Jolin Tsai, a famous singer, has become an English teacher! But she is not staying in a classroom to give you talks in English. Instead, she has published a new book, “Jolin’s English Diary Book”. It came out in Taiwan in March. Jolin is helping you learn English in a light-hearted way and giving you useful words for life outside your textbooks.
“I hope it’s a happy English book,” she said. “When you learn English in a fun way, you will keep on doing it. This certainly doesn't mean just reciting words”. Jolin has a lot of clever ways of learning. She likes to listen to English songs or find friends to talk to in English. She has been good at English since Grade 3 in primary school. Because of this, she hosted news programme on the radio herself.
Jolin knows it’s important to put English to good use. So, in her English diaries, she wrote something about her everyday life, like study, fashion, travel and family. After each diary, she gives you lots of notes. You can use them often, too! Jolin also asks you to keep diaries like hers.
1. Jolin has been good at English .| A．since she became a famous singer | B．since she was in Grade 3 |
| C．since she was in college | D．since she was 3 years old |
| A．Fashion. | B．Chinese learning. |
| C．Trip. | D．Family life. |
| A．she is not only a famous singer but also an English teacher in a primary school |
| B．you don’t have to keep English diaries |
| C．she teaches us how to be a famous singer in “Jolin’s English Diary Book” |
| D．Jolin Tsai shows us how to learn English in a fun way |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】Great Books Winter Program makes you well-prepared for future college classes and the SAT critical thinking section. Now enrollment (注册) is open. Make your plans today!
Program 1: Great Books & Writer’s Workshop at Pepperdine University One and Two-Week Programs .
Choose the one-week Discussion program. Select Writer’s Workshop for students eager to explore the art of creative writing. Or, stay for both!
One-week Tuition: $2,695 Two-week Tuition: $5.390
Program 2: Great Books & Writer’s Workshop at Amherst College One and Two-Week Programs
We will be offering Discussion programs and a Writer’s Workshop for students eager to explore the art of writing in all forms.
One-week Tuition: $2,495 Two-week Tuition: $4,990
Program 3: Great Books at Stanford University
One and Two-Week Programs
Young people gather to experience reading and life at Stanford University. Join us for one week or two of Great Books Discussion programs!
One-week Tuition: $2.995 Two-week Tuition: $5.990
Program 4: A Tall Ship Adventure
Sail from Bangor to Portland, ME
One Week Program
This program for high school students combines the study of literature with living and learning to sail. Time will be divided into discussion and sailing education with visits to coastal islands.
One-week Tuition: $2,995
Note: All on-campus programs have Materials & Events fees of $225 for one week and $475 for two.
1. If you want to learn about different types of writing, which program should you join in?| A．Program 1. | B．Program 2. | C．Program 3. | D．Program 4. |
| A．$2.995. | B．$3.220. | C．$3,470. | D．$6,215. |
| A．Fishing. | B．Discussing. | C．Learning to sail. | D．Visiting islands. |
【推荐2】My Favourite Books
Jo Usmar is a writer for Cosmopolitan and co-author of the This Book Will series (系列) of lifestyle books. Here she picks her top reads.
Matilda
Roald Dahl
I once wrote a paper on the influence of fairy tales on Roald Dahl’s writing and it gave me a new appreciation for his strange and delightful worlds. Matilda’s battles with her cruel parents and the bossy headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, are equally funny and frightening, but they’re also aspirational.
After Dark
Haruki Murakami
It’s about two sisters — Eri, a model who either won’t or can’t stop sleeping, and Mari, a young student. In trying to connect to her sister, Mari starts changing her life and discovers a world of diverse “night people” who are hiding secrets.
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
Roald Dahl’s writing and it gave me a new appreciation for his strange and delightful worlds. Matilda’s battles with her cruel parents and the bossy headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, are equally funny and frightening, but they’re also aspirational.
After Dark
Haruki Murakami
It’s about two sisters — Eri, a model who either won’t or can’t stop sleeping, and Mari, a young student. In trying to connect to her sister, Mari starts changing her life and discovers a world of diverse “night people” who are hiding secrets.
Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn
There was a bit of me that didn’t want to love this when everyone else on the planet did, but the horror story is brilliant. There’s tension and anxiety from the beginning as Nick and Amy battle for your trust. It’s a real whodunit and the frustration when you realise what’s going on is horribly enjoyable.
