Zigfried, a little mouse, blew his breath on the frosty window of the farmhouse and rubbed it to see the outside. Still nobody came. Maybe today, he thought 1. It was only a few days before Christmas and he was watching for a miracle (奇迹).
This farmhouse had been 2 too long. It needed a family. Zigfried's 3 made a noise. He realized that he hadn't eaten anything since yesterday. He jumped from the windowsill (窗沿), grabbed a 4 from his home, and went next door to Farmer Mike's.
Farmer Mike's house had been a great place for the little mouse 5 the farmer married a wife who had a cat. Zigfried 6 when he thought of it. He looked around cautiously as he 7 into the room where grain was stored and was quite 8 as he filled his bag with wheat. He was turning to leave when suddenly he 9 a hot breath about his ear. His heart beat 10 , and without thinking he started to run and luckily 11 the cat's paws (爪子).
The next afternoon Zigfried heard some good news: a 12 family would be moving into the farmhouse soon. Zigfried's granny would arrive on Christmas Eve to 13 with him. He hoped that the family would come before his granny came. Before long, a car came 14 the road leading to the house, with butter sandwiches, cheese and chocolate.
Zigfried's Christmas miracle did arrive!
The house came 15 the next few days. Zigfried 16 every single hour of them. 17, the day before Christmas when he was drinking hot chocolate with a 18 smile at the door of his home, he heard the 19of the children of the family about what they might get for Christmas. What? A cat? The 20 froze on his face； his mouth fell wide open. After a long while, he at last found his voice: “Hey! Whose Christmas miracle is this?”
Some years ago, writing in my diary used to be a usual activity. I would return from school and spend the expected half hour recording the day's events, feelings, and impressions in my little blue diary. I did not really need to express my emotions by way of words, but I gained a certain satisfaction from seeing my experiences forever recorded on paper. After all, isn't accumulating memories a way of preserving the past?
When I was thirteen years old, I went on a long journey on foot in a great valley, well-equipped with pens, a diary, and a camera. During the trip, I was busy recording every incident, name and place I came across. I felt proud to be spending my time productively, dutifully preserving for future generations a detailed description of my travels. On my last night there, I wandered out of my tent, diary in hand. The sky was clear and lit by the glare of the moon, and the walls of the valley looked threatening behind their screen of shadows. I automatically took out my pen…
At that point, I understood that nothing I wrote could ever match or replace the few seconds I allowed myself to experience the dramatic beauty of the valley. All I remembered of the previous few days were the dull characterizations I had set down in my diary.
Now, I only write in my diary when I need to write down a special thought or feeling. I still love to record ideas and quotations that strike me in books, or observations that are particularly meaningful. I take pictures, but not very often—only of objects I find really beautiful. I'm no longer blindly satisfied with having something to remember when I grow old. I realize that life will simply pass me by if I stay behind the camera, busy preserving the present so as to live it in the future.
I don't want to wake up one day and have nothing but a pile of pictures and notes. Maybe I won't have as many exact representations of people and places； maybe I'll forget certain facts, but at least the experiences will always remain inside me. I don't live to make memories—I just live, and the memories form themselves.
Mothers and daughters go through so much—yet when was the last time a mother and daughter sat down to write a book together about it all? Perri Klass and her mother, Sheila Solomon Klass, both gifted professional writers, prove to be ideal co-writers as they examine their decades of motherhood, daughterhood, and the wonderful ways their lives have overlapped (重叠).
Perri notes with amazement how closely her own life has mirrored her mother's: both have full-time careers； both have published books, articles, and stories； each has three children； they both love to read. They also love to travel—in fact, they often take trips together. But in truth, the harder they look at their lives, the more they acknowledge their big differences in circumstance and basic nature.
A child of the Depression (大萧条), Sheila was raised in Brooklyn by parents who considered education a luxury for girls. Starting with her college education, she has fought for everything she's ever accomplished. Perri, on the other hand, grew up privileged in the New Jersey suburbs of the 1960s and 1970s. For Sheila, wasting time or money is a crime, and luxury is unthinkable while Perri enjoys the occasional small luxury, but has not been successful at trying to persuade her mother into enjoying even the tiniest thing she likes.
Each writing in her own unmistakable voice, Perri and Sheila take turns exploring the joys and pains, the love and bitterness, the minor troubles and lasting respect that have always bonded them together. Sheila describes the adventure of giving birth to Perri in a tiny town in Trinidad where her husband was doing research fieldwork. Perri admits that she can't sort out all the mess in the households, even though she knows it drives her mother crazy. Together they compare thoughts on bringing up children and working, admit long-hidden sorrows, and enjoy precious memories.
Looking deep into the lives they have lived separately and together, Perri and Sheila tell their mother-daughter story with honesty, humor, enthusiasm, and admiration for each other. A written account in two voices, Every Mother Is a Daughter is a duet (二重奏) that produces a deep, strong sound with the experiences that all mothers and daughters will recognize.
We've reached a strange—some would say unusual—point. While fighting world hunger continues to be the matter of vital importance according to a recent report from the World Health Organization (WHO), more people now die from being overweight, or say, from being extremely fat, than from being underweight. It's the good life that's more likely to kill us these days.
Worse, nearly 18 million children under the age of five around the world are estimated to be overweight. What's going on?
We really don't have many excuses for our weight problems. The dangers of the problem have been drilled into us by public health campaigns since 2001 and the message is getting through—up to a point.
