The world continues to inspire travel writers. Standout books for the year ahead are to please all types of our readers.
A Search for Nearby Nature and Wilderness
World explorer Alastair Humphries spent a year examining every square metre of a 12-mile radius (半径) around his home in London and found wonder close to hand. A former Adventurer of the Year, Humphries has cycled around the globe and rowed across the Atlantic Ocean. His latest book, though, is a celebration of slowing things down and discovering a small wild world right on your doorstep. It's also a cry to revitalize London's neglected natural places in urban areas and our right to wander in them. £12.99, Eye Books.
My Adventures in Travel and Publishing
Travel publisher, Hilary Bradt's guidebook company celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. The first Bradt Travel Guide was born in1974: BackpackingAlong Ancient Ways Peru & Bolivia which included some of the very first descriptions of the Inca Trail. Since then, Bradt has published many guidebooks about the farthest parts of the planet — Mongolia and Madagascar among them. Pioneering backpacking travels before the concept was widespread, he presents this book looking back at a lifetime of trials and stimulation in the wild. £20.00, Bradt.
True Stories of Nature, Adventure & Connection
Environmental writer Laurie King has gathered a collection of original non-fiction stories, illustrations, and poems examining the human connection with nature. He takes a walk across the desert and discovers how hermits (隐士) survived in a South American forest. These exciting stories aim to inspire you to find your wild animal soul and rethink your relationship with nature. £14.99, Watkins Publishing.
Writers Walk the World
From the streets of London to the paths of Japan, the jungles of Ghana and beyond, Duncan Minshull collects the works of more than fifty walker-writers who have traveled the world's seven continents on foot. From the 1500s to the present day comes a memorable band of explorers and adventurers, scientists and craftsmen, pleasure-seekers and literary drifters sharing their experiences and asking themselves a question — why travel this way in the first place? £15.99, Notting Hill Editions.
Dave McNee met Claudia Mandekic 14 years ago. When she told McNee how hard it could be to get students excited about math, her favourite discipline, he made a surprising suggestion: "Why not throw in something they enjoy, like sports?" The idea of mixing basketball and mathematics got its first shot in 2011, when the now colleagues — who had launched a tutoring non-profit — were invited to run a summer-school program for kids who'd failed Grade 9 math at Georges Secondary School.
When the students showed up for their first day, they weren't exactly excited. Over the next few hours, Mandekic and McNee gave the kids techniques to improve their shooting while also helping them calculate their field-goal percentage — which, in turn, taught them about fractions and decimal (分数和小数) points. At the end of the game, the winning team was determined based on which group had the highest total percentage and had done the most efficient math. "When the bell rang, they were so fixated on collecting their data and figuring out which team won that they didn't leave," says Mandekic. "I realized we might be onto something."
The classes, later named BallMatics, soon spread to other schools. "I was terrible at math," says Douglas, who enrolled in a fast-track summer program. "But once I started BallMatics and realized the sport I loved was directly tied to math, it made me a lot better at it. Every time I played basketball, I was thinking about math."
Almost any math problem, McNee and Mandekic realized, can be taught on the court. Kids can learn how to navigate an X-Y grid to find their next shooting spot or absorb the basic principles of trigonometry based on the angle at which they release the ball. In 2019, McNec and Mandekic established a private high school called Uchenna Academy. At the school, kids with top basketball skills can study all subjects, train at their sport and work part-time helping out with the BallMatics afterschool programs.
Douglas, now 20 and earning a degree in education believes the school's commitment to academics is the key reason it's been a winner. "If we didn't do our work, we weren't playing at the game," he says, adding that coaches would bench kids who didn't keep up in class. "At Uchenna, we were student athletes, not athlete students."
In 2009, Kevin Pearce was at the height of his professional snowboarding career and bound for the Winter Olympics. But in an instant, it came to an end. During training, he struck his head on the edge of a pipe, resulting in a traumatic (创伤的) brain injury. It changed the course of the then-22-year-old's life.
He had to relearn how to walk and talk and essentially start over. His older brother Adam quit his job and moved across the country to help him through rehab.
He eventually started doing yoga, and his family saw how it transformed him and gave him a sense of hope: "It was the first time I remember so clearly coming out of a class with him and just seeing in his face this new expression, this new person." Adam Pearce said, "We were like, ‘We need to figure out why and how that just happened.'"
Wanting to bring hope and healing to others through yoga and meditation (冥想). Adain and Kevin co-founded the Love YourBrain Foundation in 2014. The nonprofit offers week-long meditations and community-based yoga classes across the United States for people who are living with long-term brain-related disabilities. "I think people feel isolated after brain injury because they don't feel able, and when you don't feel able, you generally retreat back inside." Adam said, "At these retreats, people are given the space to lean into those deep challenges and express them and talk about them."
Ultimately, the organization aims to create a safe space and supportive community where people with brain-related disabilities can heal together. "Connection happens quickly because there's such a shared common understanding among the group." Adam said. "Once someone sees someone be vulnerable, it instantly allows the next person (to be). By the end, people start to see vulnerability as a superpower."