The Stand
Stephen King
This is an excellent fantasy novel from one of the best storytellers around. After a serious flu outbreak wipes out 99.4% of the world’s population, a battle unfolds between good and evil among those left. Randall Flagg is one of the scariest characters ever.
1. Who does “I” refer to in the text?| A．Stephen King. | B．Gillian Flynn. | C．Jo Usmar. | D．Roald Dahl |
| A．Cosmopolitan. | B．Matilda. | C．After Dark. | D．The Stand. |
| A．A folk tale. | B．A biography. | C．A love story. | D．A horror story. |
【推荐3】When I was young, a friend and I came up with a “big” plan to make reading easy. The idea was to boil down great books to a sentence each. “Moby-Dick” by American writer Herman Melville, for instance, was reduced to: “A whale of a tale about the one that got away.” As it turned out, the joke was on us. How could a single sentence convey the essence of a masterpiece with over five hundred pages?
Blinkist, a website and an app, now summarizes nonfiction titles in the form of quick takes labeled “blinks”. The end result is more than one sentence, but not by much. Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café” is broken into 11 screens of information; Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” fills 13.
Blinkist has been around since 2012. It calls its summaries “15-minute discoveries” to indicate how long it takes to read a Blinkist summary. “Almost none of us,” the editors assure us, “have the time to read everything we’d like to read.”
But I think a book is something we ought to live with, rather than speed through and categorize. It offers an experience as real as any other. The point of reading a book is not accumulating information, or at least not that alone. The most essential aspect is the communication between writer and reader. The idea behind Blinkist, however, is the opposite: Reading can be, should be, measured by the efficient uptake of key ideas.
No, no, no. What’s best about reading books is its inefficiency. When reading a book, we need to dive in, let it take over us, demand something of us, teach us what it can. Blinkist is instead a service that changes books for people who don’t, in fact, want to read. A 15-minute summary misses the point of reading; speed-reading with the app isn’t reading at all.
1. What does the underlined part “the joke was on us” in Paragraph 1 mean?| A．We were actually joking. | B．We were laughed at by others. |
| C．We laugh at others. | D．We were just embarrassing ourselves. |
| A．an app that can summarize a book | B．a robot who can read |
| C．a person who loves reading | D．a website that can search books |
| A．Obtaining key ideas efficiently. | B．Deeply involving ourselves in books. |
| C．Accumulating information quickly. | D．Further confirming our beliefs. |
| A．Positive. | B．Doubtful. | C．Neutral. | D．Negative. |
【推荐1】Plastic straws (吸管) have been a major problem in global discussions of environmental damage. Maybe because of their small size, the production cost of straws is low. In many countries, straws are offered freely after buying soft drinks. Therefore, plastic straws are one of the most used plastics and pollutants in the world.
The plastic straw is light and small. Due to their small size, plastic straws are often eaten by sea animals. Environmentalists have shown that the death of many sea animals is caused by eating plastic straws. The other damaging characteristic of plastic straws is that they are made of materials which cannot degrade. That means the materials cannot be changed into small harmless (无害的) ones.
The most effective way of dealing with the environmental pollution caused by plastic straws is the reuse or banning (禁止) the use of plastic straws. Being plastics, the straws can be made new items. Many organizations around the world change used straws into new products. In Africa, local communities collect used plastic straws and use them to make mats and bags. Another way of dealing with environmental pollution caused by plastic straws is placing a ban on their production and use. Experts advise governments to ban using plastic straws to save the environment. A few countries in the world such as Rwanda, Macedonia, China, Kenya have already banned the use of plastic bags and are expected to include plastic straws and bottles. But it will be a long way to do this effectively.
There are few environmentally friendly and biodegradable productions to take the place of plastic straws. These productions include paper straws, bamboo straws. However, such straws are usually expensive as their production cost is high. It’s still a question whether they can entirely take the place of plastic straws.
