Fifteen years ago, I was born in a big family. I had been taught that money couldn't buy everything ever since I was a little kid. My parents are the most hard-working people I have ever seen. As much as my parents tried to teach me these values, some could only be learned through personal experiences.
As a child, I would sit in the church trying to concentrate on the words of the priest (牧师), but my attention was soon attracted by the shining gold and the diamonds worn by the Saturday churchgoers. As my eyes began to wander, I noticed men dressed in their tailored suits and shirts accompanied by women in their designer dresses with matching handbags and shoes.
My family, on the other hand, was the opposite of rich. Our hand-me-down clothes had been washed so many times that the colors had become dull and lifeless. Although this revealed the money struggles of our large family, our faces were always washed and hair neatly combed. When sitting on the old big red and white truck after the service, I pictured the lives led by those driving their brand-new cars, wishing I would be one of them.
I never stopped those fantasies, even when I was in middle school. Since it was a private school, most of the children came from wealthy families. As a result, I constantly felt ashamed. Although I could hide my lack of wealth at school by wearing our school uniforms, my poverty was embarrassingly apparent on weekends with my classmates wearing designer jeans and I had no choice but to wear my sisters’ old jeans. I never fitted in with my classmates. To my relief, there was only one girl named Julie who opened her heart to me. I was attached to her like a shadow. Soon, her birthday was approaching. Julie invited me to attend her birthday party.
注意：1．所续写短文的词数应为150左右；2．续写部分分为两段，每段的开头语已为你写好。
Paragraph 1：
However, I grew upset as I couldn't afford a gift.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Paragraph 2：
When she opened the gift box, my heart was too nervous to beat.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________2 . In 1953, when visiting his daughter’s maths class, the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner found every pupil learning the same topic in the same way at the same speed. Later, he built his first “teaching machine”, which let children tackle questions at their own pace. Since then, education technology (edtech) has repeated the cycle of hype and flop (炒作和失败), even as computers have reshaped almost every other part of life.
Softwares to “personalize” learning can help hundreds of millions of children stuck in miserable classes—but only if edtech supporters can resist the temptation to revive harmful ideas about how children learn. Alternatives have so far failed to teach so many children as efficiently as the conventional model of schooling, where classrooms, hierarchical year-groups, standardized curriculums and fixed timetables are still the typical pattern for most of the world’s nearly 1.5 billion schoolchildren. Under this pattern, too many do not reach their potential. That condition remained almost unchanged over the past 15 years, though billions have been spent on IT in schools during that period.
What really matters then? The answer is how edtech is used. One way it can help is through tailor-made instruction. Reformers think edtech can put individual attention within reach of all pupils. The other way edtech can aid learning is by making schools more productive. In California schools, instead of textbooks, pupils have “playlists”, which they use to access online lessons and take tests. The software assesses children’s progress, lightening teachers’ marking load and allowing them to focus on other tasks. A study suggested that children in early adopters of this model score better in tests than their peers at other schools.
Such innovation is welcome. But making the best of edtech means getting several things right. First, “personalized learning” must follow the evidence on how children learn. It must not be an excuse to revive pseudoscientific ideas such as “learning styles”: the theory that each child has a particular way of taking in information. This theory gave rise to government-sponsored schemes like Brain Gym, which claimed that some pupils should stretch or bend while doing sums. A less consequential falsehood is that technology means children do not need to learn facts or learn from a teacher—instead they can just use Google. Some educationalists go further, arguing that facts get in the way of skills such as creativity. Actually, the opposite is true. According to studies, most effective ways of boosting learning nearly all relied on the craft of a teacher.
Second, edtech must narrow, rather than widen, inequalities in education. Here there are grounds for optimism. Some of the pioneering schools are private ones in Silicon Valley. But many more are run by charter-school groups teaching mostly poor pupils, where laggards (成绩落后者) make the most progress relative to their peers in normal classes. A similar pattern can be observed outside America.
Third, the potential for edtech will be realized only if teachers embrace it. They are right to ask for evidence that products work. But skepticism should not turn into irrational opposition. Given what edtech promises today, closed-mindedness has no place in the classroom.