A recent study has found that using wood for construction instead of concrete (混凝土) and steel can reduce emissions (排放). But Tim Searchinger at Princeton University says many of these studies are based on the false foundation that harvesting wood is carbon neutral (碳中和). "Only a small percentage of the wood gets into a timber (木料) product, and a part of that gets into a timber product that can replace concrete and steel in a building," he says. Efficiencies vary in different countries, but large amounts of a harvested tree are left to be divided into parts, used in short-lived products like paper or burned for energy, all of which generate emissions.
In a report for the World Resources Institute, Searchinger and his colleagues have modelled (塑造) how using more wood for construction would affect emissions between 2010 and 2050, accounting for the emissions from harvesting the wood. They considered various types of forests and parts of wood going towards construction. They also factored in the emissions savings from replacing concrete and steel.
Under some circumstances, the researchers found significant emissions reductions. But each case required what they considered an unrealistically high portion (份额) of the wood going towards construction, as well as rapid growth only seen in warmer places, like Brazil. In general, they found a large increase in global demand for wood would probably lead to rising emissions for decades. Accounting for emissions in this way, the researchers reported in a related paper that increasing forest harvests between 2010 and 2050 would add emissions equal to roughly 10 percent of total annual emissions.
Ali Amiri at Aalto University in Finland says the report's conclusions about emissions from rising demand are probably correct, but the story is different for wood we already harvest. "Boosting the efficiency of current harvests and using more wood for longer lived purposes than paper would cut emissions," he says. "We cannot just say we should stop using wood."
The world is filled with challenges. . Wisdom is a wonderful accumulation of experience, knowledge and good judgement. When things get really intense and wild out there, you can rely on your wisdom to make the best choices. Here are some strategies you can use to ger wise.
Sometimes you have prejudice and you need to set it aside most of the time. You need to be receptive to different opinions. . Always develop a sense of curiosity, and observe the world from different angles. Never base your perspective on the most popular opinion and train your mind to be a judgment-free space for ideas. Never back away from learning
. Develop a thirst for knowledge. Take new classes, read now books, listen to educational podcasts (播客), and the list goes on and on. If something confuses you, surf the Internet and clear out your problems. All of these activities will strengthen your critical- thinking skills. Meet new people
Limiting yourself to only one type of people who share the same ideology (意识形态) as you can be comforting but it doesn't get you anywhere. . Share what defines you and learn from others, and this will make you wise: Cultivate new friendships and this will be extremely beneficial to your future.
A．It is a good quality to have
B．You have wisdom in yourself
C．Open yourself to diverse viewpoints
D．This will open up new pathways for you
E．In order to survive in it, you need to bè wise
F．You must be the person who learns something new every day
G．You need to know different people and learn what they have to offer
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.
Any visitor to the Chinese Culture Week being held at the University of Tehran would be amazed by the Chinese tea, food, and various artworks produced through Chinese knotting and (tradition) paper cutting — all displayed by Iranian students learning Chinese.
The Chinese Culture Week aims (introduce) Chinese culture to more Iranians. Held inside the lobby of the institute, which (establish) in 2009, the event displayed a range of artworks that contain different (element) of Chinese culture, produced by Iranian professors and students at the university.
"(give) China's increasing global influence, as well as its friendly and expanded relations with Iran, learning about the country directly is becoming (vital) important," said Hamed Vafaei, the Iranian director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Tehran. He believes that the students who are studying Chinese language at the institute will enter different sectors of Iranian society in the near future, helping more people to get to know more about China.
China is the world's second-largest economy, the most populous country, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, so learning Chinese has become a necessity as many around the world have realized, he said.
"Each of the students here is a window toward China, (help) the Iranian people have a more realistic picture of the country, which will make possible to improve bilateral relations in the long run," he added.
1. 分析利弊；
2. 你的看法。
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。
The impact of technology on our lives
……
When I was a little girl, I was crazy about snow and winter was my favorite season. I still remember playing with my friends and family with the snow falling all around. I loved to watch the snowflakes flying in all directions.
There was a strong desire inside me that I was eager to have my own snow as a special gift on my birthday. To my great disappointment, the snow disappeared before my birthday and started after it. I was completely mad. I just hungered for my birthday snow. I asked my beloved grandmother why it didn't snow on my birthday over and over again. She laughed, telling me I had asked the same question for too many times. At the same time she promised that she would make it snow when I was enjoying life to the fullest and we agreed to keep it our secret. When I begged her for my next birthday snow with eagerness, she just patted me on the shoulder gently, not giving a definite reply.
That cold winter, before my birthday, my grandmother died. I was deeply sad, but a bit angry because she had promised me to make it snow. The day of my tenth birthday, I wok e up and ran to my window, hoping to see just one snowflake. No luck. I cried and cried, thinking about my grandmother and the dream promise. There were still friends, gifts and a big dinner; there was still no snow. What's worse, there was no my beloved grandmother.
I would pray for my birthday snow in the following years, but it never came. Never!
By my sixteenth birthday, I had lost all hope of getting my snow, even though I still wished for it. During my party, I had the best time ever! I enjoyed the company of my friends and family, and I was truly happy.
注意：
1.续写词数应为150左右；
2.请按如下格式作答。
Paragraph 1:
I was outside with a friend when she asked me if I was having a good time.
……
Paragraph 2:
When I got home, my mother told me there was a surprise for me.
……
