My Favourite Books
Jo Usmar is a writer for Cosmopolitan and co-author of the This Book Will series(系列) of lifestyle books. Here she picks her top reads.
Matilda
Roald Dahl
I once wrote a paper on the influence of fairy tales on Roald Dahl's writing and it gave me a new appreciation for his strange and delightful words. Matilda's battles with her cruel parents and the bossy headmistress, Miss Trunchbull, are equally funny and frightening, but they're also aspirational.
After Dark
Haruki Murakami
It's about two sisters—Eri, a model who either won't or can't stop sleeping, and Mari, a young student. In trying to connect to her sister, Mari starts changing her life and discovers a world of diverse "night people" who are hiding secrets.
Gone Girl
Gillian Fynn
There was a bit of me that didn't want to love this when everyone else on the planet did, but the horror story is brilliant. There's tension and anxiety from the beginning as Nick and Amy battle for your trust. It's a real whodunit and the frustration when you realise what's going on is horribly enjoyable.
The Stand
Stephen King
This is an excellent fantasy novel from one of the best storytellers around. After a serious flu outbreak wipes out 99.4% of the world's population, a battle unfolds between good and evil among those left. Randall Flagg is one of the scariest characters ever.
I have worked as a keeper at the National Zoo, Paris for 11 years. Spot and Stripe are the first tiger cubs that have ever been born here. Globally, a third of Sumatran cubs in zoos don't make it to adulthood, so I decided to give them round-the-clock care at home.
I've got two children—the younger one, Kynan, was extremely happy about the tigers arriving - but all of us really looked forward to being part of their lives and watching them grow. I wasn't worried about bringing them into my home with my wife and kids. These were cubs. They weighed about 2.5 kg and were so small that there was absolutely no risk.
As they grew more mobile, we let them move freely around the house during the day, but when we were asleep we had to contain them in a large room, otherwise they'd get up to mischief. We'd come down in the morning to find they'd turned the room upside down, and left it looking like a zoo.
Things quickly got very intense due to the huge amount of energy required to look after them. There were some tough times and I just felt extremely tired. I was grateful that my family was there to help. We had to have a bit of a production line going, making up "tiger milk", washing baby bottles, and cleaning the floors.
When Spot and Stripe were four months old, they were learning how to open doors and jump fences, and we knew it really was time for them to go. It was hard for us to finally part with them. For the first few days, Kynan was always a bit disappointed that the cubs weren't there.
I'm not sad about it. I'm hands-on with them every day at the zoo, and I do look back very fondly on the time that we had them.
Art is everywhere. Any public space has been carefully designed by an artistic mind to be both functional and beautiful. Why, then, is art still so widely considered to be "the easy subject" at school, insignificant to wider society, a waste of time and effort?
Art can connect culture with commercial products in a way that not many other things can; art generates money and holds significant emotional and cultural value within communities. When people attend a concert, they are paying for music, sure, maybe even hotel rooms, meals, and transport, but they also gain an incredible experience, a unique atmosphere and a memory that will go through the rest of their lives. People don't just want material things anymore, they want to experience life一the arts are a perfect crossover（交迭）between culture and commerce.
Furthermore, the arts can bring communities together, reducing loneliness and making people feel safer. Social bonds are created among individuals when they share their arts experiences through reflection and discussion, and their expression of common values through artworks in honour of events significant to a nation's experience.
The arts clearly have a pretty positive impact on physical and psychological health. It is found that people who frequent cultural places or participate in artistic events are more likely to gain good health compared to those who do not; more engagement with the arts is linked to a higher level of people's wellbeing. The Royal Society of Public Health discovered that music and art, when used in hospitals, help to improve the conditions of patients by reducing stress, anxiety and blood pressure.
Children who are involved with the arts make greater achievements in their education: those engaged with drama have greater literary ability while others taking part in musical practice exhibit greater skills in math and languages. Kids with preference for the arts have a greater chance of finding employment in the future. Participating in the arts is essential for child development; encouraging children to express themselves in constructive ways could help to form healthy emotional responses in later life.
Vital to human life, art is celebrated and used by nations across the world for various purposes. Life without art would be boring and dead still, for art is a part of what makes us human.
Popularization has in some cases changed the original meaning of emotional (情感的) intelligence. Many people now misunderstand emotional intelligence as almost everything desirable in a person's makeup that cannot be measured by an IQ test, such as character, motivation, confidence, mental stability, optimism and "people skills." Research has shown that emotional skills may contribute to some of these qualities, but most of them move far beyond skill-based emotional intelligence.
We prefer to describe emotional intelligence as a specific set of skills that can be used for either good or bad purposes. The ability to accurately understand how others are feeling may be used by a doctor to find how best to help her patients, while a cheater might use it to control potential victims. Being emotionally intelligent does not necessarily make one a moral person.
Although popular beliefs regarding emotional intelligence run far ahead of what research can reasonably support, the overall effects of the publicity have been more beneficial than harmful. The most positive aspect of this popularization is a new and much needed emphasis (重视) on emotion by employers, educators and others interested in promoting social well-being. The popularization of emotional intelligence has helped both the public and researchers re-evaluate the functionality of emotions and how they serve people adaptively in everyday life.