1. According to the passage, education technology can ________.| A．decrease teachers’ working load |
| B．facilitate personalized learning |
| C．help standardize curriculums |
| D．be loved by schoolchildren |
| A．The students who are better at memorization tend to be less creative. |
| B．Schools with bans on phones have better results than high-tech ones. |
| C．Shakespeare was trained in grammar but he penned many great plays. |
| D．Lu Xun’s creativity was unlocked after he gave up studying medicine. |
| A．at the service of teaching |
| B．limited in use among pupils |
| C．aimed at narrowing the wealth gap |
| D．in line with students’ learning styles |
| A．To stress the importance of edtech. |
| B．To introduce the application of edtech. |
| C．To discuss how to get the best out of edtech. |
| D．To appeal for more open-mindedness to edtech. |
It was a Saturday last year, and my husband, David, and I were taking our dog, Joey, for his evening walk. We were on our way home, heading towards a bridge, when I heard a cry ahead.
As we approached, I saw a figure sitting down on the ground, uncomfortably close to the wall. It was a young man, clearly in distress, crying and shouting, his whole body shaking. I froze, suddenly aware of the gravity of the situation. The bridge ran over a high-speed train track and was a well-known suicide spot. A local family had lost their teenager in that exact place a few weeks earlier.
David and I exchanged glances. There was no one around. I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if his death was reported the next day and I’d done nothing.
I inched towards the young man and Joey instinctively glued to my side. I asked him if I could sit down, and then lowered myself on to the ground opposite him, while Joey sandwiched himself between us. I tried a few gentle questions: “What’s your name? How old are you? What do you do?” His answers were simple. “Tommy. 23. Computer. ”
“Are you OK?” I asked. “No, I’m not” he shouted back. He muttered something about a betrayal, not knowing what to do. His emotions were swinging wildly—tears one moment and fierce anger the next. I was desperate to make a connection, asking him where he went to college and feigning(装作) delight as I told him my son had studied there, too. I even found myself recounting the story of Neil Layboum, who had talked a man down from Waterloo Bridge in London 10 years ago.
Paragraph1：
I kept talking, trying to alter his mood.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Paragraph2：
When the train passed, I let out a sigh.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Honesty is a vital quality of human behavior and always regarded as a virtue.Every time people refer to the topic, I would recall an unforgettable experience which had a deep impact on my growth.
I was 16 when one morning, Dad told me I could drive him to Mijas, a town 18 miles away and then take the car in a nearby garage to get it serviced.At that time,I had just passed the driving test, and I hardly had a chance to use the car, so I said yes without hesitation.
I drove my father to Mijas,promising to pick him up again at 4 pm, then I went to a nearby garage,and put the car in there. Since I had several hours to spare, I decided to go to a movie theater near the garage to see a movie. However, I was so absorbed in the plot of the movie that l forgot the time. When the last movie finished, I looked at my watch:6 pm.I was two hours late!
I thought my father would be very angry if he knew what I was doing. And he would never let me drive again. So I decided to make up an excuse. Then, I drove to the appointed place,my father was sitting in a corner, waiting patiently. I first apologized for being late, then told him that I wanted to get there as soon as possible, but that something was wrong with some of the main parts of the car.
I would never forget the way he looked at me. “ I'm very disappointed that you thought you had to lie to me, Jason.” My father looked at me again and said, “When you didn’t show up on time, I called the gas station and asked if there was anything wrong. They told me you never picked up the car. So, you see, I know there's nothing wrong with the car at all.”
Paragraph 1
A wave of guilt swept over me.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Paragraph 2
＂I'm going to walk home now and think where I have gone wrong all these years,"father said to me.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Desiree, a 4-year-old girl, was sobbing quietly over her father, Ken, who had died nine months earlier. She was hugging a photograph of her father with her fingers running around his face. “Daddy”, she said softly, “Why won't you come back?”
Instead of gradually adjusting to her father's death, Desiree refused to accept it “Daddy will be home soon,” she'd tell her mother. “He's at work.” When she played with her toy telephone, she pretended she was chatting with her father “I miss you, Daddy,” she'd say. “When will you come back?” Desiree's situation made her mother worried.
Days later, it was Ken's birthday. “How will I send him a card?” Desiree asked her mother “How about if we tie a litter to a balloon.” her mother said, “and send it up to heaven?” Desiree's eyes immediately lit up.
Her mother took her to a store and Desiree picked out a balloon with HAPPY BIRTHDAY above a drawing of The Little Mermaid (美人鱼). Desire and her father had often watched it.
The child's eyes shone as they were on the way to Ken's grave. Then Desiree dictated (口述) a letter to her Dad. “Daddy, Happy birthday, I love you and miss you,” she rattled off (快速说). “I hope you get this and can write to me on my birthday in January.”
