With travel and the environment in the news so much lately, you’ve probably heard the word ecotourism. As travelers become more aware of their effect on the planet and want to do their part to make a difference, ecotourism has really taken off.
What is ecotourism? The definition isn’t as hard to determine as you might think. According to the International Ecotourism Society, it is defined as “responsible travel to natural areas that protects the environment and sustains the well-being of the local people”. To be simple, it’s travel that has a positive effect on a destination’s ecology and economy.
Ecotourism lets travelers participate in activities that benefit the environment. For example, travelers can act as citizen scientists in places around the world, including national parks and dive sites, to help do research and collect data. Meanwhile, ecotourism helps local communities to do well and become successful and strong. That can happen in a number of ways, involving some type of financial aspect, from providing jobs to supporting local businesses.
Being a responsible traveler, you’ll have a much more satisfying and rewarding experience. Instead of simply visiting tourist attractions and eating at chain restaurants, you can get completely involved in a local culture and really get to know the people who live there. It enriches your own life and opens your mind to new ideas.
Ecotourism is an amazing way to discover the world. Nature is full of wonders everywhere. Being able to get out in a natural area that is protected and largely undeveloped offers a chance to connect with plants and animals you may never see anywhere else. Just be sure to leave it as you found it for future explorers to discover. Get your sneakers ready, pack your bags and head for nature. A big and beautiful world is waiting for you out there.
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2 . Directions: Read the following passage. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words asfar as possible.
How to Be a Successful Team Leader?
Every well-organized team needs to have an outstanding leader with specific skills. Sometimes the leader’s abilities can come to affect the whole team. Although we students are still young, it’s never too early to cultivate leadership skills.
A team consists of both leaders and followers. Neither side can exist and work effectively without the other. What is essential to the role of leader is the ability to unite the whole team. A great leader enables their team to achieve a common goal through the giving of clear directions and support. Meanwhile, everyone on a team also desires personal success, so a balance can be hard to strike. If a leader doesn’t have fierce determination, the followers will lose their confidence and things will not be done well.
What’s more, a successful and charming leader ought to be able to handle interpersonal relationships well. They should be honest, fair, objective and impartial (公正的) when it comes to both rewards and punishments. These kinds of leaders are trustworthy, and thus, the working atmosphere will only come to be improved. They are role models who can have a strong influence on the whole team.
To become a powerful leader at school, students have to take the initiative in connecting with their fellow students. Good communication skills allow people to build good relationships, which is an essential part of being a good leader. If you find it hard to express your ideas clearly to those who you collaborate with, it may be rather difficult for you to be a good leader.
It’s a well-known fact that, whatever field you wish to work in, leadership skills are necessary for anyone who desires to have a successful career. So it’s never too early to train yourselves as promising future leaders.
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“Books will soon disappear in schools,” Thomas Edison announced in 1913: they would, he believed, soon be replaced by silent films. Each new wave of information technology - radio, television, computers - has led to similar predictions.
Like teachers, digital educational technology comes in many forms, from wonderful to awful. But, used properly, it now deserves more prominence (重要性) in schools - especially in poor countries where human teachers are often ignorant, absent or both.
According to a recent World Bank study of seven sub - Saharan African countries, half of nine - year - olds cannot read a simple word and three - quarters cannot read a simple sentence. The reason is terrible. The same study found that only 7% of teachers had the minimum knowledge needed to teach reading and writing effectively. When classrooms were inspected to see whether a teacher was present, half the time the answer was no. As for the absence of teachers, if expensive teachers do not turn up to class, government would, surely, fire them? Easier said than done. Poor governments often lack the money to check on teachers in distant villages.
Several recent studies suggested - tech can help. It seems to bring about bigger improvements in poor countries than in rich ones. Some of the scarce resources being spent on teachers could therefore be better spent on ed - tech. That does not mean dumping computers on schools in the hope that children will understand how to use them. Instead, it means providing schools with software that children can use with minimal help from an adult, that sends teachers prompts about what they are supposed to be teaching and that allows the authorities to check on whether the teacher is in the classroom.
Technology is no cure - all. Good traditional teachers are not outdated, and are never likely to be. And authorities need to hold teachers to account. But ed - tech can help greatly - by monitoring pupils and teachers alike, assisting the best teachers and, most important, making up for the failings of the worst.
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What Causes Déja Vu?
It’s a frightening feeling: You walk into a place you know you’ve never been before but are overwhelmed by a sense of familiarity-a memory you can’t quite reach. Has this all happened before? Most people experience ‘this sensation, known as déjà vu, at some point in their lives. It’s a hard feeling to study, though, because it tends to arise spontaneously and be shaken off easily.
