America's Best National Parks

Pacific: Yosemite National Park, California

Closest city: Oakland, Calif. (3.5-hour drive)

    This Golden State treasure has thick forests and rock formations like the Half Dome—a naturalist's dream in winter, spring, summer or fall. “Anytime of year, it's such an important park,” says Patricia Schultz, author of 1000 Places to See Before you Die. She recommends taking a tour with a naturalist guide to learn about the reintroduction of wolves into the park.

Pacific: Denali National Park, Alaska

Closest city: Fairbanks, Alaska (two-hour drive)

    Denali National Park includes the towering Mt. McKinley. At 20,320 feet, it's America's tallest peak. “But the park's real glory is the wildlife viewing in a setting that is vast, terrific and pristine(原始的),” says Schultz.

West: Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

Closest city: Jackson, Wyo. (45-minute drive)

    Home to ski paradise Jackson Hole, the Grand Tetons offer a charming Wild West view in any season. Schultz especially likes the park for its cross-country skiing and wildlife sighting opportunities.

East: Acadia National Park, Maine

Closest city: Bangor, Maine (45-minute drive)

    A former haunt(消磨时光的去处) of an older generation of America's wealthiest, this stretch of coastline once played host to Rockefeller, Astor and Vanderbilt. Easy hiking trails(小道) lead through forests dotted with small lakes.

    Being organized is an important skill for school and life．When you're well organized, you can stay focused，instead of spending time hunting things down．

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#} For schoolwork, it means having one notebook or place where you store all your assignment，so you know what you have to do and when. Keeping all your school work neat and in a specific place—these are the main parts of organization.

        For home stuff, being organized means having a place to put your things and putting them back as you go. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} It means keeping your schoolbag，your shoes, and your clean underwear in the same places so you always know where to find them.

    Planning is part of being organized, too. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Calendars，lists，and schedules can help you plan. You can buy or draw a calendar and keep it near your workplace. Making a schedule or “to-do” list for yourself is a good idea. Looking at your list helps you keep track of what you need to do. {#blank#}4{#/blank#} Check off things when you've done them. Use your list to help you decide which thing is the most important to work on first.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} But once you're organized，it feels great．The less time you spend hunting around for things or panicking about homework，the more time you have for better things，like reading a good book or playing.

A. Planning means deciding what you will do and when you will do it.

B. First，you should get your schoolwork organized.

C. Add new things as you get assignments.

D. You will benefit a lot from a good habit.

E. What does it mean to be organized?

F. It takes some extra efforts to organize yourself and your stuff.

G. It means hanging your coat up instead of dropping it on the floor or throwing it on a chair.

    Chimps will cooperate in certain ways, like gathering in war parties to protect their territory. But beyond the minimum requirements as social beings, they have little instinct to help one another. Chimps in the wild seek food for themselves. Even chimp mothers regularly decline to share food with their children, who are able from a young age to gather their own food.

In the laboratory, chimps don't naturally share food either. If a chimp is put in a cage where he can pull in one plate of food for himself or, with no great effort, a plate that also provides food for a neighbor to the next cage, he will pull at random —he just doesn't care whether his neighbor gets fed or not. Chimps are truly selfish.

    Human children, on the other hand are extremely cooperative. From the earliest ages, they decide to help others, to share information and to participate in achieving common goals. The psychologist Michael Tomasello has studied this cooperativeness in a series of experiments with very young children. He finds that if babies aged 18 months see an unrelated adult with hands full trying to open a door, almost all will immediately try to help.

    There are several reasons to believe that the urges to help, inform and share are not taught .but naturally possessed in young children. One is that these instincts appear at a very young age before most parents have started to train children to behave socially. Another is that the helping behaviors are not improved if the children are rewarded. A third reason is that social intelligence develops in children before their general cognitive (认知的) skills, at least when compared with chimps. In tests conducted by Tomasello, the children did no better than the chimps on the physical world tests, but were considerably better at understanding the social world.

    The core of what children's minds have and chimps' don't is what Tomasello calls shared intentionality. Part of this ability is that they can infer what others know or are thinking. But beyond that, even very young children want to be part of a shared purpose. They actively seek to be part of a “we”, a group that intends to work toward a shared goal.

