1 . Via Rail
Train Tickets from New York to Washington
Station | Departure | Arrival | Price |
Penn Station—Union Station | 12:20 am | 3:57 am | $19 |
Penn Station Union Station | 4:20 am | 8:33 am | $29 |
Penn Station—Union Station | 6:02 am | 10:14 pm | $60 |
Penn Station—Union Station | 8:00 am | 10:58 am | $70 |
Discount Policies
Seniors (above 60 years old) can benefit from a 20% discount offered by Via Rail, making it a cost-effective choice for their travel needs.
Luggage(行李) Allowance and Restriction
Via Rail allows passengers to bring up to four pieces of luggage. Carry-on items must not exceed (超过) 50 pounds and checked luggage must not weigh more than 50 pounds per item.
Passengers are allowed to bring bicycles and sports equipment on Via Rail trains.
Food and Drink Service
Via Rail provides food and drink service for purchase, offering a variety of dining options to passengers.
Payment
Via Rail accepts various payment methods, including credit cards, Interac Online, and pre-paid credit cards. It is advisable to check the website for the most up-to-date information on accept able payment methods.
Facilities for Passengers with Special Needs
Via Rail is committed to providing accessibility for all passengers. The trains are equipped with accessible restrooms, seating areas, and boarding assistance for passengers with mobility issues. Additionally, staff members are trained to assist passengers with disabilities to ensure a comfortable travel experience.
E-ticketing
Via Rail offers the option to use the e-ticketing system, allowing passengers to present their ticket on a mobile device without the need for printing.
1. Which train takes the least time?| A．The 12:20 am one. | B．The 4:20 am one. | C．The 6:02 am one. | D．The 8:00 am one. |
| A．$60. | B．$96. | C．$112. | D．$120. |
| A．It serves food and drink for free. | B．It is developing a new e-ticketing system. |
| C．It doesn’t allow sports equipment on board. | D．It provides convenient access to the disabled. |
Beth brought Louis to me when she came to visit me again.
I had to quit school and stay in the recovery center because of a rare disease. Beth was my best friend in the writing workshop. We just clicked. We both dreamed of taking writing as our career. So we often wrote about our life and shared it with each other. We even promised each other to co-author a book, a book of our own. But now ...
“I’m applying for my college this term. So I’ll be very busy in the following days. Please help me look after Louis, please ... Just drop me a quick note about it when it’s convenient for you.” She pressed her hands tightly together and looked at me anxiously. I stared at Louis, feeling bitter but hard to refuse. Beth kissed me goodbye.
That evening, I was left alone in the room, with the dog. Louis looked at me, shaking his tail. But I felt uninterested, so I lay on the bed, closing my eyes. Then some noises woke me up.
It was Louis, of course. This six-month-old puppy was laboriously(费力地) dragging his. large, hard-sided carrier. I watched in amazement. Then Louis dragged his worldly possessions, one by one: first, his bowl, then his ball and sweater. This project took most of the evening.
What happened next made me realize that not only did this dog have a mission but he obviously put thought and reasoning into each move. He took each of the personal items and put them in the carrier. After Louis finished packing his “suitcase”, he attempted to jump inside.
The message was quite clear. He wanted to go see his “mommy”—Beth. He must have seen her pack her suitcase and go away. He must do the same so he could find her.
It was so interesting that I couldn’t help taking out a pen and beginning to describe the whole thing in great detail and then emailed it to Beth. I almost got Beth’s reply immediately.
注意：1. 续写词数应为150左右;
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
“Tell me more about Louis.” Beth begged at the end of her email.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
That summer, Beth gave me a special gift—a book of Louis’ daily journal.
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Xixi, located less than five kilometers from the West Lake in the west of Hangzhou, is China’s first national wetland park. The area covers about 10 square kilometers and it
Wetlands themselves are one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems,
Xixi’s native vegetation,
4 . Nowadays, the demand on charities is greater than ever.
Have you heard of the Ice Bucket (桶) Challenge? The social media initiative started in the United States and spread around the world, raising $115 million for the research on ALS (渐冻症) — a disease which Hawking suffered from. You take a video of yourself dumping (倾倒) a bucket of ice water over your head, and then encourage three more people to do the same.
