1 . It’s 13:30 and 28-year-old Marten Pella 's smart phone starts pinging, a signal that it’s time for us to stop working around his living room table and instead start our workout routine together. A cartoon character wearing bright red shorts on video begins instructing us to do star-jumps and sit-ups around his apartment.
Pella, a research assistant at Stockholm University, is part of the Hoffice movement, which invites workers-freelancers（自由职业者）or full-time employees who can do their jobs remotely—to work at each other’s homes to increase productivity and enjoy an active social life.
Those attending Hoffice events advertised on Facebook are typically asked to work silently in 45-minute blocks, before taking short breaks together to exercise, or simply chatting over a coffee. In addition, each participant shares daily objectives with the rest of the group upon arrival, and is invited to report back on whether or not they have achieved them at the end of the day.
“Often when I am alone, I can work focused for a couple of hours but then I’m easily distracted（分心）.The help of others makes me so much more disciplined.” says Pella, who attends Hoffice events as both a guest and a host. Lunches mean networking and connecting with new contacts. “People are coming from really different areas and have different professions so there can be really interesting discussions,” he says.
The Hoffice movement has grown quickly since it was founded in 2014 by Swedish psychologist Christofer Franzen, now 37. He had been giving lectures on the benefits of collective（集体的）intelligence, but realised he was spending most of his own time working alone at his kitchen table. “I wanted to test more structured home co-working with friends in similar situations,” he says.
Franzen says that holding events in houses and apartments creates a unique atmosphere, because there’s a sense of community and desire to contribute. He’s looking for ways to expand the social value of Hoffice, by matching up members with relevant skills to share and even encouraging jobseekers to join its gatherings.
1. Where is Pella when his smart phone starts pinging?| A．In his own home. | B．In his office. |
| C．In another person’s home. | D．At Stockholm University. |
| A．Watch an exercise video. | B．Work silently for 45 minutes. |
| C．Tell each other their daily plans. | D．Report what they have achieved. |
| A．They usually work alone. |
| B．They often give lectures. |
| C．They study collective intelligence. |
| D．They have to work at a kitchen table. |
| A．Sharing Comfortable Workplaces | B．A New Way to Make New Friends |
| C．Benefits of Collective Intelligence | D．Working from Others’ Homes |
1．表示祝贺；
2．希望读到她的作品；
3．请她分享获奖感受．
注意：
1．词数100左右；
2．可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯．
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3 . People have always been defined by their generation. We had the baby boomers of the 1960s, followed by Generation X and then Generation Y, often referred to as millennials, and the new kids on the block are Generation Z - aged between 16 and 22. It's easy to classify these young people as all being the same, sharing the same attitudes towards life—but is that fair?
People from Generation Z, informally called "Z-ers", may be viewed by others as digital natives, incapable of real-world friendships. But they actually view themselves as hardworking, ambitious and about to change the world for the better. The previous generation, born between the mid-1980s and late 1990s - the millennials were also thought to have these characteristics. But many people view this new generation as “mini-millennials" because Z-ers are different and they have their own set of values and preferences which consumer brands need to cater for.
It's true to say that technology is playing an important part in the lives of Generation Z, particularly in the area of social media. In fact, they have not known life without it and using it to communicate, share ideas and campaign is second nature. It means they have more of a say on what we eat, drink and buy than any generation before them. These young people certainly need to be listened to by retailers （零售商） and businesses - they are the people with time on their hands and money.
But being a Z-er comes with pressure. One young person says "Many people in Generation Z have mental health issues because they're unsure what the future will bring." The future always brings uncertainties but maybe there is pressure for this generation to be the most successful ever.
1. When was a Z-er likely to be born?| A．In 1964. | B．In 1975. |
| C．In 1987. | D．In 1999. |
| A．Diligent and ambitious. | B．Hardworking and incapable. |
| C．Promising and different. | D．Stressed and successful. |
| A．Z-ers have known life without social media. |
| B．Z-ers pay too much attention to digital devices. |
| C．Z-ers and the millennials have the same personality. |
| D．Z-ers become a key driving force in the consumer market. |
| A．Their ambition to be the best. |
| B．Their uncertainty of the future. |
| C．Their addiction to digital devices. |
| D．Their lack of real-world friendship. |
4 . Imagine that you found a wallet in the street containing a stranger 's contact details but no cash. Would you go out of your way to return it to its owner? Now imagine that the same wallet contained a few banknotes. Would that change your response? Alain Cohn of the University of Michigan and his colleagues have taken such behavioral economics around the world.
