Sure, you talk to your parents, but what if you need to really talk? Maybe you have a problem you can't solve alone, or it could be that you want to feel closer to Mom and Dad.

    It's easy to say" Hi, Mom" or "Dad, can you pass the potatoes?", but it can be harder to start a discussion about tougher topics. When you were younger, it probably felt easy to tell your parents about your trouble. Even though you're older now, it's still perfectly OK to believe in your parents. In fact, it can help a lot.

    So why does it seem so uncomfortable at times? Why is it hard to bring up the important stuff? Sometimes kids don't speak up because they don't want to feel embarrassed. Let's face it—talking about personal stuff can make you feel embarrassed. But remember, your parents know you pretty well, and they were your age once, too! So don't let a little embarrassment stop you. It's OK to go ahead and share the personal stuff.

    Other times, kids might not want to make their parents anxious or upset. As you explain your problem, your mom might look sad or your dad might look worried. But that's OK. Your mom and dad can deal with knowing about your problem, big or small. That look on their face just means they care, and they feel for you. That's what families do—we feel for the people we love.

    Sometimes, kids don't bring up a problem because they just don't want to think about it. They hope it will just go away. When meeting a problem, they will likely choose not to face it or just keep it for themselves. But running away from a problem hardly ever solves it. And bottling up your feelings can make you feel stressed.

    Talking things over with a parent can help you feel less stressed. Together, you can think of ways to solve the problem and make you feel better. Just knowing your parent understands and cares about what you're going through can reduce your stress a lot.

    Daniel was born in New Orleans, LA., in 1962, slow to walk and talk, and short. He was the tiniest in his class, but he developed a warm, outgoing nature and was popular with his peers(同龄人). And he became skillful at sports.

    Baseball gave him his earliest challenge. He was an excellent players in Little League. At graduation, the coach named Daniel the team's most valuable player.

    His finest hour, though, came at a school science meeting. He entered an exhibit explaining how the circulatory system works. It was traditional, especially compared to（与…相比）the modern, computerized, blinking-light models entered by other students. My wife, Sara, felt embarrassed for him.

    It turned out that the other kids had made their exhibits. As the judges went on their rounds, they found that these other kids couldn't answer their questions. Daniel answered every one. When the judges awarded the Albert Einstein Plague for the best exhibit, they gave it to him.

    By the time Daniel left for college he stood six feet tall and weighed 170 pounds. He was in superb condition, but he quit baseball for English literature. I was sorry that he would not develop his athletic talent, but proud that he had made such a satisfactory decision.

    One day I told Daniel that the great failing in my life had been that I didn't take a year or two off to travel when I finished college. This is the best way, to my way of thinking, to broaden oneself. Once I had married and begun working, I found that the dream of living in another culture had disappeared. Daniel thought about this. After graduation, he worked as a waiter at college, a bike messenger and a house painter. With the money he earned, he had enough to go to Paris.

    The night before he was to leave, I tossed in bed. I was trying to figure out something to say. Nothing came to mind. Maybe, I thought, it wasn't necessary to say anything.

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。

    You may not know a lot of people when you start high school. Even if you know some new students, you still feel nervous that you don't know any upperclassmen (高年级学生) and teachers. How are you going to make friends among this sea of unknown faces?

    Most high schools welcome new students before school actually starts. These are helpful not only because you learn your way around the buildings and get to meet some of your teachers, but also because you get to meet new students. That way, when you show up on your first day of school, you may already recognize a few familiar faces.

    When you talk to people, you'll probably find that a lot of them are feeling just like you. They're all new to the school and don't know what to expect. Talking about a common concern with your classmates can help you develop friendships.

    The work in high school is something freshmen are probably worried about. The work in high school builds on what you learned in middle school, giving you a more advanced knowledge of many subjects. So you may find you have more work to do or that it's a bit more challenging (有挑战性的). If you ever find your work too difficult, teachers can give you extra help.

    High school also has more activities after class than middle school, such as clubs, music and theater groups and sports teams. This is a good time to explore your interests and try new things.

    Middle school taught you the basics of academics, time management, and social skills while providing you with a little extra support and guidance. High school gives you the chance to learn how to be more independent (独立的) and responsible (有责任的).

    If conditions get bad enough, almost any kind of weather can become a storm.

Stormy weather can cause people to cancel their plans. It can cause major events to be postponed. And severe stormy weather can be dangerous to people, fortune and anima1.

