I often help my mom cook and baked chicken is my favorite thing to make. One day, when mom was sick, I tried to make the chicken all by myself. I washed the chicken and put it in a pan in the oven (bake). When the bell rang to tell me the chicken was done, I opened the oven door. Guess what? The chicken was not cooked! I started to laugh. I forgot to turn the oven! Did you know what I did next? I (order) pizza. Mom was happy I "cooked" by myself and we could eat the pizza together.
Chocolate was first used as a drink over 3,500 years ago in Central America. It was very popular with the Mayans and the Aztecs. In fact, cocoa beans were very important to people there. That was they were used as money. In the beginning, cocoa (plant) in Ecuador, which was, for a long time, the world's number-one producer of cocoa beans. It is still one of the top (producer) of the beans, but nowadays more than 70 per cent of cocoa beans come from West Africa.
Wallace's giant bee is the world's (large) bee, with a body the size of a human thumb and wings that can spread to about 2.5 inches. That may sound (frighten), but the bee isn't likely to hurt anyone. It uses its large jaws (嘴) to collect a sticky goo, called resin, from trees. The bee (make) its home in termite mounds (白蚁丘) found on trees, using the resin to protect its nest from the termites. Until recently, the bee had been seen by scientists only (two), once in 1868 and again in 1981.
We first met Tom and Gee in the early days of our marriage. Someone had been 1 our garbage cans to the garage each garbage day, and Jim and I had wondered 2. Then one day we 3 him: an elderly man who lived across the street.
I baked cookies and left them on a chair outside the garage 4 a thank-you note. When we got home from work that day, a typed letter had replaced the 5. The letter was from Tom and explained how he had come to 6 the neighborhood on garbage day, returning cans for people he 7 knew. Back when he'd been fighting a war I wasn't alive to see, his young wife, Gee, had found herself living alone. Neighbors had taken the time to 8 her garbage cans so 9 didn't have to, and he 10 forgot. Now he paid it forward by doing the same for all of us.
A few years after we'd moved in, Tom died. We photocopied that letter and 11 it to one of our own for Gee. We told her how 12 Tom had been to us, how sad we felt sorry for her, how thankful we were to have 13 him. She wrote back and told us she still talked to Tom every day.
These days, we're planning a 14. The house that seemed so huge six years ago is filled with furniture and books and toys and, of course, people. We know it's time to go, and 15 we can't seem to stick the For Sale sign up on the lawn. Gaining a third bedroom sometimes seems like an awful trade for all we stand to 16.
It's not just Gee. It's the man who lets our kids pick peaches off the tree in his front yard. It's the ladies who 17 Jim when their pool filter (过滤器) breaks and leave overflowing baskets for our kids on Easter. It's the police officer living directly across from us, who smiles and waves and makes me feel a little 18 when Jim is away.
The moving boxes are still neatly packed in our basement, but Jim and I agree to 19 until January. Maybe before leaving I'll talk to Tom, just as Gee still does. Thank you, I'll say, for teaching us what it means to be a 20.
Amsterdam Destination Guide
Amsterdam is one of the most popular travel destinations in the world, famous for its beautiful canals, top art museums, cycling culture and so on. It is the capital and most populous city in the Netherlands and often referred to as the "Venice of the North" because of its expansive system of bridges and canals. Here are some of the key points to remember as you plan your trip to Amsterdam.
| Boom Season | Population | Language(s) | Currency | January Climate | July Climate |
| May to October | 813,562 | Dutch | Euro | Average high: 5.8 ℃ | Average high: 22.0 ℃ |
Must-See Attractions
Most visitors begin their Amsterdam adventure in the Old Centre, which is full of traditional architecture, shopping centers, and coffee shops. You'll also want to check out Amsterdam's Museum Quarter in the South District, which is great for shopping at the Albert Cuyp Market and having a picnic in the Vondelpark. The top museums to visit there are the Rijksmusuem, the Ann Frank House, and the Van Gogh Museum.
If You Have Time
There are several other unique districts in Amsterdam, and you should try to explore as many of them as time allows. The Canal Ring is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was originally built to attract wealthy home owners and is a center for celebrity spotting and nightlife today. The Plantage area has most of the city's museums, including the Jewish Historical Museum, the Scheepvaart Museum, and the botanical gardens.