Déjà vu means “already seen” in French, a term possibly coined by French philosopher Émile Boirac. In a 2009 study, Cognitive psychologist Anne Cleary of Colorado State University and her colleagues found that viewing these sneakily similar scenes was more likely to cause feelings of déjà vu than viewing dissimilar scenes-suggesting that perhaps there is some environmental trigger for the brain to call out, “Hey, I recognize that!” even when it’s never seen the scene before.
While Cleary’s research shows that a slight familiarity can result in déjà vu, Akira Robert O’Connor, a cognitive psychologist at the University of St. Andrews says, in spontaneous déjà vu cases, it’s quite possible that the familiarity feeling is random. Supporting this random-misfire hypothesis is the fact that young people actually experience more déjà vu than older people. Younger brains are a little more excitable, more likely to fire more quickly rather than holding back, O’Connor says.
Older people may also be less adept (擅长的)fact-checkers when false feelings of familiarity arise, says Chris Moulin, a cognitive neuropsychologist at the Grenoble Alpes University. Older adults still recognize such false familiarity. “It’s not perhaps that older adults are not generating false familiarity, ” Moulin says. “It’s just that they don’t have, anymore, that certainty that what they’re experiencing is false. ”
This is a normal part of aging, not the conflation (合并)of déjà vu with reality that people with dementia (老年痴呆症)may experience. So enjoy the feeling of having felt it all before while it lasts, Generation Z.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The Achievement Gap in the United States
The achievement gap in the United States refers to the observed, persistent disparity(差异)in measures of educational performance among subgroups of U. S. students, especially groups defined by socio-economic status, race and gender. The achievement gap can be observed on a variety of measures including standardized test scores, grade point average, dropout rates, and college enrollment and completion rates.
Research into the causes of the disparity in academic achievement between students has been ongoing since 1966. Many experts argue that achievement gaps are the result of more subtle environmental factors and “opportunity gaps” in the resources available to poor versus wealthy children.
Home environments have a stronger impact on school achievement than in-school factors, in part, because children spend more time outside of school than in school. Studies have found that children in poverty whose parents provide engaging learning environments at home do not start school with the same academic readiness gaps seen among poor children generally.
In addition, the out-of-school factors influencing academic performance differ significantly between children living in poverty and children from middle-income households. Being raised in a low-income family, for example, often means having fewer educational resources at home, in addition to poor health care and nutrition.
The achievement gap has become a focal point of education reform efforts by a number of non-profit organizations and advocacy groups. Attempts to minimize the achievement gap by improving equality of access to educational opportunities have been numerous, such as multicultural education, finance equalization, and interventions to improve school testing, teacher quality and responsibility.
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China’s Film Industry Finally Joins the Space Race
China was a latecomer to space exploration, and in the movies, it has been a latecomer to science fiction, too. But that is about to change.
The country’s first blockbuster set in space. “The Wandering Earth,” opens Tuesday amid grandiose expectations that it will represent the dawning of a new era in Chinese film making.
“The Wandering Earth,” shown in 3-D, takes place in a distant future in which the sun is about to expand into a red giant and devour the Earth. Therefore, earth’s governments rally and come up with a novel solution: they speckle the planet with 10,000 gigantic jets, and blast it out of its orbit and off on a hundred-generation journey to a new home 4.2 light-years away. However, a malfunction of the Earth Engine system leaves the planet caught in Jupiter’s gravity, and gradually being pulled toward destruction. A frantic group of workers have to scramble to reactivate the jets and correct the Earth’s course.
So far, the reviews have been positive. “Filmmakers in China see science fiction as a holy grail,” said Raymond, an independent critic, who noted that Hollywood had set the technological standards, and thus audience expectations, very high.
“The Wandering Earth” is adapted from works by Liu CiXin, the writer who has led a renaissance in science fiction here, becoming the first Chinese winner of the Hugo Award for the genre in 2015. His novels are sprawling epics and deeply researched. That makes them plausible fantasies about humanity’s encounters with a dangerous universe.
The openings also come as China reached a milestone in space: the landing of a probe on the far side of the moon in January. Although decades behind Russia and the United States, China has now put astronauts in orbit and has ambitious plans to join — or even lead — a new age of space exploration.
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A survey of more than 2, 000 people living in the UK has found that those with a higher IQ are more likely to live a longer life. Researchers analysed data from the Scottish Mental Surveys — in which almost every 11yearold in Scotland was given the same IQ test on the same day in 1932 — and tracked the participants’ lives up to when they passed away. Even when factors such as economic status and employment level were accounted for, the smarter kids ended up living longer than those with lower IQs. These results correlate to several previous studies that have found a link between IQ and mortality (死亡率) when other factors were filtered out.
