We are a community center who aims to bring people together. Since we cannot do that in the traditional way, we are finding a “new normal”. We have begun to offer many ways for you to virtually connect with each other and us. We are offering classes, events and films that you can attend every Saturday. All are welcome!
Guitar Lessons with Leah Roesch
Time: 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.
Price: $40.00
From beginner to intermediate level. Learn basic chords and techniques, theory, and reading music, using folk songs, rock to jazz, and blues. No experience required.
Spring Break Mini Cooking Camp
Time: 8:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Price: $60.00
Your kids are out of school and maybe you would like them out of the house for a little while? Join Kristin Freni at Gorton on March 23rd and enjoy delicious breakfast items like puffed pancakes, bacon and muffins — to bring home for the whole family to enjoy!
Watercolors with Perlwlnkle Studios
Time: 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.
Price: $50.00
Make your paintings come alive with gentle details and layers of color. Join Jennifer Evans and learn to see a flower with new eyes, and capture its lovely shapes and lines. Finished piece can be framed to your liking. All materials provided.
Passion For Play
Time: 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Price: $15.00
In a world of “screen time”, how much “play time” does your child need? Erika Larson will explore the purpose of play, walk parents through the developmental stages of play skills, and offer strategies to improve a child's play skills.
In 2006, Chris visited Honduras, a country where more than half the population lives poorly. He returned home with a plan to go back and help. He and his brother, Will, came up with an idea. They would start a business in Honduras to create opportunities for people living there.
But what kind of business would they start? They began by looking for a resource the country had naturally. The brothers chose to use wood from Honduras' thick forests. Next they had to decide what they would build with that wood. Eventually, they found their way into the toy industry.
The brothers decided to make children's blocks, drawing inspiration from the traditional wooden toys they discovered on a trip to Germany. Will and Chris decided to call their company “Tegu”, short for Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Then they staffed their factory with Honduran citizens. “We found that our workers in the factory are super proud that the name of their capital city is going out on their product and representing what they're able to do,” said Will.
In addition to giving Honduran citizens the opportunity to work and learn about running a business, Tegu is partnered with a school that helps educate the children of families that work at the Tegucigalpa trash dump.
But Will and Chris did not feel it was enough to simply help the people of Honduras — they wanted to make sure they took good care of the land, too. They felt it was important to make toys using a natural resource in a way that is sustainable.
In order to do their part for the environment, Tegu works with woodcutting cooperatives and plantation-growers to select trees responsibly. The company also plants one, two, or three trees in place of every toy set that is produced. They've already planted more than half a million trees since Tegu was founded.
A competition making up Versailles literature was launched on Sina Weibo recently. So, what is Versailles literature?
Actually, the term has nothing to do with the French palace nor with literature. It came from The Rose of Versailles, a Japanese manga series about aristocratic (贵族化的) life at the palace of Versailles in France in the late 18th century, and was coined by a Chinese influencer earlier this year. Known as humblebragging, it is a boast (吹牛) disguised as a complaint. “I have too many houses. How can I decide which one to decorate?” and “I thought I lost weight this morning. So disappointed when I realized it was because I took off the huge diamond ring my boyfriend gave me last night” are some examples of Versailles literature. The intention is to show off — usually things of materialistic values, yet one ought to pretend that's not the point.
As the 19th century English author Jane Austen famously wrote, “Nothing is more deceitful (欺诈的) than the appearance of humility(谦逊).” The psychology behind humblebragging is to be recognized for one's successes and be liked by others at the same time, according to scholars. In her article titled Why do people hate humblebragging? published in Psychology Today, psychologist Dr. Susan Krauss Whitbourne at the University of Massachusetts Amherst noted that humblebragging is a “strategy in pursuit of respect” because it draws attention to one's accomplishments in a circuitous way.
However, studies on social media users show that humblebragging as a self-promotion strategy does not work. In the essay Humblebragging: A distinct and ineffective self-presentation strategy, the University of North Carolina researcher Ovul Sezer and Harvard University scholars Francesca Gino and Michael Norton concluded from their research that humblebraggers are perceived more negatively than straight braggers due to the former's insincerity. “The critical factor differentiating the two groups of people is sincerity. People don't like braggers, but they at least see them as more sincere than humblebraggers,” said Francesca Gino.
So, how can we annoy humblebraggers back? “Just pretend you don't get whatever it is they try to show off,” a netizen advised. “And respond with genuine sympathy for their complaints.”
Visitors to Rome can now see one of the most important private collections of ancient Greek and Roman statues (雕像). The 90 works from the Torlonia Collection opened this week in the newly rebuilt Palazzo Caffarelli, overlooking the Roman Forum.
Among the works is a fountain (喷泉) that was made in ancient Greece. Experts on ancient Rome believe the fountain once stood in the garden of the general and statesman Julius Caesar. It was already hundreds of years old.
The 620-piece Torlonia Collection is believed to be the greatest private collection of classical art in the world. It was begun more than a century ago by Prince Alessandro Torlonia. He found many of the pieces on the grounds of his family's Roman garden Rich from a business relationship with the Vatican (梵蒂冈), the family bought other well-known statue collections.
In 1884, the prince built his own museum to show off his collection. When the museum closed in 1976, the pieces went into storage.
“The reappearance of such a collection is a very important event,” said art historian Salvatore Settis. “When I saw them for the first time, they were very emotional because I knew most of those pieces from books, but I had never seen them.”
