A
2024 Travel Planner: The Best Things to See in the UK
Icons of British Fashion， Oxfordshire
A fashion exhibition will open at Blenheim Palace in March. Icons of British Fashion is the largest event in the palace's 300-year history and will showcase some of Britain's most famous designers. Clothing, drawings, photographs and patterns will be on display. 23 March to 30 June. Palace entry tickets are valid for a year and cost E38 for adults，£ 22 for under-16s.
Toulouse-Lautrec in Bath
A new exhibition， Toulouse-Lautrec and the Masters of Montmartre, opens at Victoria Art Gallery in Bath in April. More than 30 pieces from the artist's colourful career will be shown alongside works by other artists of the day. This is the only chance to see Lautrec's complete collection of posters in the UK before it moves to a permanent home at the Musée d'Ixelles in Belgium. 26 April to 29 September, adults £ 10, children £ 3.50.
Back in Time at Beamish
A truly recreated 1950s picture house at Beamish will offer visitors a chance to recall the golden age of movie-going. The cinema will be the latest addition to a ＂1950s Town＂ opened last summer at the living history museum. Adults £ 24.95， children £ 15.45， a family of four £ 63.50， valid for a year.
National Gallery goes on tour
The National Gallery celebrates its 200th anniversary on 10 May. To mark the occasion， the gallery is lending 12 of its most iconic paintings to 12 venues across the UK. Paintings will travel to centres from Brighton to Edinburgh， and will all go on display on 10 May. Each of the 12 venues will run exhibitions and digital interventions to showcase its particular painting.
B
The memory of one particular summer evening is still burned in my brain as if it were yesterday. There was nothing but wide-open fields for miles and miles around our rural Minnesota home. We never saw strangers not ever and here on this hot evening was a real live one walking up our driveway.
A young man, a slightly-built hitchhiker （搭便车的人） approached our door. He knew there was a storm coming, and he desperately needed shelter. Not wanting to intrude on our home and family, he asked my dad if he could sleep in our basement for the night for protection from the rain. Instead of saying yes, my dad loaded us all up in the 1959 Chevrolet: five kids, my mum, and the man.
Our family consisted of three older children whose father had died young and three more children from the union of my mother and father. Our older brother Jerry was in the Navy, on a ship somewhere overseas. Our mum and dad worried about him.
We drove him 10 miles to the next town, where Dad bought the man a room for the night along with a hot evening meal. In the car after we dropped off the stranger, I heard my dad say to my mum, "I just hope that if Jerry ever needs anything, this kindness will be returned to him."
Weeks later, Dad told my uncle about the young man. My uncle suggested that perhaps my dad shouldn't have taken the risk of having a stranger in our car. My dad replied, "You are absolutely right. I should have invited him into our home."
C
Almost all new parents struggle to get enough sleep while caring for their newborns. For some penguin （企鹅） parents, though, periods of sleep are especially short.
Researchers recently found that Chinstrap penguins only sleep for about four seconds at a time in order to protect their eggs and newborn chicks. They do this thousands of times throughout the day. The short "microsleeps" total around 11 hours each day. The microsleeps appear to be enough to keep the parents going for many weeks.
Niels Rattenborg, a sleep researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Germany, said, "What's surprising is that the penguins are able to function okay and successfully raise their young."
Chinstrap penguins usually lay their eggs in November in nests made up of small rocks. Mated （交配的） pairs share parenting responsibilities. One parent usually watches the eggs and chicks alone while the other goes off fishing for family meals. Adult penguins don't face many natural enemies in the mating season. But large birds called brown skuas eat the penguin eggs and small chicks. Other adult penguins may also try to steal the small rocks from the nests, so penguin parents must always be on guard.
For the first time, scientists followed the sleeping behavior of Chinstrap penguins. They did this by attaching devices that measure brain waves. They collected data on 14 adults over 11 days on King George Island off the coast of Antarctica.
Won Young Lee, a biologist at the Korean Polar Research Institute, thought of the idea for the study when he saw mating penguins often blinking （眨） their eyes and possibly sleeping. But the team needed to record brain waves to confirm the animals were sleeping. "For these penguins, microsleeps have some restorative functions," he said. He added that they would not survive without it.
The researchers didn't collect sleep data outside the mating season. But they suspect that the penguins may sleep for longer periods at other times of the year.
D
When people think of word innovators throughout history, male writers likely come to mind. Shakespeare is credited with inventing more than 1,700 words, including "bedroom", "courtship" and "swagger". Charles Dickens is said to have first used the words "butterfingers" and "doormat", and Dr. Seuss reportedly came up with "nerd".
But despite contributions from famous writers, historians say another group has an even greater impact on the development of language: teenage girls. Women lead up to 90 percent of linguistic （语言的） changes, as sociolinguist William Labov observed in the early 2000s. In fact, he wrote, women are often linguistically ahead of men "by a full generation".
