We spoke to three students from around the world about different national holidays. There are different customs (习俗) for each festival.

    Tan Xiaodong, 15, Hong Kong, China

    “It'll soon be Chinese New Year. Before it, we'll clean the house and decorate it for good luck. Every shop is going to close for a few days and we'll go out a lot to celebrate in the streets. We might go and see the lion and dragon dances in the city center. I love this festival.”

    Wendy, 16, Sydney, Australia

    “Australia Day is on 26th January and it's an important holiday here. We always have a Monday off, so we celebrate for three days. My parents and I go to the countryside for a picnic and friends always come over. Many people go to beach parties or street parties and there's lots of music and dancing. What fun！”

    Amy, 14, New York, USA

    “The first Thanksgiving Day was hundreds of years ago when Europeans who came to America thanked God for his help. It's still a very important day for families to be together. This year we're going to visit my grandparents and we'll eat a delicious meal of turkey. Thanksgiving Day is on the fourth Thursday in November every year.”

Information Card

    World Music Day is a music festival. It's on June 21st every year.

    In 1976, an American musician, Joel Cohen, suggested the idea of an all­night music celebration. He wanted the festival to happen on the longest day of the year. The idea was adopted(采用)by French Music and Dance director (舞蹈总监) Maurice Fleuret in 1981 and first took place in 1982 in France. Then the idea quickly spread(展开)to over one hundred cities around the world. The idea behind World Music Day is to promote(推广)music. This happens in two different ways. The first way is that people play their music and perform in the streets. The second way is to hold free concerts.

    Many of us can't live without music. World Music Day is more than just a festival. It's also a meeting place and a good time to put the music from each country together. The festival is popular with people in the world, and more and more people join in it.

⑴～⑵题完成句子；(3)题简略回答问题；(4)题找出文章主题句；(5)题将文中画线句子译成汉语。

    Wang Xiaohong is 7 years old. Her parents gave her an iPad as a present for her birthday. She was very excited and played with the ipad every day. A month later, her eyesight decreased(下降)to 300 degrees. Thin is serious for such a young girl Many children in China are facing the same problem tablet(平板电脑)and ipad using is bringing problems to their eyesight. The problem is so common that newspapers even call the iPad the " No. I killer of children's eyesight".

    "There are about 30 shortsighted(近视的)children coming every day, " said Hu Dali, an eye doctor at Guiyang Aier Eye Hospital " Half of those children have poor eyesight because they have played with phones and iPads for too long."

    Doctors and scientists say children's eyesight is not yet fully developed and their eyes get tired more easily. The screen of an ipad uses a very bright LED backlight. If children look at an iPad screen too much, their eyes do not have time to rest. This will make their eyesight worse over time.

    Doctors advise that users should hold their iPads between 40-60 centimeters away from them. The brightness of the screen should be comfortable for children. Children had better use iPads for less than one hour every day.

    Language is always changing and developing. This isn't a bad thing. If English hadn't changed for a long time, we won't have words to describe telephones, washing machines, computers or some other new things.

    Language changes for several reasons. First, it changes because the needs of its speaker change. New technologies, new products, and new experiences need new words to express them clearly. Another reason for change is that different people have different language experiences. People use different sets of words and expressions, because they have different ages, jobs, education levels(水平) and so on.

    How does language develop then? On the one hand, many of the languages changes begin with young people. When young people communicate with others of their own age, their language grows in grammar, words and expressions that are different from the older people's. Some have a short lifetime but others can influence the language for long. On the other hand, we get new words in many different ways. We borrow them from other languages, we create them by making words shorter or combining words and we make them out of proper names.

    Languages that don't change over time are considered dead languages. The fact that English changes so much shows that it is alive and well.

    Why do people cry? Scientists say the body produces tears because they need them. One kind of tears is for the eye, the other is for the heart. They both work as cleaners. If something else like dust(灰尘) gets into your eye, tears also come into the eye to clean it out. If you are hurt by something, your strong feelings produce some poisonous chemicals(毒素) in your body, and at the same time, tears come out with them. If these poisonous chemicals are not cleaned out of your body as soon as possible, they will do harm to the heart sooner or later.

    In the United States men have heart problems more often than women do. Doctors say heart problems have something to do with the pressures(压力) of living and working now. Perhaps men suffer more from these illnesses because they do not cry enough. They need to cry more.

    In fact, you can find many ways of reducing the pressures to keep fit. Crying is a natural and physical one.

    We live on the earth. We use the sea around us. What do we take from the ocean? And what do we give to it?

    We take fishes from the ocean—millions of kilograms of fish, every year, to feed millions of people. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}We take minerals (矿物) from the ocean. We can get salt by evaporating (蒸发) seawater. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}such as gold. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}Seaweed (海草) becomes food of many kinds—even candy and ice cream—as well as medicine. Believe it or not, fresh water is another gift from the sea. We can't drink ocean water. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}But ocean water becomes fresh water when the salts are removed. In the future, we will find ourselves depending more and more on fresh water from the sea.

    The sea gives us food, fertilizer, minerals, water and other gifts. What do we give the sea? We pollute the ocean all the time. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}Throwing waste into the ocean is killing off sea life. Yet as the world population grows, we may need the sea and its gifts more than ever.

    We are finally learning that if we destroy our sea, we might also destroy ourselves. Hopefully, it is not too late.