnesota. “At the same time, there are increasing examples of parents refusing to step up when students genuinely need their family.” At Hofstra University, for example, parents now ask embarrassedly about mental-health and campus-safety resources, as if bringing up those topics were forbidden, says Branka Kristic, who heads the family-outreach programs. And Savage recalls talking to a mom who kept quiet about her son’s signs of depression until right before he failed a semester. She did not want to “helicopter in”.

That means colleges, which have spent the past decade learning to cope with parents who get too involved, now have a different problem. In recent years, hundreds of colleges have either launched or increased their parent offices, which serve as one-stop shops for moms and dads looking to make complaints, report problems and generally stay in touch.

Much of this began, of course, because schools were forced to cope with a generation of students connected with their parents like never before. On average, they communicate 22.1 times per week, according to research from Barbara Hofer, a psychology professor at Middlebury College. That’s more than twice the rate of a decade ago, before almost every student had a smartphone.

With some moms and dads thinking twice of contacting the school in the first place, some programs are being used to encourage a more balanced approach, often through email and other social media. Hofstra’s Kristic advises parents to “be a guide, while granting that the student owns the journey”. That means asking questions, listening to answers, being patient and trusting kids to resolve their own problems. But if issues persist, or if a student is in serious mental or physical danger, it also means hopping in the chopper, at least for a little while.

1. In paragraph 3, parents of Hofstra University students are mentioned to __________.

A．show that parents have gone to the other extreme of overparenting

B．provide educators with a new understanding of overparenting

C．give a further example of supportive overparenting

D．place emphasis on the necessity of overparenting

2. The phrase “hopping in the chopper” in the last paragraph refers to ___________.

A．having trust in kids	B．stepping in to solve kids’ problems
C．joining a family-outreach program	D．turning to social media for help

3. What can be inferred from the passage?

A．Mental-health and campus-safety resources are forbidden topics among parents.

B．How to Raise an Adult encourages parents to get engaged in family education.

C．Overparenting is no longer a problem because of students’ self-reliance.

D．There was less student-parent communication in the past than today.

4. Which of the following is the best title for the passage?

A．Why Colleges Need Helicopter Parents

B．How to Improve Parent-school Relations

C．Why Overparenting Is in Question

D．How to Communicate More as Parents

【推荐2】Technology is forever changing the way we get our news. Many people now get a lot of their news on electronic devices, instead of traditional media, such as newspapers, television or radio. Now, there is a new way we get the news: computer-created news readers.

Recently, China's Xinhua launched (推出) the world's first AI news presenters with the Chinese search engine Sogou. The news readers created by machine learning technology are based on two real-life newsmen. One is able to present newscasts in English; the other, in Mandarin Chinese.

One Xinhua's report said machine learning was used to examine video images and sounds of the two newsmen, which look and sound like real people.

Some machine learning experts said the system showed off China's latest progress in voice recognition, text-to-speech technology and data analysis. But several experts suggested that the term AI does not correctly describe abilities of the robotic news readers.

On social media, many Chinese noted that the AI presenters did not seem real. People blamed them for not being more lifelike. Others wondered about the effects robots might have on employment and workers. Some people argued that only low-level jobs requiring heavy labor will be easily replaced by robots. Others praised the technology as a way for companies to make money from low-cost labor machines.

Some businesses have experimented with similar technology for possible use in news operations. Britain's BBC recently released a video that used machine learning to make it look like one of its news readers speaking different languages. The London-based company that developed the system says its goal is to "remove the language barrier" for many different kinds of video across the Internet.

1. What does the author intend to do in Paragraph 1?

A．Introduce the topic of the text.

B．Summarize the different opinions.

C．Add some data about the AI presenters.

D．Compare different ways of getting news

2. What is the machine learning technology used to do?

A．To keep AI presenters from making any mistakes.

B．To make AI presenters speak more fluently.

C．To ensure images and sounds are like real persons.

D．To bring newscasts up to date every hour.

3. What are some people worried about when AI presenters were launched?

A．Robots will eventually replace human all over.

B．Robots may threaten some people's employment.

C．Robots may endanger most people's health.

D．Robots will rule over the world in the end.

4. From the last paragraph we know that______.

A．BBC has removed the language barrier in newscasts

B．BBC's news readers can speak different languages

C．BBC shows interest in Xinhua's AI news presenters

D．BBC has done similar experiments as Xinhua does

【推荐3】Roughly the size of a soda can, sitting on a bookshelf, a relatively harmless device may be turning friends away from your home. The elephant in your living room is your Internet-connected camera, a device people are increasingly using for peace of mind in their homes. But few stop to think about the effect these devices may have on house guests. Should you tell your friends, for instance, that they’re being recorded while you all watch the big game together?

