Notice

Looking forward to your active participation.

Shennongjia is said to be the place     1     Yan Di once lived. Some visitors hope that they may even encounter the legendary wild men in the remote mountains and virgin (原始状态的) forests. They do not     2     (actual) see any wild man, but they are attracted by Shennongjia’s vibrant (充满生机的) ecology, rich biodiversity and karst landforms.

Shennongjia’s beauty     3     (vary) over the year as nature takes its course.     4     (tourist) can enjoy flower blossoms in spring, be shaded from the summer heat, appreciate red leaves in autumn     5     go skiing in winter. In 2010s, China announced its plan of     6     (build) 10 pilot national parks for ecosystem preservation, including in Shennongjia Forestry District, Hubei Province.

Official data showed that visitors to Shennongjia Forestry District     7     (reach) about 15. 5 million in 2020. By 2025, the forest area aims     8     (increase) that annual figure to over 30 million, with tourism revenue of more than 10 billion yuan.

Visitors can employ a bus service if they do not drive     9     (they) own cars. The journey to Shennongjia will take up to five hours from nearby Yichang or Shiyan. In May, 2021, Shennongjia was connected to     10       newly built freeway, making the mountainous region more accessible.

5 . It is difficult for a teacher to decide whether to allow students to listen to music in the classroom. Every time students need to write an essay or work on a problem, they say, “Can I put my headphones on? I think better that way.” But is that really true? Does music help concentrate?

Research offers little to back up the idea that listening to music improves concentration. In one small study, 133 students performed reading tasks while listening to either light music, hip hop, or no music at all. Students who performed the reading tasks in silence scored the highest. Music with a higher intensity (强度) like hip hop was more distracting and had a bad effect on task performance.

Volume (音量) plays a more important role than the type of music. The study found that the louder the music, the worse the performance in concentration. The type of music didn’t matter. Data from the study showed once again that silence was the best environment to improve concentration.

However, music has a positive effect on work performance. Studies have showed that listening to music leads to positive changes in mood, as well as creativity. In fact, in music-listening cultures, which students are certainly part of, there’s actually a change in mood when the music is taken away.

It’s hard to convince my students that music doesn’t help with their concentration. Taj, a senior told me, “I wouldn’t be able to concentrate if I were listening to music and trying to read. However, when I write, I feel like music helps me concentrate deeply. I don’t have writer’s block. It’s easy for me to put my words on paper.”

“Maybe not with reading, but when it comes to math, listening to music certainly helps,” Danela told me. “You could actually be singing along with what you’re listening to and doing well in math.”

For almost every morning, the sun rose to greet the day and the birds sang its songs outside an upstairs window of the house. Inside, Jeff and Jenna would wake up.

Usually, the brother and sister got along very well. They took turns nicely with the bathroom. They said “please” and “thank you” at breakfast. They often sat together on the school bus. Afterschool they worked together happily on their special project—their own backyard house.

But one gray morning they didn’t get along well at all! Maybe it was the weather, or maybe the birds slept late. But whatever it was, they got into an angry argument.

Jenna opened her eyes and stretched. Then she sat up and let her legs dangle (悬挂) over the edge of herbed—right in Jeff’s face. She didn’t mean it. It was just one of those things that happens with a bunkbed (双层床).

That morning Jeff was not in a very good mood.

“Jenna!” he shouted. “Get your silly feet out of my face!”

“My feet aren’t silly, and they’re not in your face!” she shouted back.

Before Jeff could answer, she skipped into the bathroom ahead of him. She took a very longtime brushing her teeth, washing up, and combing her hair.

“You’d better come out of that bathroom!” shouted Jeff, banging (猛敲) on the door.

“Jeff, ”said Mama, coming out of her bedroom, “you know better than to shout at your sister.”

“But she’s taking too long in the bathroom,” complained Jeff. “And she’s doing it on purpose!”

When Jeff banged on the door again, it opened and out came Jenna, all dressed up.

“Good morning, Mama,” she said, taking no notice of Jeff at all.

Jeff and Jenna kept avoiding each other that day.

“That’s enough, ”said Mama seriously.

7 . Imran, 22, is in his second year studying community development at college. But after he puts down his books, he spends most of his spare time helping ______ families.

