John Carter was rescued from the sea near his holiday home yesterday. The accident happened while he(walk) along a steep cliff at the edge of the sea. He was blown off by a strong wind and(fall) into the sea, 30 meters below. Luckily, a woman saw him in the sea soon afterwards and she called the police rescue service. Mr. Carter was taken to hospital with a(break) arm. "I'm very lucky to be alive," he said. "I can't thank the woman enough."
Many elephants can paint. In fact, elephants in zoos sometimes draw on the grounda stick. Seeing this, some trainers teach the elephantsthey can hold paintbrushes, and encourage them to choose colors and paint. Of course, not every painting is good. Just like humans, only some elephants are very creative. Now, an online gallery sells paintings by these elephant artists. By doing this, the gallery hopes to earn money(protect) elephants.
Golden Gate Park is in San Francisco, California. It is one of the largest urban (park) in the United States. Over one million colorful flowers, trees and other plants grow in the park. But originally most of the park(cover) in sand. After a lot of work, it was finally built in 1870. Today, there are many people(visit) the park every day. They play basketball, soccer, golf and many other sports there. The park is closed in many places to traffic so people can walk, cycle, or skate(free).
A Game of Light and Shade
It was a sunny day. I had gone up and down the tower when, outside the door at the foot, a blind man came toward me. In a moment, he disappeared up the stairs. I looked at the sign that said "To the Tower", and decided to1him.
I caught up with him in the ticket office. There I was2to see the attendant (工作人员) selling him a ticket as if he were any other visitor. Then, with the ticket in one hand and3the wall with the fingers of the other, the blind man reached the stairs4to the hallway.
"That man is blind. What would a blind man climb up the tower for?" I said to the attendant, expecting him to show some5, but he didn't answer.
"Not the6certainly," I said. "Perhaps he wants to7."
I bought a ticket and8up the stairs. The man hadn't gone as far as I9. A third of the way up the tower, I heard his10. I slowed down and followed him at a little11. He stopped from time to time. When he got to the balcony (阳台), I was a dozen steps12. As I reached it, I saw him at the corner of the tower.
At last, after ten minutes, I13him. "Excuse me," I said as politely as I could, "but I am curious to know14you came up."
He smiled. "Coming up the stairs, you will notice how not just light but sun 15into the tower through the narrow windows here and there, so that you can feel the16—the cool stairs suddenly become quite warm—and how up here behind the wall there is17, but as soon as going opposite a window you can find the sun. There is no18so good as this for feeling the difference between light and shade. It is not the first time I've come up."
The blind man seemed quite19, just like a child who was enjoying his favorite games. He told me the truth that blind men can also find the beauty in life20 they cannot enjoy the sights of the world.
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So what is rewilding?
Imagine our natural homes growing instead of shrinking. Imagine species (物种) diversifying instead of declining. That's rewilding. Rewilding is ecological restoration. Rewilding offers hope for wildlife, humans and the planet.
Why is rewilding important and necessary?
Our natural ecology is broken. The places where you would expect wildlife to exist have been reduced to wet deserts. The seabed has been destroyed and there have been no living creatures any more.
Our wildlife is disappearing. Many wonderful species have declined over the past century. We've lost more of our large animals than any European country.
We need keystone species. These vital species, including top predators (食肉动物), drive ecological processes. Their loss has worsened our living systems.
Nature looks after us. Good natural ecology can provide us with clean air and water, prevent flooding and store carbon. Rewilding can leave the world in a better state than it is today.
What are challenges?
As a long-term project, our "rewilding britain" has its challenges. Many people are not interested, because we have got used to the lack of native forests. Many farmers oppose the idea. They thought it a crazy idea to bring back predators because they would start killing farm animals. It takes time to educate them. Above all, we need money! So we need your help!
Make a donation.
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With your help we can…
Open up new chances for rewilding and push for change.
Develop tools to educate, influence and spread the word.
