Every year, Barnes & Noble picks the 10 best books of the year, covering all genres and age groups. If you're looking for an amazing book to grab before the end of 2022, here are some of the best books of the year.
Cloud Cuckoo Land
This novel is both a historical and futuristic science fiction story that connects five characters across hundreds of years through their relationship to a book: "Cloud Cuckoo Land". The book they find is about a shepherd named Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird, so he can live a carefree life forever. As each character finds this book, from a 15th century kid to a young teen on a futuristic interstellar ship, their stories meet in this complex yet fascinating read.
Crying in H Mart
When Michelle Zauner was 25, her mother's cancer changed her life forever and forced her to accept her Korean American identity in a desperate attempt to stay connected to her mother. As a talented musician, Michelle had previously been divorced from her cultural roots, but quickly turned to food to keep her mother's memory alive in this powerful and heartbreaking memoir.
Pony
It is a historical, middle-grade adventure novel intended for adolescents. It talks about a 12-year-old boy named Silas who is woken in the middle of the night to see his father being taken away by three horsemen. With only his horse named Pony by his side, Silas sets off on a life-changing mission to find his father.
You Will Get Through This Night
It is a nonfiction read about mental health that offers both a personal and professional outlook on how to survive the hardest mental health days. Dividing the book into three chapters — This Night, Tomorrow, and The Days After — Daniel Howell wants readers to not just survive the hard nights but properly care for our mental health.
The year I turned fifty, I resolved to do something new every day. However, balancing 365 new things with work and family, while still managing to do the laundry and get dinner on the table every night, was not always easy. In the early weeks of the project, I found it difficult to find so many new things.
It wasn't long before my friends learned that I was open to almost anything I could consider a new thing, and the invitations began pouring in not just from friends, but friends of friends. As a result, my life was new. I went dog sledding. I attended a fashion show. I went to numerous lectures on all kinds of topics that I never would have previously considered useful or interesting and found something to appreciate in every single one. I even signed up immediately when learning about a local group trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by doing something unusual.
As time went by, whenever I learned about something that seemed remarkable, I did what I could to pursue it. Instead of "Why", I began to ask "Why not". Now I find it is easier to just keep my eyes open to the possibilities that surrounded me. It turned out that there were new things everywhere, and all I had to do was make a little effort to enjoy them.
I looked back on the year. It doesn't matter to me that many of my "new things" weren't exactly meaningful. What matters is how to make full use of them when discovering there is an endless number of new things for me. It seemed to me an obvious sign that at fifty, my life was full of promise. I could continue to grow, stretch my wings, and learn more every day for the rest of my life. I enjoyed the idea of something new, and it gave me a reason to welcome each day as an opportunity to experience the world a little differently.
A large body of research has been developed in recent years to explain many aspects of willpower. Most of the researchers exploring self-control do so with an obvious goal in mind: How can willpower be strengthened? If willpower is truly a limited resource, as the research suggests, what can be done to make it stay strong?
Avoiding temptation(诱惑) is an effective method for maintaining self-control, which is called the "out of sight, out of mind" principle. One recent study, for instance, found office workers less attracted to candy in the desk drawer than that on top of their desks, in plain sight.
The research suggesting that we possess a limited reservoir of self-control raises a troubling question. When we face too many temptations, are we to fail? Not necessarily. Researchers don't believe that one's willpower is ever completely exhausted. Rather, people appear to hold some willpower in reserve, saved for future demands. The right motivation allows us to tap into those reserves, allowing us to carry on even when our self-control strength has been run down. High motivation might help overcome weakened willpower — at least to a point.
Willpower may also be made less vulnerable(脆弱) to being exhausted in the first place. Researchers who study self-control often describe it as being like a muscle that gets tired with heavy use. But there is another aspect to the muscle comparison, they say. While muscles become exhausted by exercise in the short term, they are strengthened by regular exercise in the long term. Similarly, regular practices of self-control may improve willpower strength.
The evidence from willpower-exhaustion studies also suggests that making a list of resolutions on New Year's Eve is the worst possible approach. Being exhausted in one area can reduce willpower in other areas, so it makes more sense to focus on a single goal at a time. In other words, don't try to quit smoking, adopt a healthy diet and start a new exercise plan at the same time. Taking goals one by one is a better approach. Once a good habit is in place, Baumeister says, you'll no longer need to draw on your willpower to maintain the behavior. Eventually healthy habits will become routine, and won't require making decisions at all.
Midway through The Matrix, Cypher feasts on an enormous steak, well aware that his reality is not real, part of a digital program telling his brain that the steak is a construction and that it is "juicy and delicious". Two decades after the movie made its first appearance, something unexpected arises: The future of reality will not only be virtual but also synthetic(合成的). Cypher's future meal will be a physical one, synthesized from animal cells.
And the synthesis goes beyond dinner. Starting with components from the natural world, scientists are learning to engineer microorganisms and build biocomputing systems. However, biology has a tendency to evolve in unexpected ways.
Synthesized meat is one case in point. The driving forces behind the meat movement are practical. It has been estimated that cultured(培育的) meat would require 7 to 45 percent less energy and produce 78 to 96 percent less greenhouse gas than conventional animals farmed for consumption. But once we're able to synthesize meat, theoretically, we'll have the capability to culture meat from any animal, even those we'd never consider eating today, like dolphins or chimpanzees, which will pose a new regulatory challenge for us.
Using synthetic biology, we can even edit and rewrite life, the technology of which are already in use. In 2021, scientists in some countries announced they had grown monkey embryos injected with human stem cells. Here comes the situation worth considering: such a monkey-human hybrid will demonstrate qualities that are somewhere between humans, on which experimentation isn't allowed, and animals, which are often raised specifically for research. How will we decide when an animal becomes too human?
