The Language Exchange Programme allows students in pairs to communicate in two different languages they wish to share and learn each week. Students record short entries after each partner meeting noting the language skills practised and the topics discussed. Each pair of students meets three times throughout the term with a teacher who decides if the exchange is effective. Students who successfully complete the programme will receive one credit each.
Requirements for completion:
·One welcoming session on the second Friday of the term
·18 weekly one-hour pair meetings
·Weekly progress reports for all pair meetings
·At least three pair-teacher meetings
·One five-minute final video
Sign up!
The sign-up and registration process is as follows:
•Students sign up and indicate the languages they can share and languages they are interested inlearning.
·Based on the information entered by each student, potential pairs are identified.
·Proficiency（熟练）levels are confirmed through coursework or placement tests.
·Once a pair has been determined to be suitable, the students will be contacted individually witha special permission number to register for the programme.
Reminders:
Signing up for the programme does not automatically mean that you will be able to register and participate. Pairs are matched by languages of interest and proficiency levels. Since there are many factors involved in the pairing process, not all students who sign up will be matched with a partner and be able to register for the programme.
I know next to nothing about baseball. When in the right field during P. E. as a boy, I prayed the ball wouldn't come to me. It took a miracle（奇迹）for me to catch it. Yet I later became the father of two boys, Will and Tim（8 and5）, who were both interested in baseball. On Saturday mornings, I'd take Will out to the playground and play catch with him. Thanks to my weak arm, the ball dropped before he could catch it. After many misses one day, he said, "How am I ever going to make the major leagues?" "You got the wrong dad, kid," I thought. Baseball isn't my thing.
Still, I wanted to give my kids confidence on the field. There was an official Little League in our area, but it was super-competitive and primarily targeted older boys. What if we had something more low-key, something that welcomed boys and girls, and younger ones?
I shared the idea with some neighbors. "That would be great!" they said. Now who could organize such a thing? Not me. I tried to put the idea aside, but it wouldn't leave me. I finally decided that I must do something about it, So I called the city's recreation department, explaining that some families wanted to start a baseball league in our neighborhood. Were there any fields for that? They bounced me around. Finally, I spoke to the official in charge. I got butterflies in my stomach. What if he said no? "Yes, we have something for you," the man said, hearing my request. We got two fields for four hours every Sunday morning. Our league was founded. What a joy it was to sit on the benches, watching Will and Tim playing baseball! How grateful I was for other parents who did the coaching! And I became the most unlikely baseball commissioner（专员）ever.
Many years have passed. Now Will and Tim are new dads, and I can't wait to see what they'll have to do. I know better than anyone: Parenthood calls you to do the most unlikely things.
Is forgiveness against our human nature? To answer our question, we need to ask a further question: What is the essence of our humanity? For the sake of simplicity, people consider two distinctly different views of humanity. The first view involves dominance and power. In an early paper on the psychology of forgiveness, Droll（1984）made the interesting claim that humans' essential nature is more aggressive than forgiving allows. Those who forgive are against their basic nature, much to their harm. In his opinion, forgivers are compromising their well-being as they offer mercy to others, who might then take advantage of them.
The second view involves the theme of cooperation, mutual respect, and even love as the basis of who we are as humans. Researchers find that to fully grow as human beings, we need both to receive love from and offer love to others. Without love, our connections with a wide range of individuals in our lives can fall apart. Even common sense strongly suggests that the will to power over others does not make for harmonious interactions. For example, how well has slavery worked as a mode of social harmony?
From this second viewpoint of who we are as humans, forgiveness plays a key role in the biological and psychological integrity of both individuals and communities because one of the outcomes of forgiveness, shown through scientific studies, is the decreasing of hatred and the restoration of harmony. Forgiveness can break the cycle of anger. At least to the extent the people from whom you are estranged accept your love and forgiveness and are prepared to make the required adjustments. Forgiveness can heal relationships and reconnect people.
As an important note, when we take a Classical philosophical perspective, that of Aristotle, we see the distinction between potentiality and actuality. We are not necessarily born with the capacity to forgive, but instead with the potential to learn about it and to grow in our ability to forgive. The actuality of forgiving, its actual appropriation in conflict situations, develops with practice.
