Top 3 Best Museums in the World
Whether you are a fine art or historylover, the following three museums are sure to take your breath away.
1. LeLouvre, Paris, France
A visit to the Louvre and its collections lets visitors discover Western art from the Middle Ages to 1848, as well as a large number of ancient civilizations. The grand palace that houses the museum, which dates back to the late twelfth century, is a true lesson in architecture: from 1200 to 2011, the most innovative architects have in turn built and developed the Louvre.
•Official website: Louvre
•Highlight: Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa."
2. The British Museum, London, UK
The British Museum in London was founded in 1753 and opened its doors six years later. It was the first national museum to cover all fields of human knowledge, open to visitors from across the world. No other museum is responsible for collections of the same depth and breadth, beauty and significance.
•Official website: British Museum
•Highlight: the Rosetta Stone.
3. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia
The second-largest art museum in the world, the State Hermitage Museum was founded in 1764（200 years later than The Uffizi Galleries, Florence, Italy）, when Empress Catherine the Great acquired an impressive collection of works from the Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. Today, the collection of art works contains paintings, sculptures and so on.
•Official website: State Hermitage Museum
•Highlight: Golden masterpieces from Eurasia.
Orange chicken, sweet and sour pork, fried rice…Max Burns lists several typical Western-style of Chinese dishes that disappoint him. For a 21-year-old native British young man who spent his first thirteen years in China, those cuisines are far from authentic, but rather a category which is invented to cater to Western preferences.
What also upsets Burns is that the view of Chinese food has been subsequently skewed（扭曲）. Quite a few Westerners recognize that particular type of fare as the whole of Chinese cuisine.
"They almost have no clue about the extent of Chinese cuisine, about how it varies because people forget how big China is. It is a country that has deserts from one side, jungles and sea from the other side. Each area has its unique style of cooking." he says.
Burns tries to showcase the richness of delicious Chinese dishes by vlogging（拍摄并上传） about making Chinese dishes at home. "Food is probably the most accessible way for everyone to learn an alien culture." he says.
Sometimes, his British friends would join to help. "And quite often, they were shocked by the diversity of Chinese cuisine. They've had a long time to figure out that Chinese food is just a lot more complex. "The food adventure has helped Burns grow into an influence r with more than three million of subscribers worldwide today. "So, I can definitely say that I've changed some people's ideas about Chinese food."
Interestingly, when Burns first started vlogging in 2016 directly after moving back to Brighton, England from Beijing, copying Chinese food at home was a then "stupid idea", as he puts it, because he was never super into cooking. At the time, the videos centered more on explaining aspects of Chinese culture, including movies, snacks, restaurants and more.
Looking ahead, Burns has some plans in mind. "I would love to do a travel food show throughout China on TV. Also, I would love to have my own restaurant in the future. That's definitely going to happen."
In Georgia students will be required to build "background knowledge" by reciting all or part of significant poems and speeches. The Arkansas plan calls for students to recite a passage from a well-known poem, play or speech. That's it; an old-fashioned demand that students memorize the Gettysburg Address or Hamlet's "To be or not to be" or Gwendolyn Brooks's We Real Cool and recite it to an audience.
Most parents would probably call this a worthy exercise once abandoned for long, gathering the courage to speak in public and firing the adolescent imagination. Who could object to store memorable words in teenage heads otherwise packed with short videos?
English teachers, that's who. Modern educators view memorization as empty repetition, mechanical and prescriptive（规定的） rather than creative or thoughtful. Reciting texts from memory, they say, merely drops information into students' minds. It's repetitive learning instead of critical analysis.
That's wrong. Recitation allows students to experience a text as a living thing, ready to be taken up by a new generation. Committing a poem or speech to memory means stepping into the author's shoes and pondering_what he meant. Deciding which words to stress when reciting means thinking about what those words mean.
In our age of social media and artificial intelligence, the practice of recitation has never been more needed. Memorizing classic words reminds us that they are alive.
Watch the faces of parents as they listen to their children urging us all toward what Martin Luther King called "a dream deeply rooted in the American dream," or saying with Robert Frost, "I have been one acquainted with the night," or with Shakespeare, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..."
When young reciters return to their seats, they know they have made ageless words their own. What parents and students feel at that moment transcends（超越） a good grade. For a few minutes, hardworking teens become King, Frost or Shakespeare.
Adults check their phones, on average,360 times a day, and spend almost three hours a day on their devices in total. The problem for many of us is that one quick phone-related task leads to a quick check of our emails or social media feeds, and suddenly we've been sucked into endless scrolling.
It's an awful circle. The more useful our phones become, the more we use them. The more we use them, the more we lay neural（神经的） pathways in our brains that lead to pick up our phones for whatever task is at hand-and the more we feel an urge to check our phones even when we don't have to.
What we do know is that the simple distraction of checking a phone or seeing a notification（通知）can have negative consequences. This isn't very surprising; we know that, in general, multitasking does harm to memory and performance. One of the most dangerous examples is phone use while driving. One study found that merely speaking on the phone, not texting, was enough to make drivers slower to react on the road. It's true for everyday tasks that are less high-risk, too. Simply hearing a notification "ding" made participants of another study perform far worse on a task-almost as badly as participants who were speaking or texting on the phone during the task.
It isn't just the use of a phone that has consequences-its me re presence can affect the way we think.