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Flying High
Barrington Irving made his historic flight and founded an educational non-profit-making organization. His message for kids: "The only thing that separates you from scientists is determination, hard work and a strong liking for what you want to achieve." The secret, he believes, is having a dream in the first place, and that starts with learning experiences that inspire kids to build careers.
The moment of inspiration for Irving came at the age of 15 in his parents' bookstore. One customer, a professional pilot, asked Irving if he'd thought about becoming a pilot. "I told him I didn't think I was smart enough; but the next day he took me to the cockpit (驾驶舱) of the commercial airplane he flew, and just like that I was hooked."
To follow his dream, Irving turned down a football scholarship to the University of Florida. He washed airplanes to earn money for a flight school and increased his flying skills by practising at home on a $40 flight simulator (模拟) video game. Then another dream took hold: flying alone around the world. He faced more than 50 rejections for sponsorship before convincing some companies to donate aircraft components. He took off with no weather radar, no de-icing system, and just $30 in his pocket. "I like to do things people say I can't do."
After 97 days, 26 stops and dozens of thunderstorms, he touched down to a cheering crowd in Miami. "It was seeing so many young people watching and listening that pushed me into giving back with my knowledge and experience." Irving has been doing it ever since. He set up his non-profit-making organization, Experience Aviation (航空), aiming to increase the numbers of youth in aviation and science-related careers. Kids attend programmes dealing with hands-on robotics projects and flight simulator challenges.
"We want to create chances for students to accomplish something amazing," he notes. Perhaps Irving's most powerful educational tool is the example his own life provides. After landing his record-breaking flight at age 23, he said, "Everyone told me I was too young, that I didn't have enough experience, strength, or knowledge. They told me it would take forever and I'd never come home. Well… guess what?"
Training the Brain
People who can accomplish unbelievable tasks, such as memorizing thousands of random numbers in under an hour, state that they just have normal brains. Some memory superstars compete in Olympic-like World Memory Championships. These mental athletes, or MAs for short, can memorize names of dozens of strangers in a few minutes or any poem handed them. Ed Cooke, a 24-year-old MA, explains they see themselves as participants rescuing the long-lost art of memory training. These techniques existed not to recall useless information, but to cut into the brain basic text and ideas.
A study in the journal Nature examined eight people who finished near the top of the World Memory Championships. The scientists examined whether their brains were fundamentally different from everyone else's or whether they were simply making better use of memorizing abilities we all possess. They put the MAs and control subjects into brain scanners and had them memorize numbers and photographs. The result surprised everyone. The brains of the MAs and those of the control subjects were indistinguishable. On every test, the MAs scored in the normal range. However, when the scientists examined what part of the brain was used during a memory activity, they found the MAs relied more heavily on areas in the brain involved in spatial memory.
MAs offer an explanation: anything can be fixed upon our memories and kept in order by constructing a building in the imagination and filling it with pictures of what needs to be recalled. Dating back to the fifth century, the building is called a memory palace. Even as late as the fourteenth century, when there were copies of any text, scholars needed to remember what was read to them. Reading to remember requires a different technique than speed reading. If something is made memorable, it has to be repeated. Until relatively recently, people read only a few books intensively (细致地) again and again, usually aloud. Today we read extensively, usually only once and without continuous focus.
So the great difference is the ability to create impressive pictures in mind and to do it quickly. Using memory palaces, MAs create memorized pictures. For example, recombine the pictures to form unforgettable scenes such as the ways through a town. One competitor used his own body parts to help him memorize a 57,000-word dictionary.
Anyone who wishes to train the mind needs first to create fantastical palaces in the imagination. Then they should cut each building into cubbyholes for memories. In a short amount of time, they will notice improvement with remembering things. To keep the skill sharp, MAs deliberately empty their palaces after competitions, so they can reuse them and they recommend that beginners do the same.
Early or Later Day Care
Many young parents are confused about whether their children should have early day care, and there have always been different views on this subject.
