【推荐2】If you are the type of traveler who just wants a suitable place to hang up your hat and you don’t want to spend a fortune to do it, here are several ways to save on your next hotel room.

Be flexible

Hotel rates are based on supply and demand, so beware of peak periods. If your destination’s high season is from December through April and you’re trying to book near the end of April, you might find considerable savings if you change your travel dates by a week or two.

Check Hotel Websites

The large travel-booking websites often sell rooms from the middlemen (中间商) who have bought up empty hotel rooms. But the major hotel chains also offer last-minute discounts, and because they are not paying the middlemen, they sometimes have better deals than the travel sites.

Don’t be afraid to bargain

Most people are so intimidated by know-it-all hotel desk clerks that they don’t bargain for a better deal. But bargaining for a better deal is often worth the trouble, because most hotel general managers would prefer having a customer paying a lower-than-usual rate to no customer at all. And if you find something unfair on your hotel bill, don’t be afraid to complain. To create and promote goodwill, hotels will often reduce or cancel such charges.

Avoid hidden costs

Expensive little extras hotels never mention they may increase the cost of your stay. Don’t let this happen. Find out about resort fees for parking and Internet use before you agree to stay. And don’t touch the hotel’s phone unless you absolutely have to—the rates can be more than $5 a minute even inside the United States.

1. According to the passage, which of the following will save you some money?

A．Change your visiting places in high season.

B．Book an order for the room with the hotel far ahead of schedule.

C．Make arrangements for travelling during off-peak periods.

D．Make a demand directly on the middlemen for a fair price.

2. That travelers can bargain for better deal is often based on the fact that ________.

A．managers would rather have a customer paying less than have no one.

B．there are many business items which should not be charged.

C．customers are usually afraid to complain about the unreasonable high price.

D．the desk clerks and managers often cheat the travelers by false pretenses.

3. The passage was mainly written to ________.

A．Advertise the hotels	B．Encourage the hotel business
C．Do a service for the customers	D．Introduce the hotel services

【推荐3】How to Set Effective Writing Goal

Achievable writing goals require a certain ability to look inwards. You must evaluate where you are in your writing life, where you want to go, and how you work best. But how can you set goals that are realistic, useful, and lead you “confidently in the direction of your dreams”?

Observe your own habits and patterns

    1    . Set writing goals that are useful to you by taking stock of what you know about yourself: what type of writer are you? How do you react emotionally when faced with concrete goals? And when can you realistically squeeze some writing into your schedule?

Just as runners don’t wear hiking boots, writers must set goals that accommodate their personalities and circumstances.

Some goals, like winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, are not really up to us. They’re perfectly valid dreams, but they depend on external factors we can’t control.     2    

Break your big goals down into smaller milestone

Most projects have several phases containing several milestones along the way. If you ever find you can’t work toward your bigger goal, you can usually assume that your stepping-stone goals aren’t small enough.     3    

If word counts stress you out, make your goals measurable in other ways: commit to writing X number of days a month, or dedicate X number of hours to your writing every weekend. Measure your progress in a way that requires you to invest time and effort but takes a little pressure off of the outcome

    4    

A wise goal-setter is emotionally prepared for obstacles and can adapt their goals to meet changes in circumstances.     5    , or you’re dealing with unexpected life events that leave little room for pursuing your writing goals.

Always adjust your goal to fit your new circumstances and stand ready to make changes regardless of the outcome. Any struggle to meet your writing goals shouldn’t result in doubt about whether you’re really a writer or not.

A．Keep working and make changes

B．Be flexible and prepared for obstacles

C．Always break goals down into smaller tasks

D．Each person responds differently to goal-setting

E．So try to avoid such factors in your goal statements

F．It’s not easy to break big goals down into smaller tasks

G．You may find that writing a book takes longer than anticipated

【推荐2】阅读下面的短文和问题，根据短文内容，在相应题号后的横线上写下相关信息，完成对该问题的回答。

Rounding the corner into the classroom to pick up my daughter, I heard the teacher tell her, "You've done the most beautiful tree. Well done." A few days later, she pointed to another of my daughter's drawings and said, "Wow, you really are an artist!"

Both times, when I heard my daughter being praised, I felt at a loss. As a mother, how could I explain to the teacher that I would prefer it if she didn't praise my daughter?

Nowadays, we give a lot of praise to our children. Praise, self-confidence and performance at school, it is commonly believed, rise and fall together. But the present research shows something else—over the past decade, a number of studies on self-confidence have suggested that praising a child as "clever" may not help her at school. In fact, it might cause her to underperform. Often a child will react to praise by quitting—why make a new drawing if you have already made "the best"? Or a child may simply repeat the same work—why draw something new, or in a new way, if the old way always gets praise?

In a now famous 1998 study of children aged 10 and 11, psychologists Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller asked 128 children to solve a series of math problems. After completing the first set of simple exercises, the researchers gave each child just one sentence of praise. Some were praised for their intelligence—"You did really well, you're so clever"; others for their hard work—"You did really well, you must have worked really hard." Then the researchers had the children try a more challenging set of problems. The results were eye-opening. The students who were praised for their effort showed a greater willingness to work out new methods. They said they failed because of a lack of (缺少) effort, not a lack of intelligence. The children who had been praised for their cleverness worried more about failure and tended to choose tasks that they had done before. All in all, the excitement created by being told "You're so clever" gave way to an increase in anxiety and a drop in self-confidence and performance. When asked by the researchers to write to the children in another school, remembering their experience, some of the "clever" children lied about their scores. In short, all it took to knock these youngsters' confidence, to make them so unhappy that they lied, was one sentence of praise.

1. How did the author feel when she heard her daughter being praised? (不多于 5 个单词)
2. What have studies on self-confidence suggested? (不多于 11 个单词)
3. According to the study, what followed the children's excitement when they were praised for cleverness? (不多于 11 个单词)
4. What might the author say if her daughter really did a great job? (单词数不限)