1. Why can people be free to use plastic straws?| A．They are very cheap. | B．They are light and small. |
| C．They are dangerous. | D．They are easy to use. |
| A．Cut up. | B．Because of. | C．Go on. | D．Break out. |
| A．It’s not difficult to ban using plastic straws. |
| B．Many countries have stopped using plastic straws. |
| C．Experts advise people to stop producing plastic straws. |
| D．Some Africans change plastic straws into new products. |
| A．It is a must to use them. |
| B．It’s not easy to reuse them. |
| C．There are still some problems to be solved. |
| D．There are some other kinds of cheaper straws. |
【推荐2】The state of the world’s plants is not strong. One in five plant species faces the risk of disappearance, according to a report. And such loss of plant variety could have destructive influences on our own plant uses.
“Plants are extremely momentous to human beings,” said Kathy Willis, science director at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, who led the new report. “Plants provide us with everything--- food, fuel, medicine, and they are unbelievably important for our climate controlling. Without plants we would not be here.”
The good news is that deforestation rates around the world have decreased to a great extent since the 1950s. However, this first-ever report on the health of plant species around the world shows that there is much more to be done.
The report, named the “State of the World’s Plants”, estimates that there are now about 390,900 plant species known to science. And some 21 percent of those plants are in danger of disappearance. “The positive side is that we’re still discovering lots of new plants, about 2,000 each year, new plants for food, for fuel and for drugs,” said Dr Willis. “The bad side is that we’ve seen a huge change in land cover, mainly driven by cultural activity, with a little bit of climate change in there as well.”
Human activity has a significant effect on the risk of plant disappearance. As humans cut down forests to clear space for agriculture, towns and cities, vast stores of biodiversity (生物多样性) are lost.
Losing the diversity of plants could also be a problem for human use. Not only could this affect our own food supply directly, it could also affect the food web. If a plant-eating animal loses some of its food supplies, that change could affect the food chain.
1. What does the underlined word “momentous” in paragraph 2 probably mean?| A．Crucial. | B．Available. |
| C．Bottomless. | D．Replaceable. |
| A．About 20. | B．About 2,000. |
| C．About 82,000. | D．About 390,900. |
| A．Nature climate change. | B．Loss of vital food bases. |
| C．Destructive human activity. | D．Pollution of the environment. |
| A．To show a big change in land cover. |
| B．To appeal to people to protect biodiversity. |
| C．To reveal some harmful human behavior. |
| D．To introduce some endangered plant species. |
【推荐3】Rats and other animals need to be highly tuned to social signals from others so that can identify friends to cooperate with and enemies to avoid. To find out if this extends to non-living beings, Loleh Quinn at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues tested whether rats can detect social signals form robotic rats.
They housed eight adult rats with two types of robotic rat—one social and one asocial (不爱社交的)—for 5 our days. The robotic rats resembled a bigger version of a computer mouse with wheels to move around and colorful markings.
During the experiment, the social robot rat followed the living rats around, played with the same toys, and opened caged doors to let trapped rats escape. Meanwhile, the asocial robot simply moved forwards and backwards and side to side.
Next, the researchers trapped the robots in cages and gave the rats the opportunity to release them by pressing a button. Across 18 trials each, the living rats were 52 percent more likely on average to set the social robot free than the asocial one. This suggests that the rats perceived the social robot as a genuine social being. They may have bonded more with the social robot, because it displayed behaviours like communal (共同的) exploring and playing. “This could lead to the rats better remembering having freed it earlier, and wanting the robot to return the favour when they get trapped,” says Quinn.
The readiness of the rats to befriend the social robot was surprising given its plain design. The finding shows how sensitive rats are to social signals, even when they come from basic robots. Similarly, children tend to treat robots as if they are fellow beings, even when they display simple social signals. “We humans seem to be fascinated by robots, and it turns out other animals are too,” says Wiles.
1. Quin and her colleagues conducted a test to see if rats can ________.| A．pick up social signals from non-living rats |
| B．distinguish friends from enemies |
| C．learn sociable skills through training |
| D．send out warning messages to their fellows |
| A．It followed the asocial robot. | B．It made friends with toys. |
| C．It set the trapped rats free. | D．It moved around alone. |
| A．They tried to practice a means of escape. |
| B．They expected it to do the same in return. |
| C．They wanted to display their intelligence |
| D．They considered it an interesting game. |
| A．Rats are highly adaptable to new surroundings. |
| B．Rats are more socially active than other animals. |
| C．Rats behave differently from children in socializing. |
| D．Rats are more sensitive to social signals than expected. |
