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| Turn a great night into a truly memorable one with our hospitality packages. From dining in Edinburgh Castle to sampling the finest Scotch Whisky, we have a range of options available. Each package below includes a ticket to The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo 2024 Show, Journeys, at Edinburgh Castle. | 2024 HOSPITALITY PACKAGES Make you Journey s experience extra special with Tattoo Hospitality. BOOK NOW | |
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| THE ROYAL GALLERY DINING EXPERIENCE Only available in August, enjoy a delicious dining experience in The Royal Gallery overlooking the Edinburgh Castle Esplanade. LOCATION Edinburgh Castle Esplanade PRICES FROM £600.00 | THE GATEHOUSE PACKAGE Enjoy authentic Scottish dining presented especially for you.This exclusive dining experience is located in Edinburgh Castle’s historic Gatehouse. LOCATION Edinburgh Castle PRICES FROM £700.00 | THE WITCHERY DINING EXPERIENCE New for 2024, this package offers an intimate dining experience in Edinburgh’s renowned fine-dining restaurant The Witchery.LOCATION The Witchery by the Castle PRICE £970.00 |
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THE CASTLE PACKAGE A location like no other. Experience a pre-Show dining experience within Edinburgh’s famous fortress and enjoy a glimpse behind the scenes before the Show begins.LOCATION Edinburgh Castle PRICES FROM £323.00 | THE ROYAL GALLERY RECEPTION Enjoy our Show from the best seats in the house then join fellow guests, performers and dignitaries at a post-Show drinks and canapés reception held in The Royal Gallery.LOCATION Edinburgh Castle Esplanade PRICES FROM £415.00 | FLAVOURS OF SCOTLAND Designed for those that love whisky and those that want to find out more, Flavors of Scotland will immerse you in the world of Scotch Whisky.LOCATION The Scotch Whisky Experience, Royal Mile PRICES FROM £212.50 |
1. All of the hospitality packages provided above ______.
| A．contain a ticket to the 2024 Military Tattoo show |
| B．are available through the whole year of 2024 |
| C．offer delicate handmade Scottish souvenirs |
| D．include a well-planned tour around Edinburgh Castle |
| A．£1200 | B．£1940 | C．£646 | D．£830 |
| A．The Witchery Dining Experience | B．The Royal Gallery dining experience |
| C．Flavours of Scotland | D．The Royal Gallery Reception |
2 . Do you have bright ideas? Ideas for inventions that change society or, at least, make life easier for somebody? Perhaps we all do sometimes but we don’t often make the idea come true. Recently, in Britain, there was a competition called British Designers for Tomorrow. The competition encouraged young people to carry out their bright ideas. There were two groups in the contest: Group One was for school children over 16. And there were eleven prize-winners altogether.
Neil Hunt, one of the prize-winners, was called “Sunshine Superman”. It’s important when people study the weather to be able to record sunshine. We need to know how many hours of sunshine we have and how strong it is. Most sunshine records only record direct sunlight. Neil’s is accurate and this is very important for research into way of using its power.
You can do so much with animated cartoon. Look at Simon West’s idea for animated road signs. He uses pictures which appear to move as you go nearer to or farther from them. This isn’t a new idea. But it is new to use these pictures on road signs. “We found that people were likely to see moving signs,” said Simon. So now, you can really see rocks falling, trains moving, horses running or car falling over the edge of a cliff. Quite a warning!
The ideas in the competition were so inventive that we are surprised that British industry doesn’t ask more school children for suggestions. Perhaps this will be the start of “pupil power”!
1. The writer holds that people seldom _________.| A．have bright ideas | B．make their bright ideas come true |
| C．make their life easier | D．think of inventing something |
| A．To warn people to be careful while working. |
| B．To warn people on the roads of the danger ahead. |
| C．To add to the beauty of a city. |
| D．To help make a car trip more exciting. |
| A．take better care of school children |
| B．help school children in their studies |
| C．stop asking school children for suggestions |
| D．pay more attention to school children’s inventive power |
3 . Fit to Be Tied: Four Common Knots
Are you one of those hikers who always prefers a square knot? Here are simple, easy-to-remember alternatives that will do a better job in four common camping settings.
