The box of crayons was filled with an assortment of colors. On a gloomy rainy day, they quarreled because every color in the box thought it was the most important.
The blue colors, from the very light to the very deep, grouped together and said, “We are the most important. Without us, there would be no clear sky above, no water in the oceans, no bluebirds singing about happiness, or beautiful bluebells swaying gently in the garden. That is why blue is the most important color.”
The green crayons disagreed. From shades of the pales t moss to vivid chartreuse, they insisted green was the most important. “Without us, there would be no grass in the parks, no plants to grow food, no leaves on the trees, no Statue of Liberty! So naturally, green is the most important color.”
The reds and oranges got fired up. “Without us,” they argued, “there would be no excitement! We are the shades you see when molten lava erupts from the volcano. We are the gentle beauty of romantic sunsets at dusk and the inspiring morning sunrises taking your breath away! There is no doubt that we are the most important.”
The brown and black shades had their say. “We are darker and more plain, to be sure,” they agreed. “But we are the colors of the earth. Without the brown and black soil, you couldn’t grow crops. Surely without us, you couldn’t build a home to live in nor have wood for your fireplace!”
“Don’t forget us!” The pinks, purples and yellows piped up. “We are the colors of wild imagination! Without us there would be no unicorns(独角兽)or princesses or sweet daydreams. We are the bright hues of happiness, of cotton candy, of dollhouses. We are the most important because children need us!” The other crayons did not know what to do. For a moment, they all fell silent.
请注意：(1)续写词数应为150个左右；
(2)请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Then the color gray broke the silence.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Following her words, they looked outside and found that the rain had stopped.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________2 . When I first aspired to become a science writer, I imagined each day would be filled with inspiration and creativity. The reality, of course, is far less enjoyable than my fantasies. Researching a story, for example, often involves reading lots of dry and technical papers before I finally strike gold with the information that I seek.
Most professions, I imagine, include challenging but necessary tasks that sap enthusiasm. But a recent paper from Edward Lai at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and his colleagues may offer us all a way to boost our motivation. It is called the "easy addendum effect", and, as the name suggests, it involves ending each work session with a more pleasant task that will be relatively straightforward to complete.
The strategy was inspired by a phenomenon known as the "peak-end rule", which means we often judge events by the way they finish, rather than the overall experience. In one experiment, Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked participants to plunge their hands into water at unpleasantly cold temperatures, the first group simply in 14℃ water for 60 seconds, while the second one were given a further 30 seconds in water at 15℃. Surprisingly, most preferred the second option. It seems their memory of the experiment only focused on the last moments, which was slightly more pleasant in the 90-second set-up.
The research suggests that our impressions of work fall prey to the same preference — and we can use that to our advantage. Lai's team gave participants a series of dull tasks — from flexing their muscles against heavy weights to sorting books into alphabetical order or answering customer complaints. In each case, participants performed the tasks with or without an "easy addendum" attached to the end of the job. Those testing their strength were given a few extra rounds of lighter weights while those answering customer queries with some more straightforward requests.
Much like the ice-bath experiments, there was no logical reason why loading on additional work to an existing task should make it more pleasant overall. But the researchers found that the "easy addendums" significantly reduced the anticipated difficulty and increased participants` satisfaction with their jobs.
Since learning about Lai's research, I have tried applying this strategy to my own work. Writing is still my favourite part of the job, and so this article was a pleasant addendum to an otherwise demanding day of research for another one. By putting these words on the page, I feel far more energised about the work behind me — and readier to enjoy the evening ahead.
1. Which is the author's initial aspiration as a science writer?| A．To enjoy a challenging and enjoyable career. |
| B．To have a daily routine filled with creativity. |
| C．To conduct research and write technical papers. |
| D．To strike gold with every story they research. |
| A．Weaken. | B．Boost. | C．Inspire. | D．Refuse. |
| A．Participants could not bear 14°C longer than those could in 15℃. |
| B．Participants were unwilling to be loaded on additional work. |
| C．Participants usually cared more about the end of events. |
| D．Participants performed the tasks with an “easy addendum”. |
| A．No man is content if he or she is given more work. |
| B．“Easy addendum” can reduce difficulties in jobs. |
| C．One's pleasure comes through suffering in jobs. |
| D．“Easy addendum” can increase job satisfaction. |
“WOW. I can’t believe how many people are showing up for this!” Dandelion Pinkley said. She stood in the wide parking lot of the E-Z Life Elephant Sanctuary, watching a lot of cars getting close. Her brother Doodlebug, their cousin Rudyard, and other kids were with her. All of them were ready to wash those cars.
The elephants who lived at E-Z Life had been saved. Now they enjoyed a safe home. And every clean car meant a few more dollars to support their well-being. So working the car wash was a great way to spend a summer day!
The first few cars parked. The drivers paid, and the kids got to work.
“My car is messy!” one driver said as she paid up.
“You’re not kidding.” Doodlebug said. He began washing it.
