2 . Some places can create strong memories. We often clearly remember important events in our lives and link them with the places where they happened. Many people remember exactly where they were when they heard very good or very bad news. The following are a few special places that are important to Americans who look to the past, but also are thinking of the future.

New Orleans Streetcars

Many American cities once had streetcars, but not anymore.     1     Anthony Falls has been driving streetcars for 10 years, and plans to keep doing so.

“First of all, it’s one of the most, the oldest rail lines in the world.     2     Because at one time they didn’t have people of color driving the street car. So I think that’s a big part of my job.”

Historic Houses

Historic homes can interest people seeking to connect with the former owners. Barbara Klein tells us about three such homes, including a very simple, white house in Virginia.     3    

This simple house in Winchester, Virginia, opened its doors to the public in August. It was home to singer Patsy Cline, who died at the age of 30.

Patsy’s first cousin, Patricia Brannon, shows the house to visitors.     4     She is pleased that Winchester is finally honoring her cousin, nearly 50 years after she died in a plane crash.

Havre de Grace

Havre de Grace is a town in the American state of Maryland. This part of Maryland is famous for its wildlife. Hunters use decoys(用于诱捕鸟兽的动物或仿制物)to get ducks and geese to come close enough to shoot. The wooden birds are so highly respected here that Havre de Grace calls itself the decoy capital of the world. It also has a museum with more than 1,000 decoys.     5    

A．Most of them were hand made.

B．And second of all, it’s just part of being part of history.

C．I’s convenient, cheap and it gets you where you need to go.

D．Yet streetcars have been running in New Orleans for over 150 years.

E．It is where a famous singer of the nineteen. fifties and sixties once lived.

F．Her childhood memories helped return the house to the condition it was in in the late 1940s.

G．Vincenti hopes more young people become decoy carvers so the tradition will continue in Havre de Grace.

3 . Rural homestays (民宿) have become the fastest-growing part in the bed-and-breakfast market since the COVID-19 pandemic, fueled by travelers who seek a more relaxing, pleasant and experiential lifestyle that is close to nature, a recent report found.

Tujia, a domestic online homestay service provider, said there are nearly 800,000 domestic rural homestays available online nationwide. Most people who took rural trips are urbanites (都市人), and most of them come from Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou of Guangdong province, Chengdu of Sichuan province and Chongqing.    1    

Among those who booked rural homestays, more than 60 percent of the total were born in the 1980s and 1990s.    2     Now, the booking volume of rural homestays accounts for about 40 percent of the total short-term rentals compared with 30 percent before the pandemic, according to Tujia.

Zhou Cheng,a 33-year-old rural homestay operator, has been involved in the business for more than a decade.    3    In 2010, he started operating a rural homestay in Lijiang, Yunnan province in Southwest China, and annual income was about 200,000 yuan (S30,500), which is less than one-tenth of his current annual income.

    4    That revenue (收益) accounts for 60 percent to 70 percent of the total revenue. Most travelers stay for two days and one night, and their total spending on catering (餐饮) and accommodation together is around 2,000 yuan per person. At his homestay business, there are 13 employees in total. All of them are local villagers and their monthly income is around 4,000 yuan per person, Zhou said.

The development of rural homestays has changed the trend of previous one-day tours to suburbs into more in-depth trips.    5    In the long term, the potential room for future growth of rural tourism and rural homestays is remarkable, with the backing of favorable policies related to the revitalization of rural areas.

A．He witnessed (见证) the fast growth of the domestic bed-and-breakfast sector.

B．Besides accommodations, catering services are also provided to customers.

C．These urbanites have driven the rapid growth of rural homestays.

D．In 2021, the booking volume of rural homestays in Beijing increased by 10 percent year-on-year, and revenue jumped 38 percent year-on-year.

E．An effective way to increase consumption is to convince travelers to stay overnight.

F．Consumers’ frequent short trips to suburban areas have driven the growth of rural homestays.

G．Tourists can have more in-depth trip experiences and improve the quality of their trips.

4 . Traveling means going from one place to another or from one country to another. It is immensely beneficial in many ways. From cutting down on stress to lowering your chances of developing heart disease, the health benefits of traveling are huge. Furthermore, traveling fosters understanding between nations. It is an important factor in establishing world peace.     1    

Traveling and education both are interrelated. During traveling, a traveler visits different places and comes into contact with people in different regions. Thus it provides the traveler with first-hand knowledge. The knowledge we acquire in schools and colleges is mainly bookish in nature.     2     Traveling can remove this gap because true education takes place outside the classroom. Bookish knowledge can be made perfect and meaningful only by traveling.

