Sophia frowned as she helped her mother and father set out the cooking supplies in the shiny steel kitchen. Her family had just moved here from San Francisco,having bought a small restaurant, which was set to open in the next few days.
“Moving here was a dumb idea," Sophia grumbled,mostly to herself. The girl had been joyless about the move, but her parents had made the decision and were now too busy getting ready for the grand opening to listen to her complaints.
The first few days at her new school hadn't been easy,either. She found it hard to talk to people she didn't know, and it seemed like the students hadn't even noticed her. Sophia sighed and got back to washing dishes.
On the day of the grand opening,Sophia' s parents were all smiling,welcoming customers into the restaurant, brightly decorated in gold and red. Even Sophia was in a good mood as she rushed around,seating guests,handing out menus,and pouring tall glasses of water. This was a big day for her family.
At one of the tables sat a family with two daughters who were about Sophia' s age. As she filled their glasses,Sophia realized the twins were in her class,Emily and Jenny. Sophia ducked her head down so her long hair covered her face,and she turned away from the table.
Sophia' s mother found her soon after, in the kitchen loading the dishwasher.
“Honey, what are you doing back here? We need you out front with the customers. ”
“Mom, I don't want to be out there. There are kids from school!”
“So?” her mother asked.“That's good! Go take them some fortune cookies and say hello!”She clucked her tongue disapprovingly at Sophia and disappeared out of the kitchen.
Sophia frowned. She grabbed a handful of fortune cookies that they gave out after every meal,but first she tore open a wrapper and cracked a cookie open for herself. She popped a sweet, crunchy piece in her mouth, and absently read the fortune paper it held.
“Many friends are found with a single smile,” it read.
Sophia sighed. She put a handful of cookies into a small tray and left the kitchen.
Sophia blushed and nodded. This girl knew her name?
| A. observe B. change C. third-party D. expected E. enforce F. international G. conducted H. under I. improved J. foreign K. hostile |
Korean President Moon Jae-in told United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres that top DPRK leader Kim Jong-un promised to make open the closedown of the Punggye-ri nuclear test site to the ROK and the United States as well as to the
The ROK president asked the UN chief to allow officials to
During the April 27 summit with Moon at the border village of Panmunjom, Kim said his country will close the Punggye-ri nuclear test site in northeast of the DPRK, where all of six nuclear tests were
After the summit, Moon and Kim signed and announced the Panmunjom Declaration, agreeing to the complete denuclearization and the
The two leaders also agreed to stop all
Local media on Tuesday reported that the DPRK was removing propaganda loudspeakers from the border area, in a bid to
Guterres said he was willing to cooperate in the process in response, noting that though Moon’s calls require the approval from UN Security Council, he will make efforts to help settle peace on the Korean Peninsula. Guterres added that he will appoint a UN official in charge of arms reduction to cooperate with the ROK.
Moon also asked Guterres to issue a statement welcoming and supporting the Panmunjom Declaration by the UN General Assembly or the UN Security Council, saying UN support will be a great help to
US President Donald Trump on Monday said he has considered the Demilitarized Zone separating the DPRK and the ROK as a possible site for his meeting with Kim,
“Numerous countries are being considered for the MEETING,” Trump tweeted on Monday morning, “but would Peace House/Freedom House, on the Border of North & South Korea, be a more Representative, Important and Lasting site than a
Yours,
Li Hua
| A．is | B．being | C．was | D．be |
The other night I had dinner with my friend Kim, who in midlife is trying to change her career. She has spent decades as a successful photographer, but she knows it’s time to do something different. What, however, is she qualified to do, besides photography? “I’m good at parties,” she told me with a shrug. “And parallel parking.” We refilled our wineglasses and laughed really hard as we dreamed up the various careers in which that particular combination might be useful.
