学进去

不同的人生阶段有不同的计划。作为一名九年级的学生，毕业后你有何计划？是继续读高中还是有别的升学计划？请以“My Plan after Graduation from Junior Middle School”为题写一篇短文。

My Plan after Graduation from Junior Middle School

I will graduate from Junior Middle School soon. After graduation, ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The 17-year-old, who also goes by her Chinese name, Gu Ailing, is a freestyle skier, model and grade-A student with an American father and a Chinese mother. She grew up in the United States and still lives there.

“I was raised bilingual (双语的) and spent every summer in Beijing so I know Chinese culture and American culture,” she told the Xinhua News Agency. “And the two halves make a whole me,” Gu added.

Gu started on the snow at the age of three, was competing (参加比赛) nationally at nine and won her first World Cup event by fifteen. She won two gold medals (奖牌) and a silver for China at the 2020 Youth Olympic Games in Lausanne.

As she became better at skiing, she soon found herself competing mostly against boys.

“It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I had any girl ski friends who were at my level,” she said. “So, I was always thinking, I am the only girl here, so do I have to do anything more difficult? Do I have to make myself better so people won’t laugh at a woman skiing?”

Gu isn’t just an successful skier on the snow. She is also an excellent piano player and a good runner who led her high school team to win a second-place at an important competition. She finished her study in one of the best high schools in three years and entered Stanford in 2022.

________? Gu said that her secrets are “love, concentration (专注) and balance (平衡)”. “I’m not skiing just for the Olympic Games. I’m skiing because of my love for the sport. I started skiing at a young age because I love the snow. If you do the things you have love for, you can put all your heart into what you are doing,” she added.

《苏州日报》英文专刊以“Practice makes perfect”为题向中学生开展征文活动，请你用英语写一篇短文投稿，内容包括：

Practice makes perfect

Have you heard of the saying “practice makes perfect”? I mean ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here’s one scene. Say you are in heavy traffic and your car’s brakes (刹车) start to fail. If you keep going, you will go into the back of a truck and probably die. But if you turn sharply to avoid the truck, you risk hitting an elderly woman or a group of children. What do you do?

This is an extreme choice. But every day, drivers around the world have to make quick decisions to avoid accidents. Often, they react without even having time to think. But what would a driverless car do?

Self-driving cars are designed to deal with all sorts of situations, from understanding traffic rules to planning the easiest route that avoids construction. These programming decisions are direct and clear. Ethics (道德), on the other hand, is not. How do you program a car to decide what to do in the case of an accident? How do you choose which life is more valuable? And who gets to choose? This is a problem that ethicists, lawyers, and car makers are all wondering about.

Patrick Lin teaches robotics and ethics at California Polytechnic State University. He says that it might seem easy to say that self-driving cars must follow certain rules to minimize or reduce harm, but he says, “even that leads to morally murky (模糊的) decisions.” He gives an example: on one side of you is a motorcyclist wearing a helmet; on the other is a motorcyclist not wearing a helmet. If the car’s computer tells it to minimize harm during a necessary turn, that might mean hitting the person with the helmet. After all, they are better protected and so less likely to be hurt. But, Lin asks, aren’t you being unfair to the responsible (负责的) motorist?

According to Lin, any type of decision-making based on age, gender, or any similar factor would be discrimination (歧视) and therefore against standards of ethics. He explained that even the safest car runs the risk of having accidents, and that the responsibility for programming will lie with the car makers.

But some experts say we don’t need to worry about this problem. Bryan Casey teaches at Stanford Law School. Casey says that what a self-driving car does in a crash is not an ethical issue (问题) at all. Instead, it is a legal issue. If a driver has a crash now, the law decides if he was driving dangerously or if it was truly an accident. If the driver was dangerously careless, he faces punishment, often a fine or jail. If a breakdown caused the crash, the car makers might be at fault. Either way, laws exist to decide what is wrong, and who is responsible. Casey says that will not change with the arrival of self-driving cars.

We expect self-driving cars to be very safe, safer than human drivers because computers can react more quickly. And indeed, an autonomous vehicle should be well designed and slow down or speed up in relation to the actual case. However, accidents can always happen. This means that drivers, car makers, and lawmakers will need to deal with new problems as they appear.

Some children cannot wait to grow up. Because once you become an adult, you are free to make your own decisions. More importantly, you can do all those things that you cannot do now because you are too young. So, the question is, “At what age do you really become an adult?” Well, people become adults at different ages in different places.

