Sport plays a huge part in Australian culture. Here are some wonderful sporting events for travelers from all over the world.

I grew up with the same group of kids from age 5 to age 12. We lived in the same community, shared the same schools and experienced all the ups and downs of that period.

Then I hit junior high and a whole new world opened up to me. It seemed everyone was there, friends from football teams and people from the summer workshop. They welcomed me, figuring that I had to be cool to know so many people. I was a different person with each new group of friends and began to distance myself from the “kindergarten group”.

However, it wasn’t long before these so-called new friends left me when they found out I really wasn’t cool enough to be there. This was one of the hardest times in my life. I felt alone and was very disappointed in myself. It was then, when I thought I had nowhere else to go, that I tried to make my way back into the “kindergarten group”. I organized a camp-out and invited them to come. I had thought they were going to be cold and exclude me as I had done to them. But they all turned up and we just picked up right where we left off. There was absolutely no hate, only comfort and an unexpected sense of belonging. They gave me room to grow and learn my own lessons, my own way, in my own time.

From them, I have learned two things: the type of friends I want, and the type of friend I want to be. We will all continue to grow separately together, all the while providing the unconditional love, understanding and support only friends like these are capable of.

My brother Jack’s childhood was completely influenced by his extreme picky eating. From three to about 14, he only ate chicken, peanut butter, apples, cereal, and sweets. We tried everything in the book, but none succeeded.

However, in the past three years, he has gone through an amazing change. Today, he will eat close to ten times the types of foods he was willing to try before. He is even willing to try new things; he constantly asks to order something different at a restaurant. I’ve often wondered what makes a person change so much.

Through some research, several factors come out. The first major player in our food preferences is innate (先天的), and it all starts with genetics. As humans, we all are likely to enjoy a few particular tastes for evolutionary (进化的) reasons.

However, genetics aren’t the only factor that explains why we enjoy or dislike particular foods. In fact, most of our preferences are actually learned, sometimes even before we are born. In one study, mothers regularly drank carrot juice late in the stages of their pregnancy (怀孕). After birth, these babies tended to enjoy carrot-flavored milk more than other babies.

Additionally, I believe that sometimes, cultural influences affect your willingness to try food, Possibly, my brother finally got so sick of having to be the one who needed a special order at a restaurant that he forced himself to try and like those things he was afraid of. It simply takes time. People will learn to adapt and realize their true tastes. An open mind is a positive thing, and most will develop an ever-expanding plate as they age.

The Gezhouba Dam is the world’s largest run-of-river hydropower (水力发电) station and the first large water control project in the Yangtze River. It will celebrate the 43rd anniversary (周年纪念) of its functioning in 2024. Since its functioning, nearly 600 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity has been produced in total. It is the largest water protection project independently designed, constructed and operated by China in the 20 century.

From the start of construction in 1970 to the functioning of the first generator unit in1981, to the completion of the whole project in December 1988, more than 100,000 hydropower specialists from all over the country, who set up base in the wilderness, carrying poles and pushing carts to overcome a series of significant technical problems, finally completed all the construction tasks with their blood and sweat.

Since its completion, the Gezhouba Dam has safely released more than 60 floods equal to 45,000 cubic meters per second on the Yangtze River, effectively reducing the pressure of downstream flood control operations and helping to protect the lives and belongings of people in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze.

“The successful construction and management of the Gezhouba Dam has provided valuable experience and played a role in training talent for the design, construction and operation of the Three Gorges Project and other super dams. Practice has proved that the Chinese are able to build and manage large water projects on the Yangtze River,” Xiang Ke, deputy director of the Gezhouba Hydropower Plant, said, “A new chapter of hydropower development for the Chinese people begins with the Gezhouba Dam, and we will continue our efforts to contribute to a brighter future in this field.”

