1. When did the old lady begin to play video games?
| A．Thirty years ago. | B．Forty years ago. | C．Fifty years ago. |
| A．He takes videos. | B．He downloads games. | C．He collects reviews. |
| A．Do his homework. | B．Make videos himself. | C．Tell her more about the lady. |
2 . Take a trip down memory lane as you meet all your beloved comic characters from the Asterix & Obelix comic series at Parc Astérix. Counted amongst the top 3 largest theme parks in France, Parc Astérix is frequented by a whopping 2 million visitors annually. The rides and exhibits at the park draw inspiration from a wide range of historic cultures such as Ancient Greece and Egypt besides, the Gallic and Roman cultures represented in the comics. Situated 35 km away from Paris, the theme park is easily accessible and is perfect for a leisurely day out with your loved ones.
It is best to be well-prepared before you go on your next adventure at Parc Astérix. Here is all the information you will need before you plan your trip to this fascinating amusement park.
Daily: 10 AM — 6 PM
The best time to visit Parc Astérix is on the weekdays. Crowds are much higher on weekends and public holidays.
Getting There:
Address: 60128 Plailly, France
Take the direct exit towards Parc Astérix between exits number 7 and 8 if you choose driving. Also, FLIXBUS departs from and returns to Paris, Toucoring, Bethune, Lille, and Bruges every day. But taking a train is the simplest way. Take line 8 from Paris du Nord and get off at Aeroport Charles de Gaulle 1. Speak to a steward to learn about the Parc Astérix shuttle from here.
Facilities
Pushchairs and wheelchairs are available for rent at the park. You will have to pay a refundable deposit of 50 Euros. The daily charge for renting a pushchair is 5 Euros. Due to the limited availability, wheelchairs will be provided on a first-come-first-serve basis.
Parc Astérix Paris Tickets
Parc Astérix offers a wide range of tickets options for you to choose from. Be it standard entry tickets, packages, meal pass, permanent offers or seasonal offers — there is something for everyone.
Infants aged 0 — 2 can enter free of charge. Children aged 3 — 11 enjoy reduced ticket pricing (carry a valid photo ID).
Access to the Peur sur le Parc show (from 7 pm to 1 am) requires the purchase of a separate ticket. This ticket cannot be canceled, amended, or rescheduled.
1. What can visitors do in Parc Astérix?| A．Read comic books. |
| B．Watch comic movies. |
| C．Meet characters from a comic series. |
| D．Draw comics about the Gallic and Roman. |
| A．5 Euros | B．20 Euros | C．55 Euros | D．70 Euros |
| A．10 am on Monday. | B．11 am on Sunday. |
| C．10 pm on Friday. | D．8 pm on Saturday. |
3 . 2023 Upcoming Book Releases
The Villa by Rachel Hawkins
Although they were inseparable growing up, Emily and Chess have begun to grow apart in their 30s.Now they hope to reconnect on a girls’ trip to an Italian villa(别墅) that was the setting of a celebrity murder.The further Emily tries to solve the long-ago murder, the more Chess becomes uncomfortable and their hidden secrets come spilling out. You won’t be able to tell the true kiler until the last minute.
Stateless by Elizabeth Wein
This thrilling murder mystery set in 1937 Europe rises quickly with attraction, secrets, and betrayal.When Stella North is chosen to represent Britain in Europe’s first air race for young people, she knows all too well how high the stakes are. But promoting peace in Europe feels empty to Stella when civil war is raging in Spain and the Nazis are gaining power.
Good for a Girl by Lauren Fleshman
Lauren Fleshman is a distance runner in the United States. In Good for a Girl, Fleshman tells her true story of how she fell in love with running as a girl and shares her own running journey. Yet, the book isn’t just a memoir(回忆录). It’s a powerful look at how competitive sports are designed for men and boys and routinely fail female athletes, leading to injuries, eating disorders, and mental health issues.
