Eva spent the first week of high school trying to keep her head above water. One of the major headaches for her was finding her way in the huge school building. It was a six-story building. On each floor, hallways stretched in four directions, leading to classrooms, laboratories, and teachers’ offices. Somewhere in the building, there was also a library, a cafeteria, and a gym.

Having a poor sense of direction, Eva found it impossible to get around in such a huge building. All the different hallways and rooms were too much to think about, let alone commit to memory. She decided that she would memorize where her classes were and then pretend that the rest of the place didn’t exist.

In her first PE class, Eva was shocked when Coach Pitt announced that everyone had to run one mile around the track outside. She searched the faces of her classmates for signs of panic. There was nothing she feared more than having to run a whole mile. To Eva, “a mile” was used to describe long distances. It was ten miles from her home to her grandfather’s, and that always seemed like a long way, even in a car!

When Coach Pitt blew his whistle (哨子), Eva figured she would be left in the dust. However, while some of her classmates edged ahead, others actually fell behind. ” It’s just the beginning, “she thought.” I’ll come in last for sure. “

Soon Eva began to breathe hard, with her heart pounding and legs shaking. Feeling desperate, Eva started using a mind trick on herself. She stopped thinking about the word” mile. “Instead, she focused on reaching the shadow cast on the track by an oak tree up ahead. Then she concentrated on jogging to the spot where the track curved (拐弯). After that, she tried to see if she could complete her first lap. One lap turned into two, then three, then four.

When Coach Pitt said “Nice work!” to her at the finish line, Eva was surprised.

Eva decided to use the same trick to deal with the school building.

2 . For people who are planning a trip, a visit to a museum might not be the first thing they think of. After all, there are plenty of ways to appreciate the world’s civilization, gain exciting experiences and spend quality time with family and friends.     1    

Museums are where people learn something new, at every age! Are you interested in something specific?     2    . There, you will find yourself drawn in and inspired! Museums are a fantastic place to learn about a region’s history, scientific achievements, major cultural events, and of course, dinosaurs. They also design exhibitions related to visual arts, industrial innovations and anything that inspires an individual to learn about the past and create new paths to the future.

    3     They will surely be an exciting part of the educational experience with the main purpose to expose children to knowledge of various fields and expand their horizons. To achieve that, museums are working to create meaningful and engaging activities, interactive and knowledge-based.

Museums support tourism. They are tourism promoters in small towns and large cities. Museums aren’t a burden on tax revenue (税收) or a separate concern from other city projects.     4    Statistics show that museums support more than 726, 000 jobs in America.

Museums shape communities. They have activities and exhibitions through which visitors can learn about local history. Museums are places where a shared heritage is celebrated and a collective identity is formed. They provide an interesting public space where people meet and talk to each other.     5    

6 . For years, David James, who studies insects at Washington State University, had wanted to examine the migration (迁徙)patterns of West Coast monarch butterflies (黑脉金斑蝶). The route the butterflies travel has been hardly known because the populations are too small to follow. For every 200 monarchs tagged (打标签)by a researcher, only one is usually recovered at the end of its trip, James says, and finding even 200 in the wild to tag is unlikely. Knowing the route is vital to conservation efforts, but James had no way to figure it out- until he got a phone call from Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

The prison was looking for new activities to improve the mental health of those serving long-term sentences. So James began working with prisoners to raise monarchs through the whole process of their transformation. The adult insects were then tagged and released from the prison. Over five years, nearly 10, 000 monarchs flew from the facility. Elsewhere in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, researchers released another few thousand.

The tags included email addresses, and soon after the first butterflies took off, James started receiving messages from people who had spotted them. The butterflies, the reports confirmed, wintered in coastal California. Twelve of them landed at Lighthouse Field State Beach in Santa Cruz. Several more headed to Bolinas and Morro Bay.