    3     The benefit of traveling to a new place is that it forces you to face the unknown and think differently. We have read the majesty of the Himalayas, the vastness of the ocean and the beauty of the Taj Mahal from books.     4     It impresses our mind with the vastness, and wonder of nature’s creation. Traveling helps the traveler to know how the wonderful earth is full of natural beauty.

In general, it can be said that traveling essentially has a great educative value. Traveling is adventurous, exciting, and a great stress buster. So, educational institutions of our country should give greater facilities to their students to undertake tours to various places of importance at home and abroad.     5     Seeing the world with your own very eyes will give you a better learning experience than any book can provide.

A．Finally, traveling has great educative value.

B．Traveling widens our view and removes our stress.

C．Thus, traveling should be made an essential part of our education.

D．Traveling is to gather experience, and wisdom comes from experience.

E．They seldom go out of their classroom and most have a narrow outlook.

F．But we can know much more of them if we see those with our own eyes.

G．In most cases, theoretical studies have no practical applications in our life.

5 . When your home becomes a tourist attraction

Have you ever looked at a beautiful little news house in London and thought “It must be so amazing to live there?”    1     But for the people who actually do live in those homes, social media photography has changed what it means to live in a picturesque place.

Alice Johnston is a longtime resident of Notting Hill, the London neighborhood famous for pastel-painted row houses and for being the setting of the movie of the same name. Johnston, a journalist, has complicated feelings about her Instagram-beloved neighborhood. She lives on Portobello Road, one of the capital’s most famous streets.     2    

Once, she and a friend were walking his French bulldog when a tourist asked if they could “borrow” the pup for a quick photo. The friend and the dog agreed, the Instagrammer posed with the Frenchie in front of a bright blue door and then handed over five pounds as a thank you. In that story, everybody had a good time.     3    “I was once woken up at 6 a.m. on Easter Sunday by French teenagers taking pictures outside,” Johnston says.

    4     Johnston tries to be sympathetic to travelers coming to her hometown, recalling how she loved taking pictures of historic neighborhoods like the Marais in Paris and Alfama in Lisbon. In fact, she recently found photos of herself as a teenager hanging out at the Notting Hill Carnival, years before she moved to the capital herself. “I love to travel, so I have to be pretty understanding when people travel to where I live, and I feel lucky that it’s cool enough that people want to come where I live.”

A．And she has witnessed all kinds of crazy behavior committed in the pursuit of the perfect snapshot.

B．But there can be a darker side to living inside what some people think is a movie set.

C．“For us it’s a tremendous pleasure to be able to share the house and see so many people happy and excited about it.”

D．If so, you’re not the only one.

E．When private homes become tourist attractions, conflicts can occur.

F．When it comes to living in a much-photographed place, some people try to take the good with the bad.

6 . It could have been anywhere, my first intentionally photo-free journey, but it just happened to be Ethiopia. Photographic equipment can be a great physical burden. It may weigh anything from a few hundred grams to several kilos, depending on how seriously one approaches the business of picture-taking. Yet the real burden of photography is mental, not physical; it is the feeling of needing to take photographs, that because you have a camera you must use it.

In the first few days of camera-less travel, there are certainly moments of frustration at letting one great photograph after another go past, but having no camera, and thus being unable to take photographs, surprisingly soon stops the urge to do so. Very quickly, scenes become appreciated for what they are, rather than for the photographs they would have made.

Climbing up the western wall of the Great Rift Valley, on the way to the capital, Addis Ababa, the road emerges from a tunnel onto open, grassy plains — a small piece of uncharacteristically undomesticated countryside, with an even more uncharacteristic population of wild animals. They looked magnificent in the tearing wind, and through binoculars (双筒望远镜) they could be absorbed at leisure — theirs and mine. And thus unseen, I watched them play, free from concerns as to how close I could risk going with my camera without losing the very moment I sought to capture.

Exciting though stalking (跟踪) wild creatures can be, the photographer must obviously stalk as much out of sight as possible, thus being denied any chance of actually watching them. The photographer’s mind is effectively stopped from experiencing any more than the photographic possibilities of the scene. At eye level, the camera not only creates a physical barrier but also isolates the photographer from the joyful reality of the subject, and from everywhere else around them too. Then comes the climax, the press of the button, the pull of the trigger (快门), before more stalking, more photographs and, inevitably, the stalking too far which frightens the animals to flight. The difference between looking in order to photograph and actually seeing what is there is never more distinct than when taking pictures of animals, to the extent that the two become almost mutually exclusive. There is time only for deciding the best way to take the photograph, before addressing more practical technicalities — how to keep the minibus’s wheel out of the shot of lions, or get enough depth of field so all the flamingos (火烈鸟) on the lake are in focus at once.

1. According to the first paragraph, what is the main problem that photographers face while travelling?

A．Moving their heavy equipment about

B．Locating places to purchase batteries.