All the Dangerous Things by Stacy Willing ham
One year ago, Isabelle Drake’s life changed forever her toddler son, Mason, was taken out of his little bed in the middle of the night while she and her husband were asleep. With little evidence and few clues for the police to chase, the case quickly went cold. With great twists, the excellent thriller will keep you gripped to the page, never knowing which character you can trust.
1. Which book might attract a history lover?| A．The Villa. | B．Good for a Girl. |
| C．All the Dangerous Things. | D．Stateless. |
| A．Nonfiction. | B．Romance. | C．Fantasy. | D．Mystery. |
| A．Someone was dead in these two books. |
| B．They criticize the police for their failure. |
| C．They tell stories happening between friends. |
| D．They keep readers guessing until the very end. |
Job description: Responsible for writing news stories and comments in English and editing stories
The ideal candidates should:
1. Have master degrees in journalism, mass communications, international politics, economics, foreign languages and other related majors, and overseas study experience preferred;
2. Have a strong news sensitivity, excellent English skills in listening, oral communication, reading
comprehension, writing and translation, and be able to independently conduct interviews and write news stories in English;
3. Have good communication, news planning, teamwork skills, be able to adapt to business trips and work night shifts under high working pressure.
English video editors/reporters
Job description: Video program planning, video shooting and editing, and video platform operation
The ideal candidates should:
1. Have good skills in the use of various shooting equipment, editing software such as Premiere, Final Cut, After Effects, can independently conduct interviews, shoot and edit news videos;
2. Be familiar with domestic and foreign video platforms, browsing a large number of short video programs from home and abroad;
3. Have strong communication skills, be able to adapt to greater work pressure, have strong teamwork ability;
4. Candidates are able to work under high working pressure.
Art designers
Job description: Page design, chart design and poster design
The ideal candidates should:
1. Have bachelor degrees in art, visual communication, and other related fields.
2. Be able to independently complete design tasks under high working pressure, have good understanding and communication skills.
3. Have proficiency in using InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and other design software;
4. Candidates are able to adapt to high working pressure.
Please send your CV or resume to zhaopinbianji@globaltimes.com.cn, with the subject of the email indicating source of recruitment information + your name + position sought.
1. If you want to apply for English video editors, you are expected to be good at _______.| A．Photoshop | B．Illustrator | C．Premiere | D．InDesign |
| A．They should speak fluent English. | B．They should browse foreign websites. |
| C．They could work night shifts. | D．They could work under high working pressure. |
| A．Global Times | B．China Daily | C．The Times | D．Washington Post |
5 . Shawn Triplett knew there was a desperate need to help the children of Mayfield, Kentucky, after a deadly storm struck the town.
Mayfield was one of the towns hardest hit after a line of storms crossed the central US on Friday night and Saturday morning. Triplett- a Mayfield resident and a former soldier — was in Chicago that Friday night. Alarmed by the weather reports, his wife and two young children went to stay in a hotel of the nearby town, Paducah, without suffering the storms and ultimately out of the path of the tornadoes(龙卷风).
Able to return home the next morning, Triplett was shocked by how the town was destroyed and wanted to help however he could. He arrived at the volunteer center, where he was asked to guide a photo-journalist through streets filled with remains. That night, the two returned to shelters where they saw many suffered families including one woman comforting her son over their lost Christmas.
“It was very heartbreaking, too much for me to handle, ” he said. Therefore, he decided that more needed to be done for the children affected by the storm. Noticing that supplies available were essentials such as generators (发 电机) and bottled water, he turned to his friends on social media for donations so that he could go to Walmart and purchase toys and gifts for the kids. Around $2, 000 were raised, and the store gave Triplett a discount upon learning of his efforts. As word spread on websites, more donations poured in. He was able to return the following day and another $6,000 was spent on toys and board games, he said. Forty pairs of shoes were also picked up at a local Shoe Sensation. Triplett and other volunteers will wrap and distribute the toys for any child or family in need. He credits the kindness of everyone who tried to help and get families back on their feet right before the holidays.