①Bind cargo to your car To secure a large bag to a car roof, you need a knot that acts like a pulley (滑轮). The trucker’s knot works best. Start by forming an overhand loop, pulling a loop through, and tightening. Next, feed the rope’s free end around a roof rack (架 子) or an S-hook on the frame. Pull on the working end to obtain the desired tension; then use a quick-release half-hitch, a type of knot, to “lock” the tension in place (and make untying cargo quick and simple).
| ②Attach tent guylines (拉绳) Attached to webbing loops at key stress points on the outer walls of tents, guylines are tied to the ground with stones. They stabilize the tent in strong winds by keeping the fabric walls tight. When setting up your shelter, tighten the guylines until no loose part remains in them or the tent walls. Fit the ropes with a tight-line knot, which lets you adjust the line’s length without untying the knot. When you move the knot by hand, it slides freely along the line, but it holds tight when the loop is tensioned—so the knot holds firm when gusts of wind pull tent walls hard. |
③Lower a pack over a rock shelf Some packs feature a strong leather belt for easy rope-pulls—but most require a bowline knot, which doesn’t slip no matter the weight. It is very easy to untie after it’s been loaded. Slide the loop around the middle of the pack, tighten it, then lower away. A handy recall- aiding device: The rope’s long end is the “tree”; the loop is the “rabbit hole”; | ④Fasten a canoe to shore The clove hitch is perfect for quickly fastening boats because it’s easy to tie, holds fast under tension, and releases instantly with a pull on the free end. This makes it a speedy way to fix a line to a tree. For extra security, add one or two half-hitches.
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| A．(a)(d)(b)(c) | B．(a)(c)(b)(d) | C．(c)(d)(a)(b) | D．(c)(b)(d)(a) |
| A．Tight-line knot | B．Truckers knot | C．Clove hitch | D．Bowline knot |
| A．A website on backpackers. | B．A leaflet on safety guidance. |
| C．A scientific journal on knots. | D．A travel guide on beauty spots. |
4 . NEW STORY CONTEST
Ah, the New Year — a time for visiting friends and family as we ring out the old, ring in the new and imagine all the new adventures that await us in the year ahead.
Who knows what you’ll find when you open the door to your dryer or gaze up at the night sky? Will you write about a visit from a mythical creature, or maybe a lost animal? Will the visitor cause a problem — or solve one?
Whoever your visitor is, every buggy in Cricket (an American children’s magazine) Country will be gathered around the mailbox, awaiting the visit of your best story — just 350 words or less, please — featuring a surprising or unexpected visitor. Happy New Year!
Contest Rules
Your contest entry must be original. Ideas and words should not be copied.
Your entry must be signed by your parent or guardian, saying it is original, that no help was given, and granting Cricket permission to publish prize-winning entries in the May 2024 issue or on our website.
Be sure to include your name, age and full address on your entry.
Only one entry per person, please.
If you want your work returned, enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope for each entry.
Incomplete entries cannot be considered. Your entry will be incomplete if you forget to include your age or the signature of your parent or guardian that confirms that your work is original.
Your entry must be received by April 25, 2024.
Send entries to Cricket League, P. O. Box 300, Peru, IL 61354. (No faxes or email submissions, please!)
1. The theme of the new story contest is “_________”.| A．new adventures | B．New Year’s resolution |
| C．unexpected visitors | D．surprising inventions |
| A．be sent by means of email | B．arrive after January 25,2018 |
| C．be the contestant’s own work | D．contain no less than 350 words |
| A．the prize-winning entry can be publicized on the media |
| B．all the required information has been included |
| C．the content of the story is based on a real event |
| D．editors can make revision to the participant’s entry |
5 . Everybody loves a fat pay rise. Yet pleasure at your own can vanish if you learn that a colleague has been given a bigger one. Indeed, if he has a reputation for slacking, you might even be angry. Such behaviour is regarded as “all too human”, with the underlying assumption that other animals would not be capable of this finely developed sense of grievance. But a study by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, which has just been published in Nature, suggests that it is all too monkey, as well.
The researchers studied the behaviour of female brown capuchin monkeys. They look cute. They are good-natured, co-cooperative creatures, and they share their food readily. Above all, like their female human counterparts, they tend to pay much closer attention to the value of “goods and services” than males.
Such characteristics make them perfect candidates for Dr. Brosnan’s and Dr. de Waal’s study. The researchers spent two years teaching their monkeys to exchange tokens for food. Normally, the monkeys were happy enough to exchange pieces of rock for slices of cucumber. However, when two monkeys were placed in separate but adjoining chambers, so that each could observe what the other was getting in return for its rock, their behaviour became markedly different.