We don’t yet understand why this is the case, but there are some interesting hypotheses (假设): one is that intelligent people are more likely to strap themselves in while driving, choose to eat a healthy diet, avoid smoking, and exercise more often. Whalley and Deary found that those with a higher IQ were more likely to quit smoking after its negative health effects were published in the 1950s. In other words, smart people might just be better at avoiding things that are going to kill them.
Another hypothesis is that a high IQ is a signifier of a sturdy (强壮的) constitution and a body that’s going to last — it’s essentially a signifier rather than a cause, some scientists believe. One study published in 2005 found that better reaction times specifically helped people live longer — so a high IQ is possibly an indication of an efficient nervous system, rather than being itself a cause of longer life, the researchers proposed.
It’s a complicated area of science, particularly as an IQ score doesn’t necessarily directly represent intelligence, and can be affected by social class, education standards, and other cultural factors. Nevertheless, the link is there — and researchers are still trying to find out why.
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Is Fridge Really Necessary?
The fridge is considered necessary. It has been so since the 1960s when packaged food list appeared with the label: “Store in the refrigerator.”
In my fridgeless Fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthily. The milkman came daily, the grocer, the butcher, the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times a week. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and surplus (剩余) bread and milk became all kinds of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and we were never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on, food deliveries have ceased, fresh vegetables are almost unobtainable in the country.
The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. A vast way of well-tried techniques already existed -natural cooling, drying, smoking, salting, sugaring, bottling….
What refrigeration did promote was marketing-marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the globe in search of a good price.
Consequently, most of the world's fridges are to be found, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the wealthy countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically almost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum(嗡嗡响) away continuously, and at vast expense, busily maintaining an artificially-coo1ed space inside an artificially-heated house -while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charge.
The fridge's effect upon the environment has been evident, while its contribution to human happiness has been insignificant. If you don't believe me, try it yourself, invest in a food cabinet and turn off your fridge next winter. You may miss the hamburgers, but at least you'll get rid of that terrible hum.
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Ann Grand: a visual thinker
Ann Grand is a visual thinker. When somebody speaks to her, the words are instantly translated into pictures. like a video in her head. Unlike most people, her thoughts move from ideo-like images to generalizations and concepts. Furthermore, her memories usually appear in her imagination in order of time. and the image visualized are always specific. For example. if she thinks about a chimney, she sees detailed pictures. like the one in her old house. and then those in her hometown. That one word can turn into a full-length video in her head. Grand's mind works like the Internet search engine which produces dozens of images of an object a user is searching for.
Visual thinking has enabled Grand to build entire systems in her imagination, which works similarly to a computer program because it can produce three-dimensional design simulations. This was important to her as an equipment designer for the livestock industry. Before she started construction on her designs, she would test-run the equipment in her mind. She formed mental pictures of her designs in every possible situation, with different sizes and breeds of cattle and in different weather conditions. This process made it possible for her to correct mistakes before construction started.
Grand's mind is also sensitive to details, which was important in her work with cattle. Her sharp awareness of the visual world led to noteworthy observations about animals. She noticed many little things that most people would not consider that scared the cattle. For example, a coat on a fence or a pipe on the floor would frighten them away. Grand's visualization abilities have also helped her understand the animals she has worked with. This led her to create designs ranging from sweeping, curved fences intended to reduce the stress experienced by animals that were going to be killed to systems for handling sick cattle and pigs.
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Studying abroad is the realization of the dream, which might have been in your heart since you were kid. You are not alone. In recent years, studying abroad is getting more and more popular in China.
Of course, studying abroad provides a whole new opportunity to explore a completely new culture. You will experience new climate, new food and new customs, thus broadening your horizons. You can also learn a new language, so that you will become fluent in the language at last. Staying in a different country far from your parents makes you absolutely free to do whatever you like, and you have to learn to depend on yourself.
But, like all the other things under the sun, studying abroad also has certain disadvantages. People from different cultural backgrounds have different habits. So you will have to change many of your habits and adapt yourself to new culture. Furthermore, you may feel lonely and homesick. In addition, the living costs and tuition fees will be high, which will become a heavy burden upon your parents.
Whatever you do, both new opportunities and challenges will present themselves. Of course, you can’t be afraid of facing challenges. The most important thing is that you should take all the challenges into consideration before you make a decision to study abroad. My advice is: look before you leap.
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