1 . Brian Hamilton used to occupy himself with a six-figure job, but his life changed in a prison when he was accompanying his friend, Reverend Robert J. Harris, who often went to local prisons to do his work. During the visit, Hamilton started talking to one of the prisoners and asked what he was going to do when he got out. “He said he was going to get a job,” Hamilton says. “I thought to myself, wow, that’s going to be difficult.”
The conversation made Hamilton consider how prisoners could benefit from operating their own business, something he thought about for years. Finally in 2008, 16 years after that initial conversation, Hamilton created Inmates to Entrepreneurs, a nonprofit organization that helps people with criminal backgrounds start their own small businesses. “Harris and I taught our first course at a prison called ‘How to Start Your Own Business When You Get Out’,” he says.
At the time, Hamilton was building his own company, Sageworks. He was the chairman and co-founder of Sageworks. As Sageworks grew, so did Hamilton’s time spent teaching at prisons throughout North Carolina.
Eventually, Hamilton decided it was time to change his focus to his true passion. In May 2018, he sold his stake (股份) in Sageworks, focusing his commitment on Inmates to Entrepreneurs.
“Now, anyone is able to access the course, either to become a teacher to go into prisons to teach it or to access it for themselves as a prisoner or part of the general population,” Hamilton explains. In addition, he visits middle schools and presents the course to at-risk students to lead the so-called bad students to the right path.
The free course is funded by the Brian Hamilton Foundation, which offers help to soldiers as they adjust to civilian life and provides loans to small businesses. “We’re giving prisoners something they can do independent of a system that isn’t working for them. If you can make people know that other people care about them, it will make a difference.”
1. What does Paragraph 1 mainly talk about?| A．Hamilton lost his six-figure job. |
| B．Harris often visited local prisons to interview. |
| C．Hamilton’s life changed after visiting a prison. |
| D．Harris was optimistic about prisoners’ job prospects. |
| A．It is often short of prison teachers. | B．It provides loans to at-risk students. |
| C．It’s independent of the social system. | D．Its course has been largely broadened. |
| A．He often went to prisons before 2008. |
| B．He tried to prevent possible crimes in advance. |
| C．He wrote a book titled “How to Start Your Own Business”. |
| D．He gave away his company to those who were released from prison. |
| A．Offering care to others. | B．Giving trust to strangers. |
| C．Showing respect for teachers. | D．Providing education for children. |
| A．A man made a fruitless visit to the prison. |
| B．A man sold his business to teach prisoners. |
| C．A man realized his dream of being a teacher. |
| D．A man successfully created two organisations. |
2 . Many of us seem to have lives that follow a certain way. From kindergarten all the way to when we get married, every stage of our lives seems to be preset. And although this works well for a lot of people, according to British scholar Jay Shetty, there is no “right” schedule to live our lives by.
A few months ago, a video of Shetty’s speech “Before You Feel Pressure” became popular on the Internet across the world. In the video, he sends an important message that we should think “outside of the way” and have the courage to follow our hearts. As Shetty says in the video, we don’t have to get stressed and put ourselves in a race with our peers or judge our lives based on others’. “Everything in life happens according to our time, our clocks,” he says.
In his inspiring speech, Shetty points out that UK author J. K. Rowling got her famous “Harry Potter” series published at age 32, after being turned down by 12 publishers. Shetty also mentions that US actor Morgan Freeman didn’t get his big break until he was 52 years old. So we shouldn’t let anyone rush us.
As physicist Albert Einstein once said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that’s counted truly counts. The key to staying on our own tracks is to be patient and keep our own interest. ” In Australian nurse Bronnie Ware’s best-selling book “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying”, she recorded the dying regrets of her patients, and the top one on the list was: “I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the one others expected of me. ”
Indeed, we are all unique in our personalities and gifts, and there’s no perfect fit for all. We should listen to our inner voices and ignore what the world has taught us, and what we’ve picked up from people around us. “It is important to allow people to go back to being self-aware of their own interests, needs and concerns,” Shetty told the magazine. “It’s disconnecting from what ‘makes sense’ to what actually moves you and what makes sense internally (内在地). ”
1. What does Jay Shetty agree to?| A．The stages of our lives should be preset. |
| B．Few people have lives that follow a certain way. |
| C．All people live their lives according to schedules. |
| D．We can live our lives not according to the given way. |
| A．put more pressure on themselves |
| B．adjust their lives based on others’ |
| C．decide their lives in terms of actual cases |
| D．compete with those who are better than themselves |
| A．everyone can be a winner | B．hard work is the key to success |
| C．great new life can begin anytime | D．success does not happen in one’s youth |
| A．Everything that’s counted truly counts. |
| B．One should live a life as expected by others. |
| C．We should count and analyze everything in life. |
| D．The top dying regret was not living in the way one wanted. |
| A．people should never listen to others’ advice |
| B．we should follow the heart and do what we want to do |
| C．what makes sense should not be about what people care internally |
| D．being self-aware of interests, needs and concerns is not acceptable |
3 . When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy. Of course, this is not the way the word “literacy” is normally used. Traditionally, people think of literacy as the ability to read and write. Why, then, should we think of literacy more broadly?
