Four Great Musicals for You
Drama 101
Preparing a party for their beloved high school drama teacher on the eve of her retirement, a group of students describe how she changed their lives in this heartwarming and inspiring musical. This musical features a cast of young artists aged 13-19. It's sure to touch the hearts of theatre kids of every age.
TITA Jokes
The show centers around the women in our lives like our aunts, moms, daughters and partners. Through this musical, many of you will see more clearly their struggles and heartaches, and also how they deal with comedy and songs. In the musical, the performers sing and dance. They're humorous, enjoying making jokes.
Be Kind, Rewind
When fifteen-year-old Deirdre is sent to live with her cousins in 1995, she gets a job at the local video store where she falls in love with movies. The story is funny and heartwarming. This musical shines a light on growing up in the mid-90's and honors the now-extinct video store. For those who are missing life in the 90's, like songs and movies at that time, this show will touch them.
Unravelled: A New Musical
Three of the greatest love stories of all time（Romeo &Juliet, Orpheus &Eurydice, Della &Jim in The Gift of the Magi） are wonderfully retold and re-imagined to create an entirely new story of love. All three stories begin as they always have, but quickly intertwine（紧密相连）"The idea of writing one musical with all three separate stories never occurred to me until I wanted to write a completely different show, "said the director, Andrew Seok.
Demi Gene Moore was born on November 11th, 1962 in Roswell, New Mexico. Her childhood is covered in shadows and misery. She never knew her biological father, as he abandoned the family months before Demi was born. To make things worse, she experienced kidney dysfunction（肾脏机能障碍） and was cross-eyed.
Her stepfather had troubles of his own. He had to shift from one job to another, which made the family relocate frequently. During this period, her parents were becoming violent and alcoholics. The effect was severe on Demi and her two half-brothers but they summoned the courage to press through the pain and suffering. The family eventually managed to build themselves up during the 1970s.
She enrolled at Fairfax High School, where she attended classes with other future celebrities like Timothy Hutton. This enhanced her acting skills and fueled her passion for acting. She married singer Freddie Moore after dropping out of high school. Demi found herself working as a model and eventually that led to her first movie role —Parasite in 1982, after which Demi landed acting roles in various movies. Her most prominent that earned her immense fame was in the Blockbuster hit Ghost in the 1990s. But her marriage with Freddie Moore failed over time and then married Bruce Willis in 1987, with whom she had three daughters.
Her presence in Hollywood skyrocketed ever since. She starred in many A-List movies along with actors Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. Her second marriage ended in 2000 and then her motives went to community service for a while, but she still took on small acting roles from time to time. After dating for two years, she married actor Ashton Kutcher.
Most recently, Demi Moore walked the Fendi Runway for Paris Haute Couture Fashion Week.
A study from 2010 said that raising prices by 1%without losing sales can increase profits by 8. 7%on average. Getting the prices right can be difficult. Set them too high and you lose customers; set them too low and you leave money on the table.
To make more money, shopkeepers have been turning to price-optimization（优化） systems that predict how customers will respond to price changes. These systems are becoming cleverer thanks to advances in artificial intelligence （AI）. While older systems used historical sales data to estimate（估计） price sensitivity for individual goods, the latest AI-powered systems can find relationships between multiple goods. These AI-powered systems use big data to estimate price sensitivity —how much demand increases as the price falls or how much demand decreases as the price goes up —for thousands of products. Price-sensitive（价格敏感的） goods can then be discounted and price-insensitive ones marked up.
All this makes pricing systems "much more three-dimensional", observes Chad Yoes, the pricing official at Walmart, a supermarket. In February, Starbucks, a chain of coffee shops, expressed pride in its use of AI to price products" on an ongoing basis". US Foods, a food company, says its pricing system can promote sales and profits.
Price-optimization may make prices change more. "Shopkeepers are pricing faster today than they ever have before, "says Matt Pavich of Revionics, a pricing-software firm. That is especially true in the fast-moving world of e-commerce. But even Walmart changes the prices of many items in its stores 2-4 times a year, says Mr Yoes, up from once or twice a few years ago.
Sysco, a food company, says the AI-powered system allows it to lower prices on" key value items" and raise prices on other products. It can thus increase profits by expanding sales while maintaining profits. That keeps investors content and shoppers sweet.
Despite their bad reputation, sharks are critical to the marine ecosystem and can even help fight climate change.
In the shallows of Shark Bay, Western Australia, seagrass is food for the sea cows, which can weigh as much as 500 kg and eat roughly 40 kg of seagrass a day. Sea cows are a rich source of food for tiger sharks. By keeping the sea cow population in check, tiger sharks help seagrass meadows（草地） thrive. A flourishing seagrass meadow stores twice as much CO₂per square mile as forests typically do on land.
But tiger shark numbers are declining. Off Australia's northeast coast of Queensland, tiger sharks are estimated to have fallen by at least 71 percent, largely due to overfishing. A reduction in tiger sharks means more seagrass consumed by herbivores（食草动物） and less carbon stored in sea vegetation. This begged the question: What if they were absent from the Shark Bay—would the seagrass-dominated ecosystem survive?
To find out, researchers led by Rob Nowicki of Florida International University, spent time in Eastern Australia, where shark numbers were lower and sea cows ate seagrass largely undisturbed. "When uncontrolled, sea cows can rapidly destroy wide areas of seagrass, "said Nowicki. " When the seagrass recovers, the seagrass community looks different, with more tropical species dominating than before. "
Those findings underlined the role that tiger sharks were playing in Shark Bay. If their populations continue to decline, the resilience（恢复能力） of carbon-rich ocean ecosystems will likely decrease.