Nearby, Cousin Rudyard began shining the bumpers (保险杠) on a classic car. “Whoopee!” he shouted. “I love this car, and it’s perfect now!”
He turned to the next car, singing a funny elephant song along with some other kids. A few elephants began to come together at the wooden fence (栅栏).
“They’re happy,” Dandelion’s best friend, Tomiko, said.
“And look at the babies,” Dandelion said, as one put its trunk (象鼻) through the fence and waved at them. “We need to work faster, so we can get them more money!”
All the kids stepped up the action. For a while, it was a lot of fun. The car wash went perfectly. People drove up and paid their money. But the noise and the summer heat began to wear the young car washers down.
“I can’t take this too much longer,” Doodlebug said to his sister.
“I know,” Dandelion agreed, “but there are still so many cars waiting for a wash.” The line of cars seemed endless.
“I need a break,” Rudyard said.
“But we need to help the elephants!” Dandelion said, wanting nothing more than to take a rest. A second later she did.
“What’s the matter with you kids?” one driver complained (抱怨). “It’s only midmorning. You can’t stop working because of tiredness. You’re kids!”
注意：1.续写词数应为 150左右：2.请按如下格式在相应位置作答。
Doodlebug complained, but he started to work again.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________But before Dandelion reached the next car in line, the elephants had begun shooting water out their trunks and spraying (喷洒) each car clean.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________4 . I used to tell my children that they were smart, because I was impressed by their rapid growth. I remember clearly watching my daughter figure out how to build a Lego house that would stand up on its own, and thinking: Look at this tiny architectural genius.
But decades of research now suggest that we should not tell our children they’re “smart” when they do impressive things. When I first heard it, I felt instinctively annoyed. But after I dug into the research, I was persuaded. It all goes back to something called “growth” mindset (心态), a term developed and popularized by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford. Professor Dweck believes that we can change our abilities through effort and strategy. The alternative to a growth mindset is a “fixed” mindset — the idea that our abilities are inborn and can’t be changed. When we praise our children for being “smart,” based on victories like doing well on a test, we’re unconsciously encouraging them to believe that if they do poorly or make mistakes, they’re not smart.
It’s not just what we say that matters, but how we tolerate our children’s failures. A 2016 study by Dweck showed that parents’ “failure mind-sets” affect their children more than their views on intelligence. In other words, if parents think that failure is shameful, their children are more likely to be afraid of making mistakes. The study concludes that everyone is actually a mixture of fixed and growth mindsets, continually evolving with experience. Whatever we say or don’t say to our kids, the key is to get them more comfortable with failures big or small.
It’s helpful for kids to understand that you make mistakes and learn how they happen. When you chat with them, you can describe what you learned, or how you strategized a solution. “You don’t have to deny you have negative emotional reactions,” Dweck said. “We, as a society, don’t do that enough because we feel embarrassed when we make mistakes.” But if we discuss our missteps more and explain how we overcame them, our children can learn to do the same.
1. What did the author initially think of the research’s advice?| A．Convincing. | B．Advanced. | C．Inaccessible. | D．Unacceptable. |
| A．smartness is the key to success |
| B．difficulties in daily life teach them a lot |
| C．their abilities can be improved through hard work |
| D．they are impressive due to their good grades on tests |
| A．Affect the children via their own experience. |
| B．Hide their negative feelings from children. |
| C．Remind children to avoid making mistakes. |
| D．Pay attention to develop children’s intelligence. |
| A．The effect of a fixed mindset on children. |
| B．“Being smart” doesn’t prepare kids for failure. |
| C．The importance of being smart in family interaction. |
| D．“Being smart” is the power of praising in children’s growth. |
5 . While socializing comes naturally for some, it can be a struggle for others. Shyness is a normal, common personality trait (特征).
Get Excited About A New Adventure
You may have been shy most of your life.
Pay Attention To Your Words
Practice Mindfulness (正念)
Mindfulness involves drawing your attention to the present and being aware of your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings.
Take Small Steps
Getting started can be the hardest part of learning how to be more social for those who are shy.
| A．If so, that’s a part of you that you’re used to |
| B．Sometimes the best path toward addressing a fear is exposure |
| C．Mindfulness can help reduce symptoms of social anxiety disorder |
| D．Taking time to tend to your appearance can make a big difference |
| E．How we communicate and characterize ourselves can be powerful |
| F．However, shyness can make it hard for people to connect with others and achieve their goals |
| G．But engaging with people doesn’t have to be practiced as an important work presentation |
内容包括：
1. 自信的重要性：
2, 从缺乏信心到有自信的转变过程。
注意：1. 词数120左右，短文的开头和结尾已为你写好（不计入总词数）；
2. 可根据内容适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
Boys and girls,
Life is but a hard and bitter journey.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Thank you.