    If you weather the storm, or ride out the storm, you survive and move on without harm or injury. For example, 1et's talk about Tornado Alley, the name for part of the central United States. During springtime, this area often has a large number of powerful tornadoes. People who live there are taught to shelter in the safest place they can find and wait for the storm to pass. People who live in Tornado Alley are used to weathering many storms!

    You can also weather a storm, but it doesn't involve actual weather. “To weather the storm” can also mean to make it through a difficult experience or trying times. So, if the stock market(股市)crashes, you might have to weather a financial storm.

    Often before a big storm, conditions are calm. The calm before the storm can happen anytime. It is the time before something bad happens. For example, at the beginning of a family reunion, the adults were all talking happily. But the older children knew it was just the calm before the storm. They've seen it happen before. The adults talk happily for about an hour. Then they start arguing about events from the past—things that should really stay buried!

    But after the storm begins and you find yourself in the middle of it, you are in the eye of the storm. In the world of weather, the eye of the storm is the calmest part, in the center of a hurricane, for example. However, in the English language, if you are in the eye of the storm, you are in the most intense part of a conflict. For example, she had no idea that walking into the meeting would put her in the eye of the storm.

    However, a brainstorm does not exist in the world of weather. To brainstorm means to try to solve a problem by talking with other people. And don't worry. If we have trouble thinking of an idea for the next program, we can always brainstorm with you!

Video calls are a common occurrence, but have you imagined being able to touch the person on the other end of the line? Scientists are making this a reality.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales, Australia, have invented a soft skin stretch device (SSD), a haptic device that can recreate the sense of touch. Haptic technology can mimic the experience of touch by stimulating localized areas of the skin in ways that are similar to what is felt in the real world, through force, vibration or motion.

Vibration is the most common haptic technology today and has been built into many electronic devices, such as one attached to the back of a trackpad in laptops. However, haptic feedback with vibration becomes less sensitive when used continuously. The existing technology also has great difficulty recreating the sense of touch with objects in virtual environments or located remotely.

The new technology overcomes issues with existing haptic devices. The research team introduced a novel method to recreate the sense of touch through soft, artificial "muscles".

It works like this: imagine you call a friend in Australia. You wear a haptic glove with the SSDs and your friend also wears a glove with 3D force sensors. If your friend picks up an object, it will physically press against your friend's fingers. And the glove with 3D force sensors will measure these interactions. The force signals can be sent to your glove so your device will generate the same 3D forces, making you experience the same sense of touch as your friend.

The haptic devices could be used in various fields, allowing users to feel objects inside a virtual world or at a distance. This could be especially beneficial during such times like the COVID-19 pandemic when people rely on video calls to stay connected with loved ones. Or it could be used in medical practices. Doctors can feel a patient's organ tissues without touching them.

Anyone who has never been to China Braille Library will draw to mind various images of the place.They would wonder how the library works all the way.In fact, the library offers readers a pleasant space with several broad reading rooms on the third floor,and has 18,269 kinds of books, including 3,523 kinds of braille books, 809 kinds of braille journals, 419 kinds of books written in both braille and visible language, and 142 kinds of children's ordinary books.

The library is open to the 17 million visually impaired people in China. This library has an arrangement with China Post, under which it has manufactured a special kind of mailing bag with cards where the address of the library is printed on one side.The borrowers can make phone calls, or send WeChat messages or emails to the librarian, listing the books they are seeking. The librarian then fishes out these books, puts them into the mailing bag, fills in the address of the borrower on the other side of the card and waits for a postman to pick up the bag.Whenever the borrower finishes reading, he or she needs to put the books back into the bag, turn the address card around and put it into a postbox for the books to return to the library.

In the age of multimedia, books have taken various forms. That applies to the world of the visually impaired, too.CBL offers its readers a smart listening device that looks like an old-fashioned cellphone. Guided by a recorded voice, a user has to just press a few buttons to gain access to 20 terabytes of audiobooks stored on the CBL website.The smart listening device is part of a Digital Reading Project for the Blind launched by China Disabled Persons' Federation in 2017.

As part of the program, the government purchased 200,000 such devices and distributed them to the over 400 Braille libraries and barrier-free reading rooms nationwide for lending to the visually impaired. Now, 80 percent of them are still in use, which means more than 160,000 visually impaired people are benefiting from it.