There was a lively discussion was held in my class last Friday. It was main about protecting the fine Chinese culture. Some suggest raising people’s awareness of preserving our culture and make people fall in love with it. For example, we could conduct creative activity like discovery tours and culture shows to help people have better understand of our culture. Others thought some courses should be offered in schools, whose goal was to help students learn more about their customs, ways of life and so on. And to my view, which mattered was that everyone should feel proud of our own culture. Beside, we should attempt to pass our fine culture down from generation to generation.

2 . Two hundred years ago, the clock began to control the world of work. Paid on the basis of how many hours they worked, people rushed to and from work.

The clock’s power may at last be weakening. Flexible working existed well before the pandemic?(疫情). Now remote working has brought a greater degree of freedom. A survey of 4,700 home-workers across six countries conducted by Slack, a corporate-messaging firm, found that flexible working was viewed very positively, improving both people’s worksite balance and productivity. Flexible workers even scored more highly on a sense of belonging to their organization than those on a nine-to-five schedule.

It is hardly surprising that workers prefer flexibility. Working an eight-hour schedule is restricting. Those are also the hours when most shops are open, and when doctors will take appointments. Parents on a conventional routine may be able to take their children to school in the morning but are unlikely to be able to pick them up in the afternoon.

It is also not astonishing that home-workers feel they are more productive. After all, few people can concentrate for eight hours on end. There are points in the day where people feel like staring out of the window or going for a walk; these may be moments when they find inspiration or recharge themselves for the next task. When they do this in an office, they risk the boss’s disapproval; at home, they can work when they are most motivated.

What is striking about Slack’s study is the widespread support for home-working. Overall Just 12% of the workers surveyed wanted to return to a normal office schedule. In America black, Asian and Hispanic employees were even more enthusiastic than their white colleagues. Women with children were generally happy about it, reporting an improvement in their work-life balance.

Of course, the new schedule carries dangers: people may lose all separation between work and home life. To maintain some human contact, companies may adopt a mixed model in which workers go into the office for part of the week. But overall office-workers’ freedom is to be welcomed. The clock was a crud master and many people will be happy to escape its control.

Mr. Smith used to be in prison for three years, which may make you think he is not a good man. But as     1     matter of fact, he is kind-hearted as well as honest. The reason     2     he was put into prison was not that he himself broke the law, but that his six-year-old son blew up the bridge near his home, imitating（模仿）what he had seen on TV. Although this little boy did break the law. he was     3     young to be put in prison. According to the local law, the boy’s parents could not escape     4     （punish）.

As a result, Mr. Smith received the punishment. He was arrested（逮捕）and     5     （final） taken to the police station. Most of the people in the town showed pity on him, but it was     6     （use）. After all, law is law. Everybody is to obey     7     . As the proverb（谚语）goes, “when it rains, it pours”（祸不单行）, Mrs. Smith was     8     of work before long. She had to move to a southern state,     9     she was born and grew up. Misfortunes（不幸）tell us what fortune is .     10     the Smiths have experienced does teach us a good lesson.

4 . Make Up Your Mind to Succeed

Kind-hearted parents have unknowingly left their children defenseless against failure. The generation born between 1980 and 2001 grew up playing sports where scores and performance were not very valued because "everyone's a winner". And their report cards sounded more positive than ever before. As a result, Stanford University professor Carol Dweck, PhD, calls them "the overpraised generation".

Dweck has been studying how people deal with failure for 40 years. Her research has led her to find out two clearly different mindsets that have a great effect on how we react to it. Here's how they work.

A fixed mindset is supported by the belief that the gift is genetic — you're a born artist or mathematician. The fixed mindset believes it's sure to succeed without much effort and regards failure as personal shame(羞耻). When things get difficult, it's quick to blame others, lie, and even stay away from future difficulties.

On the other hand, a growth mindset believes that no talent is entirely born and that effort and learning make everything possible. Because the ego (自我价值感) isn't the most important thing, the growth mindset sees failure as a chance rather than shame. When faced with a difficulty, they are quick to rethink, change and try again. In fact, they enjoy this experience.

We are all born with growth mindsets. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to live in the world. But parents, teachers, and instructors often push us into the fixed mindset by encouraging certain actions and misdirected praise. Dweck's book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, and online instructional program explain this in depth. But she says there are many little things you can start doing today to make sure that your children, grandchildren and even you are never defeated by failure.

6 . Physical education(体育), or PE, isn’t required for all high school students. In some schools, it isn’t offered for some different reasons. But should high school students receive physical education? The answer is certainly “Yes.”

Today many people don’t do sports. But as is known to all, doing sports is very important for an adult. Teaching teens the importance of a healthy lifestyle and making fitness plans now can help teens put exercise in the first place as an adult.

The American Heart Association says that 10 million kids and teens suffer from obesity(肥胖症). The increase in activities that don’t get teens to move around, such as computer games, means many teens don’t get their required exercise. PE classes act as a public health measure to encourage physical activities and help teens have healthy weights.