Manju Kalanidhi, a journalist in India, thought it was an amazing way to raise awareness of ALS and raise funds for its research.
“
Manju didn’t have a big army of volunteers, but she did have donations and people who need food.
| A．But it didn’t make sense in her country. |
| B．In such a novel way, she put them together successfully. |
| C．The rate of giving has increased among the wealthiest nations. |
| D．I gave a bucket of rice to someone in need and clicked a photo. |
| E．Luckily, the world never goes short of kind and creative souls. |
| F．This has been making it so easy to motivate people to give back. |
| G．The participant donates $100 if they don’t complete the challenge. |
5 . We tend to think of large cities as melting pots — places where people from all sorts of backgrounds can mix and interact. But according to new research, people in big cities tend to primarily interact with other individuals in the same socioeconomic bracket (阶层), but people in small cities and rural areas are much more likely to have diverse interactions.
The researchers used GPS data collected in 2017 from 9.6 million cellphones across 382 metropolitan (大都市的) areas in the United States to determine how often people of different socioeconomic ranks crossed paths during the day — essentially how many times people had the opportunity to interact, even briefly, with someone in a different income bracket. They collected data on almost 1.6 billion path-crossings.
This large amount of extremely precise data allowed the researchers to see what has been missed by similar studies in the past. People living in the 10 most populous metropolitan areas, which include cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, along with their surrounding areas, were significantly less likely to interact with people of different socioeconomic ranks than people in metropolitan areas with fewer than 100,000 residents.
The good news is that there are ways to build cities to promote more socioeconomic mixing. Looking at large cities, the researchers found that those that placed frequently-visited hubs (中心) in between different neighborhoods — instead of in the center of each neighborhood — were less separated.
“These big cities have managed to develop diverse interactions because the hubs that people visit the most — which turn out to be shopping centers, squares, and similar places — are between rich and poor neighborhoods,” said Hamed Nilforoshan, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University. “Those hubs act as bridges, allowing people to see each other and interact.”
1. What might be a conclusion of the new research?| A．Urban residents interact more. | B．Large cities act as melting pots. |
| C．Urbanization leads to different social ranks. | D．Big cities showcase socioeconomic separation. |
| A．By bridging the income brackets. | B．By studying the frequency of interaction. |
| C．By comparing residents’ behavior patterns. | D．By collecting data on people’s social ranks. |
| A．Position the hubs properly. | B．Construct more shopping centers. |
| C．Control the urban expansion. | D．Design unique residential neighborhoods. |
| A．Income Bracket: What to Do with It? | B．Diverse Interactions Count in Big Cities |
| C．Socioeconomic Separation: How to Fix It? | D．Metropolitan Cities Are Great Melting Pots |
6 . When scientists and the public worry about sea level rise, they mostly focus on when and where communities will be permanently flooded. But there’s another consequence of rising seas that will affect many more people much sooner: getting cut off from roads and other critical infrastructure (基础设施). It’s a threat that society has not paid nearly enough attention to, says Allison Reilly, a civil engineer at the University of Maryland.
In a new paper, Reilly and her colleagues show the width and pace of the isolation (隔离) threat. Inspired by her work on the eastern shore of Maryland, where people already need to adjust their travel and work schedules to account for tides that frequently flood roads, Reilly and her colleagues calculated that, with one meter of sea level rise, twice as many people across the coastal United States will be isolated than will be fully flooded.
Worse still, many places currently considered at low risk of sea level rise suddenly become much riskier when isolation is taken into account, Reilly says. While planners know that low-lying Florida will be severely flooded, Maine, with its high rocky coasts, is generally thought to be at low risk. But Reilly’s work shows many Mainers are in great danger of being cut off by flooding in coastal communities and river valleys.
This far more immediate effect of rising seas needs to become part of the broader planning process. That kind of planning is starting to happen around the Chignecto Isthmus, an interprovincial land bridge in Canada, connecting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The New Brunswick and Nova Scotia governments are considering a variety of plans to raise or replace the dikes (坝). For Ollerhead, a Nova Scotian, that work can’t start soon enough. “It will take a lot of sea level rise before Nova Scotia becomes an island, but you could have a storm that cuts off the major transportation links for days, weeks, or months,” he says. “It’s nearly impossible to predict when, but it will happen eventually.”