In Australia, the 18th birthday is a very important event for young Australians because it means they can do almost anything they want. They can vote, learn to drive a car, get married, join the army and even buy their own houses. However, even if they can do all these things, most Australians have to wait until their 21st birthday to really celebrate becoming an adult. This is the traditional adult age not only in Australia, but also in the USA and the UK. It is their first year of true independence. Traditionally, people were given a key to their houses by their parents when they turned 21, meaning they could come and go as they like.

Even though 21 is the traditional adult age in many English-speaking countries, the law nowadays is different in each country. In the UK, you can join the army at 16 and even get married at 16 if your parents allow. Young people in the UK can learn to drive a car at 17 as in Australia, although they have to wait until they are 18 to vote.

In China, there is a different age for each of the stages of becoming an adult. You can vote and learn to drive a car when you are 18, but if you want to get married, women have to wait until they are 20 and men until they are 22. Chinese people celebrate important birthdays every 10 years—so when young people turn 20, they can expect a big party!

No matter what age you are, becoming an adult is really about learning how to be independent and responsible. Once you are finally able to take care of yourself and make your own decisions, then you can say that you are truly all grown-ups.

The Picture of Peace

When Mike was seven, he knew his dream was to be a photographer. He kept working on ________ for years. Recently, he was trying to take a picture of a sunset to enter the school ________ competition.

“Mom, it has been cloudy these days. I don’t think I can get this picture!” Mike complained.

“Why not use one of your photos on the ________?” suggested Mom.

“I can’t—the rules say the photos have to be ________ with a traditional camera. We hand in a roll of film, it gets developed, and we ________ one photo for the competitions.

“Why is a sunset so important?” Mom asked.

“The ________ of the competition is peace,” Mike explained, “And I feel most peaceful seeing a sunset.”

Zach, his six-year-old brother came out of the bedroom. “Hey, you want to take a picture of me? Look!” He put both arms over his head.

“Not right now,” said Mike, laughing.

That very afternoon, Mike felt excited when he saw ________ skies. He carefully lined up his shot (镜头) and waited hopefully ________ the sun reached the ground.

“That’s it! ________ !” he shouted cheerfully.

The next morning, Mike noticed he could take one more picture to complete the roll of film, so he walked into Zach’s room. Zach was ________ quietly with a teddy bear under his arm. Mike didn’t wake Zach up, and ________ took a picture of him.

A week later, Mike got the photos. The sunset picture was the one he was most eager to see. There it was! It was as nearly perfect as Mike had expected. Then, he ________ the other photos. Suddenly, he stopped. His ________ shone as he studied the photo of Zach. He looked back at the photo of the sunset, which seemed less perfect now. He weighed the two ________.

Finally, he decided to ________ the photo of Zach for the competition.

Workers at the Marine Biological Association (MBA) in England were surprised when a letter to “George Parker Bidder” arrived at their offices. They couldn’t understand why someone was writing to their former president, who had been dead for more than 60 years. It became clearer when the letter was opened. Inside, there was an old postcard. On one side was a series of questions about how the postcard had been discovered. 1．

The postcard was from a bottle dropped into the North Sea more than a century earlier. It was one of just over 1,000 bottles that Bidder had thrown into the sea as part of a study on the movement of water. 2． They were picked up by fishermen or by people walking along the beach, who then sent the postcards inside them back to Bidder.

3． It’s possible that some of the bottles with the postcards had broken. But somehow, the bottle with the recently returned postcard had remained in the sea for over a hundred years. It seems that it finally found its way to a sandy beach on an island. 4． After breaking the bottle open, she filled out the postcard and sent it off to the MBA, not realizing she was posting a message from the distant past.

Unluckily, the old postcard shows nothing new about the movement of water. All it tells the workers is where it was dropped and where it was found. 5．

As we know, there are differences between Western culture and Chinese culture. 1． Let’s look at some words about animals and plants.

Most expressions in China about the dog, for example, “a homeless dog” “a mad dog” “a running dog” and “a dog catching a mouse”, have bad meanings. 2． In English, people use the dog to describe good actions. For example, “you are a lucky dog” means you are a ucky person. And “every dog has its day” means each person has good luck sometimes. To describe a person’s serious illness, they say “sick as a dog”. The word “dog-tired” means very tired. 3． But in Western culture, “cat” is often used to describe a woman who is unkind. There are many other examples of how “cat” is used differently as well.

We can see similarities when we pay attention to the way words are used. People think the rose stands for love, peace, courage and friendship 4． 5． We can learn about many differences in cultures by comparing how some words are used.