When you ask people how to make friends as an adult, they usually give you suggestions like, “just get out there,” “join a dance class,” or , “try speed dating.” 1..
After all, making friends does require us to get out into the world and take a few emotional risks. Most of the time, however, we are not lacking for ideas on where to meet people. 2.
For this reason, most people find that reconnecting with themselves is a first step towards reconnecting with others.
If you feel tired, out of shape, or sad, most of the time, making friends is going to be extremely difficult. 3.
Start small. Use the1-minute technique to gradually increase your commitment to exercise. Get out into nature. Set a timer to remind yourself to get up every hour to stretch. Try gentle yoga.
While you build up your body, don’t forget to nourish your mind. Write down one thing every day that you are grateful for. 4.
Learn to become your own best friend.
5.Instead of relying on our social circumstances to bring people into our lives, we need to change ourselves first and then invite people into our lives.
A. On the surface, these are fine suggestions.
B. Spend a few minutes every day in reflection.
C. It will be even more difficult when you are an adult.
D. We only need to know how to start a conversation with strangers.
E. We are missing the motivation and self-confidence to get started.
F. Making friends as an adult is possible, but it requires a new approach.
G. Fortunately there are plenty of simple things that you can do to increase your physical and emotional resources.
Not so long ago, most people didn’t know who Shelly Ann Francis Pryce was going to become. She was just an average high school athlete. There was every indication that she was just another Jamaican teenager without much of a future. However, one person wants to change this. Stephen Francis observed then eighteen-year-old Shelly Ann as a track meet and was convinced that he had seen the beginning of true greatness. Her time were not exactly impressive, but even so, he seemed there was something trying to get out, something the other coaches had overlooked when they had assessed her and found her lacking. He decided to offer Shelly Ann a place in his very strict training seasons. Their cooperation quickly produced results, and a few year later at Jamaica’s Olympic games in early 2008, Shelly Ann, who at that time only ranked number 70 in the world, beat Jamaica’s unchallenged queen of the sprint(短跑).
“Where did she come from?” asked an astonished sprinting world, before concluding that she must be one of those one-hit wonders that spring up from time to time, only to disappear again without signs. But Shelly Ann was to prove that she was anything but a one-hit wonder. At the Beijing Olympic she swept away any doubts about her ability to perform consistently by becoming the first Jamaican woman ever to win the 100 meters Olympic gold. She did it again one year on at the World Championship in Briton, becoming world champion with a time of 10.73—the fourth record ever.
Shelly-Ann is a little woman with a big smile. She has a mental toughness that did not come about by chance. Her journey to becoming the fastest woman on earth has been anything but smooth and effortless. She grew up in one of Jamaica’s toughest inner-city communities known as Waterhouse, where she lived in a one-room apartment, sleeping four in a bed with her mother and two brothers. Waterhouse, one of the poorest communities in Jamaica, is a really violent and overpopulated place. Several of Shelly-Ann’s friends and family were caught up in the killings; one of her cousins was shot dead only a few streets away from where she lived. Sometimes her family didn’t have enough to eat. She ran at the school championships barefooted because she couldn’t afford shoes. Her mother Maxime, one of a family of fourteen, had been an athlete herself as a young girl but, like so many other girls in Waterhouse, had to stop after she had her first baby. Maxime’s early entry into the adult world with its responsibilities gave her the determination to ensure that her kids would not end up in Waterhouse’s roundabout of poverty. One of the first things Maxime used to do with Shelly-Ann was taking her to the track, and she was ready to sacrifice everything.
It didn’t take long for Shelly-Ann to realize that sports could be her way out of Waterhouse. On a summer evening in Beijing in 2008, all those long, hard hours of work and commitment finally bore fruit. The barefoot kid who just a few years previously had been living in poverty, surrounded by criminals and violence, had written a new chapter in the history of sports.
But Shelly-Ann’s victory was far greater than that. The night she won Olympic gold in Beijing, the routine murders in Waterhouse and the drug wars in the neighboring streets stopped. The dark cloud above one of the world’s toughest criminal neighborhoods simply disappeared for a few days. “I have so much fire burning for my country,” Shelly said. She plans to start a foundation for homeless children and wants to build a community centre in Waterhouse. She hopes to inspire the Jamaicans to lay down their weapons. She intends to fight to make it a woman’s as well as a man’s world.
As Muhammad Ali puts it, “Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them. A desire, a dream, a vision.” One of the things Shelly-Ann can be proud of is her understanding of this truth.
1.Why did Stephen Francis decide to coach Shelly-Ann?
A. He had a strong desire to free her family from trouble.
B. She suffered a lot of defeats at the previous track meets.
C. She had big problems maintaining her performance.
D. He sensed a great potential in her despite her weaknesses.
2.What did the sprinting world think of Shelly-Ann before the 2008 Olympic Games?
A. Her sprinting career would not last long.
B. She badly needed to set higher goals.
C. She would become a promising star.
D. Her talent for sprinting was known to all.
3.What made Maxime decide to train her daughter on the track?
A. Her wish to get Shelly-Ann out of poverty.
B. Her early entrance into the sprinting world.
C. Her success and lessons in her career.
D. Her interest in Shelly-Ann’s quick profit.
4.By mentioning Muhammad Ali’s words, the author intends to tell us that ________.