1. Why were Triplett and his families safe from the disaster?| A．They were rescued by soldiers. | B．They didn’t come back to Mayfield. |
| C．They were helped by an aid agency. | D．They happened to be travelling in Chicago. |
| A．A volunteer cleaning the street. | B．A boy crying for his lost families. |
| C．A photo-journalist taking pictures. | D．A mother calming her child down. |
| A．First-aid kits. | B．Emergency food. | C．Essential supplies. | D．Entertainment items. |
| A．Generous and hard-working. | B．Brave and energetic. |
| C．Sympathetic and warm-hearted. | D．Foresighted and determined. |
6 . Here, our selection of Britain’s strangest museums has something for everyone.
Glasgow Riverside Transport Museum
The museum houses steam engines, motorbikes, Glasgow buses and just about anything else that has a set of wheels, wrings or sails. One of the last tall ships in existence is moored (停泊) outside, and you can take a boat there from Govan. For those not in love with transport, there’s a copy of a 19th-century Glasgow street with traditional shops and an old subway station.
Entrance is free and for children of all ages.
The Natural History Museum, Hertfordshire
The Victorians were mad about collecting, and this is essentially the personal collection of just one home-educated boy, which began when he was 5 years old. But as a member of the Rothschild family, Walter took 40 years to do it. There’s just about every stuffed animal you could ever imagine, and quite a few you couldn’t: a polar bear; George, a mandrill (山魈) from London Zoo and a four-ton elephant seal.
Entrance is free.
The Pencil Museum1, Cumbria
It is a museum all about the history of the everyday pencil. There are free daily artists’ demonstrations and workshops, so you can enter from one end of the museum and go out with a drawing from another end. The lovely Lake District location adds to the experience and the wonderful shop is especially enjoyable for stationery (文具) lovers.
Entrance: adults £8, children £6.
The Time Machine Museum of Science Fiction, Hertfordshire
This is the result of 30 years of crazy collecting by Andy Glazzard. There are artworks from sci-fi classics, but most of the museum artworks center on Doctor Who.
Entrance: adults £4.25, children f3.25.
1. What can visitors see in Glasgow Riverside Transport Museum?| A．Stuffed animals. | B．Various vehicles. |
| C．Old bus stations. | D．Some modern shops. |
| A．£14 | B．£20 | C．£28 | D．£32 |
| A．A news report. | B．A science fiction. |
| C．A history textbook. | D．A travel guidebook. |
7 . The honeybee waggle dance has been celebrated as a most complex animal communication system. A study uncovered its new property that bees must partially learn the dance from watching experienced dancers, a discovery that torpedoes the general perception that the dance is wholly inborn. A dancer bee relays information to follower bees about the target location by adjusting herself while shaking her stomach, allowing for impressive flexibility in the angle, duration and her enthusiasm. Her body’s angle corresponds to the sun’s position relative to the nest entrance.
The distance information is conveyed by the dance duration. And the more energetic and passionate the dance, the better the food. She’ll waggle in a straight line for seconds before circling back to repeat the dance, creating the figure eight pattern.
This bee waggle dance system was long assumed to be natural behavior, but researchers made a breakthrough through an experiment. They created territories of newborn bees completely separated from mature ones. When the newborn started visiting flowers and producing their first waggle dances, they consistently made more errors in the way they reported the angle and distance to the food source than bees raised in mixed-aged territories and thus exposed to the waggle dance since they were born. They also generated looser figure eight patterns, making it harder for the follower bees to get the message. Even when placed back into a territory with mature bees, they never seemed to learn how to communicate information correctly.
These results suggest every honeybee is born with a waggle dance model that gives them a basic understanding of how to dance. By watching their elders, they’ll acquire new rules on how to generate the dance unique to their territory.