Nowadays, language is not the only important communication system. Images, graphs, diagrams and many other visual symbols are particularly significant. Thus, the idea of different types of “visual literacy” would seem to be an important one. For example, being able to read the images in advertising is one type of visual literacy.
Furthermore, very often today words and images of various sorts are juxtaposed in a variety of ways. In newspapers and magazines as well as in textbooks, images take up more and more of the space alongside words. In fact, in many modern high school and college textbooks, images not only take up more space, they now carry meanings that are independent of the words in the text. If you can’t read these images, you will not be able to understand their meanings from the words in the text as was more usual in the past.
Now there are different ways to read different types of texts. Literacy is multiple, then, in the sense that the legal literacy needed for reading law books is not the same as the literacy needed for reading physics texts or cartoon books. And we should not be too quick to dismiss the latter form of literacy. Many cartoon books are full of images that would make a modern literary critic’s heart beat fast and confuse any otherwise normal adult.
Once we see this multiplicity of literacy, we realize that when we think about reading and writing, we have to think beyond print. Reading and writing in any field, whether it is law, rap songs, academic essays or cartoon books, are not the only ways of decoding(解密) print. Video games are a new form of art. They will not replace books; they will sit beside them, interact with them, and change them and their role in society in various ways, as, indeed, they are already doing strongly with movies. We have no idea yet how people “read” video games, what meanings they make from them. Still less do we know how they will “read” them in the future.
1. What is the broad meaning of literacy?| A．The ability to read, write and view. |
| B．The ability to read, listen and play. |
| C．The ability to speak, write and think. |
| D．The ability to listen, speak and think. |
| A．Put together. | B．Pulled out. |
| C．Taken away. | D．Replaced with. |
| A．Proud. | B．Upset. |
| C．Grateful. | D．Curious. |
| A．are too violent to risk experimenting with for the purposes of understanding literacy |
| B．are unrealistic and should not fall into the same categories as the other texts he describes |
| C．are not yet entirely understood in terms of literacy, but are already impacting other forms of expression such as filmmaking |
| D．are irrelevant in academic discussion because no one has yet determined how to explain the ways that people understand them |
| A．A historical explanation of the very first video game and its evolution. |
| B．A technological definition of video games, how they are made, and how they are played. |
| C．Examples of the way that some people currently interpret video games and what they mean to them. |
| D．A price comparison of video game consoles and whether or not quality has a direct impact on literacy. |
| A．Education. | B．Health. |
| C．Advertisement. | D．Traveling. |
4 . The practice of students endlessly copying letters and sentences from a blackboard is a thing of the past. With the coming of new technologies like computers and smartphone, writing by hand has become something of nostalgic (怀旧的）skill. However，while today’s educators are using more and more technology in their teaching, many believe basic handwriting skills are still necessary for students to be successful---both in school and in life.
Virginia Berninger, professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says it’s important to continue teaching handwriting and help children acquire the skill of writing by hand.
Berninger and her colleagues conducted a study that looked at the ability of students to complete various writing tasks---both on a computer and by hand. The study, published in 2009, found that when writing with a pen and paper, participants wrote longer essays and more complete sentences and had a faster word production rate.
In a more recent study, Berninger looked at what role spelling plays in a student’s writing skills and found that how well children spell is tied to know well they can write. “Spelling makes some of the thinking parts of the brain active which helps us access our vocabulary, word meaning and concepts. It is allowing our written language to connect with ideas.” Berninger said.
Spelling helps students translate ideas into words in their mind first and then to transcribe(转换）“those words in the mind written symbols on paper or keyboard and screen,” the study said. Seeing the words in the “mind’s eye” helps children not only to turn their ideas into words, says Berninger, but also to spot spelling mistakes when they write the words down and to correct then over time.
“In our computer age, some people believe that we don’t have to teach spelling because we have spell checks,” she said. “But until a child functional spelling ability of about a fifth grade level, they won't have knowledge to choose the correct spelling among the options given by the computer.”
1. What makes writing by hand a thing of the past?| A．The absence of blackboard in classroom. |
| B．The use of new technologies in teaching. |
| C．The lack of practice in handwriting. |
| D．The popular use of smartphones. |
| A．focused on the difference between writing by hand and on a computer. |
| B．indicated that students prefer to write with a pen and paper. |
| C．found that good essays are made up of long sentences. |
| D．discussed the importance of writing speed. |
| A．Spelling improves one’s memory of words. |
| B．Spelling ability is closely related to writing ability. |
| C．Spelling benefits the translation from words into ideas. |
| D．Spelling slows down finding exact words to express ideas. |
| A．Window. | B．Soul |
| C．Picture. | D．Imagination. |
| A．Computers can help people with their choice of words. |
| B．Spell checks can take the place of spelling teaching. |
| C．Handwriting still has a place in today’s classrooms. |
| D．Functional spelling ability develops fast in the fifth grade. |