Here’s a humbling exercise: Ask yourself what you’re good at, aside from the skills you use at work. After my conversation with Kim, I put this question to a handful of friends and got responses ranging from “finding restaurants for people” to “spotting terrific old chairs.” The more I think about my own answer to this question, the more confused I seem to get.
A year ago this month I left a job, and a career, that brought me great satisfaction for more than two decades. Can serendipity(意外惊喜)be a strategy? It certainly worked for me. I happened to find a field in which my skills and the requirements of the job were a Venn diagram (韦恩图) with near total overlap. Like most of my friends, I spent my 20s and 30s marching determinedly along my given path, working hard, with purpose, and by the time I reached my 40s, I was able to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Isn’t that the way the American Dream goes?
Here’s what you learn when you wake up from that dream: hubris (自负) is the unpleasant by-product of success. If you are really good at your job for a long enough time, you begin to believe that you can be good at any job and therefore can easily jump from one thing to another, switching horses in midstream. Examples of this mistaken thinking are everywhere, from the harmlessly frivolous (Dancing With the Stars) to the dangerously serious (the current presidency). As it turns out, humility is its own kind of skill; developing it hurts, but falling on your face hurts more.
Over the years a number of 20-somethings have come to me for advice, which I have dutifully given: Work hard, meet lots of people, say yes to many things. Don’t complain, put a smile on your face, and remind yourself that studying Foucault for four years in college might not prove to be particularly relevant in the working world. Swallow your pride and ask a lot of questions.
What I should be telling the young and ambitious is this: being really good at one thing is fantastic until it isn’t. The day may come, in my experience, will come, when you know you want to do, want to be, something else. For example, 20-somethings, one day you might want to appear on Dancing With the Stars. I’m not sure if Sean Spicer is a fool or a genius for turning down this opportunity for his first post-Administration performance. Maybe he’s not aware that Apolo Ohno was placed first on the show.
Or maybe you’ll want to run for President. Never mind that it was a President–Abraham Lincoln–who popularized the warning about switching horses in midstream. If you are a real estate tycoon and loud-mouthed TV star who made a name for yourself with a combination of instinct, bravado(虚张声势)and riding the wave of chaos you create everywhere you go, then who cares what Abe Lincoln said? The White House is the logical next career step.
Or, 20-somethings, maybe you’ll do both! At the same time! After all, doesn’t today’s White House sort of resemble Dancing With the Stars, if you squint(眯眼)hard and use your imagination? With experts and amateurs working together, trying to make it all look graceful while the audience alternatively laughs and cries?
So, folks, an assignment: Ask yourself what you’re good at. As for me, aside from what I most recently did for a living–writing, editing, managing people and showing up to meetings on time–my greatest strengths seem to be making vacation packing lists and remembering which houses in my town are on the market. So I have entered this next phase of my life with gratitude (for what I’ve accomplished), humility (about all that I don’t know) and fear (see random greatest strengths). I used to be filled with optimism: if Donald Trump could become President, anything seemed possible. But with each passing month, and each new failure, my optimism dims. If he wanted to try something new, wouldn’t Dancing With the Stars have been a wiser choice?
1．Which of the following statements can be inferred from the passage?| A．Only failure contributes to the development of one’s humility. |
| B．Donald Trump is the very person for the US presidency. |
| C．Career success encourages overestimate of oneself. |
| D．College education is a must for a successful career. |
| A．Check whether one’s skill meets the requirements of the potential new job. |
| B．Seize each and every random opportunity that comes along. |
| C．Be optimistic about the potential new job and anything is possible. |
| D．Job hopping is such a severe danger as to be avoided. |
| A．It functions ideally as the political center of the United States. |
| B．It is the logical next career step for a wealthy and famous person. |
| C．It is as attractive and interesting as Dancing with the Stars. |
| D．It is a stage where officials don’t know how to run the country. |
| A．What one is really good at disappears. |
| B．One feels no more fantastic about the job. |
| C．One’s ambition weakens as he or she ages. |
| D．One tries to change to a new job. |
Social Practice in the Hope Community
Is renting clothes greener than buying them?