Minimizing the environmental damage that new roads cause is generally regarded as a good thing. But to do that, it helps to understand just how new roads cause the damage of which they are accused. Recently, a group of researchers led by Dr. Gonzalez conducted an experiment and proved that immigration is good for the health of animal populations. A road destroys only a small part of the habitat, thus destroying just a few local population s of creatures. So the argument that road-building itself is bad for biodiversity is not self-evidently correct. Those who nevertheless hold this view say that apparently separate local populations of animals are, in fact, parts of much larger populations connected via migration.
According to this theory, when a local population struggles to move about —because of an epidemic, for example — individuals from neighboring communities can fill the gaps. The implications of the theory are straightforward. Cut local populations off from each other and each is more likely to disappear. And roads are good at doing just that. Testing the theory with experimental roads, however, would be expensive. Dr. Gonzalez's brainwave was to do the whole thing on a much smaller scale.
The team studied moss-covered rocks. On some rocks the researchers left the moss untouched; on others they made "roadways" across to leave the moss isolated. After waiting six months, they found that in the disturbed habitats nearly all the bug population had declined compared with undisturbed moss, and 40% of the species had become extinct.
The real test came in the second part of the experiment. In this, the researchers removed moss much as before, but they left narrow moss paths to bridge the no-bug's-land between islands. The islands with bridges did far better than isolated islands —a result that supports the notion that population exchange is necessary to keep an ecosystem healthy.
Whether these results can be translated to large-scale ecosystems remains uncertain. But if they can, they would cause more, not less, concern about the ecological effects of road-building. On the other hand, they also suggest a way out. In Britain, tunnels are often built under roads for animals of regular habits, such as badgers（獾）, to be able to travel their traditional routes without having to fight with traffic. Extending that principle, perhaps special bridge s might be a cheap way of letting man and nature rub along a bit better.
Who can imagine life today without an Automated Teller Machine（ATM）? They are available in considerable numbers throughout the world.
The first ATM was the brainchild of an enterprising Turkish-American inventor Luther George Simjian. When the idea of an automated banking machine struck him, he registered 20 patents before any bank agreed to give it a trial run. It is easy to assume that the inventor of such a popular machine was laughing all the way to the bank. Within six months of its operation in New York in 1939, the device was removed due to lack of customer acceptance.
It was not until 1967, nearly 30 years later, that Barclays Bank, in a careful launch, rolled out a self-service machine in London, England, which proved successful. The first cash machine relied on customers' use of prepaid tokens（代币）to get envelopes with a fixed amount of cash inside.
The banks' principle was seemingly customer service. But it would be foolish to minimize the many advantages that cash machines provided to the banks themselves. By the late 1970s, the highest fixed cost for the average large bank was its branches. The greatest variable cost and loss to profits were its staff. Ban k accounts swiftly recognized that self-service operations could reduce bank branch staff cost by70 percent.
Experts quickly determined that public acceptance of ATMs counted on convenience, simplicity, speed, security and trust. For maximum efficiency, ATMs had to be located near public transport or in a shopping mall, not at a branch. The busier and more crowded the location, obviously, the better. Now, roughly 75percent of all cash provided by banks to their customers comes from cash machines..
Public acceptance of deposits（存款）by machine was significantly slower than customers' usage of ATMs for withdrawals. In general, it seems that customers sometimes still prefer and trust an over-the-counter transaction（交易）for deposits.
A．Location, in particular, was a key factor.
B．His cash machine, however, didn't prove durable.
C．The device was relatively primitive, at least by today's standards.
D．However, cash machines posed some interesting, unanswered questions.
E．An interesting factor was the issue of bio-statistics for customer identification.
F．Devices originally dismissed by the public are now recognized as essential institutions.
G．Soon afterwards, many other banks became admittedly champions of the cash machine.
In American culture, I am noticing a lack of respect, especially among children. This should be treated1 since disrespectful children will become disrespectful teenagers, and then disrespectful adults. American culture is2 the ways of teaching respect, while other cultures have methods that Americans could learn from.
In 1995, I spent a couple of months in Kenya where I lived with a pastor's family. This pastor was a part of the Maasai tribes that have some unique customs. One of them is the 3 that the children give the adults. When an adult approaches a Maasai child, the child will4 and tilt their head slightly saying "Suppa". The adult responses by saying "Ippa" touching the top of their heads. This simple act shows respect for the adult. The children 5 that they are their elder and that the adult deserves respect.