C．Trying to get the best possible shots.

D．Being under pressure to take photographs.

2. The writer suggests in the second paragraph that people who choose to leave their cameras at home ________.

A．conclude that the decision was unrealistic

B．rapidly lose the desire to take any photographs

C．come to consider previous trips as unsatisfactory

D．appreciate the excellence of other people’s photos

3. What does the writer suggest about the animals he sees?

A．They were too far away to be usefully observed.

B．They were surprisingly unaffected by the closeness of humans.

C．They might have been enjoying the situation for more than he was.

D．They might have become alarmed by the presence of a photographer.

4. The writer questions the value of stalking animals because a photographer ________.

A．can cause the animals to behave aggressively towards people

B．may become too uncomfortable to take reasonable shots

C．may not be able to appreciate the situation fully

D．can easily become distracted from his task

7 . You don’t need to travel long distances to find pleasure in nature

The Greek historian Herodotus is said to have made one of the earliest lists of seven wonders of the world. These were man-made structures, including the still mysterious feat of ancient horticulture known as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. More recent times saw natural alternatives to these marvels of classical architecture proposed: waterfalls, mountains, canyons, reefs.     1    

As environmental consciousness has risen in the west, attitudes to such sightseeing have changed. Yes, it is thrilling to visit remote forests or spot rare species. But travelling to far-flung destinations is carbon-intensive when flights or long road journeys are involved, and conservation can be made more difficult as well as assisted by sightseers. There is a balance to be struck, and ethical governments and businesses around the world try to maximize the benefits while minimizing the harms.     2    

Most of us, in the rich countries where people take most holidays, understand better than ever that there are costs as well as benefits associated with exploring. One of the six pledges proposed by an environmental campaign launched last month, The Jump, is to “holiday local”, taking short-haul flights once every three years and long-haul flights very rarely. Fortunately, the UK’s 15 national parks, 86 areas of outstanding natural beauty （known in Scotland as national scenic areas）, and countless other landscapes that are without formal status, but beloved nonetheless, mean that there is no shortage of special places for domestic nature tourists to visit—while a host of European beauty spots are accessible by rail.

One recent survey found that Windsor Great Park and Kew have become Britain’s most popular attractions, while Covid has created difficulties for indoor spaces which do not apply to outdoor ones.     3     Some companies that formerly ran foreign trips have adapted to the pandemic by taking people to watch dolphins and other marine life off British coasts instead.

    4     Sewage outflows are out of control due to failed water industry regulation. The owners of a popular rewilded estate in West Sussex—Knepp—have warned that plans to build 3,500 homes next to their land would be catastrophic for the species that live there. But as we confront an environmental emergency that grows ever more dangerous, it is essential to cultivate appreciation for the nature that surrounds us. In a small way, holiday outings to watch dragonflies, kingfishers or seals, or be surrounded by trees that are coming into leaf, could help us to focus on what matters.

A．Colombia, for example, recently introduced laws aimed at promoting sustainable tourism.

B．Visitor numbers at wildlife trusts are high, with waiting lists for beaver-spotting.

C．Travelling, especially air travel, is a luxury that is bad for the environment.

D．Dramatic landscapes, features and wildlife, and the pleasure and excitement they offer to visitors, are staples of tourism.

E．Today, the tourism sector has become one of the great economic engines in many countries, forming part of the international political agenda.

F．This is not to minimize the destruction of nature that is also taking place.

8 . My granddad often helped me make a tool to catch fish when I was young and we would spend hours along a river. It was lovely for both of us then. Many more of today’s grandparents have a growing sense of adventure. And a trend is catching on: skip-gen travel — grandparents taking fun-filled vacations with grand kids without their parents along.

A survey found that 83% of grandparents put travel with their grand kids as the number one thing when they retire. Skip-gen travel gets popular for good reason. Kids have their lives enriched and learn outside classrooms. This is also a time of talking and sharing ideas.

“How grandparents talk to children is different from how parents talk to them. Actually, I feel on a more equal footing with my grandchildren than I do with my own children,” Annie Collins, a travel architect and also part of the trend, says. “Kids away from their parents are more open to ideas and willing to express themselves. It’s not just kids gaining from traveling. Who gets the most out of this? You might think it’s them but it’s us.” According to a study by the Cleveland Clinic, grandparents who help watch and spend time with grand kids may actually live longer than their peers（同龄人）.

It’s also important to recognize that grandparents often have more time to travel. Unlike their children, who may still be in the pursuit of a personal career that offers limited time off, grandparents are often retired and likely have a different viewpoint on life, prioritizing experiences and family. So knowing the kids are in great hands, moms and dads will have a bit of time to themselves — some much-needed leisure time alone to rest and recharge their batteries.