“It’s certainly new territory (领地), especially as home security cameras become easier to fix,” says Lizzie Post, president of the Emily Post Institute, America’s distinguished manners advisors. “I think it will be very interesting to see what manners appear in terms of whether you tell people you have a camera or not, and whether guests have a right to ask that it be turned off, if it’s not a security issue.” Post wants to make clear that she’s not talking about legal rights, but rather personal preference.

When it comes to security cameras, Post says it’s a host’s responsibility to make sure guests feel comfortable within their home. If the host casually acknowledges that there is a camera in the room by telling a story about, it that may be enough to provide an opening for a guest to say if they are uncomfortable.

However, if a contractor (合约工) is working in your home, you don’t need to tell them that there are cameras watching. Then again, the camera can also work in contractors’ favor. “If anything does go wrong while they’re in the house, they don’t want to be blamed for it,” she says. “In fact, the camera could be the thing that proves that they didn’t steal the $20, or knock the vase off the table.”

1. What is Lizzie Post mainly discussing about the use of home security cameras?

A．Legal rights.

B．Moral issues.

C．The possible impact on health.

D．Likes and dislikes of individuals.

2. According to Post, what is a host’s responsibility concerning the security camera?

A．Indicating its position.

B．Turning it on all the time.

C．Making their guests feel at ease.

D．Having a casual talk with guests.

3. How can the home security camera help contractors working in your home?

A．It can prove their innocence.

B．It can record their working progress.

C．It can prevent the accidents happening.

D．It can make their work more enjoyable.

4. What’s the author’s attitude towards the security camera?

A．Negative.	B．Pessimistic.
C．Favorable.	D．Objective.

【推荐1】College helps students dream of more than a salary

From the earliest days of our country, we have seen education as the foundation for democracy and citizenship. Yet high school students and families are increasingly questioning its value. Is investing in a college or university education still worth it? The answer is definitely “Yes”.

From a financial point of view, a college education surely pays off. Students who graduate from college can expect to make about 60% more than those who do not, well over a million dollars over a lifetime. Completing college makes an even greater difference to the earning power of young women. A 25-34 year-old female with a bachelor’s degree can expect to make 70% more than if she had only completed her high school diploma. But what about the benefits of college that are more difficult to measure?

College is a passport to different places, different times, and different ways of thinking — from learning new languages to considering the are of human history to diving deep into the building blocks of matter. It gives students a chance to understand themselves differently, seeing how their lives are both like and unlike those who inhabited other eras and other lands.

College introduces students to people they’ve never met before? One of the most important ways in which students learn at college is by interacting with people who are different from themselves. I recall one student who was admitted to Harvard but wasn’t sure he would fit in at a school in the Northeast. However, one night he found himself debating the characteristics that define a genuine hero with other admitted students from around the world. Not everyone agreed, but the differences were what made the conversation exciting, and he realized how much he could learn at a place full of engaging people with a wide range of viewpoints.

College teaches students the virtue of slowing down?No one denies the value of speed, connectivity and the virtual world in an economy that thrives on all three. But “thinking” is a word that is too often forgotten. College teaches students to slow down, to change information into insight and knowing into understanding. It nurtures critical thinking. The result is that students grow in knowledge and in wisdom for a lifetime.

To conclude, investing in a college or university education is well worth it. College opens opportunities reflected in earning and employment statistics. But more importantly, in college students have acquired a new way of transforming the world, through the power of learning, analyzing, changing to adapt to what they have come to understand.

College helps students dream of more than a salary

Introduction	• An increasing number of students and families begin to       1     the value of college education. • It is     2     to invest in a college or university education.
Valid     3	4     aspect	• Students with a college degree earn sixty to seventy percent more than those       5     from high schools.
	Horizontal aspects	• Students are       6     to different places, times and ways of thinking and learn to understand themselves differently. • Students also learn by       7     with engaging people having a wide range of viewpoints.
	Virtue aspect	• Students learn to slow down and think       8    , making them grow knowledgeable and       9    .
Conclusions	• College not only helps to raise students’ earnings but also equips them with a new way to     10     the world.

【推荐2】Young children whose mothers talk with them more frequently and in more detail about people’s thoughts and feelings tend to be better at taking another person’s perspective（观点）than other children of the same age.
That’s what researchers from the University of Western Australia found in a new study published in the journal Child Development.
“Parents who frequently put themselves in someone else’s shoes in conversations with their children make it more likely their children will be able to do the same,” said lead author Brad Farrant.
Researchers of the UWA’s Telethon Institute for Child Health Research looked at the influence of how parents interact with their children to learn more about how people develop the ability to take another’s perspective.
The two-year study involved more than 120 Australian children aged between four and six, including children with typically developing language and others delayed in language acquisition（习得）.
The children completed tasks which were designed to assess their language skills, ability to infer others’ beliefs and use these to predict others’ behavior, and their ability to shift flexibly between different perspectives.
Among children with typically developing language, the researchers found that mothers who talked more often and in greater detail about people’s thoughts and feelings — commenting on how another person might react to a particular situation as well as their own feelings about the topic — had children with better language skills and better perspective-taking skills.
Children with delayed language acquisition were also delayed in their development of perspective-taking skills. This displays the role played by language as children develop the ability to take another’s perspective.
“Solving the many challenges that the world faces today requires us all to get better at taking the perspective of other people,” said Brad Farrant.
1. According to the text, to help children gain better perspective-taking skills, parents should __________.

