【推荐1】Benefits of Solitude(独处)

Learning about yourself

When you’re in any sort of social setting,you aren’t strictly yourself. You’re instead whoever you are in that context. For example, if you are a mother spending time with your children, you’re a parent in that situation. If you’re hanging out with coworkers, you’re a fellow employee. When you’re by yourself, you’re just you. This gives you an opportunity to learn how the various social contexts of your life shape your behavior and self perception(察觉).     1    .

Helping with self-regulation

It’s worth noting that spending time alone doesn’t have to have a harmful impact on your social life.

    2    . This is because spending time in solitude helps people develop the skills they need to regulate their own emotions. When you’re alone with your thoughts and feelings, you’re more aware of them. That means you have more opportunities to exercise a degree of control over how you think or feel about particular situations. This helps afterwards.     3    , your self-regulation skills will help you determine if you’re talking too much or not enough, overreacting to perceived slights, making insensitive comments, and much more.

    4    

Some of the greatest benefits of solitude are practical in nature. For instance, researchers have often found that, all other factors(因素)being equal, people who spend time alone are often more likely to develop certain strong talents than their peers. These talents can include playing an instrument, painting, cooking, or doing anything else that requires practice. It’s easy to understand why this is the case.     5    , there are also many abilities that a person is more likely to develop when they have the opportunity to devote alone time to them.

A．Developing skills

B．Spending time on interests

C．That can help you make life changes

D．When you’re socializing with\others later on

E．While people shouldn’t spend all their time with others

F．Although some skills are easier to develop with help from others

G．On the contrary, it can actually improve your social interactions over time

【推荐2】Keith Payne realized he was poor for the first time when he was in the fourth grade. The awareness came to him when a new lunch lady in the cafeteria asked him to pay for his lunch.

“Previously, the lunch lady had just waved me on because I’d always been on free lunch,” he says. “But this new lady didn’t know how things worked, and it was the first time that I had been asked to pay for my lunch.”

It was an agonizing moment and all of a sudden, he realized why he got free lunch while many of his classmates were paying for their meals every day.

“It’s not like I was poorer the day after that than I was before. Nothing objective had changed. But because of that subjective awareness, I began constantly comparing myself with my classmates and felt really unhappy,” he says.

Keith Payne is now a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina and shares how the awareness of inequality affects the way that both our minds and our bodies respond.

“As we walk through the world, it is very natural for us to compare our lives with those of others. We think about ourselves in terms of being on a certain ladder (梯子) with some people above us and it can cause serious psychological consequences,” he says.

One is that it makes us more willing to seek out risks and engage in high-risk, high-reward sort of behaviors. It affects us in ways that are similar to physical threats.

“But I think there are wiser and less wise ways to make those social comparisons,” he says. “Upward social comparisons feel terrible, but they can be motivating. Downward social comparisons feel great, and yet they can be demotivating. So one of the things I recommend is that we can be more strategic in making upward and download social comparisons, Neither one is good in itself. It just depends on what your goal is.”

1. Which of the following best explains “agonizing” underlined in paragraph 3?

A．Painful.

B．Brief.

C．Important.

D．Happy.

2. What does the author want to show by telling the story?

A．Poor people should be treated equally.

B．He wants to blame the new lunch lady.

C．There were a lot of poor people in his country.

D．We can be influenced by the awareness of inequality.

3. What does Keith Payne feel about making social comparisons?

A．Unimportant.

B．Acceptable.

C．Annoying.

D．Unnecessary.

4. What will Keith Payne most probably advise us to do if we feel stressed?

A．Talk to psychologists immediately.	B．Hang out with top performers.
C．Compare with less successful persons.	D．Stay alone and enjoy ourselves.

【推荐2】Two-time cancer survivor Tracy Pepper has developed an unlikely friendship — with a beautiful butterfly, which she called Fluffy.

Ms. Pepper found Fluffy in her garden struggling for life soon after birth. After feeding it on honey from a sunflower, Fluffy recovered but didn’t regain the use of its wings and has remained with Ms. Pepper ever since.   

She has been recording the experience on social media. In one post, she wrote, “I’m the crazy butterfly lady! I just spent 3 hours playing with him, exercising him by walking him up and down my fingers and arms, feeding him and even giving him the feeling of flying! He sat on my hand and beat his wings as I moved my hand up and down pretending he was flying!”

Ms. Pepper said it was sympathy and empathy that drove her. After battling against cancer twice and keeping herself busy with aid work in Africa, she fell into a “depression” last year.   

“When I found him helpless and unable to fly, I knew just how he felt. I went through burn-out last year. I wanted to give up… I felt really lonely.”   

So she decided to help the insect, to which she has become attached. Ms. Pepper even advertised tickets of internationally-famous Cirque du Soleil’s act she had for sale because she thought staying at home to care for Fluffy was more important.   

Unfortunately, Fluffy wouldn’t be around for long — the lifespan of a butterfly ranges from two to six weeks.

But she seemed to care little about it. She wrote on Facebook, “He has a wonderful life and when his time comes, he will die flat and happy and very very loved.”

1. What was the butterfly like when Ms. Pepper first saw it?

A．It was dying.

B．It was too old to fly.

C．It was struggling against an enemy.

D．It was feeding itself on honey from a sunflower.

2. Why did Ms. Pepper sell the tickets of Cirque du Soleil’s act?

A．Because she lost interest in the act.

B．Because she had to stay home to look after the butterfly.

C．Because she was busy with aid work in Africa.

D．Because she suffered from cancer twice and was too weak.

3. What was Ms. Pepper’s attitude towards the early death of the butterfly?

A．She felt sorry about it.	B．She remained calm about it.
C．She was rather disappointed with it.	D．She had some doubts about it.

4. Why did Ms. Pepper save the butterfly and become friends with it?

A．Because she was interested and curious.

B．Because she loved small animals.

C．Because she showed sympathy and understanding for it.

D．Because she desired to get close to nature.