We can study language change using language corpora (语料库) like the Cambridge English Corpus, which contains a large collection of texts gathered over many years.     16    

Changes in adverbial meaning. A large change in language that we recorded in our research is the change in terms of frequency (频率) of the adverb “literally”, which in the 2010s was almost ten times more frequent than in the 1990s, for example.     17     There has also been a notable change in meaning with the 2010s seeing much more metaphorical (比喻的) use of literally than before e.g. “oh I literally haven’t moved all day”. This is important, as if someone had not moved in the slightest for a whole day, then we might grow a little worried for them. This of course was not what the speaker meant.     18    

Technology. Creativity in language often assumes creativity in the wider world. and technology is a great driver of this. Think about companies like WeChat or WhatsApp. which were founded in 2011 and 2009 respectively. In 2007, if you were to say “I’ll whatsapp you”, no one would have understood.     19     In fact, in the Now Corpus there are no examples of the word WhatsApp in 2010, while in 2018 there were over 50,000 examples.

    20     The word “wicked”, for example, was originally used as a negative word. But a study shows that in spoken British English, wicked is used more positively like “well wicked” in the 2010s, An important thing to know is that if someone calls something wicked. it is not necessarily bad.

It was freezing cold last Saturday morning. Around 7 a.m. , Mark Anderson heard reports of a dog lying in the road in Arrowsic. Maine. When he arrived on the scene, he didn’t see anything right away. But after some more _______. he discovered the dog in a ditch (沟渠), almost _______ to death.

Anderson _______ there seemed to be claw (爪) marks on the ditch, possibly from the dog _______ to climb out. But maybe her paws got so cold that she gave up. Anderson _______ to carry the dog from the ditch and _______ her to a nearby rescue center where the on-duty dispatcher (调度员) _______ her.

The dispatcher gave the dog blankets and a portable heater to make her _______. Then they gave her some _______ and once she warmed up, she ate the plate clean.

Trying to find the owner, Anderson then returned to the area where he found the dog, with __________ dog posters in hand. With great __________, he knocked on doors in the area until he eventually __________ the dog’s owner, an old lady called Marie Smith. According to Marie, the dog had __________ the night before. She was very __________ and stayed awake all night waiting for her. But thanks to Anderson’s rescue __________, she managed to reunite with her beloved dog.

Imagine biting into a juicy burger that was produced without killing animals. Meat grown in a lab is turning that     36     (imagine) into a reality. Several companies are developing lab-grown beef, pork, poultry and seafood. And the field is attracting millions in funding.

If widely used. lab-grown meat, also     37     (call) clean meat, could reduce much of the cruel treatment of animals     38     are raised for food. It could also reduce the environmental costs of meat production     39     (great).

The meat     40     (produce) by first taking a muscle sample (样本) from an animal. Scientists collect stem cells from the sample and multiply (使繁殖) them to form more muscles. It’s said that one muscle sample from a cow can produce enough meat     41     (make) 80,000 hamburgers.

Many companies say they expect to have products for sale within the next few years. But clean meat will have to overcome     42     number of difficulties, such as reducing the cost and proving the safety     43     the meat before it appears on the market. The good news is that despite all these     44     (challenge), the clean meat companies are keeping trying. If they can succeed, clean meat could make our lifestyle     45     (green) and more ethical than before.

War broke out in our house in late July with less than a month to go before my first day of college. It was a battle of wills, my mom’s and my own, over which school I was to attend. She wanted me to attend the well-known nursing school to which I was originally accepted, but I wanted to go to a small, private writing college with a student body of fewer than 300 students. Every night for two weeks, we argued, yelled and gave silent treatments until both parties went to bed with regrets and frustrations.

It was mostly my fault. Since my junior year of high school, I had aimed at being a nurse. I took all the required courses, applied for nursing scholarships, and even worked as a volunteer in my town’s local hospital. My goal, or so I told everyone, was to treat the sick and heal the hurt.

Yet, as graduation and college neared, I gradually found it was not what I was meant to do for the rest of my life. I could picture myself in providing wound care, making rounds and taking temperatures, but I couldn’t picture myself happy. It wasn’t the future I wanted.

Then, it dawned on me. I had been creating and writing stories for as long as I could remember. Even at four years old, I had my dad write as I told him the stories I had created. I had written for my high school’s newspaper and attended a writing camp over the previous summer. I loved it, and writing was what I had always pictured myself doing as a hobby. Now, it had become much more than a hobby. It was going to be my career even if the future was uncertain. It had to be.