A．give their children more chances to express themselves

B．talk more with their children about people’s feelings

C．encourage their children to guess other people’s thoughts

D．spend more time playing with their children

2. Which of the following is TRUE about the study?

A．Over one hundred American children took part in it.

B．All the children had delayed in language acquisition.

C．The children in the study were around five years old.

D．Mothers helped their children to complete the tasks.

3. Which have an effect on the development of children’s perspective-taking skills?

A．The surrounding environments.	B．Mother’s perspectives.
C．Personal characters.	D．Language skills.

4. In the last paragraph, Brad Farrant __________.

A．stressed the importance of perspective-taking skills

B．expressed his concern about the world’s challenges

C．showed how to take the perspective of other people

D．explained why other people’s opinions are important

5. According to the text, we can learn __________.

A．parents should talk to their children frequently no matter how old their children are

B．it was Brad Farrant who wrote the study in Child Development herself

C．the only way to improve language skill is talking to children more often

D．parents who are always thinking about others will help their children do the same way

【推荐3】Every time the results of the international PISA test are released, the United States gets another opportunity to whip itself for students’ unsatisfying performance.

PISA is the Program for International Student Assessment, a test administered to students in 79 countries around the world. It allows critics on both sides of the school-reform debate to peer at the results of other nations, compare them to the U.S. outcomes and find examples that appear to confirm their own beliefs about why our 15-year-olds are not at the best in science, math and reading. Those opposed to standardized testing and accountability measures look at Finland’s high scores and point out that in that country, there are no mandatory standardized tests until the end of senior year of high school. Children are encouraged to play more. Their school days are shorter and no one attempts to hold teachers accountable according to a rigid set of rules. The students are given very little homework. The nation’s scores and ranking have slid over the past decade, but it still consistently outshines the U.S.

Meanwhile, fans of more regular testing are likely to hold up Singapore and South Korea as models. Singapore’s curriculum is highly scripted and pretty much the same across the nation — something that the Obama administration hoped to achieve through its Common Core curriculum. Teachers continually prepare students for hard tests and depend heavily on worksheets and drills. South Korean families depend heavily on private tutoring to help their children perform well on high-stakes tests. Students in these two countries also outperform American students on the PISA test.

But if Finland, Singapore and South Korea are all doing better than America, that suggests there may be a factor at play other than how students are taught. And indeed there is something that all three of these nations, and every other country that outranks America on the PISA test, have in common: lower rates of child poverty. “Socio-economically disadvantaged students across OECD countries are almost three times more likely than advantaged students not to attain the baseline level of proficiency (能力) in science,” PISA reported in a 2018 paper.

Though America is by most measures a wealthy country, it is one with many poor people. A 2017 UNICEF report looked at the relative child poverty rates of 41 well-off nations. America ranked seventh from the bottom.

“Because in every country, students at the bottom of the social class distribution perform worse than students higher in that distribution, U.S. average performance appears to be relatively low partly because we have so many more test takers from the bottom of the social class distribution,” A 2013 study by Stanford University researchers concluded.

There’s no getting around it: This is a shameful situation in a developed, wealthy nation. When poverty equates to lower academic performance, people pass that poverty from one generation to the next. Until they are willing to face that problem and take bold measures against it, the nation’s rankings will always be limited.

For various reasons, PISA results aren’t the ultimate measure of how well a nation’s schools are doing. But when it comes to measuring the effects of income inequality, PISA offers a powerful lesson for the United States: If they want a better educated population, they cannot ignore their culpability in allowing so many children to grow up in poverty.

1. We can learn from the passage that PISA is a test______.

A．administered to all the students around the world

B．reflecting students’ ability in science, math and reading

C．causing criticism from the educational authorities in the US

D．held by the United Nations annually for 15-year-old students

2. According to the passage, we can learn that_____ .

A．The US government has taken measures to handle poverty issues.

B．Scores of students from Finland in PISA have improved in recent years

C．The case in Singapore is used as opposition against standardized testing

D．For students in South Korea, the help from teachers in schools is not enough

3. What does the underlined word “it” refer to?

A．The 2013 study by Stanford University researchers.

B．There are many test takers from lower class in the US.

C．The US ranked the seventh among 41 well-off countries.

D．The US average performance is poorer than other countries.

4. What is the author’s purpose in writing this passage?

A．To present different opinions of the school-reform debate in the US.

B．To argue poverty contributes to the low ranking of the US in PISA.

C．To illustrate that the US students performed poorly academically.

D．To compare the education systems in the US and other countries