Usually what weighs us down are not the ...

It is acknowledged that _______ shortest distance between persons is _______ sincere smile.

法国哲学家卢梭说过：“No Thanksgiving would be no virtue”（没有感恩就没有真正的美德。）如今社会上一些人缺乏感恩之心，少数人甚至在父母年老体弱时都不愿意赡养。

    请你结合自己的实际，谈几点父母值得你感恩的地方，以及将来你会做些什么来报答父母的养育之恩。

注意：

1．短文的开头已给出，但不计入总数。

    2．字数100字左右。（感恩-thanksgiving）

    Not only do our parents give us life, but they also give us endless love and support, always sharing our happiness and sorrow.

Parents and kids today dress alike, listen to the same music, and are friends. Is this a good thing? Sometimes, when Mr. Ballmer and his 16-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, listen to rock music together and talk about interests both enjoy, such as pop culture, he remembers his more distant relationship with his parents when he was a teenager.   

    “I would never have said to my mom,’ Hey, the new Weezer album is really great. How do you like it?’” says Ballmer. “There was just a complete gap in taste.”  

    Music was not the only gulf(分歧). From clothing and hairstyles to activities and expectations, earlier generations of parents and children often appeared to move in separate orbits.   

    Today, the generation gap has not disappeared, but it is getting narrow in many families. Conversations on subjects such as sex and drugs would not have taken place a generation ago. Now they are comfortable and common. And parent-child activities, from shopping to sports, involve a feeling of trust and friendship that can continue into adulthood.

    No wonder greeting cards today carry the message, “To my mother, my best friends.”   

    But family experts warn that the new equality can also result in less respect for parents.   

    “There’s still a lot of strictness and authority on the part of parents out there, but there is a change happening,” says Kerrie, a psychology professor at Lebanon Valley College. “In the middle of that change, there is a lot of confusion among parents.”    

    Family researchers offer a variety of reasons for these evolving(演化的) roles and attitudes. They see the 1960s as a turning point. Great cultural changes led to more open communication and a more democratic process that encourages everyone to have a say.   

    “My parents were on the ‘before’ side of that change, but today’s parents, the 40-year-olds,were on the ‘after’ side,” explains Mr. Ballmer. “It’s not something easily accomplished by parents these days, because life is more difficult to understand or deal with, but sharing interests does make it more fun to be a parent now.”

Several years ago, I had a huge falling out with one of my best friends. So huge, in fact, that now I can’t even remember what happened.

In the past nine years, I’ve seen her twice, and each time we’ve been polite but distant. And that troubles me because we were once inseparable. I’d like nothing more than to go back nine years, and continue our friendship. But how? How do you reconnect with friends you’ve lost throughout the years?

Linking to your past

The desire to reconnect with lost friends isn’t unusual. Why? Because friends link us to the past. “Friends from years ago are custodians (监护人) of our past,” says Sandy Sheehy.

Although you can share information about your past with friends you’ve met recently, you don’t have a shared history with them. So you wind up only telling them about your past, rather than sharing it with them.

But many people never try to reconnect. Women especially have trouble taking the first step. Shyness or fear that the other person doesn’t want to reconnect often stops many women. And that shouldn’t be. Your friends probably want to be in touch with you as much as you want to be in touch with them.

Searching for friends

Fortunately, finding lost friends isn’t as difficult as it once was, thanks to tools like the Internet. Our experts offer these suggestions for locating contact information:

Search Internet sites designed to locate people like classmates.com and switchboard.com.

Contact your high school or college alumni (校友) office to request current address information.

Surf online yellow pages. Check current phone records from your friend’s hometown.

Network with other friends who might have known your friend.

Get in touch with any of her relatives, if you know where they live. If you know where she works, find the company’s website and search the directory of personnel.

1.What is the subject discussed in the passage?

    A. How to make new friends.                

B. How to rebuild friendship.

    C. How to develop healthy friendship.          

D. How to keep in touch with friends.

2.The underlined sentence “friends from years ago are custodians of our past” in Paragraph 3 means _____.

    A. years ago old friends kept something for us

    B. in the past old friends took care of us

    C. old friends are part of our life history

    D. old friends know what wrongs we did

3.What makes us unwilling to reconnect old friends?

A. Lack of money.     B. Busy time.    C. Regret and shame. D. Fear and shyness.

4.How can we make contact with the lost friends?

    A. By asking other friends of the information on your lost friends.

    B. By searching your friends’ telephone number on the Net.

    C. By asking the local post office about your friends’ new address.

    D. By putting an advertisement in your friends’ local town.

Researchers found that walking around with a forced smile and fake (假的) happiness simply leads to people feeling unhappier. So, putting a brave face on your sadness could be harmful. The research also found that women suffered more than men when pretending to be happy.

    Dr. Brent Scott, who led the study, said employers should take note because forcing workers to smile when dealing with the public can result in bad outcomes. He said, “Smiling for the sake of smiling can lead to emotional tiredness, and that’s bad for the organization.” He also said the research showed customer-service workers who had “fake smiles” throughout the day fell into a bad mood and didn’t want to work, so their productivity dropped.

    The study is one of the first of its kind to examine emotional expressions over a period of time and compare the different effects on men and women. Dr. Scott’s team examined the effects of “surface acting”, or fake smiling, compared to “deep acting”, or making people smile by thinking of peasant memories.

    Dr. Scott said, “Women were harmed more by surface acting, meaning their moods worsened even more than men’s. However, they were helped more by deep acting, which means their moods improved more by thinking of pleasant memories. ”

    According to Dr. Scott, women tend to suffer more when pretending to be happy because they are expected to be more emotionally expressive than men. Therefore, forcing a smile while feeling down is more likely to go against their normal behavior and cause more harmful feelings.

    Although deep acting can improve moods a little in the short term, Dr. Scott says, it’s not a long-term solution to feeling unhappy. “There have been some suggestions that if you do this over a long period you start to feel unreal. You’re trying to develop positive emotions, but at the end of the day you may not feel like yourself any more.”

1.According to the passage, Dr. Scott’s study ______.

    A. is supported by some big employers in the USA

    B. is meaningful as there haven’t been many similar ones

    C. examined more women than men for a long time

    D. aimed to make the employees more productive

2.Women suffer more from fake happiness mainly because ______.

    A. they usually turn up shy in public places

    B. they should be more emotionally expressive

    C. they are often treated in a terrible way

    D. they like thinking of pleasant memories

3.It is implied in the passage that deep acting _____.

    A. doesn’t have any effect on men         

B. cannot improve our moods in any case

    C. harms our feelings in the long run      

D. pleases people by feeling like another person

4.What is the best title for the passage?

    A. Fake smiling makes people unhappy.  

B. Women shouldn’t be forced to smile.

    C. An important suggestion for workers.

D. Why people don’t want to work.