Imran leads a team of 350 youth volunteers at IMVN, an on-profit founded by himself. Since 2020, Imran has ______ more than 200 small social events, like distributing food and raising funds. That’s pretty ______ considering that in 2020, Imran was just 19 years old.

Imran is committed to helping lower-income families, because he ______ first-hand how it was to be in need. When in middle school, he and his family ______ together in a one-room shelter. “It was tough living there because of the ______ constraint (束缚). There was no privacy; it also made studying ______,” Imran recalled. “But it also opened my eyes to the ______ of being less privileged,” he added.

They had to stay in that shelter for two years before managing to ______ for a rental flat. They have been living there since. It was his experiences living in a ______ that influenced his passion for volunteer work. “I know how it feels to have ______, so I really understand how our beneficiaries (受益者) feel, so it gives me ______ to continue assisting them,   says Imran.

His passion for volunteering was something that ______ overtime. ______, he started volunteering because it was a free activity that could keep him occupied. Now, he feels satisfied when he is able to help bring a ______ to people’s face.

8 . Sleep is widely recognized as one of life’s necessary processes. But do you know that sleepless nights can also lead to selfish behavior? Insufficient sleep affects how likely a person is to help someone, according to new research published in the journal PLOS Biology.

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, conducted three studies looking at this “selfish” effect, analyzing changes in neural (神经系统的) activity and behavior that benefit others, and found it was common even after a small loss of sleep.

Research scientists Eti Ben Simon and Matthew Walker told that this finding was most surprising. “Even if we lose just one hour of sleep, it is enough to influence the choice to help another and hit our natural human kindness and our motivation to help other people in need,” said Ben Simon.

In the first study, by looking at a database of 3 million charitable donations between 2001 and 2016, Eti Ben Simon, Matthew Walker and their colleagues saw a 10% drop in donations following Daylight Saving Time (夏令时). This drop was not seen in states that don’t follow the one-hour forward. In the second study, the researchers looked at the brain activity of 24 people after eight hours of sleep and after a night of no sleep. The areas of the brain associated with theory of mind were less active after sleep loss, this study found. In the third study, which measured the sleep of more than 100 people across three to four nights, researchers unexpectedly found that sleep quantity and quality both typically influenced emotional and social behavior. “These findings could suggest that once sleep time rises above some basic amount, sleep quality is the most critical factor that influences desire to help other people,” Dr. Ivana Rosenzweig, asleep physician said.

Ben Simon and Walker hope their research will allow people to regain a full night of sleep if necessary. “Sleep loss fundamentally changes the way we are social and emotional creatures,” Walker said.

9 . Over the past 50 years, it turns out that high-speed trains are not just reducing journey times, but most importantly, it’s driving economic growth, creating job opportunities and bringing communities closer together.

Although Japan started the trend with its Shinkansen “Bullet Trains” in 1964, it was the coming of France’s TGV in the early 1980s that really promoted a global high-speed train revolution that continued to speedup. China has built around 42,000 kilometers of high-speed railways since 2008 and plans to top 70,000 kilometers by 2035.

But the United States detoured the revolution. For the rich and economically successful nation on the planet, with an increasingly urbanized population of more than 300 million, it is increasingly difficult to give a good reason. Cars and airplanes have dominated long-distance travel in the United States since the 1950s. Now Americans still almost entirely depend on crowded highways or the headache-causing stress of an airport and airline network.

“Many Americans have no concept of high-speed rail and fail to see its value,” says William C. Vantuono, editor-in-chief of Railway Age, North America’s oldest railroad industry publication.

“It’s logical that the United States hasn’t yet developed a nationwide high-speed network, ”says Scott Sherin, chief commercial officer of train builder Alstom’s US division. “For decades, traveling by car wasn’t a hardship, but as highway congestion (堵塞) gets worse, we’ve reached a stage where we should start looking more seriously for the alternatives.”

“The magic numbers are centers of population with around three million people that are 200 to 500 miles apart, giving a trip time of less than three hours—preferably two hours. Where those conditions apply in Europe and Asia, high-speed rail reduces air’s share of the market from 100% to near zero. The model would work just as well in the USA as it does globally,” adds Scott Sherin.