This is the first known example of such complex social learning of communication in insects and is a form of animal culture, strikingly similar to the way human language generates new languages to shape itself around the local conditions. While the waggle dance is second to human language in terms of the ability to communicate diverse information through random symbols, the newly-discovered property makes it even more language-like and just that much more mind-blowing.
1. What does the underlined word “torpedoes” mean in paragraph 1?| A．Illustrates. | B．Overturns. | C．Fits in with. | D．Gives rise to. |
| A．The dancer’s physical angle. | B．The dancer’s dance duration. |
| C．The dancer’s dance liveliness. | D．The dancer’s body flexibility. |
| A．They’re absolutely ignorant of the waggle dance. |
| B．They can’t survive but for contact with mature bees. |
| C．They enhance dance routines by autonomous trial and error. |
| D．They can master the local dance by following elders from birth. |
| A．The waggle dance. | B．Human language. |
| C．The new property. | D．Diverse information. |
8 . When I was 13, I climbed my first mountain--a fairly gentle 3,900-foot peak. I was overweight at the time and out of breath when I reached the summit. But I loved challenging myself. Soon I’d climbed nearly 100 peaks. My parents were happy I’d finally found a hobby.
I often go climbing with my friend Mel Olsen. She and I drove to tackle 11, 240-foot Mount Hood. It’s safer to start winter climbs at night when there’s less risk of the sun melting the snowpack. That day, we started at 3 a. m. At around9 a. m., we reached an ice step. It was about three or four feet tall and sloped al a 75-degree angle. 1 volunteered to go first. I placed my left foot on the ice step.
I gained a sense of the ice when 1 stuck my ax and crampons (鞋底钉) into it, and it felt good. Confident I was safe, I put my full weight on it. Suddenly, I heard a crack, and as the snowpack became thinner, a whole piece of ice broke off the step, right under my foot.
In an instant, I fell backward, bouncing off the rock face and rolling down the mountain as if I were a character in a video game. I remember thinking, This is it. You’re done. I stuck out my arms and legs, grabbing at anything. That stopped my rolling down the mountain, but I was still sliding, After 2 few seconds, I came to a stop on a shallow slope.
I asked myself: Where are you? Mount Hood. What’s the date? December 30. Good. My brain was functioning. Then I checked my body to see where I was hurt. For the most part, I was fine, except that I was suffering from a sharp pain in my left leg. Later I’d learn that I’d broken my femur (大腿骨) and that the bone was slicing into my skin and muscle.
At the bottom of Mount Hood, I was loaded into an ambulance and taken to a hospital. The doctors told me it would be a year before I could climb again, but I was back on the trails within six months.
1. Why did the author and her friend set out at 3 a. m. ?| A．It was the best time to enjoy scenery. | B．It was more challenging to climb at night. |
| C．They wanted to finish the climb before sunset. | D．They hoped to avoid some possible dangers. |
| A．To show her strong character. | B．To make her idea more convincing. |
| C．To help readers imagine the scene. | D．To add to the humor of the description. |
| A．By recalling what had happened. | B．By checking whether she was injured. |
| C．By calling an ambulance for rescue. | D．By asking herself some factual questions. |
| A．She is too brave to pay attention to any danger. |
| B．R She has a strong desire for professional knowledge. |
| C．Setbacks can’t stop her from challenging herself. |
| D．The love for nature sets her apart from her friends. |
1. Where are drinks served all day?
| A．In the cafe. | B．In the dining room. | C．By the swimming pool. |
| A．Have lunch. | B．Go swimming. | C．Attend a conference. |
| A．The updated program. |
| B．The high temperature. |
| C．The late lunch. |
| A．Some rooms are being repaired. |
| B．The General Manager can’t come. |
| C．speaker isn’t able to give her talk. |
| A．Create more jobs. |
| B．Improve the air quality. |
| C．Close some businesses. |
