While I was jumping rope, my smartphone took a fall to the floor which created cracks（裂缝）on my screen. However, the music kept playing. 30 minutes later, I could see only one-tenth of my screen while the rest was black. The next morning, I decided not to use it for 24 hours. I felt a sense of calm that day, which led to my not using it for on week. One week ended up becoming 60 days in total without my smartphone.
Here are some advantages I noticed in this challenge.
-You'll become "bored"
Without my phone, 1 became bored, but my mind went through all kinds of topics, Boredom（无聊）is a perfect way to create new ideas on a business or project, When you are bored, you allow your mind to relax to reach all possibilities.
-You'll be able to reduce your "work" hours
A survey found that adults checked their smartphones 85 times a day, or once every 10 minutes. As I learned in my challenge, by not having my smartphone, I fell into deep work more easily, so I completed my tasks in a shorter time.
-You'll improve your mental health
Without my phone, I avoided reading negative news and comments. While that helped make a big improvement in my mental health, the biggest reason for it was truly communicating with people. It brought me more connections with humans in the real world. I went to more dinners with friends and asked more questions to strangers.
"Children, tomorrow I shall expect all of you to write compositions," said a teacher of Love Lane School. "Then, on Friday those who have done the best may stand up and read their compositions to the school. " Some of the children were pleased, and some were not. "What shall we write about?" they asked.
Some of them thought that "Home" was a good subject. Others liked "School". One little boy chose "The Horse". A little girl said she would write about "Summer". The next day, every pupil except Henry Longfellow had written a composition.
"Well, then," said the teacher, "you may take your notebook and go out behind the schoolhouse for half an hour. Think of something to write about, and write the word on your notebook. Then try to tell what it is, what it is like, what it is good for, and what is done with it. That is the way to write a composition. "
Henry took his notebook and went out. Just behind the schoolhouse was Mr. Finney's barn. Quite close to the barn was a garden. And in the garden, Henry saw a turnip（萝卜）.
"Well, I know what that is," he said to himself and he wrote the word turnip on his notebook. Then he tried to tell what it was like, what it was good for, and what was done with it.
Within half an hour, he had written a very neat composition on his notebook. He then went into the house, and waited while the teacher read it.
The teacher was surprised and pleased. He said, "Henry Longfellow, you have done very well. Today you may stand up before the school and read what you have written about the turnip. "
Many years after that, some funny little poems about Mr. Finney's turnip were printed in a newspaper. Some people said that they were what Henry Longfellow wrote on his notebook that day at school.
The world is full of screens. They are on TVs, computers and smartphones. Screens are at school, at home, and just about everywhere in between. The time people spend every day looking at screens is known as "screen time. " Most families have rules about how much time children can spend with screens. Why do they have rules? Are there good reasons to limit screen time?
In many ways, screens are helpful for communication and connecting with other people. Social media and video calls allow people to be always in touch with one another. ____ By sharing and commenting on videos, photos, games or music, people can meet others who have similar interests.
However, some adults are worried that young people spend too much time on screens and not enough time meeting people in real life. As a result, they may not properly understand feelings or develop strong relationships. Many kinds of screen time may be good for students. Students may use screen time to develop their skills in creating music or videos. They may even learn skills such as coding（编程）computer programs. When students use their screen time to do research online, they may meet people who are different from them or ideas they have never thought about before.
However, some researchers think that screens change how the brain processes information. Some have linked （连接） screen time to lower test scores or less attention time.
In the future, scientists will continue studying the effects of screen time. Parents will likely continue to make rules limiting screen time. Plenty of good things can come from all this screen time, but it's a good idea for people to pay attention to how much time in a day they spend looking at a screen. They should know how screen time influences their health, relationships, and learning.
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Scientists at Purdue University created the world's whitest paint — a discovery that not only adds yet another choice to the "which white should we paint this wall" dilemma, but also might help the climate crisis.
The paint was developed by Purdue mechanical engineering professor Xiulin Ruan and his team. It works through a passive cooling technology that offers great promises to reduce space cooling cost and global warming. "When we started this project seven years ago, we had saving energy and fighting climate change in mind," Ruan said in a podcast（播客） episode of This Is Purdue. They wanted to create a paint that would reflect sunlight away from a building, dramatically decreasing the need for air conditioning.
