1 . A giant dam was built many years ago to control the Colorado River in the U.S. This dam was built to protect the land and houses around the river.

This huge dam is in the Black Canyon. It is possible to drive a car from one side of the river to the other on a road, which is on the top of the dam. This dam is so big that there is an elevator inside. The elevator goes down forty-four stories from the road to the bottom. There is enough concrete in this dam to build a highway from New York to San Francisco. Thousands of people worked on this dam for five years.

This huge dam was called Boulder Dam when it was finished in 1936.Later it was renamed Hoover Dam in honor of a president of the United States. Hoover Dam, one of the highest dams in the world, is situated between the states of Arizona and Nevada.

2 . …“I was on the way to a personal-injury accident in West Nashville. As I got onto Highway 40, blue lights and sirens(警笛) going, I fell in behind a gold Pontiac Firebird that suddenly seemed to take off quickly down the highway. The driver somehow panicked at the sight of me. He was going more than a hundred miles an hour and began passing cars on the shoulder.”

3 . …However obvious these facts may appear at first glance, they are actually not so obvious as they seem except when we take special pains to think about the subject.

…

4 . Would you BET on the future of this man？He is 53 years old. Most of his adult life has been a losing struggle against debt and misfortune. A war injury has made his left hand stop functioning，and he has often been in prison. Driven by heaven-knows-what motives，he determines to write a book.

The book turns out to be one that has appealed to the world for more than 350 years. That former prisoner was Cervantes，and the book was Don Quixote（《堂吉诃德》）. And the story poses an interesting question: why do some people discover new vitality and creativity to the end of their days，while others go to seed long before？

We’ve all known people who run out of steam before they reach life’s halfway mark. I’m not talking about those who fail to get to the top. We can’t all get there. I’m talking about people who have stopped learning on growing because they have adopted the fixed attitudes and opinions that all too often come with passing years.

……

5 . Invited by Mr. Ye Huixian, host of the well-received TV programme ＂Stars Tonight＂, Miss Luo Lin, Miss Asia of 1991, appeared as the guest hostess on the Shanghai TV screen last Sunday.

Born in Shanghai and taken to Hongkong when she was only six years old, Luo Lin has never dreamed of being Miss Asia. Her childhood dream was to be an air hostess. Before she took part in the competition, she had been an airhostess in Cathay Airline for seven years. However, it still took her three months to learn the art of walking on the stage, dancing, singing, making-up and other proper manners, designed by the Asia TV Station.

＂It’s really a hard job for me. I won’t enter for such competition any more. Anyhow, I am quite lucky. I am also glad to have had more chance to work for the social welfare since I won the title. This time, in Shanghai, I’d love to make a deep impression on my TV audience,＂ said Luo Lin with a sweet smile.

6 . If you could change your child’s DNA in the future to protect them against diseases, would you? It could be possible because of technology known as CRISPR-Cas, or just CRISPR.

CRISPR involves a piece of RNA, a chemical messenger, designed to work on one part of DNA; it also uses an enzyme (酶) that can take unwanted genes out and put new ones in, according to The Economist. There are other ways of editing DNA, but CRISPR will do it very simply, quickly, and exactly.

The uses of CRISPR could mean that cures are developed for everything from Alzheimer’s to cancer to HIV. By allowing doctors to put just the right cancer-killing genes into a patient’s immune system, the technology could help greatly.

In April scientists in China said they had tried using CRISPR to edit the genomes (基因组) of human embryos. Though the embryos would never turn into humans, this was the first time anyone had ever tried to edit DNA from human beings. With this in mind, the US’ National Academy of Sciences plans to discuss questions about CRISPR’s ethics (伦理问题).

For example, CRISPR doesn’t work properly yet. As well as cutting the DNA it is looking for, it often cuts other DNA, too. In addition, we currently seem to have too little understanding of what DNA gives people what qualities.

There are also moral questions around “playing God”. Of course, medicine already stops natural things from happening —— for example, it saves people from infections. The opportunities to treat diseases make it hard to say we shouldn’t keep going.

A harder question is whether it is ever right to edit human germ-line (种系) cells and make changes that are passed on to children. This is banned in 40 countries and restricted in many others. However, CRISPR means that if genes can be edited out, they can also be edited back in. It may be up to us as a society to decide when and where editing the genome is wrong.

Also, according to The Economist, gene editing may mean that parents make choices that are not obviously in the best interests of their children:“Deaf parents may prefer their children to be deaf too; parents might want to make their children more intelligent at all costs.”

In the end, more research is still needed to see what we can and can’t do with CRISPR. “It’s still a huge mystery how we work,” Craig Mello, a UMass Medical School biologist and Nobel Prize winner, told The Boston Globe. “We’re just trying to figure out this amazingly complicated thing we call life.”

7 . My doorbell rings at 11 a.m. On the step, I find an elderly Chinese lady. She is small and slight. She holds a paper carrier bag in her hands.

I know this lady. It is by no means her first visit. Her daughter, Nicole, bought the house next door last October. Nicole, who is currently in Shanghai, has apparently told her mother that I am having heart surgery shortly, and the result is that her mother has decided I need to be supplied with meals.

I know what is inside the paper carrier bag — a stainless-steel container with a meal of rice, vegetables and either chicken, meat or shrimp. This has become an almost-daily occurrence.