In the 1970s, Finland, for example, had the highest rate of heart disease in the world and being overweight was its main cause. Not any more. A public health campaign has greatly reduced the number of heart disease deaths by 80 per cent over the past three decades.
Maybe that explains why the percentage of people in Finland taking diet pills doubled between 2001 and 2005, and doctors even offer surgery of removing fat inside and change the shape of the body. That has become a sort of fashion. No wonder it ranks as the world's most body conscious country.
We know what we should be doing to lose weight—but actually doing it is another matter. By far the most popular excuse is not taking enough exercise. More than half of us admit we lack willpower.
Others blame good food. They say: it's just too inviting and it makes them overeat. Still others lay the blame on the Americans, complaining that pounds have piled on thanks to eating too much American style fast food.
Some also blame their parents—their genes. But unfortunately, the parents are wronged because they're normal in shape, or rather slim.
It's a similar story around the world, although people are relatively unlikely to have tried to lose weight. Parents are eager to see their kids shape up. Do as I say—not as I do.
The technology is great. Without it we wouldn't have been able to put a man on the moon, explore the ocean's depths or eat microwave sausages. Computers have revolutionized our lives and they have the power to educate and pass on knowledge. But sometimes this power can create more problems than it solves.
Every doctor has had to try their best to calm down patients who've come into their surgery waving an Internet print-out, convinced that they have some rare incurable disease, say, throat cancer. The truth is usually far more ordinary, though: they don't have throat cancer, and it's just that their throats are swollen. Being a graduate of the Internet “school” of medicine does not guarantee accurate self-health-checks.
One day Mrs. Almond came to my hospital after feeling faint at work. While I took her blood sample and tried to find out what was wrong, she said calmly, “I know what's wrong；I've got throat cancer. I know there's nothing you doctors can do about it and I've just got to wait until the day comes.”
As a matter of routine I ordered a chest X-ray. I looked at it and the blood results an hour later. Something wasn't right. “Did your local doctor do an X-ray?” I asked. “Oh, I haven't been to the doctor for years,” she replied. “I read about it on a website and the symptoms fitted, so I knew that's what I had.”
However, some of her symptoms, like the severe cough and weight loss, didn't fit with it—but she'd just ignored this.
I looked at the X-ray again, and more tests confirmed it wasn't the cancer but tuberculosis (肺结核)—something that most certainly did need treating, and could be deadly. She was lucky we caught it when we did.
Mrs. Almond went pale when I explained she would have to be on treatment for the next six months to ensure that she was fully recovered. It was certainly a lesson for her. “I'm so embarrassed,” she said, shaking her head, as I explained that all the people she had come into close contact with would have to be found out and tested. She listed up to about 20, and then I went to my office to type up my notes. Unexpectedly, the computer was not working, so I had to wait until someone from the IT department came to fix it. Typical. Maybe I should have a microwave sausage while I waited?
A German study suggests that people who were too optimistic about their future actually faced greater risk of disability or death within 10 years than those pessimists who expected their future to be worse.
The paper, published this March in Psychology and Aging, examined health and welfare surveys from roughly 40,000 Germans between ages 18 and 96. The surveys were conducted every year from 1993 to 2003.
Survey respondents (受访者) were asked to estimate their present and future life satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10, among other questions.
The researchers found that young adults (age 18 to 39) routinely overestimated their future life satisfaction, while middle-aged adults (age 40 to 64) more accurately predicted how they would feel in the future. Adults of 65 and older, however, were far more likely to underestimate their future life satisfaction. Not only did they feel more satisfied than they thought they would, the older pessimists seemed to suffer a lower ratio (比率) of disability and death for the study period.
“We observed that being too optimistic in predicting a better future than actually observed was associated with a greater risk of disability and a greater risk of death within the following decade,” wrote Frieder R. Lang, a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Lang and his colleagues believed that people who were pessimistic about their future may be more careful about their actions than people who expected a rosy future.
“Seeing a dark future may encourage positive evaluations of the actual self and may contribute to taking improved precautions (预防措施),” the authors wrote.
Surprisingly, compared with those in poor health or who had low incomes, respondents who enjoyed good health or income were associated with expecting a greater decline. Also, the researchers said that higher income was related to a greater risk of disability.
The authors of the study noted that there were limitations to their conclusions. Illness, medical treatment and personal loss could also have driven health outcomes.
However, the researchers said a pattern was clear. “We found that from early to late adulthood, individuals adapt their expectations of future life satisfaction from optimistic, to accurate, to pessimistic,” the authors concluded.
例： . was that the young player performed extremely well in the table tennis tournament. (delight)
令球迷欣喜的是那位年轻的球员在乒乓球锦标赛中表现得极为出色。
答案：What delighted the fans/made the fans delighted
知道你正在干什么，能降低失败的风险，这就像给自己的能力买了份保险。
由于没有说服我父母，我没能上戏剧学校，而那才是我的兴趣所在。
五年以来，总工程师和他的同事们一起一直在寻找新的科学农耕方法。
白天干农活的时候，我总是把羊拴在河边的树上。
由于时间紧迫，我认为从这里去会议中心最好的办法是乘出租车。
光传播的速度快到我们难以想象。
上学时我遇到过很多老师，其中两位对我影响很大。
我不常丢东西，所以当我拿钱包却发现钱包不在时，大吃一惊。
据报纸报道，武汉正在建设几条新的地铁线路。
多数人认为，要不是受了重伤而告别足球，上周他本会为英格兰踢球的。
