At 9 feet tall and weighing about 250 pounds, the ostrich (鸵鸟) is the world's largest bird. As the myth goes, a frightened ostrich will bury its head in the sand (make) itself invisible to its hunters. If that sounds like a "bird-brained" way to escape danger, you're right! Actually, the ostrich plays dead in this way. When this behavior (see) from a distance, the ostrich's head might not be visible, (give) the false impression that its head is buried.
I picked up the phone, slowly dialing the number to her house. All I could think was we could possibly have a conversation about. Nothing! I didn't think I could have anything in common with the person is 50 years older than me. "Your grandmother won't be around forever," my mom said, so I just did what she told me and called my grandmother. What I didn't know was that the phone call (change) my attitude to life.
Ten years ago, people bought electric vehicles (EVs) to reduce their carbon footprint. the limited range and high price made EVs something of a rare sight on roads. A lot can change in a decade. Advances in battery technology (mean) electric cars now travel much further on a single charge. Government grants (补贴) serve to draw buyers away from gasoline-powered cars. The change will have a huge impact life. Roads will become far (quiet) and pollution levels will be reduced quickly, potentially leading to improved quality of life.
The small town of Allen Crossing, Indiana, has been the place I've called home for all 16 years of my life. That's where I spend hours just 1. Looking at how the wind blows the wild flowers to create a magical 2 of color. Looking at the way insects move hurriedly among plants. The beauty of nature has always been what 3 me to create art. I used to think that artists get inspiration from 4. Then I went to New York and something happened that really made me 5 that idea.
I was offered two-week courses at an art college there. When I took the train to the college for the first time, I had some serious 6 about whether I had made the right choice about coming. I was so used to the 7 countryside. New York, however, was noisy and 8. People pushed past me to squeeze through the doors of the subway cars. Everything moved at such a 9 pace that I felt I had no time to process it all.
Art classes were another story. 10 I started making art, I felt like myself again. Working from memory, I made a series of drawings of natural scenes. "Your images are very 11 and accurate," one teacher told me. "Why not try using brighter colors and bolder shapes and motions?" I followed her advice and was amazed at the 12.
One day my cousin Ken came to see my drawings. "Gosh! These are great! They remind me of graffiti (涂鸦)." He exclaimed.
I looked at my drawings and was 13.To me graffiti was not art, it was
14 messy, unreadable writing on walls.
"Cool," Ken continued. "If you're into art, you should come with me." I followed him to a huge factory that was completely 15 with graffiti. The walls were covered with bright colors, portraits, words and calligraphy-like symbols. What I saw was art not unlike what I had been making. The big 16 was that the artists drew images from city life, such as crowded subway trains and tall, shiny buildings. In every sketch, there was a(n) 17 that reminded me of that first subway ride, only it was a creative one.
Now I know that 18 is different for everyone. What drives one person crazy can be the thing that drives another person to 19. I may not look at the city the way street artists do, but they may not see nature the way I do. I 20 the way the city's energy inspires them. And now I use that energy wherever I am to create my own art.
AQUILA Children's Magazine is the most intelligent read for curious kids. Full of enthusiastic articles and challenging puzzles, every issue covers science, history and general knowledge. AQUILA is a quality production, beautifully illustrated with contemporary artwork throughout.
Intelligent reading for 8—12 year-olds
Cool science and challenging projects
Inspires self-motivated learning
Exciting new topic every issue
AQUILA is created and owned by an independent UK company. It has 28 pages, printed on high-quality paper and there are no advertisements or posters. Instead it is full of well-written articles, thought-provoking ideas and great contemporary artwork. Each monthly issue is centred around a new topic.
AQUILA works as a superb learning extension to current primary (or KS2 and KS3) curriculum (课程), but it is much more than that! Entertaining and always surprising, AQUILA is recommended because it widens children's interest and understanding, rather than encouraging them to concentrate only on their favourite subjects. It gives children a well-rounded understanding of the world, in all its complexity.
The concepts in AQUILA can be challenging, requiring good comprehension and reading skills. 8 years is usually a good age to start. Some gentle interest from an adult is often helpful at the start.
In 2020 AQUILA will have been in publication for 28 years, but it has never appeared in newsstands or shops. We are subscription only.