A. players should be highly inspired by coaches
B. motivation allows great athletes to be on the top
C. hard work is necessary in one’s achievements
D. great athletes need to concentrate on patience
5.What is the best title for the passage?
A. The Key to High Performance
B. The Dream for Championship
C. The Making of a Great Athlete
D. The Power of Full Responsibility
In the depths of the French Guianese rainforest, there still remain unusual groups of indigenous(土著的)people. Surprisingly, these people live largely by their own laws and their own social customs. And yet, people in this area are in fact French citizens because it has been a colony of the French Republic since 1946. In theory, they should live by the French law. However, their remote locations mean that the French law is often ignored or unknown, thus making them into an interesting area of “lawlessness” in the world.
The lives of these people have finally been recorded thanks to the effects of a Frenchman form Paris called Gin. Gin spent five months in early 2015 exploring the most remote corners of this area, which sits on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, with half its population of only 250,000 living in its capital, Cayenne.
“I have a special love for the French Guianese people. I have worked there on and off for almost ten years,” says Gin. “I’ve been able to keep firm friendships with them. Thus I have been allowed to gain access to their living environment. I don’t see it as a lawless land. But rather I see it as an area of freedom.”
“I wanted to show the audience a photographic record touching upon the uncivilized life,” continues Gin. “I prefer to work in black and white, which allows me to show different specific worlds more clearly.”
His black-and-white pictures present a world almost lost in time. These pictures show people seemingly pushed into a world that they were unprepared for. These local citizens now have to balance their traditional self-supporting hunting lifestyle with the lifestyle offered by the modern French Republic, which brings with it not only necessary state welfare, but also alcoholism, betrayal and even suicide.
1.Why does the author feel surprised about the indigenous people in French Guiana?
A. They are separated from the modern world.
B. They often ignore the Guianese law.
C. They seldom follow the French law.
D. They are both Guianese and French citizens.
2.Gin introduced the special world of the indigenous Guianese as _________.
A. a tour guide B. a photographer
C. a film director D. a geographer
3.What is Gin’s attitude towards the lives of the indigenous Guianese?
A. Cautious. B. Appreciative.
C. Uninterested. D. Doubtful.
4.What does the underlined word “it” in the last paragraph refer to?
A. The uncivilized world. B. The self-supporting hunting.
C. The modern French lifestyle. D. The French Republic.
Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children, who are able from a young age to gather their own food.
In the laboratory, chimps don’t naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random ---he just doesn’t care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.
Human children, on the other hand are extremely cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate in achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.
There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught .but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive (认知的) skills, at least when compared with chimps. In tests conducted by Tomasello, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.
The core of what children’s minds have and chimps’ don’t is what Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But beyond that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.
1.What can we learn from the experiment with chimps?
A. Chimps like to take in their neighbors’ food.
B. Chimps tend to provide food for their children.
C. Chimps seldom care about others’ interests.
D. Chimps naturally share food with each other.
2.Michael Tomasello’s tests on young children indicate that they_________.
A. know the world better than chimps
B. know how to offer help to adults
C. have the instinct to help others
D. trust adults with their hands full
3.The passage is mainly about _________.
A. cooperation as a distinctive human nature
B. ways to train children’s shared intentionality
C. the helping behaviors of young children
D. the development of intelligence in children
Basketball Statistician Help Wanted
The Athletic Department is looking for students to help assist staff during the Fall 2016, Winter 2016-17 and Spring 2017 semesters. Students in this position will be keeping live statistics during basketball games. Students must meet all of the following requirements:
●Good computer skills
● Available evenings and weekends
●Knowing basketball rules and statistics
Students interested in working for the Athletic Department should contact the Athletic Coordinator at their respective campuses.
●TP/SS Athletic Coordinator, Michael Simone, 240-567-1308
●Rockville Athletic Coordinator, Jorge Zuniga, 240-567-7589
●Springfield Athletic Coordinator, Gary Miller, 240-567-2273
●Germantown Athletic Coordinator, Gauri Chavan, 240-567-6915
1.When will the job start?
A. Almost 1 year B. About two years
C. Three semesters D. About 1.5 years
2.Who is more likely to get the job?
A. Ted, computer major, basketball fan, free on evenings and weekends.
B. Judy, IT staff with night classes, children’s basketball team coach.
C. Sam, English major, member of the college basketball team.
D. Molly, part-time programmer, high school basketball player, new mother.
3.What should you do if you want to apply for the job in Rockville?
A. Contact Gauri Chavan B. Dial 240-567-2273
C. Dial 240-567-1308 D. Contact Jorge Zuniga
假定你是李华，你和李明升入高中后在不同的学校。李明刚入学一段时间，就遇到了一些问题，请根据他所遇到的问题写一封回信并提出相应的建议。
问题：1.不适应，感到孤独；
2.学习英语有困难；
3.经常玩手机。
注意：1.词数100左右；
2.可适当增加细节，以使行文连贯；
3.信的开头和结尾已给出，不计入总词数。
Dear Li Ming,
I'm glad to hear from you.___________________________________________________________________
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Hoping my advice is helpful for you and may you enjoy your new school life.
Yours,
Li Hua