Her mother wrote the message and their address on a small piece of paper, which was then wrapped in plastic and tied to the end of the string on the balloon. Finally, Desiree let fly the balloon. For almost an hour, they watched the shining spot of silver grow smaller and smaller till disappear. “Now Dad's going to write back to me,” Desiree said confidently.
Every day since they'd flew the balloon, Desiree had asked her mother, “Do you think Daddy has my balloon yet?” Several weeks passed, and she stopped asking.
Paragraph 1One day, 3,000 miles away, Wade was on a duck hunt when suddenly something in the bush caught his eyes. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Paragraph 2
Desire's fifth birthday came and later on the afternoon, a package arrived.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Alexis Vaughan, 17, sat quietly in the passenger seat of her dad's car. She stared out the window at the Preston, Idaho, cornfields.
Alexis, a high school student, let her eyes lazily scan the landscape for wildlife. Still, she was terrified when a deer came into view about 200 yards in front of them, just a few feet off the road. "Dad, there's a deer, there!" Alexis said, rolling down the window for a better look. It was a three-point buck (雄鹿) — a male deer with sharp, three-pronged antlers (角) on each side of its head.
As the car moved closer, Alexis saw that the buck's head was bent toward the ground. Then she heard a scream. A few seconds later, she saw an arm fly up near the buck's head. Alexis realized the buck was attacking a woman. Sue Panter, a 44-year-old mother, had been out for her morning run. The buck had come out from the tall corn and began following her. Having lived in rural Idaho for years, Sue knew that most bucks got frightened by humans. But this buck edged closer, even when she threw at it with a handful of gravels (石子).
Sue went to pick up a log to use for self-defense, and the buck attacked her. It lifted her with its antlers (角) and threw her into the air. Sue could feel the horns punctured (刺穿) her leg and blood flowed down her leg. Within seconds, the buck had pushed her off the road and into the cornfield.
When Alexis and her father pulled up, the buck was rolling Sue like a rag doll. Alexis looked into the woman's terrified eyes, and before her father had even stopped the car, the 104 pound teenager jumped quickly out of the car and down the slope toward the buck. She was kicking and hitting it to get its attention. Then Michael, her father, who had followed his daughter, wrestled the buck away from the women by holding the antlers.
注意：
1）所续写短文的词数应为150左右；
2） 续写部分分为两段，每段的开头语已为你写好；
Paragraph 1:
Alexis helped Sue up the slope.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Paragraph 2:
Then she heard her father yell.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
7 . Feeling achy and feverish? Your misery has plenty of company. By the end of December, the tally (计数器) of flu-like illnesses in the state exceeded the peaks in the two previous seasons, when the biggest number of cases occurred in February and March. This time, the flu virus seems to be hitting even harder.
Flu is unique among human diseases. It circulates constantly in cool and dry areas. Because it spreads from person to person and can be picked up easily, nearly everyone is exposed. While it’s unclear whether the annual flu epidemic (流行病) will worsen this year, or just arrived earlier, fears have been increased by the severity of flu in Australia during its most recent season and the fact that the vaccine may protect against the predominant (盛行的) kind of the flu only 30 percent of the time.
Despite the worries, doctors and public health officials say there is no evidence that people are getting sicker than usual. Flu cases in Massachusetts started rising around Thanksgiving and increased steadily, with an especially steep climb in the last week of the year. “This is a bad flu season but not a horrible one,” said Dr. Andrew G. Villanueva, a lung specialist and chief quality officer at the Lahey Hospital & Medieal Centre in Burlington.
The flu season, while clearly in full swing, doesn’t “feel different” from previous years, Villanueva said. “We’re not seeing a lot of people being hospitalized because of flu,” he said. “Most people with the flu recover on their own without medical care.”
1. What’s the function of the first paragraph?| A．A lead-in. | B．A comment. | C．A summary. | D．A background. |
| A．The outbreak of the flu is terrible. |
| B．The flu has arrived earlier than before. |
| C．The vaccine against the nu is highly effective. |
| D．Everyone feels horrible at the mention of the flu. |
| A．Crowded | B．Changeable | C．Permanent | D．Active |
| A．To explain what flu is. |
| B．To rid people of flu panic. |
| C．To warn readers of how serious the flu is. |
| D．To inform readers how to prevent the flu. |
Growing up on a small farm, I lived a life that I took for granted. My father worked in the city as a plumber(水暖工).He was not highly educated, but he was smart, looking at problems in an engineer’s way. He was a man made of leather, brass and chewing tobacco who tried to teach my brother and me useful things, including respect. He also had a temper and was strict with us for he would scold us when we made some careless mistakes. Sometimes, my father seemed like a distant enemy to me and I didn’t like him very much.