In the world of capuchins, grapes are luxury goods (and much preferable to cucumbers). So when one monkey was handed a grape in exchange for her token, the second was reluctant to hand hers over for a mere piece of cucumber. And if one received a grape without having to provide her token in exchange at all, the other either tossed her own token at the researcher or out of the chamber, or refused to accept the slice of cucumber. Indeed, the mere presence of a grape in the other chamber (without an actual monkey to eat it) was enough to induce resentment in a female capuchin.
The researchers suggest that capuchin monkeys, like humans, are guided by social emotions. In the wild, they are a co-operative, group-living species. Such co-operation is likely to be stable only when each animal feels it is not being cheated. Feelings of righteous indignation(义愤填膺), it seems, are not the preserve of people alone. Refusing a lesser reward completely makes these feelings abundantly clear to other members of the group. However, whether such a sense of fairness evolved independently in capuchins and humans, or whether it stems from the common ancestor that the species had 35 million years ago, is, as yet, an unanswered question.
1. In the opening paragraph, the author introduces his topic by ________.| A．posing a question |
| B．justifying an assumption |
| C．making a comparison |
| D．explaining a phenomenon |
| A．monkeys are also angered by slack rivals |
| B．hating unfairness is also monkeys’ nature |
| C．monkeys, like humans, tend to be jealous of each other |
| D．no animals other than monkeys can develop such emotions |
| A．more inclined to weigh what they get |
| B．attentive to researchers’ instructions |
| C．nice in both appearance and temperament |
| D．more generous than their male companions |
| A．Monkeys can be trained to develop social emotions. |
| B．Human anger evolved from an uncertain source. |
| C．Animals usually show their feelings openly as human do. |
| D．Cooperation among monkeys remains stable only in the wild. |
6 . A Victory for Women in Economics
Economic history has long been documented through a male perspective, putting emphasis on the contributions of men and their viewpoints. For proof, just look to the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Not only are women insufficiently represented as economists, economics as a field has historically ignored the role women play in the economy.
Goldin has challenged the traditional male-centered world and turned the attention to women’s economic roles and challenges. Her Nobel recognition isn’t merely an honor for her individual achievements. It shows the world how inclusive, diverse and interconnected the field truly is.
| A．Economics isn’t just the boring science — it’s a human science. |
| B．Goldin’s research advocates the establishment of support systems for families to address the gender pay gap. |
| C．Part of the problem is that economics is often identified with finance, banking and the stock market. |
| D．It wasn’t a victory just for her but for women in the field. |
| E．It’s been awarded to 90 men since 1969 — and just three women. |
| F．Traditional models often oversimplified households’ decision-making processes and did not account for women’s contributions. |
7 . Today, in most of the theatres in Britain, the stages are situated behind a sort of arch (拱门), called the proscenium (幕布前的舞台部分) arch. The arch runs across the building with the stage on one side of it and the auditorium, housing the audience, on the other. The audience is kept to the area from which it can get a clear view of the stage.
The modern idea of having the stage in front of the proscenium arch is not really modern, of course. It makes our stages much like Shakespeare’s.
Moreover, nowadays, people are finding that modern theatres are built to sit in comfortably for two or three hours at a stretch.
| A．Over the last few decades, since the Second World War, theatrical customs have altered. |
| B．It makes people feel, as they watch a play or a show, that they are seeing a living and moving picture. |
| C．All these innovations have quickened up the pace of the drama. |
| D．This is an advantage both for actors and audience. |
| E．Today the theatres are much more comfortable because of the many improvements. |
| F．Often they can meet and eat in the restaurants attached to the theatres. |
8 . Australia looks browner and flatter than I remembered; it’s dry grass here and there dotted with tough bushes and unremarkable buildings. The lighting is violently intense.
My friend keeps talking in the driver’s seat and I respond with ‘Ah-huh’ and ‘Oh really?’ to appear interested in her string of gossip about people whose faces I have long forgotten, whose stories I’ve stopped caring about.
‘Are you okay?’ my friend asks, taking her eyes off the road to study my expression with her all-knowing eyes.
‘Just tired,’ I say. She accepts my lie with an unconvinced shrug. I keep searching in my mind’s eyes, hoping to bring back into focus images from the remote towns of Asia: steam coming off boiling pots, baskets filled with strange fruits, giant pigs alongside little kids.
I laugh at the thought.
‘Something funny?’ my friend asks.
‘Oh, just a memory,’ I say. ‘The little kids in northern Thailand were so friendly. When we’d pass them in the street, they’d greet us at the top of their lungs in their native language.’
