I'm a 34-year-old man, married, lived in a nice house, and have a successful career as an educational consultant. But my life was not always so great. I had a learning disability from an early age. I went to a special school where I got plenty of extra help. Still, I suffered the rest of my school days in public schools.

       My life improved remarkably when I discovered art. The art world gave me a chance to express myself without words. I went to a workshop and gradually got good at making things with clay(黏土). Here I learned my first important lesson: disabled as I was in language. I could still be smart and well express myself with clay. And my confidence came along.

I got my next lesson from rock climbing. It was a fun thing but I was scared from the start. I soon noticed it wasn't a talent thing; it was practice. So I did it more. After about five years of climbing, I found myself in Yosemite Valley on a big wall. I learned that if you fall in love with something and do it all the time, you will get better at it.

       Later I decided to apply my previous experience to learning how to read and write. Every day I practiced reading and writing, which I used to avoid as much as possible. After two hard years, I was literate.

       Having gone through the long process with art, rock climbing, and reading and writing, now I've got to a point in my life where I know I am smart enough to dive into an area that is totally unknown, hard, but interesting.

    While contact between adolescents (between the ages of fifteen and nineteen) and their peers (同龄人) is a universal characteristic of all cultures, the nature and the degree of such contact vary a great deal. In American contemporary society, adolescents spend much more time with their peers than with younger children or adults.

    This pattern of age segregation(隔离) in American society did not become usual until the beginning of the industrialized society. Changes in the workplace separated children from adults, with adults working and children attending school. The dramatic increase of mothers in the workplace has further contributed to the reduction in the amount of time adolescents spend with adults. School reform efforts during the nineteenth century, which resulted in age-segregated schools and grades, have reduced the amount of time adolescents spend with younger children. Finally, the changes in population are considered a factor that may have contributed to the emergence of adolescent peer culture. From 1955 t0 1975, the adolescent population increased dramatically, from 11 percent t0 20.9 percent. This increase in the number of adolescents might be a contributing factor to the increase in adolescent peer culture in terms of growth in size.

    Research supports the view that adolescents spend a great deal of time with their peers. Reed Larson and his colleagues examined adolescents' daily activities and found that they spend more time talking to their friends than engaging in any other activity. In a typical week, high school students will spend twice as much time with their peers as with adults. This gradual withdrawal from adults begins in early adolescence. In sixth grade, adults (excluding parents) account for only 25 percent of adolescent social networks. Another important characteristic of  adolescent peer culture is its increasingly autonomous (白治的) function. While childhood peer groups are conducted under the close supervision of parents, adolescent peer groups typically make an effort to escape adult supervision and usually succeed in doing so.

    (Note: Answer the questions or complete the statements in NO MORE THAN EIGHT WORDS.)

    A study of more than five million books, both fiction and non-fiction, has found a marked decline in the use of emotional words over time. The researchers form the University of Bristol used Google Ngram Viewer, a facility for finding the frequency of terms in scanned books, to search for more than 600 particular words identified as representing anger, dislike, fear, joy, sadness and surprise.

    They found that almost all of the categories (类别) showed a drop in these “mood words” over time. Only in the category of fear was there an increase in usage.

    “It is a steady and continuous decrease,” said Dr Alberto Acerbi. He assumed that the result might be explained by a change in the position occupied by literature, in a crowded media landscape. “One thing could be that in parallel to books the 20th century saw the start of other media. Maybe these media—movies, radio, drama—had more emotional content than books.”

    Although both joy and sadness followed the general downwards trend, the research, published in the journal PLOS One, found that they also exhibited another interesting behaviour：the ratio (比率) between the two varied greatly, apparently mirroring historical events.

    During the Roaring Twenties the joy-to-sadness ratio reached a peak that would not occur again until before the recent financial crash. But the ratio plunged at the height of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the researchers held a reserved opinion about their claim that their result reflected wider social trends. In the paper, they even argue that the reverse could be true.

“It has been suggested, for example, that it was the suppression (压抑) of desire in ordinary Elizabethan English life that increased demand for writing ‘filled with romance and sex' perhaps,” they conclude, “songs and books may not reflect the real population any more than catwalk models reflect the average body.”