AQUILA Subscription
UK: 12 Months £55 – 4 Months £30
Europe: 12 Months £60 – 4 Months £35
World: 12 Months £70 – 4 Months £35
Birthdays
Select the Birthday option, write a gift message and choose the birthday month. We will dispatch to arrive at the start of the month you have entered. The package posts in a blue envelope marked ‘Open on your birthday'.
The spot of red was what first caught Randy Heiss's attention on December 16, 2018. He walked toward it and found a balloon attached to a piece of paper. "Dayami," it read on one side, in a child's writing. Heiss flipped the paper over. It was a numbered list in Spanish. His Spanish isn't very good, but he could see it was a Christmas list.
He was charmed and wondered whether he could find the child. About 20 miles to the southwest, just across the border, was the city of Nogales, Mexico. Based on the prevailing wind, he was pretty sure that's where it came from.
Back home, Heiss's wife who is fluent in Spanish translated the list. Dayami, probably a girl, had asked for a doll, a dollhouse, clothes and art supplies.
Heiss then posted about his quest on Facebook, attaching photos, hoping someone might know the girl's family.
A few days passed with no leads; Heiss worried that time was running out before Christmas. On December 19, he decided to send a private Facebook message to Radio XENY based in Nogales. The next morning, Heiss awoke to a message: The staff had located Dayami, who indeed lived in Nogales and would be willing to arrange a get-together at the radio station.
Heiss and his wife rushed to buy everything on Dayami's list. Then they drove for 45 minutes, crossing the border into Nogales. They finally met the very excited girl. "Her eyes were wide open with wonder. Like, 'Oh my gosh, this really did work!' It was a beautiful experience," Heiss said. "Quite healing for us."
Heiss, 61, has lived in Bisbee, Arizona for more than three decades. Ten years ago, he and his wife lost their only child. They have no grandchildren. Now they split their time between Nogales and Bisbee.
"Being around children at Christmastime has been absent in our lives," Heiss said. "It's been kind of a gaping hole in our Christmas experience." He has since reflected on what a miracle it was that he spotted the balloon at all, let alone that he was able to locate Dayami and her family.
In industry and medicine, robots routinely build, break down and inspect things; they also assist in surgery and pharmacies. Neither they nor "social" robots—which are designed to engage with people and to establish an emotional connection—behave like The Jetsons' maid, Rosie, or other beloved robots of fiction. Even so, expect social robots to become more complicated and popular in the next few years.
Like most robots, social robots use artificial intelligence (AI) to decide how to act on information received through cameras and other sensors. The ability to respond in ways that seem lifelike has been informed by research into such issues as how perceptions (认知) form, what constitutes social and emotional intelligence, and how people understand others' thoughts and feelings. Advances in AI have enabled designers to translate such psychological and neuroscientific (神经学的) insights into algorithms (演算) that allow robots to recognize voices, faces and emotions; interpret speech and gestures; respond appropriately to complex verbal and nonverbal cues; make eye contact; speak conversationally; and adapt to people's needs by learning from feedback, rewards and criticisms.
In consequence, social robots are filling an ever expanding variety of roles. A 47-inch humanoid called Pepper (from SoftBank Robotics), for instance, recognizes faces and basic human emotions and engages in conversations via a touch screen in its "chest." About 15,000 Peppers worldwide perform such services as hotel check-ins, airport customer service, shopping assistance and fast-food checkout. Social robots have particular appeal for assisting the world's growing elderly population. Japan's PARO Therapeutic (治疗的) Robot, which looks like a lovely seal (海豹), is meant to stimulate and reduce stress for those with Alzheimer's disease and other patients. Mabu (Catalia Health) engages patients, particularly the elderly, reminding them to take walks and medication. Social robots are also gaining popularity with consumers as toys. Early attempts to incorporate social behavior in toys, such as Hasbro's Baby Alive and Sony's AIBO robotic dog, had limited success. But both are resurging, and the most recent version of AIBO has complicated voice and gesture recognition, can be taught tricks and develops new behaviors based on previous interactions.
Worldwide sales of consumer robots reached an estimated $5.6 billion in 2018, and the market is expected to grow to $19 billion by the end of 2025. This trend may seem surprising given that multiple well-funded consumer robot companies, such as Jibo and Anki, have failed. But a wave of robots is lining up to take the place of defunct robots, including BUDDY (Blue Frog Robotics), a big-eyed mobile device that plays games in addition to acting as a personal assistant and providing home automation and security.
