One Saturday afternoon, Amy found Meg and Jo getting well dressed. They were going to the theater with Laurie. She wanted to come.

“I can’t take you, dear, because you aren’t ____,” began Meg, but Jo cut in ____ “You can’t go, Amy. Laurie invited only Meg and me.” Amy cried, “You’ll be ____ this, Jo March.”

While Jo and Meg were at the theater, Amy ____ Jo’s book of writings. Jo’s loving work of several years was gone in the fire.

That night, Mother asked Jo to forgive（原谅）her sister, but Jo ____.

The next day, Jo went to the river with Laurie to skate on the ice. Amy followed them. Jo saw her coming and turned her back. But Laurie did not ____ Amy. He warned Jo to stay away from the middle of the river. The ice there was ____. Jo heard him, but Amy did not.

Something turned Jo round. She happened to see Amy throw up her hands and go down, with a scaring cry. The ice ____. Jo tried to call Laurie, but her ____ was gone. She tried to rush forward, but her feet seemed to have no ____ in them. Laurie’s voice cried out, “Bring a rail（横杆）, Jo. Quick, quick!”

She never knew ____ she did it, but for the next few minutes she worked, blindly obeying Laurie. Together they got the child out. Amy was more scared than ____.

When Mother had put Amy to bed, Jo whispered, “Are you sure she is ____ . Quite safe, dear. She is not hurt, and won’t even catch cold,” replied her mother cheerfully.

“Mother, I had kept my anger ____ it grew so strong. Today, without ____, it might have been too late. Oh, Mother, what shall I do?”

“Anger can make us do very bad things to people we love. We must learn to control our anger,” said Mrs March.

Jo looked at Amy in her bed and gave her a big kiss.

—Taken from Little Women

   Is it possible to have a diet（日常饮食）that’s both healthy and friendly to our planet? Here are answers to your eco-friendly food questions.

Does what I eat influence climate（气候）change?

Yes. The world’s food system is responsible for（为……负责）about one quarter of the planet—warming greenhouse gases that humans produce each year. That includes raising and harvesting all the plants, animals, and animal products we eat, as well as processing, packaging, and shipping food to markets all over the world.

Which foods have the largest influence?

In general, beef and lamb have the biggest climate footprint per gram of protein while plant—based foods like beans, rice, corn and wheat have the smallest influence. Pork, chicken, eggs are somewhere in the middle.

Is there a simple food choice I can make?

Studies have shown that people who eat a meat—heavy diet can reduce their food—related footprint by one third or more by moving to a vegan diet — no meat, dairy（乳制品）, or eggs. If you don’t want to go that far, just eat less meat.

Can I really make a difference to our planet?

We need more food to feed the world’s growing population. One person alone can make only a tiny difference. If many people make changes to their diets, that will start to add up. It will make a greater difference if the world’s heaviest meat eaters make some changes to their diets.

Roberta, Peter and Phyllis lived in a large house in London. Father worked hard in a government office. He was never angry and always ready for a game. Mother was almost at home, ready to play with the children, and read to them, and help them do their home—lessons.

These three lucky children always had everything they needed: pretty clothes, good fires, a lovely playroom and a dog called James. They had a happy life, but they did not know how happy till the pretty life in the large house was over.

Peter had a toy engine and it broke. After dinner, Peter showed Father the engine. Father looked it over and promised to do it on Saturday.

At that moment two men came to see Father. Minutes passed. Father’s voice came out from the study, loud and angry.

More time passed. Then Mother came in and said, “Father’s been called away— on business.”

A week after their father went away, their mother said, “Now, we’re going to move to the country. A pretty little white house, called Three Chimneys. ”

The family started packing: clothes, plates, candles and also tables and chairs. “We seem to be taking all the ugly things,” said Roberta.

“We’re taking the useful ones,” said Mother. “We’ve got to play at being poor for a bit.”

Peter said joyously, “I do like moving! I wish we moved once a month.” Mother laughed and said, “I don’t like moving!”

As she turned away, Roberta saw her face. She never forgot it.

“Oh, Mother,” she whispered, “how I love you! You are brave enough to laugh when you’re feeling like that! ”

Then they took a train to Three Chimneys. No one knew how long they had been in the train when Mother woke them up.

They stood in the cold night air on the dark platform. At that moment they didn’t know how important the station and the trains would become to them. They didn’t know they were going to be the railway children.

— Taken from The Railway Children

As a mountain, 1,642-foot Squaw Peak isn’t that impressive. But its views attract many hikers（远足者）. Henry Grant, a college student at Ithaca College, was one of them.

While waiting for his mother one day in August, 2019, Grant watched other hikers enjoy the view. One hiker, dressed in pink, was looking over the lip of the cliff（悬崖）with her husband.

When Grant’s mother rejoined him, the two continued on their way. Suddenly, he heard something scaring: “Paula! Paula!” a man shouted crazily. Grant turned around quickly.   ________

Several hikers immediately started looking for her, but their view was screened by trees. Uncertain they could help, Grant and his mother headed down the trail. But when he saw some hikers still searching, he decided to lend a hand. After promising his mother that he would be safe, he went on alone.