The Torlonia family chose Settis to help with the difficult job of deciding which works should be shown to the public. Anna Maria Carruba helped prepare the statues for the show. “Many of these pieces were already restored from (the year) 1600 onwards. We didn't need to work on the structure of the statues but only on the surfaces, cleaning them,” she said.
The show will stay open until June 29, 2021. It is the result of public and private cooperation among the culture ministry, the city of Rome, the Torlonia Foundation and the Roman jeweler Bvlgari.
Should you listen to music when you work? Some will say they love it, claiming that it improves their performance; others will say they cannot work effectively with music playing in the background. It just depends on what sort of work you're doing.
In a recent study, we brought participants into our lab with a variety of tasks. They included an easy task-searching through word lists and crossing out words containing the letter "a" and a more difficult task-memorizing word pairs and recalling the partner to each word. Some participants completed all of the tasks in silence, whereas others completed the tasks with instrumental music that was either loud or soft, and either simple or complex, the latter meaning music with more instrumental tracks..
We found that participants who listened to simple music or no music performed about the same on the easy task.Contrarily, participants performed worse on the more difficult task when they listened to any music, regardless of complexity or volume, compared to those who didn't listen to any music.
Not surprisingly we typically need to use fewer of our mental resources when we perform easy tasks, whereas demanding tasks require more brainpower. However, because we might be less engaged during easier tasks, there's a greater risk of drifting off to sleep. Music might give us the extra boost we need to get refreshed. Listening to music can become overkill (过犹不及). So we have to strike a balance between the type of music and the type of task.
A. What should we make of these findings?
B. Several key findings emerged from our study
C. However, difficult tasks already demand a lot of our mental resources.
D. Our research has found that the effects of work may depend on our personalities.
E. We want to develop a more comprehensive framework that could be applied broader.
F. However, participants who listened to complex music performed best on the easy task.
G. Interestingly enough, our research has found that both of these perspectives can be true.
It was a hot, wet summer day a few years ago. At a local gas station, I noticed two elderly ladies 1 away from their car. There was a look of shock and
2 on their faces. I looked and saw what they saw. Five wasps (大黄蜂) had started to 3 a nest around the gas cap. My eyes 4 in surprise. I shared the ladies' fear. The nest seemed to be forming.
Wasps had never been 5 of mine. Several times wasps had 6 me while I was cutting my grass, bringing me a lot of pain 7 I was afraid to cut the grass for a long time.
The most 8 time, however, was when I was a young boy. A friend of mine and I were running and playing in my backyard. I had 9 stepped on one of their hidden nests because before we knew it, we were being run after and 10 over and over by the wasps. We ran to my mom with tears in our eyes. My mom immediately let us have a cold bath and put us in the 11 water before giving us medicine to fight all the 12 in our little bodies from the stings(刺毛).
Recalling the past stings, I knew I couldn't let fear prevent me 13others now. I reached into my back pocket for a paper towel and tore out the nest while the 14 wasps flew around me. The ladies finally thanked me and I said “You're welcome!” with a smile and a(n)15 heart.
The teen years are not easy for parents and teens. Teens try to set themselves apart their parents, and one way may be to dress in a way that parents may disagree on. Are the clothes (absolute) different from what you expect? Sometimes teens think (amaze) clothes and hairstyles may be a way to try out a new identity, or a way to fit in. Peer (同龄人) pressure istypical issue which shows itself in different ways, some dangerous and some annoying. The teen years are a time of (reflect) and independence. Teens may quarrel with parents as behavior issues come up. Talking to your teens about these issues is a way of communicating your concern as well your understanding.
Parents have to express their personal expectations and moral (value), and draw the line at risky behavior. Teens are under lots of pressure，but parents need to give them some space and allow them (express) themselves in ways that will not hurt them. As parents, you can't expect your teens to be the same as you once (be). It's important to talk with your teens about the dangers and results of engaging in risky behavior, but when it (come) to clothes and hair, it may not be worth the kind of argument. Set rules for what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior together with your teens, and be clear on the non-negotiable issues.
假定你是李华，你校最近举办了主题为“红歌伴我成长（Growing up with the Red Songs）”的校园音乐会。请你为校英语报写一篇报道，内容包括：
①时间、地点；
②音乐会过程；
③同学们的感受。
注意：①词数80左右；
③可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯；
Two men, both seriously ill, occupied the same hospital room. The doctors didn't hold too much hope for their recovery. “What both of them need is a miracle,” they said. One man's bed was next to the room's only window. The other man had to spend all his time flat on his back. The men talked for hours on end. They spoke of their wives and families, their homes, their jobs, their involvement in the military service, where they had been on vacation. The companionship grew stronger as time went by.
Every afternoon when the man in the bed by the window could sit up, he would pass the time by describing to his roommate all the things he could see outside the window. The man in the other bed began to live for those one-hour periods where his world would be broadened and enlivened by all the activity and color of the world outside. These periods gave him something to hold on to while he went through the pain of treatment.
The window overlooked a park with a lovely lake. Ducks and swans played on the water while children sailed their model boats. Young lovers walked arm in arm among flowers of every color and a fine view of the city skyline could be seen in the distance.
As the man by the window described all this in detail, the man on the other side of the room would close his eyes and imagine the amazing scenes. One warm afternoon the man by the window described a parade passing by. Although the other man couldn't hear the band, he could see it in his mind's eye as the gentleman by the window described it with vivid words.
Paragraph 1：One morning, the nurse found the man by the window lying lifelessly on the bed.
Paragraph 2：The man was greatly surprised at what he saw when he took his first look out of the window.
注意：
①续写词数应为150左右；
②请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