Clothing rental is a hot new industry and retailers are demanding to get on board in hopes of attracting green shoppers. But is renting fashion actually more environmentally-friendly than buying it, and if so, how much more? Journalist and author Elizabeth Cline investigated this question and concluded that it’s not as sustainable as it seems.
Take shipping, for example, which has to go two ways if an item is rented — receiving and returning. Cline writes that consumer transportation has the second largest carbon footprint of our collective fashion habit after manufacturing. She writes, “An item ordered online and then returned can send out 20 kilograms of carbon each way, and increases up to 50 kilograms for rush shipping. By comparison, the carbon impact of a pair of jeans purchased from a physical store and washed and worn at home is 33.4 kilograms, according to a 2015 study by Levi’s.”
Then there’s the burden of washing, which has to happen for every item when it’s returned, regardless of whether or not it was worn. For most rental services, this usually means dry cleaning, a high impact and polluting process. All the rental services that Cline looked into have replaced perchloroethylene (氯乙烯), a carcinogenic (致癌的) air pollutant that is still used by 70 percent of US dry cleaners, with hydrocarbon alternatives, although these aren’t great either.
Lastly, Cline fears that rental services will increase our appetite for fast fashion, simply because it’s so easily accessible. There’s something called “share washing” that makes people engage in more wasteful behaviors precisely because a product or service is shared and thus is regarded as more eco-friendly. Uber is one example of this, advertised as “a way to share rides and limit car ownership.” and yet “it has been proven to discourage walking, bicycling, and public transportation use.”
Renting clothes is still preferable to buying them cheap and throwing them in the dustbin after a few wears, but we shouldn’t let the availability of these services make us too satisfied. There’s an even better step—and that’s wearing what is already in the closet.
Yours,
Li Hua
Some documents have been making the rounds lately — where people who work various positions in different industries share how much they’re paid.
Bravo! It’s about time we blew up that old belief that salaries have to stay secret. This is not just a matter of curiosity. Having information about salaries can help narrow the gender wage gap, which has barely changed for more than a decade. Recently released date from the US Census Bureau shows that, on average, women working full time still are paid only 82 cents for every dollar paid to a man. And the gap is even wider for many women of color: Black women make 62 cents, and Latinas just 54 cents. What’s more, the pay gap even extends into her retirement. Because she earned less and therefore paid less to the social security system, she receives less in social security benefits.
Having greater access to salary information is helping to speed things up. A new research report by the American Association of University Women shows that the wage gap tends to be smaller in job sectors where pay transparency (透明) is a must. For example, among federal government workers, there’s just a 13 percent pay difference between men and women, and in state government, the gap is about 17 percent. But in private, for-profit companies, where salaries are generally kept under wraps, the gender wage gap jumps to 29 percent.
Fortunately, salary information is increasingly available on some websites. Certain companies and many human resources departments are pushing ahead with this practice. Of course, it’s going to take more than salary transparency to equalize earnings between women and men. But sharing salaries can and must be part of the solution. The more information women have about how jobs are valued — and what different people earn — the better they will understand their value in the labor market and be able to push for the pay they deserve.
1．Why are the figures mentioned in paragraph 2?| A．To reveal the severity of gender wage gap. |
| B．To confirm the previous belief about salaries. |
| C．To satisfy readers’ curiosity about others’ salaries. |
| D．To appeal to readers to share their salary information. |
| A．The inequality between men and women. |
| B．The need to keep salary information a secret. |
| C．The advantage of working for the government. |
| D．The benefit of making salary information public. |
| A．Critical. | B．Favourable. |
| C．Unclean | D．Negative. |
| A．Why It Pays to Share How Much You Make |
| B．Where Salary Information Difference Lies |
| C．What It Takes to Realize Gender Equality |
| D．How Woman’s Value Improves at Work. |
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