     (Note：Answer the questions or complete the statements in NO MORE THAN TEN WORDS.)

    Born in 1949, Diana Nyad took an early interest in swimming as a sport and was a Florida State High School swimming champion. Like many young athletes, she had Olympic dreams, but a serious illness kept her from competing in the Games. The disappointment didn't stop her from going forward. Instead, she became interested in marathon swimming. A brilliant athlete, she was well-conditioned for spending long periods of time in the water. As a long-distance swimmer, she would compete against herself and the obstacles presented by distance, danger, cold, and exhaustion.

    For ten years Nyad devoted herself to becoming one of the world's best long-distance swimmers. In 1970, she swam a ten-mile marathon in Lake Ontario, setting the women's record for the course. In 1972 she set another record by swimming 102.5 miles from an island in the Bahamas to the coast of Florida. Then she broke a third record when swimming around Manhattan Island in 1975.

    Nyad attempted to swim the distance between Florida and Cuba in 1978. Though the span of water is less than 100 miles wide, it is rough and dangerous. After battling the water for two days, she had to give for the sake of her own health and safety. Even so, she impressed the world with her courage and strong desire to succeed. For Nyad her strength of purpose was just as important as reading Cuba. That is how she defined success. It did not matter that her swim came up short; she believed she had touched the other shore.

When Nyad ended her career as a swimmer, she continued to try new things—travelling the world as a reporter, writing books and giving public speeches about her life. Diana Nyad works to inspire others, just as she did when she swam the waters of the world.

    Last December, Doris Low turned 90. Once a week she still drives to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) in Toronto, where she helps transform literature into Braille(盲文) to bring the power of story and knowledge to the hears and minds of blind readers. She has been volunteering her time and talents to such enterprises foe more than 40 years.

    After working in the business world for a while, Low got fed up. So she turned to teaching at a technical school and later moved into the library.

    Low's mother liked reading. As her eyes began to fail, low read to her. Then “ hearing an advertisement encouraging people to learn Braille, I decided to give it a try.” In 1973, she was certified as a braille transcriber (转译者) and began transcribing books as a volunteer for the CNIB library.

The job was strenuous —she could get to the end of a page, make a mistake on the last line, and have to do the whole thing again. For a number of years, low also worked in the CNIB sound studio reading books onto tape. Three years ago, she took up proofreading (校对) at the CNIB's word factory.

    In April, during Volunteer Week, the CNIB recognized Low for her great contributions. Thanks to volunteers like Low, the CNIB library has got more than 80,000 accessible materials for people unable to read traditional print. “ I can't imagine how many readers of all ages have benefited from

Doris's contribution as a skilled volunteer through her rich voice and her high degree of accuracy in the hundreds of books she has brailled and proofread over the years— and she is still doing so,” said a CNIB official.

     “For me,” said Low, “the CNIB is more than just a place to volunteer. Three thins matter most in my life: a little play, a little work, a little love. I've found them all here.”

    It was a hot summer day that found me running down the street with a dollar in my sweaty hand. The closer I got to Sam & Joe's Stationery Store, the more excited I was. After all, a dollar was a tidy sum for an 11-year-old boy in 1961.

    Out of breath, I swung open the door and got a blast of cold air that instantly cooled me off. I was in a place of pure happiness. Sam & Joe's had it all—books, candy, toys, baseball cards，puzzles and games. I went directly to the bar and ordered a bottle of soda. There I sat, considering my next move.

    Books always came first. I picked out five titles. Next came the candy, rows and rows of it. I chose five candy bars, which brought my total to 75 cents. Then a bottle of cold orange juice, a bag of chips and a pack of Ted Williams baseball cards. After paying the clerk, I still had 5 cents.

    I hurried directly to my backyard, where an apple tree patiently waited for me. There, sitting in the shade against its strong trunk, I read my books, ate my candy and drank my orange juice.

    As I sat in my own personal heaven, I started thinking about having more. That's when a fantastic life—changing idea popped into head: If I could get more money, I could buy more books I liked, buy anything I wanted. That's how it all started.