However, skip-gen travel is not for every grandparent. After all, grandparents are worn out with years and not so energetic. They surely treasure the chance to form close ties with their grandchildren, but it’s wiser to say no when only the youth could enjoy themselves, for the travel should be a win for everyone involved.

1. Why does the author mention fishing experiences with his granddad?

A．To lead in the trend of skip-gen travel.	B．To share the pleasure in going fishing.
C．To stress the importance of family ties.	D．To show the growing interest in adventure.

2. Which of the following may Annie Collins agree?

A．Many parents are too strict with children.

B．Grandparents benefit more from skip-gen travel.

C．Spending time with grandparents is better for kids.

D．Children become mature when away from parents.

3. What do we know about the parents whose kids are on skip-gen travel?

A．They enjoy the moment to relax.	B．They feel less anxious and stressed.
C．They miss their kids very much.	D．They look forward to their own trip.

4. What does the author suggest grandparents do?

A．Get kids involved in travel planning.	B．Strengthen the bond with grandchildren.
C．Reduce skip-gen travel appropriately.	D．Make decisions in both sides’ interests.

9 . I come from a family of travelers. My mom started a travel agency when she was younger than I am now, and growing up they never left me behind when they went on their adventures.

I graduated early and got a degree from a community college by the time I turned 18. At that time, I had traveled to around 70 countries. This was the point in my life where people began to ask me the question that a young person will never want to be asked: “What are you going to do next?”

In an attempt to answer that question, I began by asking myself what I was most passionate about, which has always been traveling. That’s when it dawned on me — the very first time I thought about breaking the world record.

In 2016, I got serious and started working on my mission to travel to every single one of the world’s 196 sovereign nations without any official sponsorship. I spent countless hours crammed on planes, trains, chicken buses, tuk-tuks and junk boats traveling with nothing but a backpack. I have encountered health issues, spanning from malaria in West Africa to hospital-worthy food poisoning in Pakistan. I learned how to cope with public anxiety attacks by myself in foreign countries, and I endured the brain-sizzling frustration of dealing with officials from every country that requires a visa.

Believe it or not, beyond a record breaker, these memories are treasurable as they were the most defining moments of my life, spent far, far away from my comfort zone, I’m currently writing a book about my experiences in every country and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. After finally completing this massive life goal, I’ll be taking the next few months to nourish my physical and mental health as I make plans for the future.

1. Why are the young unwilling to be asked the question?

A．They are uncertain about their future.

B．They are unemployed after graduation.

C．They don’t know which country to go next.

D．They don’t have good communication skills.

2. What do we know about the authors world tour?

A．She was self-funded.	B．She starved in Pakistan.
C．She got her visas smoothly.	D．She mostly traveled by plane.

3. What does the author think of her experience?

A．Comfortable.	B．Touching.
C．Invaluable.	D．Ordinary.

4. What does the author plan to do next?

A．Start a new book.	B．Build up her body.
C．Take some lessons.	D．Make a public speech.

10 . Many people travel to enrich and enjoy themselves.     1     Lonely Planet and Forbes listed their top trends of 2019. Here, TEENS has picked out three of them. Let’s take a look.

Augmented attractions

World travel can be expensive. But virtual reality and augmented reality (VR and AR), are giving more possibilities to “travel” for little cost. With ever-improving headsets, smartphones and WiFi connections, technologies have changed the way we travel.     2    

In 2019, NASA provided a VR experience of Mars, allowing people to “walk” its surface with just a headset. Paris’ famous museums, meanwhile, provided more applications with AR technology, which gives visitors more context and information about exhibits.

    3    

Which style do you prefer, travel on your own or with family and friends? Traditionally, travel seems to be a group activity to have fun together and avoid loneliness. But that has changed. This year, solo travel has become popular, especially among young people.

Traveling on your own means that you are the boss of everything, choosing wherever you want to go, whatever you’re eager to tuck into and whenever you go out. For some people, it also releases a better person, ready to deal with anything.     4     It opens up your mind to new things and pushes you out of your comfort zone.

Getting off the common path

There are always some “must-see” spots anywhere you travel. Paris’ iconic Louvre Museum is an example. However, with crowds blocking your view of Mona Lisa to take pictures with their phones, you may not be able to enjoy this masterpiece.

In order to avoid the crowds, many like to visit less famous places after searching online or following local agencies. With less transportation and fewer things to do, hitting up small towns lets people slow down and notice the little things.     5     What better way to enjoy the scenery?

A．Travel brings power and love back into your life.

B．However, their travel methods may be different each year.

C．It brings the 360-degree experience of museums, and historical sites to our homes.

D．Solo Travel

E．Package Tour

F．Traveling in a totally foreign land on your own can be challenging.

G．Take a walk, ride a bike, sip coffee a little slower, take a deep breath and explore.