“As easy as falling off a log” is often used to describe a job that does not take much effort. You might hear a student say to her friend that her spelling test was “as easy as falling off a log”. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}. It is easier to fall off the log than to stay on it.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}. One is “easy as pie”. Nothing is easier than eating a piece of sweet, juicy pie unless it is a “piece of cake”.

    “Piece of cake” is another expression that means something is extremely easy to do. A friend might tell you that his new job was a “piece of cake”.

    Another expression is “as easy as shooting fish in a barrel”. It is hard to imagine why anyone would want to shoot fish in a barrel. But, clearly, fish in a barrel would be much easier to shoot than fish in a stream. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}.

    Sometimes, things that come to us easily, also leave us just as easily. In fact, there is an expression —“easy come, easy go”—that recognizes this. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}. Easy come, easy go.

    When life itself is easy, when you have no cares or problems, you are on “Easy Street”. Everyone wants to live on that imaginary street.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}. It means to treat a person kindly or gently, especially in a situation where you might be expected to be angry with him. A wife might urge her husband to “go easy on” their son, because the boy did not mean to damage the car.

    {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    Home can be a great place for children to study. It's important to provide a workspace of their own where they can read books or just write a letter to their friends.

    Location (位置)

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}Kitchen and dining room are not so well suited for regular study，since books and pens get in the way of the day­to­day uses of those areas. Set up a place where a child can settle in and leave papers and pens at hand without having to clear everything away each night. For a child that likes being alone，set aside a corner of his bedroom，but keep it separate from things like games，music and other hobbies not related to studying.

    Keeping Things in Order

    Parents should encourage their child to spread out，but to leave it neat and orderly when he isn't using his workspace. Ownership is very important for self­respect{#blank#}3{#/blank#}The workplace should be personal，but not another part of the playroom.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Encourage the whole family to help build a supportive environment that children need for success in school. Give them a good example of how to deal with problems，how to manage time and get things done in the right way. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}Study will be more enjoyable and effective when supported by the whole family.

A．Attitude Is Everything

B．Bring Organization into Your Home

C．Here are several ways to choose a location.

D．Building a Good Home Learning Environment

E．Hold a can-do attitude and your child will follow your example.

F．Setting up a space in a common area of your home can be a good idea for children.

G．A child who learns to organize his space will carry organization into every corner of his life.

注意：每个空格只填1个单词。

    Ants: master cooperators

    Millions of ants live together in a colony, but they don't compete, get confused, or become disorganized. They behave in an amazing orderly manner at all times. Some scientists refer to ants as 'super-organisms' because they live in such highly organized societies that work together to survive. The way ants live and work together has made them one of the most important creatures on the planet.

    Ants, like bees, belong to a class of eusocial insects. Eusocial insects are broken into groups within their community, and each group has a special job to do depending on the needs of the community. There are three basic groups in an ant colony: queens, soldiers, and workers. Queens are the largest ants, and their only job is to reproduce—they lay all of the eggs that will eventually become soldiers and workers. Soldiers are responsible for protecting the colony and finding new places for nests. Worker ants have many jobs within the community, including caring for the eggs and young ants, hunting for food and maintaining the nest.

    Some scientists are studying how ants can lead to a better understanding of labor issues, social class, and the use of nature resources in human communities. Ants have had millions of years of practice in working together to survive and grow. For a colony to function successfully, ants have to cooperate, from which people can learn a lot. Researchers hope that gathering information about how ants live together in communities can help people learn to cooperate and compromise with each other.

    However, others argue that there are fundamental differences between ants and humans that mean human societies are unlikely ever to attain ant-like levels of collaboration. For example, ants in a colony don't compete with each other. When they are short of food in the colony, some worker ants automatically become 'feeder' ants and feed others with the food in their stomach, regardless of their usual job. When the food supply is replenished, they become worker ants again.

    In addition, ants are able to work together without a leader giving them directions. Despite their names, queen ants are not leaders. Instead, ants find out what they need to do from their sense of smell. Research on harvester ants pass each other, they pick up a chemical smell which tells them what the other ant is doing. The number of ants they pass doing a particular job determines what they need to do. It is a form of communication, but unlike human communication it has no content; it is just based on numbers.

    While ants undoubtedly have a great deal to teach us about organization and the structure of networks, those searching for a greater understanding of human behaviour and morals may need to look somewhere.

    Main {#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    They live together in colony without competitions, {#blank#}2{#/blank#} or being disorganized

    The way they work together for {#blank#}3{#/blank#} living in highly organized societies makes them unique on the planet.

    Three groups, including queens, soldiers and workers in an ant colony have a special job, {#blank#}4{#/blank#} the needs of the community {#blank#}5{#/blank#} of studying ants.