Although the continuing popular appeal of emotional intelligence is desirable, we hope that such attention will excite a greater interest in the scientific and scholarly study of emotion. It is our hope that in coming decades, advances in science will offer new perspectives (视角) from which to study how people manage their lives. Emotional intelligence, with its focus on both head and heart, may serve to point us in the right direction.
I have a drawer full of letters to Santa. Each year my children would write up their Christmas wish lists. They were polite requests for the latest game or toy. As the children got older, they would give Santa some hints(提示)on where to buy their presents.
Those letters taught my children a valuable lesson about writing: It has a purpose. Sometimes our purpose is to achieve something; other times it may be to entertain
inform, or persuade. And when writing doesn't seem to have any purpose or get any kind of meaningful response, then it can be hard to get excited about doing it.
Christmas is a great time of year for children to communicate with others through writing. When children write for real audiences and real purposes, they can learn to choose their words accordingly. You write "Dear Santa" because you don't know him personally and you want to show him respect.
Texting, online messaging, live chats while playing video games all mean that they are constantly producing written messages. However, because they are usually writing to family and friends, they use informal language most of the time.
There is nothing wrong with this kind of writing. It suits the audience and the purpose and gets the job done. This type of writing won't be rewarded by the school examiner, nor by a future employer or a potential client. The very best communicators are those who know how to adjust their language to match their audience.
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A. It isn't that these young people can't write. B. But it is always purposeful-or at least it should be. C. The age of pen-and-paper letter writing may have passed. D. As a result, each year they received something they wanted. E. You write "Hi Nanna and Pop" because you are close to them. F. As technology develops, young people are writing more than they ever have. G. But if this is the only kind of writing young people do, it will cause problems. |
Like many young people, Jessica wants to travel the globe. Unlike most of them, this 25-year-old is doing it 1. She and her husband have spent the last two years traveling the world, stopping everywhere from Paris to Singapore. It might sound like one long, expensive 2, but the couple has an unusual way to make their travel 3.
They're part of a new form of the 4 economy: an online group of house sitters. Throughout their no-cost stays in 5 homes, they feed pets and water plants in the homeowner's 6.
It's not all sightseeing. The two travelers carefully 7 their trips, scheduling their days around the pets that are sometimes difficult to 8. But house sitting also offers a level of 9 they can't find in a hotel. "It's like 10 at a friend's house," Jessica says.
The couple has a high 11 rate in getting accepted as house sitters and they always go beyond the homeowner's 12. For Jessica, that means 13 plenty of pictures of happy pets, keeping the house 14 and leaving a nice small gift before heading to the next house. "You want to make the homeowner feel that they made the right 15," she says.
Henry Tyler made the catch of the year on the weekend. When he saw a young child hanging from a sixth-floor apartment balcony(阳台) , Henry ran one hundred metres, jumped over a 1.2-metre fence, and held out his arms to catch the (fall) child.
Eric Brown, only three years old, knocked Henry down when he fell. The boy is in the hospital and doctors say he'll be OK.
Brown family live in an apartment building outside Toronto. On the day of the accident, Mrs. Brown was at work and Eric was at home with his father. They both fell (sleep) while watching TV.
Eric woke up a little later when he heard children playing outside. He pushed a chair onto the balcony, and climbed up (see) them. When he looked down, he (accidental) slipped and fell over the edge. He hung on for a few minutes screamed for his father, but his father didn't hear him.
Henry (fix) his car when he heard the screams. He looked up and saw Eric hanging from the balcony. He quickly (throw) his tools aside, and started running, arms out.
"He saved my (son) life," said Mrs. Brown. "I don't know to thank him."
"I just didn't want the boy to be hurt," said Henry.
1）农场情况；
2）采摘过程；
3）个人感受
注意：
1）词数80左右；
2）题目已为你写好。
题目：My Weekend
My Weekend
Lisa woke up on Saturday morning very excited. Today she was turning 10. She thought her mother would make her a special breakfast. Last year on her birthday, Lisa woke up to the smell of pancakes and sausage cooking. The kitchen table was full of fresh fruit and juice, and her family had even bought lots of fresh flowers to put on the table.
But when she went downstairs this morning, her father, mother and brother were eating cereal (麦片) at the table, just like any other day. No one even said "Happy birthday."
When the phone rang and her mother announced that Lisa's aunt wanted to speak with her, she knew that it must be to wish her the best on her 10th birthday. But to Lisa's surprise, her aunt simply wanted to remind her to pick up her mail the next week while her aunt was out of town.
Lisa was quite confused. She thought that her family would say something about her special day, but she didn't want to seem upset. She tried to be cheerful. After all, she was looking forward to meeting her friends in the park soon. Surely they were going to be excited about her birthday.
When Lisa arrived at the park, her friend Jane was the first to greet her. "Nice day, isn't it, Lisa?" she asked.
Lisa, ready for her friend to wish her a happy birthday, responded excitedly, "Yes, it is! It's a great day. You know why?"
"Because it's Saturday and the weather is great!" Jane replied.
Lisa nodded, but looked down in disappointment.
Soon the rest of her friends arrived, and they all had a good time playing soccer and spending time together. But Lisa couldn't help but think that it was strange that none of them had mentioned her birthday.
As she walked home in the late afternoon sun, Lisa tried her best not to cry. How could everyone forget her birthday? She was close to tears by the time she reached her home.
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。
On stepping in, Lisa was quite surprised.
When the birthday candles were lit, the warmest moment came.