Depending on where you stand, the synthetic realities land somewhere between "really exciting" and "critically concerning". As individuals, we undertake a shared responsibility to make good choices about this coming synthetic technology.
Nature soothes(抚慰) our stressed-out souls. We know that nature is the best prescription, and new research suggests we can gain benefits while visiting parks.
The study published in the International Journal of Environmental Health Research found that spending 20 minutes in a city park can make you happier regardless of whether you use that time to exercise or not.
"In general, we found park visitors reported an improvement in emotional well-being(幸福感) after the park visit," the study's lead author and The University of Alabama at Birmingham professor Hon K. Yuen said in a statement. " Instead, we found time spent in the park is related to improved emotional well-being."
For the study, 94 adults visited three city parks in Mountain Brook Alabama, completing a questionnaire about their subjective well-being before and after their visit. A visit of between 20 and 25 minutes showed the best results with a roughly 64% increase in the participants' self-reported well-being even if they didn't move a great deal in the park.
The study group was truly small, as the study's co-author and another UAB professor Gavin Jenkins acknowledges. The challenge facing cities is that there is increasing evidence about the value of city parks but we continue to see the decrease of these spaces.
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A. Something was used to track their physical activity. B. You usually visit a small green space in your neighborhood. C. However, its findings pointed out the importance of city parks. D. If you want to feel happier, you just need to exercise for 20 minutes in a park. E. The best part is that you needn't visit a national park or go far out of your way. F. This means people can benefit from visiting a nearby park, regardless of physical ability. G. But we didn't find levels of physical activity are linked to improved emotional well-being. |
Jack was a strong boy and could complete any task in physics class. One day I asked the kids to integrate art and physics into a 1 using pulleys(滑轮). They should solve a problem of their own design, drawing it on paper, yet with absolutely physical 2. "Mr. Lampert," Jack said, "I can't 3." I was very 4 with his reaction but assured him he could do the 5.
The day the assignment was due, Jack invited me to his barn(谷仓). As we 6, I saw a whiteboard with Jack's simple drawings of pulleys, ropes and various mathematical calculations. We walked further and I was 7 to see what Jack had been working on. 8 from a high girder(大梁) was a strong rope winding through several pulleys; at the end was a platform 9 with at least four hundred pounds of hay(干草) and old tractor parts. Jack said to me, "Mr. Lampert, jump on!" He explained to me how he had 10 the exact lifting force needed and then Jack smiled as he pulled the entire weight and me up and down 11. "What do you say? Is that an A?" he asked. "Jack, that's an A-plus!" I said 12 as he let me down.
While I had 13 whether Jack would solve his shortcomings, Jack had clearly stepped up to the challenge. He created a masterpiece and 14 that students can and will solve pretty much anything you present them. Jack was strong physically, but more importantly, he was 15.
In every photo from our family vacation to Washington, D.C., I was showing off the souvenir I picked out at the Smithsonian's National Zoo — a white, oversize, cotton sweatshirt with pandas (dance) on the front.
Nearly 30 years later I found myself among pool of photojournalists and video crews packed into the panda enclosure(围场), covering a small cub(幼兽) named Bei Bei for National Geographic.
After the photographs of Bei Bei (publish), my editor suggested I ask zoo administrators if I could return periodically (document) the first year of the cub's life. They said yes.
On that first day with Bei Bei, I felt a little thrill as a zoo staffer took me down a quiet path to the back of the panda enclosure the panda's keepers were waiting. They introduced (they), handed me shoe coverings and a mask, and led me through a series of gates and (eventual) to Bei Bei.
Soon I was making regular (stop) at the zoo to record the baby panda's transformation. My kids had never been (interested) in my job than when I was on the Bei Bei beat. When I mentioned the project friends and neighbors, they would light up in ways I'd never seen. It turned out that everyone loved pandas.
1）你心目中的中国符号；
2）简要介绍；
3）说明理由。
注意：
1）写作词数应为80左右；
2）请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
A Symbol of China
My family moved in a small house in Brighton, Colorado on my seventh birthday. My first memory is our neighbor Bill, an old man, handing me strawberries from his garden through a hole in the chain-link fence. "We need to make the hole bigger," he said jokingly. Later I knew that he lived alone.
Bill spent much time working in the garden, and I was always talking to him from our yard. I was a chatterbox. I think what drew me to Bill is that he never got tired of listening to me. I also think Bill saw a lot of himself in me — we were both lonely and anxious — and that may be why he always took the time to listen to me. It was a wonderful connection.
There weren't any kids of my age in the neighborhood, and my parents were very busy, so I mostly played in the yard with my dog. I had a lot of imaginary friends — a whole family, actually, with a wife, children, a best friend... no joke. Weird kid.
One day, my parents asked Bill whether he'd watch me while they were away on business. This worked for everyone, so it became a somewhat monthly occurrence. Bill had a spare room in his house, which became "my" room.
Bill promised to teach me to drive the lawn tractor(割草机) someday and I was always looking forward to it. In winter, Bill would attach a snowplow(铲雪机) to the front of the dawn tractor. I seriously told him that I would invent a better snowplow when I grew up. "Sure you will. You'll get a patent certificate. It takes a certificate to prove an important thing," Bill said with a smile.
One snowy morning, an idea suddenly hit me. My parents were watching TV when I spit it out, "What if I adopted Bill as my grandpa?" My parents said I could go over and ask him.
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。
I knocked on his door, sat down in his living room, and asked, "Can I adopt you as my grandpa?"
……
The next morning, while learning to drive the lawn tractor with a snowplow, I accidentally plowed down our chain-link fence.
