It was in October. I was aimlessly wandering down the street, heading into a most gloriously beautiful sunset. I had an urge to speak to someone on the street to share that beauty, but it seemed everyone was in a hurry.

    I took the next-best action. Quickly I ducked into a department store and asked the lady behind the counter if she could come outside for just a minute. She looked at me as though I were from some other planet. She hesitated, and then seemingly against her better judgment, she moved toward the door.

    When she got outside I said to her, “Just look at that sunset! Nobody out here was looking at it and I just had to share it with someone.”

    For a few seconds we just looked. Then I said, “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.” I thanked her for coming out to see it; she went back inside and I left. It felt good to share the beauty.

    Four years later my situation changed greatly. I came to the end of a twenty-year marriage. I was alone and on my own for the first time in my life. I lived in a trailer park which, at the time, I considered a real come-down, and I had to do my wash in the community laundry room.

    One day, while my clothes were going around, I picked up a magazine and read an article about a woman who had been in similar circumstances. She had come to the end of a marriage, moved to a strange community, and the only job she could find was one she disliked: clothing sales in a department store.

    Then something that happened to her changed everything. She said a woman came into her department store and asked her to step outside to look at a sunset. The stranger had said, “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world,” and she had realized the truth in that statement. From that moment on, she turned her life around.

    Many people believe that you lose the ability to learn new languages as you get older. Language experts, however, will tell you that you're never too old to learn a new language. As you get older, it can be more difficult to learn a new language, though.

    Children and adults learn new languages in different ways. For children, language is their life. They study for thousands of hours every year, because they need to learn languages to become part of their communities. Adults, on the other hand, are already part of a language community. Learning a new language means becoming part of another language community, and adults rarely get the chance to practice as much as young children do.

    Moreover, children learning a new language are expected to make mistakes. This gives them freedom when learning to be daring and confident. Adults, however, often feel pressured to be perfect when learning a new language. This can discourage many people and make it even harder to learn a new language.

    When young children learn a new language, they come to see various languages as a “normal” part of society. This mindset （思维模式） helps them embrace learning a new language without feeling like they're doing something unusual or “too hard”.

    So if you want to learn a new language, go for it! It's never too late to learn a new language. If you're older, it may take more work, but it can be done. If you're a young child, though, now is the time to step out and learn a new language!

阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项（A、B、C和D）中，选出最佳选项。

    There are many useful suggestions that can help one to improve English. Here are some of them to increase one's English language vocabulary.

    Learning English vocabulary is about much more than just learning the right words. It is based on understanding important words and expressions.

    Learning a word will not help very much if you quickly forget it. Researches show that it takes from 10 to 20 repetitions(重复) to really make a word part of your vocabulary. Since most words are learned from how they are used in context (上下文), the more words one is shown, the better vocabulary one will have. Keep a piece of paper close to you. When you read, pay close attention to the word you do not know, write the word down and try to understand its meaning from the context. Then look up the word in a dictionary. 

    Remember that if you do not use English words that you have just learned in conversation or writing, you will forget them very quickly. So the best way to learn new words effectively is just by trying to use them in conversation and writing. Remember also that practice is the key to fluent spoken English.

    Building vocabulary is a life-long task. Remember: ＂In the beginning was the word.＂ Your future could depend on how rich your vocabulary is. It will also determine the quality of your communication.

Reasons to visit St.Louis

Whether you're traveling alone, with a friend or with the whole family, there's a nearly endless selection of activities you'll want to experience—so many that it's hard to decide where to go first.

Missouri Botanical Garden

    You could easily spend an entire day making your way through the 79 acres(英亩)on display here. The gardens also boast(以拥有……而自豪) seasonal exhibits, such as the summer Lantern Festival—taking place through July—that showcases beautiful works of light each year.

4344 Shaw Blvd, 314-577-5100, missouribotanicalgarden. org.

St. Louis Art Museum Free

    There are more than 33,000 works on display here, including the recent addition of 225 donated pieces of feature work by American artists and more than 200 pieces from Asia. The museum is free, and special exhibits are free on Fridays.

    I Fine Arts Drive, 314-721-0072, slam. Org
St. Louis Science Center Free

    With a wealth of displays to keep kids and adults alike entertained and learning all day, the center boasts an impressive 700 hands-on exhibits, including a fossil dig site, water tables in the discovery room, electrical energy demonstrations, and cyber activities.

    5050 Oakland Ave, 314-289-4400, slsc.org

St. Louis Zoo Free (Free for some attractions)

    The zoo includes beautiful naturalistic displays and boasts plenty of activities to keep kids excited, from feeding exhibitions and safaris(游猎), to sea lion shows and conservation talks.

    One Government Drive, 314-781-0900, stlzoo.org.

    Around this time a few years ago, it was common to see videos of friends on social media having a bucket of icy water thrown on them. Known as the “ice bucket challenge”, it was created as a way to raise money for the medical condition ALS. But now, there's a new challenge and this time, no water is involved.

    What is it? Well, think of a fruit that you'd never normally sink your teeth into. Perhaps you've got it: a lemon. While we enjoy using lemons to add flavor to dishes, very few of us would actually eat one as we'd eat an apple or an orange.

    But the horrible taste is the precise reason why the “lemon face challenge” is taking off. Participants bite into a lemon, taking a selfie as they do it before posting the photo online. The fun is all about expression people make as all that citric acid (柠檬酸) hits their taste buds (味蕾). Every expression seems to say, “This is worse than freezing water.”

    The serious side to this trend is the good cause it's all in aid of. The challenge aims to raise awareness of a rare brain cancer that affects young children. It was started by Aubregh Nicholas, an 11-year-old US kid. She was diagnosed with this rare brain cancer herself in September 2017, but has since raised almost $50000 to cover her medical expenses thanks to the challenge.

    If a challenge is going to raise publicity and contributions from people, it has to be something interesting and original. That way the ice bucket challenge took off in 2014 and it explains why so many people are now sharing their lemon faces. There are a lot of stories about the downside of social media these days. The charity challenges, however, show how online culture can unite the world and bring help to the people who most need it.

    Time flies, but the tracks of time remain in books and museums. This is what made a recent tragedy in Brazil even more terrible.

    On Sept.2, a big fire ripped through the National Museum of Brazil.“ Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge were lost,” Brazilian President Michel Temer wrote on Twitter after the fire. “It's a sad day for all Brazilians.”

    Most of the 20 million pieces of history are believed to have been destroyed. Only as little as 10 percent of the collection may have survived, Time reported. Among all the items, there were Egyptian mummies, the bones of uniquely Brazilian creatures such as the long－necked dinosaur Maxakalisaurus, and an 11,500－year－old skull called Luzia, which was considered one of South America's oldest human fossils.

    Besides these, Brazil's indigenous(本土的，土著的) knowledge also suffered. The museum housed world－famous collections of indigenous objects, as well as many audio recordings of local languages from all over Brazil. Some of these recordings, now lost, were of languages that are no longer spoken.

    “The tragedy this Sunday is a sort of national suicide, a crime against our past and future generations,” Bernard Mello Franco, one of Brazil's best－known columnists, wrote on the O Globo newspaper site.

    The cause of the fire is still unknown, as BBC News reported on Sept. 3. After the fire burned out, crowds protested outside the museum to show their anger at the loss of the irreplaceable items of historical value.

    According to Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida, museums are living, breathing stores of who we are and where we've come from, and the world around us.

    Just as underwater grass floats on the surface if it loses its roots, a nation is lost without its memories. The fire at the National Museum of Brazil teaches the world an important lesson: We should never neglect history.