‘Cool,’ she says, and then-’Hey, guess what? I had my bathroom remade!’ ‘Wow,’ I say. And then she details her bathroom project, and I ‘Ah-huh’ and ‘Oh really?’. Home improvements, kids, full-time jobs: these are the standard conversation topics of thirty-something women. In the years since I left, my friends have matured into responsible adults, but I’m stuck in another place entirely, more comfortable in a local bus traveling along the edge of a Himalayan mountain. If they are all grownups now, what does that make me?
People say that travel changes you, but I never anticipated it would be like this. I close my eyes and return to the excitement of being sped at 565 miles per hour to somewhere foreign and wild. But I must stay this time. My dad has been diagnosed with a serious illness and so here I am, back in reality, back to my roots.
1. How does the author feel on her arrival in Australia?| A．Interested. | B．Conflicted. | C．Exhausted. | D．Excited. |
| A．They have different interests and lives as grownups. |
| B．They share fond memories of growing up together. |
| C．They care about and provide updates for each other. |
| D．They enjoy telling personal stories to exchange ideas. |
| A．they make me think of growing up as they do |
| B．we are all adults who will eventually settle down |
| C．a comfortable home is what we all need as adults |
| D．diverse experiences shape individuals’ life paths |
| A．Feeling Lost When Back in Australia |
| B．The Excitement of Traveling to Australia |
| C．Australia: A Place like Asia in My Heart |
| D．Out of Asia, Out of Mind |
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| A．can clean both our hands and hand-held items |
| B．uses soap and water to kill harmful bacteria and viruses |
| C．is commonly used in hospitals to control infection after surgery |
| D．takes 30 second s to reduce almost all the viruses on mobile devices |
| A．transferred | B．connected | C．disinfected | D．updated |
| A．It will open automatically when the cell phone is cleaned. |
| B．There is no evidence that it has the effect of preventing infection. |
| C．Users needn’t turn over their cell phones to get every side cleaned. |
| D．Customers can get a 10% discount if they buy it online with a code. |
10 . I used to think my little comer of urban England was somewhere I could get away from the stress and strain of modern-day life — until they moved in next door. There are two of them. They are white, woolly and probably have sharp teeth as well as loud bark. But every time their constant barking interrupts my sleep, I remind myself that, in many respects, I am lucky. The neighbors don’t hold all-night parties, nor do they shout or throw crockery at each other, and though their dogs may bark, they don’t bite.
According to a recent consumer magazine report on “nightmare neighbors”, dogs are the fifth most common source of bad relations between neighbors. Noise of any description heads the list of complaints, followed by DIY enthusiasts, parking quarrelling, and arguments over house extensions.
So what alternatives are there? One is to take legal action. But this can be time-consuming and expensive and does nothing to improve already difficult relationships. The other alternatives are to sell up and go, or to try to reach a solution with the help of someone neutral. Mediation UK — the United Nations equivalent of garden fence conflicts — was set in 1984 to help resolve community disagreements.
In most cases, the lack of communication is found the main cause of conflict. David Nation of Plymouth Mediation points to poor public housing and widespread unemployment as additional factors. He also reports more cases of complaints from people who live in flats. Large houses built in the nineteenth century and designed as single-occupation family homes have, he says, been changed into flats with little or no attention to sound insulation. Dividing walls are paper thin and hardly block out sound at all.
Buyers can also be put off by the external appearance of neighboring houses. Anything from wild, uncared for gardens to unusual external color schemes can put off buyers — even though the offending property is next door. But it could be worse. John Gladden, of Norbury in Surrey upset his neighbors in St Oswald’s Road by mounting a huge fish in fiberglass (玻璃纤维) and putting it on the roof of his house. The local council argued that he should have got planning permission; residents thought the fish did nothing to improve the appearance of the neighborhood, and war broke out. Sightseers poured in and homes near the suburban property can now be hard to sell.
1. Why doesn’t the writer like her next-door neighbor’s dogs?| A．They wake her up. | B．They occasionally bark. |
| C．They are aggressive. | D．They remind her of sheep. |
| A．dogs | B．noise | C．parking | D．DIY |
| A．the color scheme | B．the garden | C．the situation | D．the house |
| A．inform people what to do if they have problems with their neighbors |
| B．describe the writer’s own problems with her neighbors. |
| C．illustrate the types and causes of problems between neighbors |
| D．explain the activities of the organization Mediation UK |