In one recent study, for example, researchers asked participants to either put their phones next to them so they were visible（like on a desk）, nearby and out of sight（like in a bag or pocket）, or in another room. They were found to perform far better when their phones were in another room instead of nearby-whether visible, powered on or not.
Strategies to Overcome Self-Doubt Once and For All
Being self-confident is not easy and not everyone can do it, but it doesn't need to be that difficult.
Going through life can be very challenging at times. When we were young, no one told us how hard it will be in the future but here we are And it is unpleasing and can kill your confidence levels if not controlled from the beginning.
We will all experience some self-doubt, which is natural. It happens to us during normal days or whenever we are going to start a new job, a new task, or a new relationship, anything new in life will make you self-doubt. This sort of feeling puts you into dark days when nothing seems to go right and you might feel like giving up, and that is the time to be strong.
Self-doubt is when you are unsure about one or more aspects of yourself. For example, when starting a new job, you might feel inexperienced or might think that you are not fit enough for the job, and this is a prime example of self-doubt.
Low-level of self-criticism is actually good for you. It motivates you and pushes you to be better in life, to become greater than yesterday. This type of feeling will push you to work harder and faster than before and will also increase your productivity, but it should be a low level of self-criticism. You don't want to punish yourself over things that are beyond your control.
A. We needn't take it seriously.
B. It's impossible for us to deal with it.
C. One of the big problems of adult life is having self-doubt,
D. Self-doubt isn't all that bad, let us tell you why.
E. Let's explore to find ways to remove self-doubt forever.
F. It will take long for us to solve this problem.
G. There are some people mistaking self-doubt for something else.
One teacher had two students. One of them had a positive vision while the other had the 1 one.
One day, the teacher 2 for a park with both the students and while wandering in the garden, they 3 a mango tree from which some ripe and juicy mangoes were 4 . On seeing this, the teacher thought to 5 both of his students. Then, he asked the first one, "My dear child, what do you think of this mango tree?"
The student answered instantly, "Teacher, in spite of people 6 this tree with stones, it gives us sweet and juicy mangoes. It does 7 but still it gives us fruits. I wish all human beings learn this important 8 from the mango tree-to share their 9 even if they have to suffer for this."
After that, the teacher asked the other student the same question. The student 10 answered, "Teacher, this mango tree is no good and will not give mangoes by itself but only when we hit it with stones and 11 . Therefore, we should hit it hard to get sweet mangoes from it. That is the only way to 12 these mangoes. It is also clear from this tree that in order to get good 13 from others, we need to be violent and only when we become violent, then and only then will we get 14 ."
The teacher was delighted with the answer given by the first student because he had an admirable vision and 15 the tree with positive vision.
The popularity of ancient towns in the south of the Yangtze River, such as Zhouzhuang and Wuzhen, has aroused a nationwide trend in the construction of ancient towns. Lin Peng, the director of China's Institute of Ancient Cities and Cultural Studies, pointed that there are more than 2,800 developed or developing ancient towns in our country, is definitely the highest number globally.
In ancient towns, immersive（沉浸式） experience being mentioned here is historical and cultural characteristics—the "ancient" of ancient towns. Apart from visible "special buildings", characteristics also include invisible "culture". Tourists in ancient towns want to see the living （condition） of local people, feel the vitality of town life, try characteristic local snacks （influence） by geography and folk customs, and understand how long history （shape） local culture. Out of modern fast-paced work and life, tourists want to awaken their inner softness with a slow-moving ancient town.
Touring ancient towns is for recreation, relaxation, and pleasure, if all the ancient towns in different places are the same and cannot find their own （unique）, then ancient town tourism will （eventual） decline. Let every ancient town become a unique historical imprint（印记）, so that tourists can find their "poetry and distance" while （wander） through the ancient towns. This is the soul that ancient towns need to regain.
注意：1. 词数 80左右；2. 可以适当增加细节，以使行文连贯。
Notice Dear schoolmates, Student Union |
Mrs. Smith knew something was wrong with 7-year-old Miguel. He was one of her best students and a very hardworking child. But lately, he was failing his tests and no longer seemed focused on his studies. Mrs. Smith couldn't quite put her finger on what was wrong with the young boy. She knew his family had immigrated to America from South Africa, and she reasoned they were probably in some sort of trouble.
One day, Mrs. Smith was walking b nc k to her car after a long day at work and stopped in her tracks to see a tired Miguel on the streets. It took her a while to realize that the boy was sitting on a cardboard box with his homework spread out in front of him and studying. "Miguel!" she cried, approaching him. "What are you doing here, darling?" With tears streaming down his cheeks, Miguel poured out everything happening to him and his family.
Mrs. Smith was heartbroken as Miguel began sharing his story with her. He said that when they first arrived in the country, they were living with relatives, who had recently sold their house and moved to another city. His parents were now living in a shelter. Miguel didn't have a desk or table to do his homework in the shelter, and it was too noisy. He said he couldn't concentrate on his studies there and didn't know where to go until he found a spot on the street behind the school.
Mrs. Smith knew she had to do something to help this less fortunate student. She arrived at school early the next day and arranged a small desk in the back of her classroom for Miguel. She also got him extra school supplies and the permit to stay back after lessons and do his homework in the classroom, for which Miguel was extremely grateful.
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。
Mrs. Smith later found that Miguel's mother was deaf, and his father no longer had a job. The next day, Mrs. Smith approached the school headmaster and told him about Miguel's story. |