    It helps people understand labor issues, social class, and the use of natural resources better

    Ants are {#blank#}6{#/blank#} in working together to survive and grow, helping people run the communities smoothly

    It helps people learn to cooperate and {#blank#}7{#/blank#} with each other

    Differences between ants and humans

    For {#blank#}8{#/blank#} of food some worker ants automatically become "feeder ants {#blank#}9{#/blank#} ants, humans have leaders giving people directions

    Suggestion

    Researchers should have different {#blank#}10{#/blank#} in understanding human behaviour and morals.

The urge to share our lives on social media

    People have long used media to see reflections of themselves. Long before mobile phones or even photography, diaries were kept as a way to understand oneself and the world in which one lives. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as diaries became more popular, middle-class New Englanders, particularly white women, wrote about their everyday lives and the world around them.

    These diaries were not a place into which they poured their innermost thoughts and desires, but rather a place to chronicle (记录) the social world around them. The diaries captured the everyday routines of mid-19th-century life, and women diarists in particular focused not on themselves but on their families and their communities.

Diaries today are, for the most part, private. But things were different for these New England diaries. Young women who were married would send their diaries home to their parents as a way of maintaining kin (血缘) relations. When family or friends came to visit, it was not uncommon to sit down and go through one's journal together.

    Diaries are not the only media that people have used to document lives and share them with others. We have long used media like photo albums, baby books and even slide shows as a means of creating traces (痕迹) of our lives. We do this to understand ourselves and to see trends in our behaviour. We create traces as part of our identity and part of our memory.

    Sharing everyday life events can strengthen social connection and intimacy (亲密感). For example, you take a picture of your child's first birthday. It is not only a developmental milestone: the photo also strengthen the identity of the family unit itself. The act of taking the photo and proudly sharing it further reaffirms (再次证实) one as a good and attentive parent. In other words, the media traces of others figure in our own identities.

    Today's social media platforms are, by and large, free to use, unlike historical diaries, which people had to buy. Today, advertising subsidises (补贴) our use of networked platforms. Therefore these platforms encourage use of their networks to build larger audiences and to better target them. Our pictures, our posts, and our likes are commodified—that is, they are used to create value through increasingly targeted advertising.

    Instead of social media merely connecting us, it has become a craze (狂热) for information, continually trying to draw us in with the promise of social connectivity—it's someone's birthday, someone liked your picture, etc. There's a multibillion-dollar industry pulling us into our smartphones, relying on a longstanding human need for communication.

    The urge to be present on social media is much more complex than simply narcissism (自恋).

    Social media of all kinds not only enable people to see their reflections, but to feel their connection as well.

    The environmental group Heal the Bay organized a beach clean-up. And I was one of the volunteers. We went to Venice Beach to clean up the trash.

    At first glance, the beach didn't look dirty at all. But then I saw a Styrofoam(泡沫)cup half buried in the sand on the beach. I pulled hard and finally got it out. As we moved farther, we found pieces of Styrofoam spread all over the sand. The Heal the Bay representative had told us that these little pieces of Styrofoam and other small pieces of plastic are what actually harm sea life most. Sea animals eat the plastic. After eating it, they think they are full. As a result, they can die of starvation as they are cheated by their feeling and don't think they need to eat any food.

    We kept on picking up the trash. Then I saw someone with a full Heal the Bay trash bag and I went to see what was inside. When I opened the trash bag, I found everything from a pair of old jeans and a brown belt to headphones and some plastic bags. It made me very angry with the people who left their things behind without thinking what effects they might have on the ocean.

    It is really important to protect the ocean. The ocean covers 70 percent of the Earth's surface. A clean ocean not only helps animals in the ocean survive but also helps us survive.

    By noon, the sun was shining and the temperature was rising. The volunteers that had spread out across Venice Beach were coming back to throw the trash they had collected into the truck. I could not believe how much trash there was. All together we collected more than 135 bags of trash. I do hope that next time people go to the beach, they will stop littering.

    Over the past twenty years, American country music has become more and more popular. Song writers are no longer writing about the modern values of the USA—money, success or expensive things to buy. Instead, they are writing once more about things that are common for everyone: feeling alone in the modern world, the value of having good friends and so on.

    In the 1950s, American music was about other things, for example, love—getting or losing a boyfriend or girlfriend. Money was also thought to be important.

    Then in the 1960s, song writers turned to other subjects. During these years many young students were angry with society, so songs were often full of anger. Political leaders were not well thought of.

    Today country music has returned. It has become big business and brings in between 200 and 400 million dollars a year. Once, the home of American country music was Nashville, Tennessee. Now, however, the music has reached all parts of the States, from Los Angeles in the west to New York in the east. Singers do not just come from the States but from all over the world. There are many famous singers from Britain, Canada and Australia. A lot of them appear on television too.

    The first country singers sang while playing the guitar. It was easy for them to carry a guitar on their travels. Now, however, a lot of electrical equipment is needed for large theatres.

    Country music today still remains very popular.