Heating, cooling, and lighting account for 28 percent of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions. And overusing air conditioning can overwhelm a city's power grid and cause blackouts （停电）. In a Queens blackout in 2006, 175, 000 people were left without power, which lead to 40 deaths. This paint could effectively be an alternative to air conditioners in some places.
The paint reflects 98. 1% of solar radiation while also giving out infrared（红外线的）heat. Because the paint takes in less heat from the sun than it gives out, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without using power. Covering a roof area of 1, 000 square feet with the paint could create 10 kilowatts of cooling power, the researchers found. "That's more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses," Ruan told This Is Purdue.
You can't buy the paint just yet, but researchers are partnering with a company to put the paint on the market. While individual action to fight climate change can help save our planet, it's important to note that the vast majority of the world's greenhouse gas emissions can be traced back to 100 companies. Maybe we can douse（浇） those companies with this white paint, too — it could be worth a shot.
Tetraplegic paticnts（those who can't move their upper or lower body） are prisoners of their own bodies. Now a robot arm is to help them interact with their world. This research was completed by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne （EPFL）. Professor Aude Billard and Jose del R. Millan worked together to create a computer program that can control a robot using electrical signals from a patient's brain.
First, the user wears an EEG cap to have their electrical signals inside their brain scanned（扫描）effectively, which are then interpreted by the machine-learning algorithm （算法）. The computer then sends signals to the robot arm to determine how it moves. As the robot arm performs a motion, the algorithm is looking to get feedback from the user when it makes a mistake：perhaps it moved too fast, or too violently. The end goal is that the robot can learn the right movements for a task in a given context. For example, you might want the arm to use a bit of force to throw a paper ball, but you might want it to be gentler when putting glass bottles.
In the team's research, they trained the robot arm to pick up a glass. The arm would move towards the glass and the user's brain would decide if they felt it was too close or too far away. The process is repeated until the robot understands the optimal route for the individual's preference - not too close to be a risk but not so far away to waste movement.
"Training an algorithm to read brain waves in a consistent fashion was the most challenging part, because the brain is not only focused on the hand but also processing many other things, " said Millan. "This means our algorithm will never be 100% accurate. "
The researchers hope to eventually use their algorithm to control wheelchairs, which would allow people in wheelchairs to have greater control over their movements, speeds and general safety. However, this does require contirtency. over time frour the algorithm.
Sitting in the garden for my friend's birthday. I felt a buzz（振动） in my pocket. My heart raced when I saw the email sender's name. The email started off: "Dear Mr Green, thank you for your interest" and "the review process took longer than expected. "It ended with" We are sorry to inform you…"and my vision blurred（模糊）. The position-measuring soil quality in the Sahara Desert as part of an undergraduate research programme-had felt like the answer I had spent years looking for.
I had put so much time and emotional energy into applying, and I thought the rejection meant the end of the road for my science career.
So I was shocked when, not long after the email, Professor Mary Devon, who was running the programme, invited me to observe the work being done in her lab. I jumped at the chance, and a few weeks later I was equally shocked-and overjoyed-when she invited me to talk with her about potential projects I could pursue in her lab. What she proposed didn't seem as exciting as the original project I had applied to, but I was going to give it my all.
I found myself working with a robotics professor on techniques for collecting data from the desert remotely. That project, which I could complete from my sofa instead of in the burning heat of the desert, not only survived the lockdown but worked where traditional methods didn't. In the end. I had a new scientific interest to pursue.
When I applied to graduate school, I found three programmes promising to allow me to follow my desired research direction. And I applied with the same anxious excitement as before. When I was rejected from one that had seemed like a perfect fit, it was undoubtedly difficult. But this time I had the perspective（视角）to keep it from sending me into panic. It helped that in the end I was accepted into one of the other programmes I was also excited about.
Rather than setting plans in stone, I've learned that sometimes I need to take the opportunities that are offered, even if they don't sound perfect at the time, and make the most of them.
What is life? Like most great questions, this one is easy to ask but difficult to answer. The reason is simple: we know of just one type of life and it's challenging to do science with a sample size of one. The field of artificial life-called A Life for short-is the systematic attempt to spell out life's fundamental principles. Many of these practitioners, so-called A Lifers, think that somehow making life is the surest way to really understand what life is.