1. What is the threat Allison Reilly mentioned in paragraph 1?| A．The rising sea level. | B．Flood-related isolation. |
| C．Permanent flooded areas. | D．Irreparable infrastructure. |
| A．Conclusions of a new paper. | B．Calculations of collected data. |
| C．Situations of Eastern Maryland. | D．Influences on coastal United States. |
| A．To clarify a point. | B．To offer a solution. |
| C．To present an assumption. | D．To illustrate a reason. |
| A．Dismissive. | B．Doubtful. | C．Favorable. | D．Unclear. |
7 . My daughter said she wanted to redecorate her room. The thought of tackling a room redecorating project intimidated me, but I knew that following through on helping my girl create a new space for herself would mean a lot to her. So, I worked up my courage.
Together, my daughter and I set a budget for our project, spread paint samples on her wall and calculated how much paint we’d need. And finally deep breath — we started painting. Neither of us had ever painted a room before. After rolling a paint roller across her wall for the first time, my daughter frowned (皱眉) and said, “Maybe we should hire someone to do the painting for us, Mom.”
I couldn’t help wondering if she might be right, but I assured her that if we followed the painting pointers we’d studied and took our time, we could do a fine job. I didn’t want her to miss out on the wonderful feeling of competence that comes from trying something you want to do but fear you might not be able to do.
There had been many times when we’d realized we had been in the wrong way and had to do it again. We had to problem-solve with whoever might help. Finally, we finished the painting. It was not perfect, but the overall effect made my daughter really happy. It was her ideas and work that made all visible.
Thinking about doing such a project with my daughter, it struck me that she got to see me being a rank beginner — messing up and starting over all the way. She watched me looking up answers when I needed them and asking for help when I hit dead ends. Instead of being an authority with all the answers, I learned with her. I showed my daughter what learning looks like, in all its messy glory. That’s definitely the best part I’ll treasure.
1. What does the underlined word “intimidated” in paragraph 1 probably mean?| A．Inspired. | B．Frightened. | C．Reminded. | D．Attracted. |
| A．To overcome her fear of failure. | B．To keep the project under budget. |
| C．To show her talent for decoration. | D．To let the kid enjoy the joy of success. |
| A．Being a rank beginner. | B．Being a success in decorating. |
| C．Being a model learner. | D．Being an authority with all answers. |
| A．Reflective. | B．Enthusiastic. | C．Ambitious. | D．Demanding. |
8 . Mark Twain has been called the inventor of the American novel. And he surely deserves additional praise: the man who popularized the clever literary attack on racism.
I say clever because anti-slavery fiction had been the important part of the literature in the years before the Civil War. H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is only the most famous example. These early stories dealt directly with slavery. With minor exceptions, Twain planted his attacks on slavery and prejudice into tales that were on the surface about something else entirely. He drew his readers into the argument by drawing them into the story.
Again and again, in the postwar years, Twain seemed forced to deal with the challenge of race. Consider the most controversial, at least today, of Twain’s novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Only a few books have been kicked off the shelves as often as Huckleberry Finn, Twain’s most widely read tale. Once upon a time, people hated the book because it struck them as rude. Twain himself wrote that those who banned the book considered the novel “trash and suitable only for the slums (贫民窟).” More recently the book has been attacked because of the character Jim, the escaped slave, and many occurrences of the word nigger. (The term Nigger Jim, for which the novel is often severely criticized, never appears in it. )
But the attacks were and are silly — and miss the point. The novel is strongly anti-slavery. Jim’s search through the slave states for the family from whom he has been forcibly parted is heroic. As J. Chadwick has pointed out, the character of Jim was a first in American fiction — a recognition that the slave had two personalities, “the voice of survival within a white slave culture and the voice of the individual: Jim, the father and the man.”
