Both my parents were good at gardening. Our family of ten depended on the food we grew in our huge vegetable garden. My mother canned (把……装进罐中) much of the produce for winter, and my father sold potatoes and cabbages to the local stores and schools. Our garden was the pride of the neighborhood.
But then, one summer when I was quite young, we had a problem. Someone was stealing our vegetables. My parents were quite surprised. “I don’t get it,” my father said. “If someone wants vegetables from us, all they have to do is ask. If they can’t afford to pay for them, they could just have them.”
Then one of the neighbors tipped us off that a single elderly man who lived a short distance from us was seen selling vegetables in a nearby town. Benny didn’t have a garden, had no regular job and lived in a small, poor house. My parents found out he was taking our vegetables to earn a few extra dollars. And later, they found it was true. My father decided to deal with this situation in his own way.
One day, he told my mother that he’d go to hire (雇用) Benny. My mother was surprised, saying, “We don’t have enough money to hire anyone. Besides, why would we hire the man who’s taking our vegetables?” My father replied that he was going to hire him to guard our garden. My mother was confused and didn’t think it would work.
My father explained, “Here’s what I think. Benny has got himself backed into a corner, and I’m going to give him a way out. I think he can’t refuse me. And he sure can’t take the vegetables that he’s guarding.”
When my father told him about the job, Benny was obviously a bit shocked. But Dad solved it pretty well. “Benny,” he said, “someone, probably some kid, has been taking vegetables out of our garden. I wonder if I could hire you to guard the garden.” Then Dad added that he would also have breakfast with us every day.
In life, once on a path, we tend to follow it, for better or worse. What’s sad is that even if it’s the latter, we often follow a certain path anyway because we are so used to the way things are that we don’t even recognize that they could be different. Psychologists call this phenomenon functional fixedness.
This classic experiment will give you an idea of how it works — and a sense of whether you may have fallen into the same trap:
People are given a box of tacks (大头钉) and some matches and asked to find a way to attach a candle to a wall so that it burns properly. Typically, the subjects try tacking the candle to the wall or lighting it to fix it with melted wax (石蜡). The tacks are too short, and the candle doesn’t fasten to the wall. So how can you accomplish the task? The successful technique is to use the tack box as a candle holder. You empty it, tack it to the wall, and stand the candle inside it.
To think of that, you have to look beyond the box’s usual role as a container just for tacks and reimagine it serving an entirely new purpose. That is difficult because we all suffer — to one degree or another — from functional fixedness. The inability to think in new ways affects people in every corner of society. The political theorist Hannah Arend coined the phrase frozen thoughts to describe deeply held ideas that we no longer question but should. In Arendt’s eyes, the complacent reliance on such accepted “truths” also made people blind to ideas that didn’t fit their worldview, even when there was ample evidence for them. Frozen thinking has nothing to do with intelligence, she said, “It can be found in highly intelligent people.”
Another context in which frozen thinking can turn truly dangerous is medicine. If you land in the hospital, it’s natural to want to be treated by the most experienced physicians on staff. But according to a 2014 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), you’d be better off being treated by the relative novices.
1．What does “functional fixedness” mean?The teenage years are probably the most unsettled and stressful years in a person’s life. Teens experience significant physical, emotional, social and cognitive changes. And teens of today face more challenges as they go through more uncertain times of the 21st century.
As teens experience massive physical, social and emotional changes, the challenges are managing social expectations of ideal body images, developing their identity and finding their place in the world. In the past, a teen who was criticized for his or her larger figure or pimpled (有粉刺的) face, might feel embarrassed and dejected in school.
There have been many discussions about new technologies and ways of working, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, which will impact future jobs.
| A．They can also be spread quickly by sharing with others. |
| B．Furthermore, social media has taken bullying to a new level. |
| C．The future has always been a dreamland for teens to anticipate. |
| D．Today, these same sufferings can be expanded by social media. |
| E．Social media, and technological advances are posing new challenges. |
| F．Additionally, social media is a strong tool for a teen to defend himself. |
| G．The challenge for a teen today is preparing for a largely unknown future. |
On a cold winter evening, I, together with my 6-year-olds on Bob, was on our way home, heading towards a bridge, when I heard some strange noise ahead.
As we approached the bridge, dusk was starting to fall and I could see a figure lying on the bridge floor, uncomfortably close to the railing (栏杆) of the bridge. It was a young man, clearly in great pain, crying and shouting, and his whole body was shaking. I was shocked, and suddenly realized the serious situation. The bridge ran over a high-speed train track and was a well-known death trap. A local family had lost their teenager in that exact place a few weeks earlier.
I quickly looked around but there was no one else nearby. I knew I wouldn't be able to live with myself if his death was reported the next day and I'd done nothing about that.
Without any hesitation, I inched towards the figure, and little Bob followed quietly on my side. I asked the young man if I could sit down, and then lowered myself on to the bridge floor opposite him. I tried a few gentle questions, asking, “What's your name? How old are you? What do you do?” His answers were rather simple, which were “Tom. 21. Computers.”