If you think about it, work-life balance is a strange ambition for a fulfilling life. Balance is about stasis: if our lives were ever in balance—parents happy, kids taken care of, work working—then our overriding thought would be to shout "Nobody move!" and pray all would stay perfect forever. This false hope is made worse by the categories themselves. They imply that work is bad, and life is good. And so the challenge, we are told, is to balance the heaviness of work with the lightness of life.
Yet work is not the opposite of life. It is instead a part of life—just as family is, as are friends and community. All of these aspects of living have their share of uplifting moments and moments that drag us down. The same is true of work. Treat work the same way you do life: by maximizing what you love.
We have interviewed several anesthesiologists (麻醉师) about the thrills they feel in their jobs. One said he loved the thrill of holding each patient hovering at that one precise point between life and death. Another said she loved the bedside conversations before the operation aiming to calm the panic that affects many patients. Another was drawn mostly to the anesthetic mechanism and has devoted himself to defining precisely how each drug does what it does.
Think of your life's many different activities as threads. Some are black and some are white. But some of these activities appear to be made of a different substance. These activities contain all the tell-tale signs of love: before you do them, you find yourself looking forward to them; while you're doing them, time speeds up and you find yourself in flow; and after you've done them, you feel energetic. These are your red threads, and research by the Mayo Clinic suggests that doctors who weave the fabric of their life with at least 20% red threads are significantly less likely to experience burnout.
The simplest way for you to do this is to spend a week in love with your job. During the week, any time you find yourself feeling one of the signs of love write down exactly what you were doing in the column "Love". And any time you find yourself feeling the inverse write down what you were doing in the column "Loathe". By the end of the week you will see a list of activities in your "Love" column, which create in you a positive feeling, one that draws you in and lifts you up.
Our goal should be to, little by little, week by week, intentionally unbalance all aspects of our work toward the former and away from the latter. Not simply to make us feel better, but so that our colleagues, our friends and our family can all benefit from us at our very best.
For serious birders who regularly observe birds in the wild, ignoring climate change isn't possible. We have been seeing and documenting the effects of a warming climate since at least the 1950s.
Glossy black great-tailed grackles (美洲黑羽椋鸟), for example, previously found primarily in the tropics (热带), first reached southeastern California in 1964. They are now found throughout most of the state.
New research from the National Audubon Society highlights the dangers of the trend. For its new report, "Survival by Degrees," Audubon scientists analyzed the current geographic ranges of 604 North American bird species, and modeled how those ranges would change at different levels of warming. At a global temperature rise of three degrees Celsius, they found that 389 of those species—or nearly two-thirds of those studied—would become endangered, losing much of their current habitat.
Why does this matter to anyone who's not a bird watcher? For one thing, birds play a crucial role in the ecology, keeping down insect populations and serving as food themselves for larger predators (食肉动物). Their shifting ranges warn of increasing droughts, floods, fires, rising seas and unlivable cities.
Audubon scientists modeled what would happen at lesser levels of warming, and the results are striking. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees would reduce the danger for three-quarters of those threatened birds. Audubon's report "Survival by Degrees" is not a depressing forecast but rather a call to action. It stresses the need for action at every level, by individuals and governments alike, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
As a lifelong birder, I'm proud of the role my tribe has played in documenting the effects of climate change. When local conditions change, particular types of frogs or wildflowers may decrease and disappear, few will notice. I hope people can pay close attention to the urgent message in this new report and work together for solutions. Birds tell us we don't have time to wait.
A. We still have time to do something about it, however.
B. But they also serve as a visible symbol of broader environmental shifts.
C. This would greatly benefit humans, reducing the potential suffering for people.
D. But when a bird species disappears, we dedicated birders document the change.
E. In recent decades, that has meant a consistent northward shift in where species are found.
F. The changes will make birding exciting, with birders finding new species in unexpected places.
G. Even if some could shift their range northward, they would soon start to run out of room on the map.
1）你每天的学习安排；
2）你的收获。
注意：1）词数不少于50；
2）开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数。
Dear Jim,
……
Yours,
Li Hua
注意：词数不少于60。
提示词：3D打印机 3D printer