Not doing sports increases teens’ hazard of developing many diseases. An active lifestyle offers a good way of protection from these health problems. As much as 75 percent of health-care spending goes toward treating medical conditions that can be prevented by lifestyle changes, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.

According to the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition (PCFSN), students who performed five hours of physical activity each week improved their academic(学业的)performance. Students from programs with no physical activity, who used the extra time for classroom study, did not perform better on tests than those who gave up some study time in support of physical education.

7 . The sound woke Damian Languell at 8:15 in the morning. It was so loud that he _________ it came from inside his house in Wade, Maine. As he _________ to investigate, he heard another sound, this one coming most _________ from outside. Watching out of his bedroom window, he saw a tree _________ in smoke about 500 yards away. A car was wrapped around the tree’s base, its engine _________.

“I _________ buckets of water,” said Languell. Then he ran to the crash _________. The car looked worse up close. It was nearly _________ into two, and the tree was where the driver’s seat ought to have been, as if planted there. No one should have _________ this crash, and yet there was 16-year-old Quintin Thompson, his __________ face pressed against the driver’s side window, in visible __________. Languell, 35, tried pouring the fire with his buckets of water with no success. “When the __________ got into the front seats, I realized I had to get him out of there,” he said.

Completely __________ his own safety, Languell opened the car’s back door and __________ in. He cut through Thompson’s seat belt using a __________ he’d had the foresight to bring with him. Now that Thompson was free of the __________, Languell pulled him out of the vehicle, and then __________ the teen to safety just before the entire car was surrounded in flames.

Although Thompson suffered several breakings to his legs, spine, and face, a social media post __________ him as “looking great, smiling, and joking”. Languell thinks about that day often. Displaying the sort of sympathy that __________ him to help, he explained, “My heart goes out to Thompson. When you are that close to that level of hurt, you feel it so __________.”

Child labor     1     (be) a problem for many years. Over a hundred years ago, Charles Dickens shocked many of his readers when he described the conditions where young     2     (child) worked in British factories. The conditions Dickens described continue, almost unchanged today, in many parts of the world. The only difference is     3     today’s employment of children is confined to small industries and family businesses, such as hotels, restaurants and     4     (particular) farms, rather    5     to large factories. The children not only receive nothing or very little for their long hours of work, but also they     6     (prevent) from attending school. Therefore, when they become older they are unable     7     (do) any other kind of work.

The solution     8     the problem is clearly better laws to protect young children, greater supervision (监督) of industry and heavier fines for those     9     break the laws. Only in this way can young boys and girls be allowed to enjoy the most valuable time of     10     (they) lives—childhood.

A 30-year-old man was finally rescued from the Alaskan wilderness after his cabin burned down,     1     (leave)him trapped in the snow for almost three weeks.

Tyson Steele had been living alone     2     several months in a small house in Skwentna, a town     3    (locate)70 miles northwest of Anchorage. He had been burning a fire in     4    (he)woodstove back in December when a piece of flaming cardboard     5    (fly)up his fireplace chimney and landed on his roof, which started a slow fire that eventually left the cabin in ruins. Since Skwentna only has a population of about 35 people, Steele's     6    (near)neighbor lived about 20 miles away. With no means of     7    (communicate)to call for help, Steele endured sub-zero temperatures     8     severe weather conditions wearing long johns(秋裤), boots with no socks, and a heavy wool sweater.

When his family and friends hadn't heard from Steele for several     9    (week), they requested a welfare check from Alaska State Troopers. As a helicopter flew over the area, they caught sight of Steele waving his arms in the air next to a massive "SOS" sign     10     he had stamped into the snow.

10 . Healthcare staff and bank clerks have been on the front line of the health and economic crises striking the UK, but behind the scenes, another group of workers robots have been toiling away and overcoming both emergencies with no fear of COVID-19. But will COVID-19 speed up the rise of robots?

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is software that robotizes repetitive back-office tasks. The National Health Service (NHS) has used it during the widespread disease to con-trol demand and capacity planning in caring for all levels of patients day and night. Jason Kingdon, Blue Prism's new chief executive who is recovering from COVID-19, says, “Before RPA, these were manual processes. You had to train a number of staff to put them in place. Now, you only need to train a single robot to manage the administration.” More than two fifths of bosses across 45 countries that responded to a survey by EY (Ernst & Young) said they were planning on accelerating spending on automation technology to prepare for a post-Covid world.

COVID-19 has already left tens of millions unemployed, so firms won't be short of cheap labour on the other side of the crisis. But experts still think Al will be the more cautious choice for companies. One of them said, “It's important to remember that even in China, which has much lower wages, 12.5 million manufacturing jobs have been cut over the past four years as more robots have been adopted.”

However, Al is overhyped (过分提倡)in many ways and poor application could lead to a rise in anxiety towards automation. Again, we should think of history as a guide. A lot of, workers riots(暴动) in the early 19th century happened during the continental blockade of the Napoleonic Wars when there was significant mess to trade in Britain. These things are not unrelated.