    Buying new clothes isn't an easy matter for everyone, here are some tips(建议) for you .When you want to go shopping, decide how much money you can spend on new clothes. Think about the kind of clothes you really need. Then look for those clothes you really need. Then look for those clothes on sale.

    There are labels(标签) inside all new clothes. The labels tell you how to take care of your clothes. The label for a shirt may tell you to wash it in warm water. A sweater label may tell you to wash in cold water. The label on a coat may say "dry clean only", for washing may ruin this coat. If you do as the directions(说明)on the label, you can keep your clothes looking their best for a long time.

    Many clothes today must be dry cleaned. Dry cleaning is expensive. When buying new clothes, check to see if they will need to be dry cleaned. You will save money if you buy clothes that can be washed.

    You can save money if you buy clothes that are well-made. Well-made clothes last longer. They look good even after they have been washed many times. Clothes that cost more money are not necessarily better made. They do not always fit better. Sometimes less expensive clothes look and fit better than more expensive clothes.

    Kakano means "seed" in Māori. For Jade Temepara, a Māori woman who was crowned New Zealand's Gardener of the Year in 2012, though, it means a lot more. Temepara owns Kākano, a Māori restaurant and cooking school in Christchurch, on New Zealand's South Island.

    Even a first-time tourist to New Zealand will notice the presence of the Māori culture and language everywhere. Now, so many non-Māori young people learn the language — a trend that picked up after the passage of the Māori Language Act in 1987 — that it's not unusual to hear teens and twenty somethings of European descent in Auckland asking their friends if they want to hang out and get some kai (food) later. That's a striking contrast from several generations ago, when New Zealand law banned Māori in schools, either in written or spoken form.

    While Temepara was happy to see the Māori language make a comeback, there were still parts of her native culture that were less present in New Zealand's daily life. She felt that too few Māoris of her generation were trained in their culture's traditional cooking methods and native ingredients (原料). That's when Temepara came up with the idea of launching a cooking education program that would go into Māori schools and other community gathering places to teach classes in traditional Māori cooking and food preparation.

    The idea was so successful that it eventually led to a brick-and-mortar cafe and shop in central Christchurch. There, Temepara trades in traditional kai — look for cold smoked mussels, karengo (a native seaweed), Manuka honey and a native variety of sweet potato called kumara.

    Although many of the ingredients grow wild in New Zealand, that doesn't mean just anybody can harvest them.

    "The Māori subtribe Katti Menguai are the only ones that are allowed to have some, if they come from a lineage of chiefs. It is by bloodline only. You can't even be invited. If you're not blood, that's it, you can't go. My family is of that lineage. And so, traditionally we would harvest the birds." This is both a tribal (部落的) practice and an accepted national law.

Richard Holmes, a British author and academic, is something of a Romantic, famous for biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his last book, "The Age of Wonder", he wrote about science and Romanticism and their common commitment to discovery. In his new book, "Falling Upwards", he combines the two again to tell the stories of Europe's early balloonists (气球飞行者).

Mr Holmes's love of balloons was aroused at a village festival and his enthusiasm is one of the book's many pleasures. He refers to the cheerful tone used in many first-hand ballooning stories, and applies it in this second-hand account. He describes men and women wrapped up in fur coats under their hydrogen-filled balloons, enjoying cold chicken and champagne and looking back to earth to see mankind "for what it really is."

Mr Holmes makes much of the strange side of ballooning, but the book is at its best when examining its more serious applications. In the American civil war, for example, both North and South put observers in balloons to spy on enemy movements. And during the Prussian attack on Paris in 1870-71， balloonists managed to fly out of the city to communicate with the French government in exile (流亡) in Tours.

"Falling Upwards" contains much of the historian's writing characteristics, such as footnotes and bibliography (文献书目), but its epilogue (后记) refers modestly to what has gone before as "a series of true balloon stories". It does touch on the more technical aspects of ballooning, and says little about the French Montgolfier brothers who are credited as its inventors. That though seems a small price to pay for such a spirited work. Mr Holmes's tale ends at the start of the 20th century when the business of flight was being handed over to the airship and the airplane.