Now women are leading the charge online. Though Oxford University Press'2023 word of the year, "rizz", meaning charm, was coined by a man, several runners-up, including "situationship" and "swiftie" were inspired or first used by women. The term "goblin mode", which refers to lazy behavior, was Oxford's 2022 word of the year and appears to have been first used by a woman on Twitter in
2009.
It's often impossible to tell who first used new words. But whether or not young girls invent new phrases, they are more likely to be early adopters of the latest lingo（术语）， says University of Toronto linguist Sali Tagliamonte, "They're pushing changes forward."
There are a handful of possible reasons why girls lead lexical （词汇的） innovation. According to Gretchen McCulloch, author of Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, women tend to be more socially aware. They have larger social circles and may be exposed to more language diversity. And because women tend to be caregivers, boys usually learn language from their mothers, whereas women and girls learn words from other women.
阅读下面短文，从短文后的选项中选出可以填入空白处的最佳选项。选项中有两项为多余选项。
How to Deal with Awkward Silences
We all know what it's like when a conversation dies off and you're left to sit in silence. Thankfully, filling these silences isn't as difficult as it may seem. Read on to learn how to initiate small talk and deal with awkward silences.
• Think of topics ahead of time.
Before attending a social event, think of a few "go-to" topics to jumpstart a dead conversation. This will help you to fill the silences instead of struggling for words in the moment. Recent news, local events, popular books and television shows are all good fallback options.
• Ask open-ended questions.
Ask questions that have more than one possible answer. They help avoid resulting in short response. For example, instead of asking, "Did you like your high school?", you could ask, "What did you like about your high school?"
•
As with any good conversation, the biggest key is to listen. If they respond to your question with a short statement such as "Yes"or "No", that might indicate that they aren't comfortable talking about a particular subject. Instead, talk about something that you know they're interested in. For example, "I heard you won your football game the other night. I'd love to hear about it."
• Give a compliment （表扬）.
For example, you could say, "I really like your shirt. Where did you get it?" This could move the conversation in another direction while making the other person feel good. Stick to saying nice things if you're trying to make small talk.
A. Keep the conversation flowing.
B. It also allows you to spend more time together.
C. Listen carefully and respond to their reactions.
D. There's only one word to describe it: awkward.
E. This is always a safe bet, as long as it's appropriate.
F. Such questions are likely to get the person talking more.
G. However, avoid some subjects that may cause arguments.
第一节（共15小题；每小题1分，满分15分）
阅读下面短文，从每题所给的A、B、C、D四个选项中选出可以填入空白处的最佳选项。
Growing up on a farm, Tori James spent much of her early years outdoors, building shelters and playing in muddy streams. She 1 herself as an ambitious and adventurous child and owes the Duke of Edinburgh Award to her love for 2 . James says she could never have 3 that one day she might be the youngest British woman to 4 the peak of Mount Everest.
Today, James is a（n）5 adventurer. Alongside her successful climb of the world's 6 peak in 2007, she was a member of the first all-female team to 7 a tiring 650-kilometre ski race to the Magnetic North Pole in 2005, and in 2014 she set the 8 for the longest non-stop open-sea kayak crossing in UK waters.
Yet ahead of her first exploration at the age of 18, James had 9 her ability to last a month out in the cold without the comfort of a hot bath. "It's only by 10 our comfort zone that we understand our true potential," she explains, "That's when the 11 happens."
James encourages would-be adventurers not to be 12 by the conventional image of the rugged （粗犷的）， hardy explorer. "I am such a believer that, with the right support and skills, everyone can bring 13 to an exploration," she adds, "Sometimes, it's only out in the field that someone's 14 talents emerge, 15 in the process of exploration."
阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。
A composting（堆肥） program at The Wesley School in Los Angeles is helping students get hands-on experience and ways （handle）human-driven climate change. For the past year, all the leftover food waste from the school has gone into composting containers rather than a landfill it would be buried and would produce planet-warming gases.
The school's composting program（come）into being in 2022, and this year, the school held a （celebrate）to reveal what happened inside a series of five-foot-tall containers. Steven Wynbrandt, a local farmer composting consultant who has helped the school with its program, broke the ties that held the container closed. Rich black compost spilled out from the container.
The school will use the compost on plants around campus. Some will （offer）to families that want to use it at home, and whatever is left will be donated.
It takes two hours for the container to be emptied and prepared to receive next day's lunch leftovers. The other containers remain full of food waste that is in the process of （break）down. Decorated （poster）on the outside of each container indicate when they can be opened so that the next generation of plants on campus can benefit the rich soil.
After several deliveries, I found it wasn't very efficient.
Three and a half years later, I saved a massive $6,500, and Dad and I flew to Cairo, Egypt.
