My sister and I grew up in a little village in England. Our father was a struggling lawyer, but I always knew he was special. He never criticized us, but used praise to bring out our best. He'd say, "If you pour water on flowers, they flourish (茂盛). If you don't give them water, they die." I remember as a child I said something unkind about somebody, and my father said, "Any time you say something unpleasant about somebody else, it's a reflection of you." He explained that if I looked for the best in people, I would get the best in return. From then on I've always tried to follow the principle in my life and later in running my company.

    Dad's also always been very understanding. At 15, I started a magazine. It was taking up a great deal of my time, and the headmaster of my school gave me a choice: stay in school or leave to work on my magazine.

    I decided to leave, and Dad tried to sway me from my decision at first, as any good father would. When he realized I had made up my mind, he said, "Richard, when I was 23, my dad persuaded me to go into law. And I've always regretted it. I wanted to be a biologist, but I didn't pursue my dream. You know what you want. Go fulfill it."

    As it turned out, my little publication went on to become Student, a national magazine for young people in the U.K. My wife and I have two children, and I'd like to think we are bringing them up in the same way Dad raised me.

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    If two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct, people will still be driving gasoline powered cars 50 years from now, giving out heat-trapping carbon dioxide(二氧化碳) into the atmosphere—and yet that carbon dioxide will not contribute to global warming.

    In a proposal by two scientists, vehicle emissions(排放) would no longer contribute to global warming. The scientists, F. Jeffrey Martin and William L. Kubic Jr., are proposing a concept, which they have named Green Freedom, for removing carbon dioxide from the air and turning it back into gasoline.

The idea is simple. Air would be blown over a liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which would absorb the carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then be put to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel(燃料): gasoline or jet fuel.

    This process could change carbon dioxide from an unwanted, climate-changing pollutant into a vast resource for renewable fuels. The cycle—equal amounts of carbon dioxide produced and removed—would mean that cars, trucks and airplanes using the synthetic(合成的) fuels would no longer be contributing to global warming.

    Although they have not yet built a synthetic fuel factory, or even a small model, the scientists say it is all based on existing technology. “Everything in the concept has been built, is operating or has a close cousin that is operating.” Dr. Martin said.

    The Los Alamos proposal does not go against any laws of physics, and other scientists who have independently suggested similar ideas. Dr. Martin said he and Dr. Kubic had worked out their concept in more detail than former proposals.

    There is, however, a major fact that explains why no one has built a carbon-dioxide-to-gasoline factory: it requires a great deal of energy.

    According to their analysis, their concept, which would cost about $5 billion to build, could produce gasoline at an operating cost of $1.40 a gallon and would turn economically practical when the price at the pump hits $4.60 a gallon.

    Other scientists said the Los Alamos proposal perhaps looked promising but could not evaluate it fully because the details had not been published. “It's definitely worth pursuing,” said Martin I. Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University. “It's not that new an idea. It has a couple of pieces to it that are interesting.”

    Have you ever felt like you are not given the kind of respect you deserve? In one way or another, all of us have felt this way. We've yearned(渴望) to be looked at as an authority, someone people look up to and trust. We're not taught in school how to do this and our parents didn't tell us the secret on how to establish our authority. It's something we learn and gain by ourselves. And the answer is as simple as changing our mindset. What? No way! Oh but it is. People tend to underestimate the power of the mind. Change your game by changing your mind.

    Take time to look back and think about people in your life who are an authority or a leader at work, who has more credibility(可信度) than you or who you look up to and inspires you. They are up there not for the reasons you think. If you really think about it, they aren't the smartest of the bunch, not the most educated, and neither are they the best. And in no way do they even call themselves an expert. Instead, they are up there because they are great teachers and advocates(支持者) for the success of their customers or employees.

    Let's take Richard Simmons for example. This famous fitness personality has been a household name ever since he started gaining popularity during the first few years of his career. Stop and think, though, do you really think he is the best person to really get people into shape? Is he the Einstein of fitness and nutrition? Or does he even call himself a master of his craft? Of course not. People look up to him and give him authority because he is a great educator. Instead of sharing information that's far too complicated to understand, he figures out what your problems are and finds out a way to fix them. He even has social media that he updates on a regular basis with topics that are helpful and easy to understand for his fans and followers.

    Depending on the field you're in, you can share with people things you know and that you think they will want to know as well. If you're a nurse, for example, you can make a blog post for common health problems and quick remedies(治疗方法) people can do at home. Remember, the simpler you can make it, the better. People will trust you completely if you give them easy solutions. Like Richard, you'll soon be the expert you'll want to listen to. You can be an advocate also by showing people that you have their best interests at heart. You can also start up conferences to take up people's concerns and try to deal with them the best way that you can.

    So, how will you be viewed as an authority? Make that mind shift. Find out what concerns and troubles your target. Give solutions. Show that you care. And help them climb up that ladder of success. Ladies and gentlemen, that's how it's done.