The work helps researchers identify ideal places to plant milkweed and other vegetation that are important to the life cycle of West Coast monarch butterflies. It also brought out the gentler side of some of the prisoners. “They were very worried that they were going to harm the butterflies, ”James says. Watching the monarch change their form also touched the men. “This butterfly changed, ” James recalls prisoners telling him, “and maybe we can too. ”

7 . Tom Sawyer Play Is an Adventure

A 35-minute hand-clapping, foot-stomping musical version of a Mark Twain favorite returns with this Tall Stacks festival.

“Tom Sawyer: A River Adventure” has all the good stuff, including the fence painting, the graveyard, the island and the cave. It is adapted by Joe McDonough, with music by David Kisor. That’s the local stage writing team that creates many of the Children’s Theatre of Cincinnati’s original musicals, along with the holiday family musicals at Ensemble Theatre.

This year Nathan Turner of Burlington is Tom Sawyer, and Robbie McMath of Fort Mitchell is Huck Finn.

Tumer, a 10th-grader at School for Creative and Performing Arts, is a familiar presence on Cincinnati’s stages. He is a star act or of Children’s Theatre, having played leading roles in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “The Wizard of Oz,” and is fresh from Jersey Production “Ragtime”.

McMath is a junior at Beechwood High School. He was in the cast of “Tom Sawyer” when it was first performed and is a Children’s Theatre regular, with five shows to his credit. This summer he attended Kentucky’s Governor’s School for the Arts in Musical Theatre.

Note to teachers: Children’s Theatre has a study guide demonstrating how math and science can be taught through “Tom Sawyer.” For downloadable lessons, visit the official website of Children’s Theatre.

9 . Dr. Smith of New York works at a center for children who can’t learn well. One day a father brought his son to him for________ at his office.

The father told Dr. Smith about his son. “My son has ________ in learning and can’t even play baseball. He isn’t doing well because he doesn’t try. I have done everything for him. I have even shouted at him. But nothing ________. ”

After Dr. Smith tested the boy, he ________ his father. He asked the father to sit in front of a ________ and then gave him a pencil and a piece of paper. There was a ________ on the paper. He asked the father to look only in the mirror and ________ the lines of the star with the pencil. The father made the same ________ anyone makes. Every time he ________ the pencil, it went the wrong way. The father’s face became red.

At this ________ the doctor shouted at him, “Hurry up! Why are you ________ so long? You can’t do such an ________ thing! You don’t know left from right!” These ________ made the father very angry.

“Now you can ________, can’t you?” The doctor said to him. “Your son has felt just like that all the time. You scolded (训斥) him too often, so he didn't try any more. He was afraid of making mistakes. ”

________ the father understood everything. He put his face down. Now he felt so sorry.

10 . We all know that unpleasant feeling when we’re talking about something interesting and halfway through our sentence we’re interrupted. But was that really an interruption? The answer depends on whom you ask, according to new research led by Katherine Hilton from Stanford University.

Using a set of controlled audio clips (录音片段), Hilton surveyed 5, 000 American English speakers to better understand what affects people’s perceptions of interruptions. She had participants listen to audio clips and then answer questions about whether the speakers seemed to be friendly and engaged, listening to one another, or trying to interrupt.

Hilton found that American English speakers have different conversational styles. She identified two distinct groups: high and low intensity speakers. High intensity speakers are generally uncomfortable with moments of silence in conversation and consider talking at the same time a sign of engagement. Low intensity speakers find it rude to talk at the same time and prefer people speak one after another in conversation.

The differences in conversational styles became evident when participants listened to audio clips in which two people spoke at the same time but were agreeing with each other and stayed on topic, Hilton said. The high intensity group reported that conversations where people spoke at the same time when expressing agreement were not interruptive but engaged and friendlier than the conversations with moments of silence in between speaking turns. In contrast, the low intensity group perceived any amount of simultaneous (同时) chat as a rude interruption, regardless of what the speakers were saying.

“People care about being interrupted, and those small interruptions can have a massive effect on the overall communication,” Hilton said. “Breaking apart what an interruption means is essential if we want to understand how humans interact with each other.”