One day I came home from primary school and his car was already there. Once inside, I was told by my mother that he didn’t feel well. His back hurt. My father never missed work; in fact, when he came home, he went to the barn to work even more. I remember looking at him secretly around the corner as he lay on his bed in the middle of the day.
Later, my mother told me he got multiple myeloma(多发性骨髓瘤),a type of cancer. As the cancer grows, the person will shrink because the disease destroys the body’s energy and the abnormal antibodies cause problems for other cells and tissue. Bones eventually look like Swiss cheese, and when they break, they may never heal. But I didn’t realize that my father’s time was rather limited and just treated him the same way I used to.
For the last year of my fathers life, his entire day consisted df rising from his hospital bed in the living room and walking to his chair to sit and think. He was predictably in that chair when I came home one day during the ninth grade. I do not remember where my mother and brother were, but the two of us were alone.
Paragraph 1 :
He asked me to sit down and what he told me still moves me these decades Later.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Paragraph 2 :
At that moment, I realized that he was doing more than telling.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last Christmas my older sister Jane got a unicycle (独轮脚踏车) she had requested. I thought it kind of strange, wondering why she would want something like that. She did ride and practice for a while, but eventually stopped.
Curious, I tried it, finding it very hard and thinking it impossible for a weak girl like me to learn. Since our dining room of our old house had low beams (屋梁), I used them like monkey bars to practice riding, which helped a lot. Because I thought it was really fun, I practiced every spare moment I had, teaching myself to go forwards, backwards and to turn. Practicing was something I loved to do in my spare time, but it did get discouraging when I fell. After months of practicing, I finally made it.
One morning, our teacher Maria excitedly announced that a school talent show was to be held to raise money for charity. She encouraged my classmates to sign up for it. I’m not always best in front of a crowd, which was why I was very nervous when I meant to put on my performance by doing a hula hoop (圈) and riding a unicycle on stage. But I overcame my fear and entered myself for the talent show, for which I practiced a lot in case I should mess up.
My routine (整套动作) was to do the hula hoop from my neck, down to my stomach, then to my knees. After that, I was to ride my unicycle forwards and backwards on stage. Lastly I would do the hula hoop while riding the unicycle. I was to do all this accompanied by my carefully selected music. I wondered what people from my seventh grade would think of my performance. With my friends inspiring me, I built up my confidence. On the night of the show, many people found out there was going to be a unicycle performance, so more came, even the headmaster.
Para. 1: I was both nervous and excited when it was my turn.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Para. 2: When I got home, I couldn’t wait to check my mobile phone left at home.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________As Amy Hagadorn rounded the corner across the hall from her classroom, she ran into a tall boy from the fifth grade running in the opposite direction.
“Watch it, dwarf.” The boy yelled as he kept away the little third-grader. Then, with an unfriendly smile on his face, the boy took hold of his right leg and imitated the way Amy limped (跛行)when she walked.
Amy closed her eyes for a moment. “Forget it”! she told herself as she headed for her classroom. But at the end of the day, Amy was still thinking about the tall boy’s mean teasing (嘲弄). It wasn’t as if he were the only one. It seemed that ever since Amy started the third grade, someone teased her every single day. Kids teased her about her speech or her limping. Amy was tired of it. Sometimes, even in a classroom full of other students, the teasing made her feel all alone.
Back home at the dinner table that evening, Amy was quiet. Her mother knew that things were not going well at school.
“There’s a Christmas wish contest on the newspaper,” Amy’s mom announced. “Write a letter to Santa, and you might win a prize”.
The contest sounded like fun to Amy. She started thinking about what she wanted most for Christmas. A smile took hold of Amy when the idea first came to her. Out came pencil and paper, and Amy went to work on her letter.
While Amy worked away at her writing, the rest of the family tried to guess what she might ask from Santa. Amy’s sister, Jamie, and Amy’s mom both thought a three-foot Barbie doll would top Amy’s wish list. Amy’s dad guessed a picture book. But Amy wasn’t ready to reveal her secret Christmas wish just then. Here is Amy’s letter to Santa, just as she wrote it that night:
注意：
1．所续写的短文的词数应为150左右；
2．续写部分分为两段，每段的开头语已为你写好；
Paragraph 1：
“Dear Santa Claus,” she began.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Paragraph 2：
The next day, a picture of Amy and her letter to Santa made the front page of the News Sentinel.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