Communication between my benefactor (恩人)and me is somewhat handicapped by the fact that she doesn’t speak English and all I can say in Mandarin is “hello”. Once, she brought an iPad and pointed to the screen, which displayed a message from Nicole telling me that her mother wanted to know if the food was all right.

“Your mother just can’t be bringing me meals like this all the time” I protested. “I can hardly reciprocate by cooking something from my native land, like roast beef or Yorkshire pudding for her” I said.（22）

“Oh, no,” Nicole said. “Don’t worry about that. She has to cook for the family anyway, and she wants to do it for you. You can call her Wing, which is her surname.”

The tenant in my basement suite is a university student who speaks Mandarin quite well, so with her help, I have found out that Wing is 68—13 years younger than I am — and that she lived through the Cultural Revolution. For my part, I was raised in wartime Britain.

So here we are, two grandmothers a world away from where we were raised, neither of us able to speak the other’s language. But the doorbell keeps ringing and there is the familiar paper carrier bag, handed smilingly to me by Wing.

Right now I am working on some more Mandarin words—it’s the least I can do after such a display of kindness.

“Thank you” is, of course, the first one, which somehow seems inadequate.

8 . Parents of pupils at Greasley Beauvale primary school, in Newthorpe, Notts, are marked from A to D based on their involvement with their children’s education. “The system is intended to improve the children’s performance at school by encouraging their parents to attend events, such as parents’ evenings and plays, and help with learning at home.”

It has been in place since 2011 and has become public knowledge these days thanks to a report from Office for Standards in Education(Ofsted) earlier this month. “Children of parents in groups A and B make significantly better progress than those whose parents are in groups C and D, but that the system ensures less-engaged parents are productively supported by the school,” wrote Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, assessing Nottinghamshire schools in his final annual report.

Then how do parents feel about being graded? “It makes my day! Telling a parent what the influence their lack of engagement is having on the life chances of their child is not easy,” said Pat Walker, 63, whose eight-year-old granddaughter attends the school.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous. Those parents who work nine to five won’t have time to have as much input as, say, stay-at-home mums who have the time to contribute more and go to more school events,” said a mother-of-one.

Another mother said: “I try not to take notice of it, but it really angers me that the teachers are just sitting in the room judging us all and giving us marks. It’s one thing when your child gets a bad grade, but now they openly embarrass us parents too. What on earth are teachers for? It is their job, not ours!”

9 . Terrafugia Inc. said Monday that its new flying car has completed its first flight, bringing the company closer to its goal of selling the flying car within the next year. The vehicle —named the Transition – has two seats, four wheels and wings that fold up so it can be driven like a car. The Transition, which flew at 1,400 feet for eight minutes last month, can reach around 70 miles per hour on the road and 115 in the air. It flies using a 23-gallon tank of gas and burns 5 gallons per hour in the air. On the ground, it gets 35 miles per gallon.

Around 100 people have already put down a $10,000 deposit to get a Transition when they go on sale, and those numbers will likely rise after Terrafugia introduces the Transition to the public later this week at the New York Auto Show. But don’t expect it to show up in too many driveways. It’s expected to cost $279,000. And it won’t help if you’re stuck in traffic. The car needs a runway.

Inventors have been trying to make flying cars since the 1930s, according to Robert Mann, an airline industry expert. But Mann thinks Terrafugia has come closer than anyone to making the flying car a reality. The government has already permitted the company to use special materials to make it easier for the vehicle to fly. The Transition  is now going through crash tests to make sure it meets federal safety standards.

Mann said Terrafugia was helped by the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision five years ago to create a separate set of standards for light sport aircraft, which are lower than those for pilots of larger planes. Terrafugia says an owner would need to pass a test and complete 20 hours of flying time to be able to fly the Transition, a requirement pilots would find relatively easy to meet.

10 . The Intelligent Transport team at Newcastle University have turned an electric car into a mobile laboratory named “DriveLAB” in order to understand the challenges faced by older drivers and to discover where the key stress points are.

Research shows that giving up driving is one of the key reasons for a fall in health and well-being among older people, leading to them becoming more isolated (隔绝) and inactive.

Led by Professor Phil Blythe, the Newcastle team are developing in-vehicle technologies for older drivers which they hope could help them to continue driving into later life.

These include custom-made navigation (导航) tools, night vision systems and intelligent speed adaptations. Phil Blythe explains: “For many older people, particularly those living alone or in the country, driving is important for preserving their independence, giving them the freedom to get out and about without having to rely on others.”

“But we all have to accept that as we get older our reactions slow down and this often results in people avoiding any potentially challenging driving conditions and losing confidence in their driving skills. The result is that people stop driving before they really need to.”

Dr Amy Guo, the leading researcher on the older driver study, explains, “The DriveLAB is helping us to understand what the key points and difficulties are for older drivers and how we might use technology to address these problems.

“For example, most of us would expect older drivers always go slower than everyone else but surprisingly, we found that in 30mph zones they struggled to keep at a constant speed and so were more likely to break the speed limit and be at risk of getting fined. We’re looking at the benefits of systems which control their speed as a way of preventing that.

“We hope that our work will help with technological solutions (解决方案) to ensure that older drivers stay safer behind the wheel.”

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