In different countries Dr. Cohn's research assistants entered public buildings like banks, museums and police stations. They handed in a fake wallet to an employee in the reception area, saying they had found it on the street outside, before making a hurried exit. Each wallet was a see-through plastic card case containing three identical business cards with a unique email address and a fake native's name, a shopping list and a key. Most importantly, some wallets also included $13.45, while some had no cash. Then, the team simply waited to see who would email the “owner” about returning the wallet.
In 38 of the 40 countries, the wallets with money in them were returned more often than those without: 51% compared with 40% for the cashless. While rates of honesty varied greatly between different countries, the difference within individual countries between the two return rates was quite stable around 11 percentage points. In addition, wallets containing a larger sum of money ($94.15) were even more likely (by about another ten percentage points) to be returned than those with less, although the “big money” experiment was done in only three countries.
With greater temptation (诱惑), then, comes greater honesty - at least when it comes to lost wallets and small cash. Interestingly, though, when Dr. Cohn and his team surveyed a sample of 299 volunteers, most of them predicted that the more money there was in a wallet, the more likely it was that it would be kept.
A certain doubt about the motivation of others is probably good for survival, so the response of the general population may be understandable. But is the warm inner satisfaction coming from “doing the right thing” also a powerful reason? As this study shows, such thought is real and universal
1. What does Dr. Cohn's research team try to find out?| A．How long it usually takes before a lost wallet is returned. |
| B．How people of different occupations react to lost w alts. |
| C．How people behave differently at public and private places. |
| D．How people respond to lost wallets of varying amounts of cash. |
| A．Work division in the team. | B．Detailed arrangements. |
| C．Contents inside the wallets. | D．Preparations made in advance. |
| A．They drop with bigger money. | B．They vary from country to country. |
| C．They are quite the same globally. | D．They are stable, unrelated to money. |
| A．A research paper. | B．A travel brochure. |
| C．A psychology magazine. | D．An economy newspaper. |
The expression,“ everybody’s doing it,” is very much at the center of the concept of peer pressure. It is a strong influence of a group, especially of children, on members of that group to behave as everybody else does. It can be positive or negative. Most people experience it in some way during their lives.
People are social creatures by nature, and so it is hardly surprising that part of their self-respect comes from the approval of others. This instinct (天性) is why the approval of peers, or the fear of disapproval, is such a powerful force in many people’s lives. It is the same instinct that drives people to dress one way at home and another way at work, or to answer “fine” when a stranger asks“ how are you?” even if it is not necessarily true. There is a practical aspect to this: it helps society to function efficiently, and encourages a general level of self-discipline that simplifies day-to-day interaction.
For certain individuals, seeking social acceptance is so important that it becomes like an addiction; in order to satisfy the desire, they may go so far as to abandon their sense of right and wrong. Teens and young adults may feel forced to use drugs, or join gangs that encourage criminal behavior. Mature adults may sometimes feel pressured to cover up illegal activity at the company where they work, or end up in debt because they are unable to hold back the desire to buy a house or car that they can’t afford in an effort to“ keep up with the Joneses”.
However, peer pressure is not always negative. A student whose friends are good at academics may be urged to study harder and get good grades. Players on a sports team may feel driven to play harder in order to help the team win. This type of influence can also get a friend off drugs, or to help an adult take up a good habit or drop a bad one. Study groups and class projects are examples of positive peer groups that encourage people to better themselves.
Schools try to teach kids about the dangers of negative peer pressure. They teach kids to stand up and be themselves, and encourage them to politely decline to do things that they believe are wrong. Similarly, it can be helpful to encourage children to greet the beneficial influence of positive peer groups.
What is Peer Pressure
| Concept of peer pressure | Peer pressure refer to the strong |
| It works in nearly everyone of us, and | |
| A | Being social creature, people expect the approval from their fellow members |
| People around will affect how one lives | |
| Peer pressure helps society function efficiently. | |
| Influences of peer pressure on | The desire to be socially accepted by one’s peers is like a drug. |
| Negative influences include lack of | |
| Positive influences are good grades , team | |
| To avoid the danger of negative peer pressure, kids should learn to be |
6 . By now you’ve probably heard about the “you’re not special” speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: “Do not get the idea you’re anything special, because you’re not.” Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the Internet — took issue with McCullough’s ego-puncturing words. But lost in the uproar was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they’re particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it’s not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.