When it comes to boosting shark numbers, there have been movements toward more sustainable fishing, but a large percentage of the industry have not changed their methods, which is a reason why the population of many marine top predators（捕食者） continues to decline.
Apart from supporting sustainable fishing, Nowicki said the only way to truly protect marine life is to reduce our global greenhouse gas emissions. "Ultimately, if we are going to conserve our ecosystems in the centuries to come, we are going to need to solve climate change while undertaking species conservation at the same time."
When raindrops fall to the ground in summer, a familiar scent always follows. Many people call this the "smell of rain". However, rain is made up of odorless（无味的） water. So, where does this smell come from?
But it actually comes from wet soil. This special odor even has its own name: petrichor（潮土油）, which comes from a pair of chemical reactions.
The pleasant smell has long been an interest of scientists since Australian scientists first documented the formation of petrichor in 1964. According to scientists, some plants produce oils during dry periods.
Yet, it's the second reaction that creates the most petrichor. It occurs when chemicals produced by bacteria in soil are released. These bacteria break down and change into simple chemical compounds, providing nutrition for plants. Meanwhile the process also produces geosmin（土臭素）, a compound with a distinct earthy aroma（香味）.
Lots of animals are sensitive to geosmin but human beings are extremely sensitive to it. When it rains after a long period of dryness, drops of water hit the ground. Geosmin is then released from the surfaces. And it finally gives raindrops their familiar scent. If it rains heavily enough, geosmin will be spread downwind, warning others of coming rain.
And the next time someone mentions how much they love the smell of rain, you can prove your intelligence by explaining where that smell comes from.
A. And when it rains, these oils are released into the air.
B. The smell of petrichor is quite pleasant to the human nose.
C. There are a group of microorganisms widely found in soils.
D. Rain can refresh the soil specially when it rains heavily.
E. Scientists found the distinctive smell doesn't come from rain.
F. The pleasant smell always comes into being with the flow of air.
G. It is further spread around its surroundings with the aid of wind and rain.
My mother was always knitting（针织）. What a shock to me when she recently told me that knitting helped her1stresses of raising four children. And I have now2that it is true for me — and much more.
My mother taught me to knit when I was about 6. But I soon3 the project, as it was boring for a young child. My next knitting was restarted in Madison, where I was in graduate school and feeling the4 of the studies. Miraculously, the knitting saved my soul in that stressful semester of studies and other life events of love and5.
Knitting during the pandemic6my despair at not being able to participate in my 7volunteer activities. I knitted dozens of scarves to8to a shelter and this helped me feel9the community.
Knitting scarves, shawls（披肩） and blankets for my daughter when she went away for university brought me 10as I imagined every stitch（针脚） of love11 my now- adult child — as once my arms12her when she was young.
My mother's legacy is vast, but the major life13she taught me through knitting is that there is a step- by- step process of building, 14and rebuilding. It requires patience and a belief that stitches that are cast off（收针） can always15their way back on.
Hangzhou art exhibitions paint the wonders of Southern Song Dynasty
Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang province, East China, was the political, economic and cultural center more than 800 years ago, when it （serve） as the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty（1127-1279）.
A gathering of outstanding intellectuals, scholars, and artists lifted the city's culture and art to a new peak, casting long- standing influence in Chinese history that has lasted to present day.
（mark） this booming scene, five exhibitions opened at the art museum of China Academy of Art in Hangzhou on Saturday. Paintings and calligraphic pieces from different periods of time （be） now on show to showcase the Song era to audiences, to help them understand how Chinese cultural traditions have been passed on throughout centuries.
The center exhibition of the five is Embrace the Landscape, brings together 37 classic paintings —10 of them dated to Song Dynasty（960-1279）— borrowed major museums across the country. It provides an enactment（呈现） of the landscapes and （society） and cultural lives led by people in Southern Song, in Hangzhou, then called Lin' an, and neighboring areas in Jiangnan, a term （refer） to the lower reaches of the Yangtze River.
Through these objects one will also see the cultural lineage that has been passed on since the Tang Dynasty （618-906）and has been further developed by the elite communities in Song, and how their accomplishments continued to guide and inspire artists in the following （dynasty）.
There is no way they just drove into that water, thought Corion Evans. The 16-year-old was hanging out with his friend in a parking area underneath a Moss Point Mississippi, highway in July when a car with three teenage girls inside drove off a boat ramp（斜坡） and into the Pascagoula River. It came to rest some 20 feet from land and then sank. "The driver of the car", Evans thought, must have blindly followed wrong directions from her GPS.
It was around 2: 30 a. m. by the time Evans and his friend Karon Bradley got to the river's edge. In the darkness they could hardly make out the girls holding tightly to the roof, the only part of the car still, barely, above water. But they could hear screaming.
Evans took off his shirt and shoes, threw his phone down, and then dived into the water, a river he knew alligators （短吻鳄） called home. He helped the first girl he saw and, keeping her head above water led her ashore.
Just then, a man called out. Police Officer Garry Mercer had arrived. He dived into the river to help another of the girls. But halfway back to shore she panicked and went underwater, pulling Mercer down with her.
Evans jumped back into the water and helped them until they could stand. "If he hadn't been there, who knows? "Mercer told the Washington Post.
There was still one girl in the water. Cora Watson, 19, could not swim. She was drinking water, struggling to stay afloat. And scared.
注意：
1）所续写短文的词数应为80左右；
2）请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Hearing Cora's screaming, Evans jumped again back into the river.
