Sit With Us

You’re at your new school. It’s lunch time, but you don’t have anyone to sit with. You want to join someone at their table, ______ you’re not sure if they’re friendly. What do you do? Natalie’s ______ of solving the problem was to create an app. She knows what it feels like to be alone at a new school. She found it difficult to make new friends and had to ______ a new table at lunch every day. If she sat ______, she felt lonely. But if she asked to join someone and was ______, she felt embarrassed. She created a lunch-planning app to help students like ______ find people to have lunch with.

The app — called Sit With Us — is ______. If a student is having lunch in the afternoon, he or she can create an invitation. Other students can open the app and ______ that invitation. They can then use the app to decide when and where to ______. This allows students to make ______ online instead of face-to-face. This is the reason why it works so ______: it lowers the risk of being refused, and the embarrassment that goes along with it.

Natalie is ______ to see that people are replying to her app actively — especially those who suffer from bullying (遭受欺凌). Soon after she made her app available to the public, she won a prize for it. She ______ appeared in many news stories.

Natalie was even asked to speak at a university. In her ______, Natalie wanted people to know that you don’t have to do something ______ to change lives. Sometimes, a simple thing — like having a friend to enjoy lunch with — can make all the difference.

Wang Yaping is an astronaut. In 2013, she became the second Chinese woman to travel to
24．. She is also famous for a physics class televised for more than 60 million people.

Wang trained very hard for many years
25． an astronaut. The hardest part was
26． training. Wearing a spacesuit and carrying special and
27． equipment(装备), she walked several kilometers through the
28． and sandy desert. “Sometimes it was so windy and dusty(布满灰尘的),” she says, “that we couldn’t
29． each other even though we were just a few meters away.”

Wang
30． her job. She remembers watching the first
31． astronaut go into space. “I was so proud and also very excited. But
32． I watched it, a thought came into my mind: We have men pilots and women pilots; and
33． a man astronaut. When will there be a
34． astronaut? And today, it’s me becoming one of the first few.”

Why is the sea salt? Long before we discovered scientific ways of thinking about it, we explained it in a story. Even though the answer isn’t scientific, it holds some other truth in it — especially about the human heart.

Long ago, a poor old couple lived on the coast. One day, an old storyteller came to their village. The old couple gave him a meal. In return, he gave them a coffee mill (磨粉机) and said, “Say, ‘Mill, please grind (磨粉)’,” and it’ll make whatever you want, to stop it, say ‘Mill, please cease (停止) grinding’.”

Soon the old couple had a much better life. They’d been happy people, and they didn’t need much more. But the young couple next door were never satisfied. When they saw the old couple wearing good clothes and buying good food, they burnt with envy (羡慕). So one day, the young husband went to the old couple’s house secretly and heard, “Mill, please grind hot chocolate!” He was surprised to see it coming out.

Then the young couple stole the mill from the old couple. With it, they rode a horse and set off down the coast, where no one would know them. Along the way, the husband showed proudly and asked, “What do you want it to make?” “Oh. I don’t know. Why not salt?” the wife said. “Mill, please grind salt!” he said. “It works!” the wife shouted. But then they noticed the salt went everywhere. “Make it stop,” the wife said. But the husband didn’t know how. “Mill, please stop grinding! Please, no more!” His words didn’t work. The mill kept grinding. Finally, the young husband threw the mill into the sea as far as he could.

And there it’s been, for hundreds of years, endlessly grinding salt. That’s why the sea is salt.

Indonesians love to celebrate. They believe that celebrating and eating together brings good luck. Let’s party Indonesia-style.

Would you be surprised to find a New Year’s Day in March? Indonesians on the island of Bali are getting ready to ring in Nyepi, their New Year. It falls in March or April on the night of the new moon and is a symbol of a fresh start for the people and the island of Bali. On the eve of Nyepi, families and friends get together in the market. They carry a huge monster which is made of wood and other materials around the village three times. After that, people set it on fire, hoping to drive out evil (邪恶的) spirits.

After Nyepi, a Turun tanah ceremony begins in honor of a child’s first steps. At the Turun Tanah, parents invite friends and family to a party to introduce the baby. They put different objects such as a bracelet (手镯), pen, mirror or toy computer around their baby. If the baby picks up a pen, he or she may be a writer. A child who picks up a gold bracelet may be rich.

While Turun tanah celebrates the future of a family. Galungan celebrates its past. Ancestors who have died return ‘home’ during this ten-day celebration. And living relatives do their best to make them happy. Tall bamboo poles line the street. People attend the ceremonies and visit their family and village temples. Actors and dancers give performances that tell stories of good fighting against evil.

A year of festivals has come to an end. Don’t worry: next year, Indonesia will be buzzing (发出嗡嗡声) again with celebrations, so welcome to the party!

A．

B．

C．

D．

Improvements in technology often happen overnight. Some gadgets get smaller and faster. Others are replaced (代替) by newer things like smartphones. They can do hundreds of things. Here are some old gadgets that people used to use.

①________

Do you have a landline at home? These are phones that people plug (插入) into their living room walls. Mobile phones didn’t use to be so common at that time, so most families had a landline. But landlines only worked at home. What did people do when they were outside and needed to call someone? They looked for a pay phone! Then, most people had their own mobile phones and many homes no longer had landlines.

②________

People today store plenty of information online, or on SD cards. But in the 1980s and 1990s, people used to use floppy disks. The first floppy disks were large, expensive, and not very useful — each disk could store just 175 KB of information! Later, floppy disks got smaller and better. But even the best ones could only hold 1.44 MB. You would need three or four disks just for one song, and about 22,000 disks to match the storage (储存空间) available on a 32 GB phone!

③________

It’s easy to take photos today. People often have thousands just on their phones! But photos used to be expensive, and people took fewer of them. To take a photo, you had to buy a roll of film. This allowed you to take about 30 photos. After finishing the roll, you left it at a shop. The shop developed the photos to make them be seen, which you could collect after a few days.

Technology changes all the time, and the gadgets we use today will one day be old. What do you think will be next to disappear?

Silk, the word itself is beautiful. The story of silk started in China over 4,000 years ago. It says a silkworm’s cocoon(蚕茧) fell into a woman’s teacup. It then opened into a single, unbroken thread (线).
53． The Chinese learned they could use the cocoons to make cloth that was both beautiful to look at and soft to touch.

54． In other countries, silk was valuable and not often seen. Often it was worth more than gold. It’s said that the secret finally got out when a princess left China to go to India. In her hair, she secretly carried many silkworms.

By the year 1 A. D., silk was sold as far west as Rome, and all along the Silk Road.
55． Centuries later, in 1522, the Spanish brought silkworms to Mexico.

Nowadays people around the world still make many beautiful things from silk. Silk isn’t only beautiful. It seems that it’s easy to break.
56． For example, it has been used to make bicycle tires(轮胎). And some doctors even use silk threads in the hospital.
57． This makes it great for clothes like winter jackets, pants, and shoes.

All of this from a little insect—the silkworm. That is the miracle(神奇) of silk.

学校决定开展向航天女英雄王亚平学习的英文演讲活动，请你按下面表格要求写一篇演讲稿。先简单介绍王亚平的个人信息，再谈谈你从本卷完形填空B篇中感受到的她的优秀品质（personality），最后说说你打算如何向她学习。

Hello, everyone! It’s my honor to introduce an astronaut hero — Wang Yaping. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Thank you!