Such inflated self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it’s often exactly when we’re least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously. In a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more stringently. Poor students, the authors note, “lack insight” into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with coauthor Justin Kruger, suffer from a “dual burden”: they’re not good at what they do, and their very ineptness prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.
In Dunning and Kruger’s study, subjects scoring at the bottom of the heap on tests of logic, grammar and humor “extremely overestimated” their talents. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they guessed they were in the 62nd. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was “metacognitive skill”: the capacity to monitor how well they’re performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There’s a paradox here, the authors note: “The skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain.” In other words, to get better at judging how well we’re doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.
There are a couple of ways out of this double bind. First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don’t possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you’re doing, but just what it is that you’re doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.
If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won’t need parents, or a commencement（毕业典礼） speaker, to tell them that they’re special. They’ll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.
1. Which can be the best title of this passage?| A．Special or Not? Teach Kids To Figure It Out |
| B．Let's Admit That We Are Not That Special |
| C．Tips On Making Ourselves More Special |
| D．Tell The Truth: Kids Overestimate their Talents |
| A．we don't know whether our young people are talented or not |
| B．young people don't know how to assess their abilities realistically |
| C．no requirement is set up for young people to get better |
| D．we always tend to consider ourselves to be privileged |
| A．They usually give themselves high scores in self-evaluations. |
| B．They tend to be unable to know exactly how bad they are. |
| C．They are intelligently inadequate in tests and exams. |
| D．They lack the capacity to monitor how well they are performing. |
| A．know how to cultivate clear logic and proper grammar |
| B．don't know how well they perform due to their stringent self-judgement |
| C．don't view themselves as competent because they know their limits |
| D．tend to be very competent in their high-scoring fields. |
| A．we need internal honesty with ourselves and external honesty from others |
| B．the best way to get better is to carefully study past success and failure |
| C．through comparison with others, one will know where and when he fails |
| D．neither parents nor a commencement speaker can tell whether one is special |
7 . A community feels more alive when people who live there try to help improve it. If you look around and see that your community has a lot of problems, there's no better time to start fixing them than right now.
Stop to offer help when and where you're needed
It's a simple way to create the atmosphere that makes people feel safe and happy. If you see someone in need of assistance, come to their aid instead of looking on.
Volunteer in your community
Donating your time is an excellent way to have a positive effect on your community.
You can help in many ways. Consider starting your own business. In this way you can serve your community by offering a great product and possibly even hiring employees. And try to get most of your produce from the local market and shop at local stores.
Attend community events
How often do you show up to community events?
| A．Learn about organizations |
| B．Support your local economy |
| C．Start participating in community activities as many as you can |
| D．Just be aware that becoming a volunteer is a serious commitment |
| E．Keep reading for ideas on how to help make your community better |
| F．Hold activities in an effort to make the neighborhood a better place |
| G．Do for others what you'd want them to do for you if you were in their situation |
8 . COURTESY PAUL BOZYMOWSKI-Three New York City police officers paid for a woman’s groceries rather than arresting her.
As temperatures approached 90 degrees in New York City last July 4th, three police officers ducked into a Whole Foods Market to get something cold to drink. What they walked into was a heated human drama.
Once inside, the cops, Lt. Louis Sojo and Officers Esanidy Cuevas and Michael Rivera, were approached by a store security guard who asked for help with a suspected shoplifter. The woman in question didn’t have the look of a career criminal. She was obviously scared, and her cheeks were wet with tears.
The cops peeked inside her bag. “All we saw was containers of food.” Cuevas told CBS New York.
"I’m hungry," she explained quietly.
Caught red-handed, the woman no doubt expected to be sentenced to jail for the crime of being hungry while poor. But the cops had other ideas. “We’ll pay for her food,” Sojo told the surprised security guard.
There’d been no discussion among the three men. It went unsaid. Instead, they picked up the woman’s bag and accompanied her to a cash register, where each took out $10 to pay the tab. She would not be arrested today.