There is much more. Twain’s mystery novel Pudd’nhead Wilson stood as a challenge to the racial beliefs of even many of the liberals of his day. Written at a time when the accepted wisdom held Negroes to be inferior (低等的) to whites, especially in intelligence, Twain’s tale centered in part around two babies switched at birth. A slave gave birth to her master’s baby and, for fear that the child should be sold South, switched him for the master’s baby by his wife. The slave’s light-skinned child was taken to be white and grew up with both the attitudes and the education of the slave-holding class. The master’s wife’s baby was taken for black and grew up with the attitudes and intonations of the slave.
The point was difficult to miss: nurture (养育), not nature, was the key to social status. The features of the black man that provided the stuff of prejudice — manner of speech, for example — were, to Twain, indicative of nothing other than the conditioning that slavery forced on its victims.
Twain’s racial tone was not perfect. One is left uneasy, for example, by the lengthy passage in his autobiography about how much he loved what were called “nigger shows” in his youth — mostly with white men performing in black-face — and his delight in getting his mother to laugh at them. Yet there is no reason to think Twain saw the shows as representing reality. His frequent attacks on slavery and prejudice suggest his keen awareness that they did not.
Was Twain a racist? Asking the question in the 21st century is as wise as asking the same of Lincoln. If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the “wisdom” of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. Lincoln, who believed the black man the inferior of the white, fought and won a war to free him. And Twain, raised in a slave state, briefly a soldier, and inventor of Jim, may have done more to anger the nation over racial injustice and awaken its collective conscience than any other novelist in the past century.
1. How do Twain’s novels on slavery differ from Stowe’s?| A．Twain was more willing to deal with racism. |
| B．Twain was openly concerned with racism. |
| C．Twain’s themes seemed to agree with the plots. |
| D．Twain’s attack on racism was much less open. |
| A．Jim grew up into a man and a father in the white culture. |
| B．The slave’s voice was first heard in American novels. |
| C．Twain suspected that the slaves were less intelligent. |
| D．Jim’s search for his family was described in detail. |
| A．The attacks. | B．The shows. | C．White men. | D．Slavery and prejudice. |
| A．Twain’s works had been banned on unreasonable grounds. |
| B．Twain’s works should be read from a historical point of view. |
| C．Twain was an admirable figure comparable to Abraham Lincoln. |
| D．Twain had done more than his contemporary writers to attack racism. |
Zhangye Danxia National Geological Park in Gansu is the best representative of China’s colorful Danxia landform. With a wide
The site is characterized by amazing landforms, including
The most representative spots in the park such as the Seven-color Screen and the Colorful Sunset look like a rainbow hanging in the distance. However, scenes are totally different on the edge of the hills. The colors there turn into yellow and grey like shells in the sun. Scenes are even more breathtaking
10 . The Self-Portrait Challenge
Have you ever done a self-portrait in an art lesson at school? Today, we’re challenging you to write self-portrait poems. It’s not uncommon to feel like the way people see you on the outside doesn’t quite match up with how you feel on the inside. So creating a self-portrait can be a good opportunity to address those differences and present the realest, truest version of yourself.
Your challenge is to create a self-portrait in lines, using words instead of paint. Read on for some more inspiration.
Writing Tips● Have a go at writing a list of metaphors exploring your physical appearance, starting from your head and working your way down towards your feet.
● Instead of representing yourself directly, take on another character, such as a fictional character, a historical figure, or even a different version of yourself.
● Play around with personification, by taking on the voice of a physical object in your poem. Think about what a self-portrait from the point of view of a mirror, or a bowl of your favourite food would look like?
How to enter
This challenge is for writers aged up to 25 based anywhere in the world. The deadline is 23:59 GMT, 17 March 2024. You can send a poem, or poems, written down, or as video or audio files. We are using Submittable to accept submissions to this challenge. You will need to make a free Submittable account to submit in this way. Using Submittable helps our team to administrate and process entries more quickly. Selected poets will be published on Young Poets Network.
1. What does the Self-portrait Challenge encourage participants to do?| A．Explore true selves. | B．Convey positive emotions. |
| C．Illustrate personal profiles. | D．Compare different personalities. |
| A．Using simple language. | B．Presenting yourself directly. |
| C．Taking a different point of view. | D．Focusing on physical appearance. |
| A．A writing tool. | B．A search engine. |
| C．An email account. | D．An online platform. |