Money Saving Tips
Unless you really want to see the tulips (郁金香) blooming, avoid booking between mid-March and mid-May. This is when hotel and flight prices rise.
Look for accommodations in Amsterdam's South District, where rates are generally cheaper than in the city center.
Buy train tickets at the machine instead of the counter to save a bit of money.
Instead of hiring a tour guide, hop on a canal boat. They're inexpensive and will give you a unique point of view of the city.
Check out our homepage to view price comparisons for flights, hotels, and rental cars before you book.
Three months after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Rebecca Sell, then 24, a photojournalist for Fredericksburg photographed a New Orleans couple worriedly examining water-spotted photo albums. As she took the photo, something within her clicked. "I told them I could take the ruined pictures, copy them and give them digitally restored (修复) photos," she recalls. Although a bit sceptical, the couple agreed. Rebecca took their photos home, restored them and took them to the couple at their temporary home. "It felt so good to be able to do that for them," says Rebecca.
When her editor, Dave Ellis, saw the photo of the couple, he suggested they go back and restore damaged photos for even more people. So in January 2006, with paid time off from the paper, the two set up shop in Pass Christian. After posting a notice in the community newsletter, Rebecca and Dave received 500 photos in four days. For each, the pair took a new digital picture, then used high-tech software to erase water spots and restore colors. It just so happened that a popular website linked to Dave's blog about the experience, and soon Operation Photo Rescue, as it came to be known, had emails from hundreds of volunteers, including photographers and restoration experts, eager to help.
Though digital restoration is a painstaking process, mending irreplaceable family pictures means the world to victims like Emily Lancaster, 71, who took out piles of ruined photo albums after Katrina, never thinking the mess could be saved. But she just couldn't bear to part with a few treasured pictures, including a portrait of her father, who had passed away, and a photo of her husband as a boy. Then she heard about Operation Photo Rescue. "I didn't have a whole lot of hope they could fix them, but they did," Emily says. "Almost every day I think about all the pictures I've lost. I'm so happy to have these two."
In the five years since Katrina, Operation Photo Rescue has collected thousands of pictures ruined by floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. Volunteers make "copy runs" to disaster areas across the country to gather damaged photos from survivors; operating costs are covered by donations. "It's great to be able to give people some of their history back," says Rebecca. "One person told me that thanks to us, her grandmother got to see her photos again before she passed away. Moments like that remind me why I do this."
Like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I'm a slightly different person in each of my languagesmore confident in English, more relaxed in French, more emotional in Czech. Is it possible that, along with these differences, my moral compass (指南针) also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I'm using at the time?
Psychologists who study moral judgments have become very interested in this question. The findings of several recent studies suggest that when people are faced with moral dilemmas (困境), they do indeed respond differently when considering them in a foreign language than when using their native tongue.
In a 2014 paper led by Albert
Costa 
volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the "trolley problem": imagine that a runaway trolley is moving quickly toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move. You are next to a switch that can move the trolley to a different set of tracks, therefore sparing the five people, but resulting in the death of one who is standing on the side tracks. Do you pull the switch?
Most people agree that they would. But what if the only way to stop the trolley is by pushing a large stranger off a footbridge into its path? People tend to be very hesitant to say they would do this, even though in both situations, one person is sacrificed to save five. But Costa and his colleagues found that presenting the dilemma in a language that volunteers had learned as a foreign tongue dramatically increased their stated willingness to push the sacrificial person off the footbridge, from fewer than 20% of respondents working in their native language to about 50% of those using the foreign one.
Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing ways of thinkingone of these, a quick, natural "feeling," and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more careful way simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language signals our cognitive (认知的) system to prepare for difficult activity.
An alternative explanation is that differences arise between native and foreign tongues because our childhood languages are filled with greater emotions than are those learned in more academic settings. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less filled with the emotional reactions that surface when we use a language learned in childhood.