All the woman could do was weep in gratitude. Covering her face with a kerchief and drying her eyes, she repeated, “Thank you, thank you.”
She wasn’t the only one touched by this act of mercy. “It was a very beautiful, genuine moment,” says Paul Bozymowski, who was at the store. He was so taken by what he’d witnessed that he posted a photo on Twitter for all to see.
But attention was never what the officers sought. They were driven by a far more common emotion. As Sojo told CNN, “When you look at someone’s face and see that they need you and they’re actually hungry, it’s pretty difficult as a human being to walk away from something like this.”
1. What can be learnt about the woman from the passage?| A．She had stolen in the shop several times before. |
| B．She was caught on the spot by three police officers. |
| C．She was found innocent and would not be arrested. |
| D．She was forced to commit the crime due to the dilemma of life. |
| A．appeal for sympathy for the people in need | B．express his gratitude to the police officers |
| C．show more people the cops’ act of kindness | D．record the unforgettable moment in his life |
| A．Their great devotion to work | B．A deep sense of being human |
| C．The attraction of the public attention | D．Their different attitude towards shoplifting |
Arriving in Sydney on his own from India, my husband , Rashid, stayed in a hotel for a short time while looking for a house for me and our children as we would go there when he made everything settled.
During the first week of his stay, he went out one day to do some shopping. He almost got lost in those unfamiliar blocks. When he came back in the late afternoon, he discovered that his suitcase was gone. He was extremely worried as the suitcase had all his important papers, including his passport. For a while, he was overwhelmed with depression with no one to turn to.
He reported the case to the police and then sat there，lost and lonely in a strange city, thinking of the terrible troubles of getting all the paperwork organized again from a distant country while trying to settle down in a new one.
Late in the evening, the phone rang. It was a stranger. He was trying to pronounce my husband’s name and was asking him a lot of questions. Then he said they had found a pile of papers in their trash can（垃圾桶）that had been left out on the footpath.
My husband rushed to their home to find a kind family holding all his papers and documents. Their young daughter had gone to the trash can and found a pile of unfamiliar papers. Her parents had carefully sorted them out, although they had found mainly foreign addresses on most of the documents. At last they had seen a half-written letter in the pile in which my husband had given his new telephone number to a friend. My husband was so excited about the return of the suitcase. Meanwhile, the kindness of this family made him feel that this place could be a new start, a new home for a brand new life.
注意：
1. 所续写短文的词数应为150左右；
2. 应使用5个以上短文标有下划线的关键词语；
3. 续写部分分为两段，每段的开头语已为你写好；
4. 续写完成后，请用下划线标出你所使用的关键词。
Paragraph 1:
In order to thank this family,…
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Paragraph 2:
A few weeks later, my children and I arrived in Sydney.
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10 . Detective Ashley Jones works at a police department in England. He has recently made a significant
Jones got the idea after he had talked with an elderly lady who had been cheated of her
This led Jones to the conclusion that there are too many extremely
The idea is catching on
This effort is not just a(n)
The Chat Bench is a fantastic new project that
| A．choice | B．discovery | C．visit | D．promise |
| A．experienced | B．suffered | C．prevented | D．felt |
| A．solution | B．puzzle | C．excuse | D．intention |
| A．pleasure | B．prize | C．credit | D．money |
| A．eventually | B．frequently | C．previously | D．occasionally |
| A．ashamed | B．shocked | C．excited | D．amused |
| A．mind | B．forgive | C．risk | D．enjoy |
| A．active | B．lonely | C．cautious | D．stubborn |
| A．learned | B．refused | C．pretended | D．decided |
| A．forced | B．ordered | C．convinced | D．taught |
| A．put away | B．make out | C．tear apart | D．set up |
| A．read | B．claimed | C．meant | D．implied |
| A．formal | B．joyful | C．awkward | D．crazy |
| A．randomly | B．slowly | C．quickly | D．purposefully |
| A．positive | B．disappointing | C．correct | D．embarrassing |
| A．realized | B．examined | C．discussed | D．formed |
| A．break down | B．put up | C．keep off | D．take out |
| A．glance | B．attempt | C．knock | D．attack |
| A．heart-breaking | B．risk-taking | C．face-saving | D．crime-cutting |
| A．forbids | B．appoints | C．encourages | D．troubles |