So far no one has convincingly made artificial life. This track record makes A Life a ripe target for criticism, such as declarations of the field's doubtful scientific value. Alan Smith, a complexity scientist, is tired of such complaints. Asking about "the point" of A Life might be, well, missing the point entirely, he says. "The existence of a living system is not about the use of anything. "Alan says. " Some people ask me, 'So what's the worth of artificial life?' Do you ever think, 'What is the worth of your grandmother?'"
As much as many A Lifers hate emphasising their research's applications, the attempts to create artificial life could have practical payoffs. Artificial intelligence may be considered A Life's cousin in that researchers in both fields are enamoured by a concept called open-ended evolution（演化）. This is the capacity for a system to create essentially endless complexity, to be a sort of" novelty generator". The only system known to exhibit this is Earth's biosphere. If the field of A Life manages to reproduce life's endless "creativity" in some virtual model, those same principles could give rise to truly inventive machines.
Compared with the developments of Al, advances in A Life are harder to recognise. One reason is that A Life is a field in which the central concept--life itself-is undefined. The lack of agreement among A Lifers doesn't help either. The result is a diverse line of projects that each advance along their unique paths. For better or worse, A Life mirrors the very subject it studies. Its muddled（混乱的）progression is a striking parallel（平行线）to the evolutionary struggles that have shaped Earth biosphere.
Undefined and uncontrolled, A Life drives its followers to repurpose old ideas and generated novelty. It may be, of course, that these characteristics aren't in any way surprising or singular. They may apply universally to all acts of evolution. Ultimately A Life may be nothing special. But even this dismissal suggests something: perhaps, just like life itself throughout the universe, the rise of A Life will prove unavoidable.
One day, a baby snail found that he had to carry a big and heavy shell at any time. He didn't 1 why it was, so he went up to his mother and asked, "Why was I born with a shell that grew so 2 and heavy?" His mother said, "Because we don't have 3 to hold us up. We can only move slowly, so we need a shell to 4 us. "
The baby snail asked again, "The caterpillar （毛毛虫） has no bones, and she can't move quickly either. Why can she 5 without a shell?" The mother snail answered, "That's because a caterpillar will become a butterfly. She can 6 high into the sky. The sky can protect her. "
The baby snail had one more 7 "But the earthworm moves like us. He has no bones and he won't turn into a butterfly. Why doesn't he carry a hard and heavy shell?" His mother said, "He can dig a hole and hide in the 8 , and then the earth can protect him. "
The baby snail then cried, "We are so 9 ! We have no protection from the sky or from the ground!" His mother smiled at him. "That's why we have a shell. My dear, imagine that if we don't have the shells, what will happen to you? Hot sun will dry out our bodies and we'll have nowhere to sleep. What's more, we'll die in the heavy rain. How 10 it is! We don't depend on the sky or the ground for protection. We should depend on ourselves. "
My father was raised in a fatherless home at a time when government assistance（帮助）was unheard of. The family of five struggled hard to 1 , which caused my father to be extremely mean with his money.
When we children—two older brothers and myself—asked him for some money, his face turned cold, saying "If you are old enough to ask, you are old enough to 2 ". So when the need 3 , we tried to seek jobs in the neighborhood or sell produce from the garden.
His attitude didn't soften as we grew into adulthood and went to jobs or college. Since none of us had a car, we had to ride the bus whenever we came home. Though the bus stopped about two miles from home, father never 4 us, even in 5 weather. If someone 6 , he would say, "That's what your legs are for! "For me, the walk didn't bother me as much as the 7 of walking alone along the highway and country roads. I also felt that my father didn't seem concerned about my safety. That feeling disappeared one spring evening. It had been an extremely 8 week at college. Tests and long hours in labs had left me 9 . I longed for home and a soft bed. As other students were met at their stops, I gazed 10 out of the window. Finally, the bus stopped at my destination. I stepped off and walked home with my luggage.
A row of hedge（树篱笆）edged the driveway that climbed the hill to our house. Once I turned off 走下）the highway and saw the hedge, I was always 11 because it meant that I was almost home. On that particular evening, the hedge had just come into 12 when I saw a（an） 13 moving toward the house along the top of the hedge. Upon closer 14 , I realized it was my father. Then I knew each time I came home, he stood 15 the hedge, watching until he knew I had arrived safely. I swallowed hard against the tears. He did care, after all.