There's strong evidence that memory connects a language with the experiences and interactions through which that language was learned. For example, people who are bilingual (双语的) are more likely to recall an experience if reminded in the language in which that event occurred. Our childhood languages, learned in the middle of passionate emotion, become filled with deep feeling. By comparison, languages acquired late in life, especially if they are learned through limited interactions in the classroom or dully delivered over computer screens and headphones, enter our minds lacking the emotionality that is present for their native speakers.
We talk continuously about how to make children more "resilient (有恢复力的)"，but whatever we're doing, it's not working. Rates of anxiety disorders and depression are rising rapidly among teenagers. What are we doing wrong?
Nassim Taleb invented the word "antifragile" and used it to describe a small but very important class of systems that gain from shocks, challenges, and disorder. The immune (免疫的) system is one of them: it requires exposure to certain kinds of bacteria and potential allergens (过敏原) in childhood in order to develop to its full ability.
Children's social and emotional abilities are as antifragile as their immune systems. If we overprotect kids and keep them "safe" from unpleasant social situations and negative emotions, we deprive (剥夺) them of the challenges and opportunities for self-building they need to grow strong. Such children are likely to suffer more when exposed later to other unpleasant but ordinary life events, such as teasing and social rejection.
It's not the kids' fault. In the UK, as in the US, parents became much more fearful in the1980s and 1990s as cable TV and later the Internet exposed everyone, more and more, to those rare occurrences of crimes and accidents that now occur less and less. Outdoor play and independent mobility went down; screen time and adult-monitored activities went up.
Yet free play in which kids work out their own rules of engagement, take small risks, and learn to master small dangers turns out to be vital for the development of adult social and even physical competence. Depriving them of free play prevents their social-emotional growth. Norwegian play researchers Ellen Sandseter and Leif Kennair warned: "We may observe an increased anxiety or mental disorders in society if children are forbidden from participating in age adequate risky play."
They wrote those words in 2011. Over the following few years, their prediction came true. Kids born after 1994 are suffering from much higher rates of anxiety disorders and depression than did the previous generation. Besides, there is also a rise in the rate at which teenage girls are admitted to hospital for deliberately harming themselves.
What can we do to change these trends? How can we raise kids strong enough to handle the ordinary and extraordinary challenges of life? We can't guarantee that giving primary school children more independence today will bring down the rate of teenage suicide tomorrow. The links between childhood overprotection and teenage mental illness are suggestive but not clear-cut. Yet there are good reasons to suspect that by depriving our naturally antifragile kids of the wide range of experiences they need to become strong, we are systematically preventing their growth. We should let goand let them grow.
Today's students are surrounded by information. The ability to figure out exactly why authors write and not accept every opinion as fact is a key skill. The following strategies teach them how to figure out why authors really write.
Start with why. "Why did the author write this piece?" is the key question asked to identify author's purpose. To help students expand their understanding of "why," post various types of nonfiction (an advertisement, opinion article, news article, etc.) around your classroom and have students quickly identify a purpose for each.
Talk about structure. Authors use different structures for different purposes. For example, one author may use time order to explain an event, while another author uses compare and contrast to put that event into context.
Often when authors write, they're trying to get readers to feel a certain way. Perhaps the author of an article about whale conservation wants readers to feel sad about the difficult situation of whales. Or the author of a letter may want to make the recipient feel better about a situation. After students read a text, stop and ask: How do you feel? And how did the author get you to feel this way?
Connect it to students' own writing. It doesn't have to be said that writing and reading go hand in hand. When students are asked to write about a topic that they think everyone should know about, to explain a procedure or to share a personal memory, they'll become more conscious of how authors approach writing.
Observe how purpose changes within a text. Author's purpose is often studied through the text as a whole, but authors have different reasons for writing within texts as well. Then, they may launch into a list of facts that make the reader feel discouraged about the situation. And finally, they may conclude with an appeal. Take a short article and break it apart, identifying the different purposes so that students see how author's purpose changes as they read.
A. Get to the heart.
B. Identify the topic.
C. The readers may get more advanced in their work with informational text.
D. For example, an author may include a funny anecdote (轶事) to draw the reader in.
E. In particular, they'll need to figure out author's purpose and draw their own conclusions.
F. Expand students' awareness of why people write by having them write for different purposes.
G. Or keep a running Author's Purpose board with a list of the various reasons that authors write.