In my early 20's, I worked at a children's home in South Carolina where the children from 4 to 19 years old were taught to respect their elders. They 6 me as "Mr. Vince" and every adult worker there with a "Mr, Mrs, or Ms.". However, as I counsel and talk to teachers and other professionals who work with children now, there seems to be a 7 in such as friendly behavior that children give adults. Fewer students treat teachers with respect: Children frequently talk back to their teachers, parents or seniors, interrupt conversations, and disregard their 8 . Children casually speak with other adults like waiters, store clerks, postmen, cashiers, etc. in the way as if they are children's 9 .
Immanuel Kant expressed two 10 attitudes in Europe that are still dominant today. One is that only humans are persons because they have autonomy—they freely choose to act on principles by 11 laws on themselves, and not on desires. It is this mind based on 12 that gives humans special status. Second, to learn to follow principles instead of desires, a human child needs to learn 13 to the laws of adults. They must practice 14 regulation before they are able to practice autonomy. Kant said that "act in the way you want others to act in the situation, taking other people as persons, not 15 you use for your own goals". Only in this way can you become a real person with intrinsic values.
Shenzhou XVIII manned spaceship successfully （dock）with the space station at 3:32 am on April 26 2024, according to the China Manned Space Agency（CMSA）. The whole process took （approximate）6.5hours.
The spaceship, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket, blasted off at 8:59 p. m. from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China. About 10 （minute）after the launch, the Shenzhou-18 spaceship separated from the rocket 3 entered its designated orbit. The crew members are good shape and the launch is "complete success," the China Manned Space Agency（CMSA）announced.
While in orbit, the Shenzhou-18 spaceship is scheduled （make ）a fast, automated rendezvous and docking with the space station combination. The Shenzhou-18 crew will rotate with the Shenzhou-17 crew in orbit.
The Shenzhou-18 crew members are Ye Guangfu, Li Cong and Li Guangsu, with Ye as the mission （command）. The Shenzhou-18 mission marks Ye's second journey into space.（follow）his previous role as a crew member during the Shenzhou-13 mission from October 2021 to April 2022．Li Cong and Li Guangsu, belong to the third group of Chinese astronauts, are both embarking on their first-ever space adventure.
注意：1．词数80左右；2．请按如下格式做答，标题和结尾已为你写好，不计入总词数。
Guardian of Welcoming-Guest Pine Wanted
……
Please contact Miss Wang before 30 July. Inquiries are encouraged but visits declined.
Mount Huangshan Nature Reserve
On a sunny Friday morning, Mr. Stone, the Grade 4 head teacher, walked into the classroom with a new student following him. She was a lively girl from Mexico, and her red mushroom hair cut immediately drew everyone's eyes. With a welcoming smile, Mr. Stone gestured for her to sit beside Mike, a student known for teasing others.
During break time, Mike couldn't help but laugh when he caught sight of his new deskmate. Sara's distinctive hairstyle seemed like an open invitation for him to make fun of her. Leaning in towards Sara, he playfully suggested, "Hey, Sara. Ever thought about changing your name to Dora? You look just like Dora the Explorer!" His words caused laughter and cheers from the others in the classroom.
Sara's eyes filled with tears, her cheeks turning red with embarrassment. Feeling hurt and upset, she stood up suddenly, rushing to the teacher's office to seek support from Mr. Stone. After hearing her story, Mr. Stone offered her gentle comfort, saying, "Sara, your hairstyle is truly pretty. Remember, everyone has their own sense of beauty."
Mr. Stone then directed his attention to Mike, expressing his disappointment and urging Mike to apologize to Sara. "Mike," he continued, "your actions were unkind. We must treat everyone with empathy（同情）. Laughing at Sara's hair has deeply hurt her."
This conflict was temporarily settled, but Mr. Stone found himself lost in thought. Reflecting on his own childhood, Mr. Stone recalled how he had been teased for being overweight. The pain caused by hurtful words was like wrinkles on a crumpled（压皱的）ball of paper. Even if you smoothed them out, the wrinkles stayed.
He wanted to teach an important lesson to Mike, the troublemaker. Then, a unique strategy came to mind. He contacted Mike's mother, explaining the situation and discussing a plan with her to develop empathy in her son. They agreed that over the weekend, Mike's mother would arrange for Mike to have his hair cut extremely short.
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 Monday morning, Mike unwillingly approached the classroom.
……
At that moment, Mr. Stone walked into the classroom with a ball of paper.