The power of Chinese emperors rose and fell with their control of the Grand Canal. Today, this waterway is shorter than it was once, it is still the longest man-made river in the world. （important）, the Grand Canal continues to provide a vital cultural and economic link for modern China.
The original Canal system began around the year 605, China's emperor Yang realized that he needed a better way to move food and feed his army, so the emperor ordered the construction of the first section of the Grand Canal, （connect） those existing canals, lakes and rivers.
For more than a thousand years, goods （transport） along the Grand Canal. Even today the country's watery highway plays an important economic role in China. Boats continue to carry tons of coal, food and other goods Hangzhou and Jining. However, local governments eager to increase （tour） and city development have torn down almost all of the older canal-side buildings. In 2005 a group of citizens proposed that the historic Grand Canal be made UNESCO world heritage site, hoping this status would protect both the waterway and the architecture around it. With UNESCO status officially （grant） in 2014, the world's greatest engineering accomplishments continue to link north and south China for （century） to come.
For me, nothing is more satisfying discovering hidden gems（珍宝）in secondhand shop. all, one person's trash is another person's treasure.
Two years ago, I came across a collection of dusty photos. I thought, if these were （I）, or my family's, I'd want someone to return them to me, so I made it my goal to do so for others.
I've since visited secondhand shops （week）, and have accumulated more than 50, 000 of these items. I organize them in big boxes all over my house in New York. Photographs, home movies, undeveloped films, photo albums - you name it, I've collected it.
I've also set up a social media account to help reunite items with their owners or other family members. The quickest we've been able to find an owner is within two minutes. Someone commented below a photo I posted, "I think that's my child's preschool teacher. " The longest we've taken to find someone is four months, but I'm proud that we still made it. There are （thousand） of photos that have yet to be reunited. social media, this project would not be possible.
People are often quite emotional when we get in touch - most of these items are （lose） after a house move or a family death. Sometimes people donate a camera to a charity shop and forget to take the memory card out.
We once （manage）to reunite a family with pictures from 1943, which was special. I found a can containing two rolls of film at a shop. One of my followers found a family on a heritage site, and their old photographs looked similar to the ones I found. We contacted them, and they confirmed their ancestors were in the photographs. They were extremely grateful and said that a family member had recently moved out of New York, which is probably how the film ended up at a secondhand store.
I'd love to create a building to hold all these memories. I want every photo and video to be digitized so they can be preserved online. I'm bringing together a team to return the photos to their owners. , I am still working on it since we are short of money. Maybe one day, I can realize my dream.
Have you ever had to overcome an extreme challenge in your life?
My teenage years had been insane. From schoolwork to athletics, I had always been running around. Everything was so difficult.
Throughout my hectic teenage years I have been faced with many extreme challenges that have required extreme focus and hard work to overcome. If it hadn't been for hard work, none of these challenges that I faced would have been conquered.
Two years ago, when I was a freshman in high school, I dealt with an extremely significant injury. This took place in my tennis tournament in January. In the climax of my match, I jolted my back to the left and soon after felt a sharp, painful shock run through my spine. I knew at that difficult moment I seriously injured my back. I was rushed off the court and my parents made an appointment with an orthopedist （矫形外科医生）for the next morning.
I walked into the office extremely nervous and suffering from excruciating pain. My tennis season for school started in three months and I absolutely needed to build up the strength.
After about twenty minutes of waiting in the office, which felt like an eternity, the doctor walked in to examine my Xrays. With a sorrowful face, the doctor looked into mine and my mother's eyes and said," There is a 50/50 chance that Lucas will be able to participate in this years tennis season. Lucas broke his L5 vertebrae in his lower back. " My heart dropped and I felt a sadness come over me. The doctor said that I would be sitting out of physical activity for two and a half to three months.
Those three months were the longest three months of my life. I was so eager to get back to practices for the season. Every day, I would think about how it was going to be when I was fully healthy. I asked myself, "Am I going to be out of shape? Should I even play this year? I probably won't have a successful season. "
From that dreadful day on, I decided that I was going to put in the work to be back in top form and have a successful season.
注意：续写词数应为150左右。
不得照抄原文或试卷中的阅读材料。
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After I got the "all clear" from my orthopedist I was going to get to work.
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My hard work proved to be very effective.