8 . Children’s Acquiring the Principles of Mathematics and Science
It has been pointed out that learning mathematics and science is not so much learning facts as learning ways of thinking. It has also been emphasized that in order to learn science, people often have to change the way they think in ordinary situations. These changes in ways of thinking are often referred to as “conceptual changes”. But how do “conceptual changes” happen? How do children change their ways of thinking as they learn in school?
The psychologist Piaget suggested an interesting hypothesis (假说) relating to the process of cognitive (认知的) change in children. Cognitive change was expected to result from the pupils’ own intellectual activity. When met with a result that challenges their thinking, that is when faced with conflict, pupils realize that they need to think again about their own ways of solving problems, regardless of whether the problem is one in mathematics or in science. He hypothesised that conflict brings about unbalance, and then triggers processes that ultimately produce cognitive changes. For this reason, pupils need to be actively engaged in solving problems that will challenge their current mode of reasoning. However, Piaget also pointed out that young children do not always abandon their ideas in the face of conflicting evidence. They may actually abandon the evidence and keep their theory.
Piaget’s hypothesis about how cognitive change occurs was later translated into an educational approach which is now termed “discovery learning”. Discovery learning initially took what is now considered the “lone learners” route. The role of the teacher was to select situations that challenged the pupils’ reasoning; and the pupils’ peers had no real role in this process. However, it was subsequently proposed that interpersonal conflict, especially with peers, might play an important role in promoting cognitive change. This hypothesis has been investigated in many recent studies of science teaching and learning.
Christine Howe and her colleagues, for example, have compared children’s progress in understanding several types of science concepts when they are given the opportunity to observe relevant events. In one study, Howe compared the progress of 8 to 12-year-old children in understanding what influences motion down a slope. In order to figure out the role of conflict in group work, they created two kinds of groups according to a pre-test: one in which the children had dissimilar views, and a second in which the children had similar views. They found support for the idea that children in the groups with dissimilar views progressed more after their training sessions than those who had been placed in groups with similar views. However, they found no evidence to support the idea that the children worked out their new conceptions during their group discussions, because progress was not actually observed in a post-test immediately after the sessions of group work, but rather in a second test given around four weeks after the group work.
1. Which of the following statements is in line with Piaget’s hypothesis?| A．Teachers play a big role in learning by explaining difficult concepts. |
| B．Teaching should be consistent in order to easily acquire knowledge. |
| C．Children can help each other make cognitive progress. |
| D．Cognitive progress mainly relies on children’s own intellectual activity. |
| A．was adopted during discovery learning early on |
| B．requires help from the pupils’ peers |
| C．relies on how the teacher guides the students heavily |
| D．played an important role in cognitive change |
| A．The most active children made the least progress according to a pre-test. |
| B．The children were evaluated on their abilities to understand a physics phenomenon. |
| C．The teacher aided the children to understand a scientific problem in group work. |
| D．All the children were working in mixed-ability groups to work out new conceptions. |
| A．that children acquire more when learning in groups |
| B．that children opposing each other would learn slower |
| C．that the children were given a total of three tests, at different times |
| D．that there can be a satisfying result thanks to the duration of test |
(1)子曰：“知之者不如好之者，好之者不如乐之者。”
(2)子曰：“三人行，必有我师焉。则其善者而从之，其不善者而改之。”
(3)子曰：“温故而知新，可以为师矣。”
注意：
(1)词数不少于100；
(2)可以适当增加细节。以使行文连贯。
参考词汇：《论语》the Analects of Confucius
Topic: Discussion on the chapters of Analects of Confucius
Posted by Li Jin
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My dad and I had been looking forward to the Stale cross-country race of my senior year of high school, which would be the climax (顶点) of my existence.
I was the fastest runner on my team, and I was supposed to make it into the top fifteen. We had been working towards this race for three years. It was everything to me, and it was everything to my dad. He was a runner and was wild with joy by my success in running. He made it to every race, even flying home early from business trips to see me run. I always listened for his voice, which rang above the crowd-telling me to relax my arms, calling out my time. He pushed me. He cheered for me. He believed in me. We spent countless hours on the sandy canals of Arizona. Breathing in the dust of the desert, the blossoms of the orange trees, and the terrible smell of the dairy farm, we made our way across the city. We pounded miles and miles into our running shoes, marking with every step the path to greatness. It was a journey that was just ours. A dream passed on from one generation to the next.
Then the big day came. It was hotter than normal - too hot. My throat felt like a field of cotton, cracked with the summer heat, as I waited for the gun to fire. I gazed out at the crowd; dozens of familiar faces from church and school flickered across my view. They had come for me. They were counting on me. I saw my dad set his watch, worry and excitement etched across his face. With the sound of a gunshot, the race began.
For the first two and half miles, I felt great. I had never before been so ready for something. The weeks leading up to the race were filled with hard practices and a strict diet. The scorching sun beat upon my back, blinding me with its brilliance. Nothing was going to stop me, though.
注意：1. 所续写短文的词数应为150左右；
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
However, without warning, my strength was running out.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________I whispered, “I’m so sorry I disappointed you, Dad.”
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