The British psychoanalyst John Bowlby believes that separation from parents during the sensitive "attachment" period from birth to three may scar a child's personality and lead to psychological problems in later life. Some people have drawn the conclusion from Bowlby's work that children should not be subjected to day care before three because of the parental separation it causes, and many people do believe this.
According to Bowlby, a great deal of psychological harm can occur when young children are separated from their parents. If they are left without touch for a while, they will have a higher stress level. Parents' influence on their children's well-being may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is developing rapidly and when nearly all of her or his experiences are shaped by parents and the family environment.
However, there are critics. Some anthropologists (人类学家) point out that the love affair between children and parents found in modern societies does not usually exist in traditional societies. There has been a long history of the fact that father and mother did not bring up their children alone. Plato, around 394 B.C., argued that a system of early child care would free women to participate in society. Results from Israeli and Dutch studies show that child-raising duties are more evenly distributed among a broader group of people.
Besides, studies have reported that early day care has a neutral or slightly positive effect on children's development. They learn the benefits of being socially smart, understanding the concept of sharing and caring. They promote concentration skills, which is very important in their learning. There are games where children are taught basic language and mathematical skills through stories and everyday examples.
Common sense tells us that early day care would not be so widespread if children had problems with it. But Bowlby's analysis raises the possibility that it has delayed effects. The possibility that such care might lead to more mental illness 15 or 20 years later can only be explored by the use of statistics. Whatever the long-term effects, parents sometimes find the immediate effects difficult to deal with. Children under three dislike leaving their parents and show unhappiness. At the age of three almost all children find it easy to go to the nursery. The matter, then, is far from being clearly known, though experience and available evidence indicate that early day care is reasonable for young children.
I: Introduction P: Point Sp: Sub-point (次要点) C: Conclusion
B . 
C . 
D . 
Can We Stop Food Longing Through Imaginary Eating?
Are you fighting an urge to reach for chocolate? Then, let it melt in your mind, not in your mouth. According to the recent research, imagining eating a specific food reduces your interest in that food, so you eat less of it.
This reaction to repeated exposure to food—being less interested in something because you've experienced it too much—is called habituation.
The research is the first to show that habituation can occur through the power of the mind. "If you just think about the food itself—how it tastes and smells—that will increase your appetite," said Carey More wedge, a well-known psychologist. "It might be better to force yourself to repeatedly think about chewing and swallowing the food in order to reduce your longing.Visualizing yourself eating chocolate wouldn't prevent you from eating lots of cheese," he added.
More wedge conducted an interesting experiment. 51 subjects were divided into three groups. One group was asked to imagine putting 30 coins into a laundry machine and then eating three chocolates.Another group was asked to imagine putting three coins into a laundry machine and then eating 30 chocolates. Lastly, a control group imagined just putting 33 coins into the machine—with no chocolates.When they said they had finished, these were taken away and weighed. The results showed the group that had imagined eating 30 chocolates each ate fewer of the chocolates than the other groups.
Physical signals—that full stomach feeling—are only part of what tells us we've finished a meal. The research suggests that psychological effects, such as habituation, also influence how much a person eats. It may lead to new behavioral techniques for people looking to eat more healthily, or have control over other habits.
A. What's more, this only works with the specific food you've imagined.
B. People were advised to try different methods to perform the experiment.
C. For example, a tenth bite is desired less than the first bite, according to the study.
D. All of them then ate freely from bowls containing the same amount of chocolate each.
E. It meant those who repeatedly imagined eating would concern about some specific food.
F. This requires the same motor skills as eating small chocolates from a packet, the study says.
G. This study is part of the research looking into what makes us eat more than we actually need.
1)推荐一个演讲话题；
2)说明推荐的理由；
3)建议他做哪些准备工作。
注意：1)词数不少于50；2)邮件的开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数。
Dear Jim,
Yours,
Li Hua
Green Travel in My Family