“Are you OK?” I asked. “No, I'm not!” He shouted back. He said something about a betrayal (背叛), and not knowing what to do. His emotions were changing wildly. I tried to make a connection, so It old him my name, where I lived, and how I was a mother of two children. After asking him where he went to college, I pretended to be amazed that my niece (侄女) had studied there, too. I told him that his life was very valuable and the betrayal was just one tiny part of it. I even found myself telling the story of Neil Lay bourn, who had persuaded a man to be down from Waterloo Bridge in London, “They're great friends now and have even run a marathon together for charity,” I said. “Who knows? That could be us.” I kept talking gently and eagerly.”
Last August, Joe and Mary Mahoney began looking at colleges for their 17-year-old daughter, Maureen. With a checklist of criteria in hand, the Dallas family looked around the country visiting half a dozen schools. They sought a university that offered the teenager’s intended major, one located near a large city, and a campus where their daughter would be safe.
“The safety issue is a big one,” says Joe Mahoney, who quickly discovered he wasn’t alone in his worries. On campus tours other parents voiced similar concerns, and the same question was always asked: what about crime? But when college officials always gave the same answer- “That’s not a problem here,” --Mahoney began to feel uneasy.
“No crime whatsoever?” comments Mahoney today. “I just don’t buy it. ” Nor should he: in 1999 the U.S. Department of education had reports of nearly 400,000 serious crimes on or around our campuses. “Parents need to understand that times have changed since they went to college,” says David Nichols, author of Creating a Safe Campus. “Campus crime mirrors the rest of the nation."
But getting accurate information isn’t easy. Colleges must report crime statistics by law, but some hold back for fear of bad publicity, leaving the honest ones looking dangerous. “The truth may not always be serious,” warms S. Daniel Carter of Security on Campus, Inc., the nation’s leading campus safety watchdog group.
Imagine that as you are boarding an airplane, half the engineers who built the plane tell you there is a 10 percent chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on board. Would you still board?
In 2022, over 700 top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in a survey about future AI risk. Half of those surveyed stated that there was a 10 percent or greater chance of human extinction from future AI systems.
The fear of AI has haunted humanity since the mid-20th century, yet until recently it has remained a distant prospect, something that belongs in sci-fi more than in serious scientific and political debates.
In the beginning was the word.
| A．Humans often don’t have direct access to reality. |
| B．Language is the operating system of human culture. |
| C．In games like chess, no human can hope to beat a computer. |
| D．By gaining mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key to civilization. |
| E．Technology companies are caught in a race to put all of humanity on that plane. |
| F．For thousands of years we humans have lived inside the dreams of other humans. |
| G．It’s difficult for human minds to grasp the capabilities of GPT-4 and similar tools. |
In interviews, famous people often say that the key to becoming both happy and successful is to “do what you love.” But
Anyone who wants to have a good command of a skill must go through the
The
Csikszentmihalyi suggested that those who most
While there isn’t yet a pill that can turn dull practice into an exciting activity for anyone, it is comforting that we seem to be able to advance into flow states. By giving ourselves unstructured, open-ended time, minimum distractions and task set at moderate level of
| A．functioning | B．stimulating | C．enriching | D．mastering |
| A．fixed | B．concentrated | C．paralleled | D．instructed |
| A．transformation | B．substitute | C．cycle | D．condition |
| A．role | B．pleasure | C．an interest | D．part |
| A．poisonous | B．rewarding | C．ignorant | D．frustrating |
| A．objection | B．distinction | C．principle | D．standard |
| A．apply | B．devote | C．adjust | D．expose |
| A．deliberately | B．readily | C．hesitantly | D．flexibly |
| A．feature | B．control | C．advantage | D．sympathy |
| A．security | B．jealousy | C．reward | D．contribution |
| A．Unexpectedly | B．Fortunately | C．Typically | D．Obviously |
| A．cultivated | B．extended | C．influenced | D．bridged |
| A．Otherwise | B．Therefore | C．Furthermore | D．Instead |
| A．advocated | B．suspended | C．discouraged | D．observed |
| A．priority | B．difficulty | C．curiosity | D．identity |
The Perfect Gift
Colin walked through the mall with his head down. He couldn’t bear to look at another window display of great Christmas gifts he couldn’t afford. There were only a few days left until Christmas, and Colin still didn’t t have a present for his parents. He had only managed to save four dollars and seventeen cents. He counted the money in his pocket and sighed heavily.
“You look upset today, Colin. What is the matter?” Colin’s older sister Whitney asked.
Colin explained his problem to his sister.
“Why don’t you make them something?” Whitney suggested.
“Making presents is for babies,” Colin said. “Mom and Dad won’t like baby stuff.”
“Hey, that is not true. When I was your age, I wrote Mom and Dad a poem for Christmas. They loved it so much that they had it framed (给……做框),” Whitney said.