After 15 minutes of climbing over large rocks, pushing past bushes, and slipping（滑） down loose earth, Grant found a pink figure. The woman had fallen about 75 feet. Luckily, she was alive.

“Paula! Paula!” Grant shouted. The woman didn’t reply. She was badly hurt. Grant called the police to report her location. She kept trying to move, and every time she moved, she slipped a little more. Afraid that in her unclear state of mind she might fall off the rock to her death, Grant climbed on all fours up a tight, narrow path by digging into the earth with his fingers and feet until he reached Paula.

Paula was moaning, almost senseless. Grant gently put her hand in his, trying to keep her mind off the pain by keeping asking her questions: “Where are you from? Do you have kids?” Soon, they were joined on their perch（歇脚处）by another hiker named Simon.

About 45 minutes later, first rescuers（救援者）arrived. Paula and her husband were flown to a hospital. Five hours after the woman in pink had fallen, Grant was back on top of Squaw Peak.

Ever wondered why your virtual（虚拟的）home helper doesn't understand your questions? Or why your navigation app took you on the side street instead of the highway? In a study published April 21st in the journal iScience, Italian researchers, Arianna Pipitone and Antonio Chella, designed a robot that “thinks out loud”.

To explore how inner speech might influence a robot’s actions, the researchers built a robot called Pepper that speaks to itself. It has the ability to reason and think. They then asked people to set the dinner table with Pepper according to etiquette（礼仪）rules. In one experiment, the user asked Pepper to lay the napkin at the wrong place, going against the rules. Pepper started asking itself a series of self-directed questions and concluded that the user might be mistaken. To be sure, Pepper confirmed the user’s order, which led to further inner speech.

“Ehm, this situation troubles me. I would never break the rules, but I can’t make the user unhappy, so I’m doing what he wants,” Pepper said to itself, laying the napkin where it was required to be. Through Pepper’s inner voice, the user can learn Pepper was facing a difficult situation and solved it by prioritizing the user’s order.

Comparing Pepper’s actions with and without inner speech, Pipitone and Chella discovered the robot had a higher task-completion rate when having self-dialogue.

However, some people find the robot spends more time completing tasks when it talks to itself. The robot’s inner speech is also limited to the knowledge that researchers gave it. Pepper’s designers still say their work provides a framework（构架）to further explore how self-dialogue can help robots focus, plan, and learn. “In some ways, we are creating a generational（世代的）robot that likes to chat. From navigation apps and the camera on your phone to medical robots in the operation rooms, machines and computers alike can take advantage of this chatty feature,” says Chella.

Reading is fun! You can also analyze texts（文本）to learn more from the texts and about the texts. One way you can do this with fiction books, passages, or poems is by exploring their themes.

A theme is a central idea running throughout the text, connecting the characters and events. The writer may express his or her thoughts about humanity or a worldview through a theme. Themes can be ideas like friendship, bravery, love, honesty or family. Make sure you know what the writer is saying.

Sometimes, themes are hard to find out. First, the theme may not be able to be included in just one word like the examples above. There may also be more than one theme in the text. What’s more, some themes are not presented in the words directly. You have to use clues in the texts to find them.

To start exploring the theme, first you need to make sure you’ve read the whole text. Since themes develop over time, you can’t fully understand the underlying themes until the end of the text. Then, ask yourself to sum up（概括）the text and try to work out a “big idea”. For example, did many characters resolve problems with their families? If there was only one small problem with a character’s family, then “family” might not be the theme of the text. Finally, after finding out a “big idea”, go through the text to find examples that support this idea. You needn’t repeat every detail of the story-a few key examples will be fine.

Now you are ready to explore the theme of a text!

Chinese people started to build gardens more than 2,000 years ago. Chinese gardens are a special form of t
66． Chinese culture and art.

At the entrance to a Chinese garden, there is usually a huge stone or wall to screen（挡住）your view. This is to give you a pressed-in feeling, in order to later produce unexpected joy w
67． you turn around the hall to see the amazing rock formations（假山）and a big lake. The best e
68． is the Summer Palace.

Rock formations play an i
69． role in the design of a Chinese-style garden. Without them, a garden could not be considered a Chinese-style garden. They are as important to a Chinese-style garden as sculptures are to a European-style garden. Ge Garden in Yangzhou is famous for i
70． Four Seasons Rockeries（假山花园）.

G
71． in the south are mostly small in size. Chinese garden designers have used the method of “borrowing scenery with a mirror（镜子）” to create a sense of s
72．. A mirror is hung opposite a window to take in the outside scenery. A fine example of this is Pian Shi Shan Fang, a rockery in He Garden, Yangzhou. A big mirror is built into the wall of its west corridor. The whole garden will be s
73． in the mirror wherever the visitors are. A pool or a lake in a garden a
74． serves this purpose. A pool runs from south to north through the garden of Pian Shi Shan Fang. East of the rockery, a man-made moon is reflected（倒映）in the p
75．.

Whatever methods used, every effort is made to achieve the purpose of giving visitors a sense of space in the garden.

某英文报正在举行“家乡美”为主题的征文活动，你打算以“Spring in my hometown”为题写一篇英语短文投稿，请根据以下问题提示完成征文。

Spring in my hometown