My family had only recently moved into a new neighborhood. All of my neighbors have been very friendly and helpful since we moved in.

However, Mrs Davis, an elderly lady living in the last house on the other side of the road, escaped associating with us, or anyone else. When I asked around the neighborhood why, they warned me not to go after her because they thought she was insane (精神失常的) and preferred staying alone after losing her husband and only daughter in an aircraft crash. After that, she stayed isolated (孤立的) from all the neighbors, refusing all the care and help.

I often saw her on the streets during the evening, but she was always by herself. She appeared weak and I always wanted to help her, but after hearing what my neighbors had said about her, I wasn’t sure whether I should.

One day, when I was on my way to the supermarket, our paths crossed. I was walking past her and overheard her singing a tune. It immediately drew my attention because my parents used to sing the same song with me. I began to sing along with her, and she smiled at me for the first time. But when I smiled back, she quickly hurried her pace and went home.

She seemed very different to me that day. I refused to trust my neighbors’ claims that she had cut herself off from the rest of society because she was insane, so the next day, I knocked on her door. Mrs Davis was home, and instead of letting me in, she just looked at me silently through the window. I noticed her staring at me and was about to walk to the window when she quickly closed the curtains.

The next day, I revisited her house. “Hello, I brought you something,” I called out to her. “It’s the record of the music you were singing yesterday.”

The door opened and Mrs Davis’ eyes widened in surprise at the sight of me standing there.

Several days later in the morning, the doorbell rang at my house.

2 . Maps, number lines, shapes, artwork and other materials tend to cover elementary classroom walls. However, too much of a good thing may end up _______ attention and learning in young children, according to research published in Psychological Science.

Psychology researchers Anna V. Fisher, Karrie E. Godwin and Howard Seltman of Carnegie Mellon University looked at whether classroom displays affected children’s ability to maintain _______ during instruction and to learn the lesson content. They found that children in highly decorated classrooms were more distracted, spent more time off-task and demonstrated smaller learning _______than when the decorations were removed.

“Young children spend a lot of time — usually the whole day — in the same classroom, and we have shown that a classroom’s _______ environment can affect how much children learn,” said Fisher, lead author and associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Should teachers _______ their visual displays based on the findings of this study?

“We do not suggest by any means that this is the answer to all _______ problems. Furthermore,_______ research is needed to know what effect the classroom visual environment has on children’s attention and learning in real classrooms,” Fisher said. “_______, I would suggest that instead of removing all decorations, teachers should consider whether some of their visual displays do make it difficult for young children to _______.”

For the study, 24 kindergarten students were placed in ________classrooms for six introductory science lessons on topics they were unfamiliar with. Three lessons were taught in a heavily decorated classroom, and three lessons were given in a sparse (稀疏的) classroom. The results showed that while children learned in both __________ types, they learned more when the room was not heavily decorated. Specifically, children’s __________ on the test questions was higher in the sparse classroom (55% correct) than in the decorated classroom (42% correct).

“We were also interested in finding out if the visual displays were removed, whether the children’s attention would __________ to another distraction, such as talking to their peers, or the total amount of time they were distracted would remain the same,” said Godwin, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology and fellow of the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research.

However, when the researchers totaled all of the time children spent off-task in both types of classrooms, the rate of off-task __________ was higher in the decorated classroom (38.6% time spent off-task) than in the sparse classroom (28.4% time spent off-task).

The researchers hope these findings will lead to further studies into developing guidelines to help teachers design classrooms __________.

5 . As a traveler with a disability, I have always avoided cruises. This expedition-style small-ship cruise changed my mind.

When our expedition leader ________ we would make a Zodiac (卓迪船) ________ at Jan Mayen, a tiny island in the Arctic Ocean, I stepped out onto my balcony aboard our ship, ________ to find clear skies and calm seas. ________, I was met with a gust of wet wind and a view of mist-covered mountains in the distance. Jan Mayen wasn’t on our itinerary (行程), and due to its ________ location and often unpredictable weather, very few people ever ________ the island. I knew the ________ weren’t ideal, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

In fact, the possibility of ________ adventures was one of the reasons I chose this small-ship cruise. So I ________ joined my shipmates in the mud room, where we put on waterproof clothes and life jackets before hopping in the Zodiacs for a bumpy ________ to a black-sand beach. Even the fierce wind and rain couldn’t ________ our excitement as we ________ our way to the beach and hiked to a viewpoint, pausing to photograph little purple flowers ________ the volcanic rocks.

Our visit there wasn’t about what we could do or see. It was an opportunity to just be—to exist in a brief ________ on a tiny, often inaccessible, volcanic rock in the Arctic. And that’s something I never thought I’d ________ in my lifetime.

Doubts clouded my mind as I into that new world, Parsons School of Design. But fate had a plan, introducing me to Kathleen, who would become my guiding light.

I remember feeling out of place on my first day at Parsons, questioning everything from my outfit to my abilities. As I walked in and scanned the classroom, my vision sharply stopped on one person. Wow. She looked cool. I plopped myself down next to her and introduced myself as Dorri, thrilled when she smiled and said, “Hi. I’m Kathleen.” That was all it took.

What a difference Kathleen made in my school life! Her confidence, discipline, and responsibility were worlds away from my shaky, wild, and lazy nature. We became inseparable, signing up for the same classes, and I was always trying to earn her approval.

One day the homework assignment was to create an exciting illustration based on a pair of shoes. Bursting with ideas, I pulled out my favorite pair of antique thrift shop “old-lady shoes” and poured my heart into the project. Proud of my work, I rushed to Kathleen’s apartment to show her my creation, holding up my paper with glowing confidence. But Kathleen’s reaction was unexpected, crushing my pride with a single question: “Is that the only drawing you did?”

“Well, yes,” I responded sheepishly, “Why?”

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go to Washington Square Park and really do some drawings.” I was puzzled, but when she led, I willingly followed, with my pad tucked under my arm.

As we made our way to the park, Kathleen enthusiastically talked about form, content, and composition and stressed the significance of observing subjects closely. She described the shoes in my drawing as the kind worn by elderly women who frequent the park to feed pigeons. That moment, she taught me to look closely and recreate diligently.

Paragraph 1: At the park, Kathleen pointed to a bench with a napping old woman and said, “Here, draw her shoes repeatedly.”

Paragraph 2: The next day was the class feedback session.

Short-form videos, which gained popularity on the Chinese platform Douyin, have given rise to a new trend in entertainment: ultra-short (超短) dramas.     1     (tailor) to our fast-paced lifestyles, ultra-short dramas are far more likely to attract people to try them out than traditional television series. In the past, committing     2     a show meant investing upwards of 40 minutes, but with ultra-short dramas, only a few minutes is enough for     3     taste.

Despite the initial success of ultra-short dramas, Chinese authorities     4     (tighten) regulations and intensifying monitoring on them. Currently, most of these ultra-short dramas revolve around clichéd (陈词滥调的) romantic plots, often     5     (feature) a wealthy individual getting together with a poor person. This narrative trend bears the potential     6     (shape) young minds’ perceptions of reality and their approaches to real-life challenges.

What’s equally concerning is     7     ultra-short dramas are designed to catch the viewers’ attention with bite-sized runtimes. In a world dominated by smartphones,     8     attention spans are already declining, frequent     9     (expose) to ultra-short videos can only worsen the issue.

It’s natural for us to seek entertainment. But it’s also worth pausing to consider the consequences     10     diving into ultra-short dramas.