Colin knew that was true. The poem was hanging in the living room right above the fireplace. Mom and Dad often stood at the fireplace and read the poem to him. But Colin wasn’t good at writing poems, so that didn’t really help him.
“It doesn’t have to be a poem,” Whitney said, “It could be anything that makes them think of you whenever they look at it. That’s why homemade gifts are special — because they make you think of the person who made it.”
“But I don’t know how to make anything Mom and Dad would actually want!” Colin said, kicking a tiny stone across the parking lot.
Whitney opened the car door. “Yes, you do! You’re always drawing those funny little comics. Why don’ t you do a family portrait(全家福) as a comic? Mom and Dad would love it.”
”Maybe," Colin said. He thought about the idea the whole way home. He even pictured how he would draw everyone.
Paragraph 1: For the next two days, Colin drew one picture after another.
Paragraph 2: After all the other presents were opened, Colin handed his gift to his parents.
When I was in my fourth year of teaching，I was also（and am still）a high school track and field coach（田径教练）. One year，I had a student，John，who entered my class when he was a junior. John changed to our school from Greece，and seemed to be interested in sports，so I encouraged him to join our track team. I explained to him that even though he had never taken part in it before，I did believe that he could do well in any event，and that I would be willing to coach him in whichever ones interested him. He accepted the offer，and began to work hard at every practice.
About a month later，I had found out from other sources that John was a first-class tennis player，winning various junior awards in his home country. I went to him asking，“John，I really appreciate that you came out for the track team，but why didn’t you play tennis instead？It seems that would interest you a lot more，since you’re so good at it.”John answered，“Well，I like tennis，but you told me that you believed in me，and that you thought I could do well in track，so I wanted to try it for that reason.”
From then on，I often remember my student’s reply. I told it to a friend and she suggested I write it down to share somewhere with more teachers. No matter how critical（挑剔的）students can be of themselves，I’ve found that a simple“I trust that you can do it！”can go a long way！
1．According to Paragraph 1，what did the author seem to think more about？| A．John’s PE marks. |
| B．John’s self-confidence. |
| C．John’s interest in sports. |
| D．John’s state of health. |
| A．He had been an excellent runner. |
| B．He was encouraged by his teacher. |
| C．He liked running more than tennis. |
| D．He had no tennis coach to train him. |
| A．To build a close teacher-student relationship. |
| B．To introduce a new way of sports training. |
| C．To explain the value of sports. |
| D．To show the importance of encouragement. |
| A．Teachers. | B．Parents. |
| C．Students. | D．Players. |
One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists have managed to turn an unassuming drone (无人机) into a remote-controlled pollinator (授粉媒介) by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly.
Animal pollinators are needed for the reproduction of 90% of flowering plants and one third of human food crops. Chief among those are bees — but many bee populations in the United States have been in steep decline in recent decades. Thus, the decline of bees isn't just worrisome because it could disrupt ecosystems, but also because it could disrupt agriculture and economy. People have been trying to come up with replacement techniques, but none of them are especially effective yet.
Scientists have thought about using drones, but they haven't figured out how to make free-flying robot insects that can rely on their own power source without being attached to a wire. “It’s very tough work,” said senior author Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. His particular contribution to the field involves a gel, one he’d considered a mistake 10 years before and stuck in a storage cabinet. When it was rediscovered a decade later, it hadn’t dried up or degraded at all. “I was so surprised because it still had high viscosity,” Miyako said.
The chemist noticed that when dropped, the gel absorbed an impressive amount of dust from the floor. Miyako realized this material could be very useful for picking up pollen (花粉). He and his colleagues chose a drone and attached horsehairs to its smooth surface to mimic a bee’s fuzzy body. They coated those horsehairs in the gel, and then controlled the drones over lilies, where they would pick up the pollen from one flower and then deposit the pollen at another one, thus fertilizing it.
The scientists looked at the hairs under a scanning electron microscope and counted up the pollen grains attached to the surface and found that the drones whose horsehairs had been coated with the gel had about 10 times more pollen than those that had not been coated with the gel.
Miyako does not think such drones would replace bees altogether, but could simply help bees with their pollinating duties. There’s a lot of work to be done before that's a reality, however. Small drones will need to become more controllable and energy efficient, as well as smarter, with better GPS and artificial intelligence.
1．What does the underlined word “viscosity” in Para.3 probably mean?| A．Hardness. | B．Stickiness. |
| C．Flexibility. | D．Purity. |
| A．bees disrupt both agriculture and economy |
| B．scientists have invented self-powered robot insects |
| C．bees in the United States are on the edge of extinction |
| D．Miyako found the special feature of the gel by chance |
| A．its body is made like a bee’s |
| B．its GPS works more efficiently |
| C．some flowers are coated with the gel |
| D．horsehairs with the gel are attached to it |
| A．are not yet ready for practical use |
| B．may eventually replace bees in the future |
| C．are much more efficient than bee pollinators |
| D．can provide a solution to economic depression |
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