    A bicycle may be seen by most people as just another vehicle (交通工具), but for many Londoners, cycling is a way of life. According to an official UK government survey in 2017, about 570,000 bike journeys are made every day in London. In fact, almost half of the vehicles that pass over London Bridge each day are bikes.

    London introduced a public bike-sharing system in 2010. “There can be no doubt that our trusty bicycles have changed the way people get around our great city,” Johnson told the Guardian in 2015.

    In London, bikes are used for more than just taking short trips to and from the subway. No matter where you want to go in the city, taking a bike is usually the quickest and easiest choice.

    And it's not just shared bikes that the government is encouraging people to ride. In many companies across the UK, the UK government's Cycle to Work scheme (骑行倡议) allows employees to buy a brand new bike without having to pay any tax (税). This means that it's common to see many people cycling to and from work, and some employers even provide workplace showers and lockers (储物柜) for their workers. More importantly, a cycle-friendly boss may let you off for being late if you rode a bike to work.

    Not only is it great for the environment and our body, cycling is also good for the mind. According to National Geographic Magazine, “Bike riding can improve people's happiness.”

    In 2009 a new flu virus was discovered. Combining elements of the viruses that cause bird flu and swine flu, this new virus, named H1N1, spread quickly. Within weeks, public health agencies around the world feared a terrible pandemic (流行病) was under way. Some commentators warned of an outbreak on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu. Worse, no vaccine(疫苗) was readily available. The only hope public health authorities had was to slow its spread. But to do that, they needed to know where it already was.

    In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) required that doctors inform them of new flu cases. Yet the picture of the pandemic that showed up was always a week or two out of date. People might feel sick for days but wait before consulting a doctor. Relaying the information back to the central organizations took time, and the CDC only figured out the numbers once a week. With a rapidly spreading disease, a two-week lag is an eternity. This delay completely blinded public health agencies at the most urgent moments.

    Few weeks before the H1N1 virus made headlines, engineers at the Internet giant Google published a paper in Nature. It got experts' attention but was overlooked. The authors explained how Google could "predict" the spread of the winter flu, not just nationally, but down to specific regions and even states. Since Google receives more than three billion search queries every day and saves them all, it had plenty of data to work with.

    Google took the 50 million most common search terms that Americans type and compared the list with CDC data on the spread of seasonal flu between 2003 and 2008. The idea was to identify areas affected by the flu virus by what people searched for on the Internet. Others had tried to do this with Internet search terms, but no one else had as much data-processing power, as Google.

    While the Googles guessed that the searches might be aimed at getting flu information—typing phrases like "medicine for cough and fever"—that wasn't the point: they didn't know, and they designed a system that didn't care. All their system did was look for correlations(相关性) between the frequency of certain search queries and the spread of the flu over time and space. In total, they processed 450 million different mathematical models in order to test the search terms, comparing their predictions against actual flu cases from the CDC in 2007 and 2008. And their software found a combination of 45 search terms that had a strong correlation between their prediction and the official figures nationwide. Like the CDC, they could tell where the flu had spread, but unlike the CDC they could tell it in near real time, not a week or two after the fact.

    Thus, when the H1N1 crisis struck in 2009, Google's system proved to be a more useful and timely indicator than government statistics with their natural reporting lags. Public health officials were armed with valuable information.

    Strikingly, Google's method is built on "big data"—the ability of society to handle information in new ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value. However,   ▲  . For example, in 2012 it identified a sudden rise in flu cases, but overstated the amount, perhaps because of too much media attention about the flu. Yet what is clear is that the next time a pandemic comes around, the world will have a better tool to predict and thus prevent its spread.

    On my first day of high school, going into math class, I was pointed and laughed at by two of my classmates. I initially thought my fly was open, or that something was stuck in my teeth. But as I took my seat, I heard one student whisper, "Why is a black boy taking Honors?" So, my fly wasn't open. An honors level class had simply been taken by a student whose skin was brown.

    Many people think my clothes should be big enough for me to live in, or expect me to listen to only "black music." In seventh grade, a group of my classmates fixed their cold stares on my clothes. They called out to me, "Go get your gangsta clothes." In one of my Spanish classes, the teacher asked me, "Do you like rap music or rock music more?" I replied, "Rock." The look of shock on my classmates' faces made me uncomfortable.

    Now I still take all Honors courses. I still wear clothes that fit me. My music library covers from rock to pop to techno, and almost everything in between. When it comes to choosing my friends, I am still colorblind. I continue to do my best to work in school in order to reach my goals; and yet, when I look in the mirror, I still see skin of that same brown.

    I believe in being myself. I believe that I myself should decide who I am and what actions I take in life. In high school, popularity often depends on your willingness to follow trends. And I've been told that it doesn't get much easier going into adulthood. But the only other option is to sacrifice my personality for the satisfaction and approval of others. This can be appealing, but I'm not going to do that.