This Sunday in London, an American running phenomenon will hit the UK for the first time — and looks set to leave a mark. The Color Run™ series, founded in 2011 by Utah resident Travis Snyder, who currently lives in Los Angeles, is a 5k with a twist: runners start in white clothing, and at each kilometer get caked in brightly colored powders (made from 100% eco-friendly and natural food-grade corn starch) thrown by volunteers.

    Snyder, 35, previously organized rock climbing events but says it was having a child that inspired him to think of an event combining fitness and pleasure. So far,  600,000 people have already taken part in Snyder's fitness festivals across the world, from Sydney to Rio de Janeiro, becoming America's biggest 5k along the way.

    What does Snyder think is its appeal? "I think sometimes people get tired of being so competitive," he says. "In a running event, the person next to you is the tool that you are going to compare yourself to; whether or not you run faster than them or they run faster than you. The Color Run still has running in its basis: people still get to be out and be active. But instead of it being an exclusive experience, it's an inclusive experience, where the people next to you are part of that."

    The events attract a large population, including families and children, along with a higher proportion of women than most runs. For many, it is their first race and furthest distance. Synder's eight-year-old son has taken part in 20 of the races. "It's not a big deal because he doesn't think of it as 5k – he is just running and having fun."

    In line with this theme of participation rather than competition, there are no praises for coming first. If runners want to get a result, they will have to track it themselves, as it is not officially timed. And, needless to say, the finish line is one big party – before the clean up begins.

    Here comes a story that many years ago a man arrived at a village in India to catch monkeys so he could sell them to zoos. The monkeys, however, were very clever and every sort of trap he set failed. A young boy watched the man's pathetic efforts and laughed.

    The man said, “If you can catch me a monkey, I'll give you $ 2.” That was a huge amount of money then.

    The boy went to his home and took a clay pot with a narrow neck. He placed a few nuts around the pot and put lots of nuts inside. He then tied the pot to a tree and told the man, “We should have a rest in a few hours. Let's wait in the village. The monkey will call us when he is ready.”

    Certainly enough, a band of monkeys soon discovered the nuts and the pot. One slipped his hand in the pot and grabbed a handful of nuts, but he couldn't pull his hand out of the narrow opening of the pot because his fist(拳头) was clenched. The monkey feared and started making loud noises. Some of the other monkeys tried unsuccessfully to pull the pot off his hand.

    The boy and the man heard the noises and the boy got a big strong bag. As they approached the monkeys they all ran away except the one with its hand in the pot. The boy grabbed the monkey and the pot. The man was amazed and asked the boy the secret of his monkey trap, “Why was it so easy for the monkey to get his hand in but so hard to get it out?”

    The boy laughed and said, “The monkey could have easily got his hand back out and escaped, but he would have had to let go of the nuts in the pot and he just wasn't willing to let go. They never are.”

    What lessons can be learned from this story? Do people sometimes trap themselves by holding onto things that they should let go? Do you?

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。

    Mom was a teacher most of her life. When she wasn't in the classroom, she was educating her children or grandchildren: correcting our grammar; starting us on collections of butterflies, flowers or rocks; or inspiring a discussion on her most recent “Book of the Month Club” topic. Mom made learning fun.

    It was sad for my three brothers and me to see her illness in her later years. At eighty-five, she suffered a stroke(中风) and she went steadily(不断地) downhill after that.

    Two days before she died, my brothers and I met at her nursing home and took her for a short ride in a wheelchair. While we waited for the staff to lift her limp body back into bed, Mom fell asleep. Not wanting to wake her, we moved to the far end of the room and spoke softly. Several minutes our conversation was interrupted by a muffled sound coming from across the room. We stopped talking and looked at Mom. Her eyes were closed, but she was clearly trying to communicate with us. We went to her side.

    “Whirr,” she said weakly.

    “Where?” I asked. “Mom, is there something you want?” “Whirr,” she repeated a bit stronger. My brothers and I looked at each other and shook our heads sadly.

    Mom opened her eyes, sighed, and with all the energy she could gather said, “Not was, say were!”

    It suddenly occurred to us that Mom was correcting brother Jim's last sentence. “If it was up to me…”

    Jim leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Thanks, Mom,” he whispered. We smiled at each other and once again shook our heads…this time in awe (敬畏) of a remarkable teacher.

    Guide to Stockholm University Library

    Our library offers different types of studying places and provides a good studying environment.

    Zones

    The library is divided into different zones. The upper floor is a quiet zone with over a thousand places for silent reading, and places where you can sit and work with your own computer. The reading places consist mostly of tables and chairs. The ground floor is the zone where you can talk. Here you can find sofas and armchairs for group work.

    Computers

    You can use your own computer to connect to the wifi specially prepared for notebook computers; you can also use library computers, which contain the most commonly used applications, such as Microsoft Office. They are situated in the area known as the Experimental Field on the ground floor.

    Group-study Places

    If you want to discuss freely without disturbing others, you can book a study room or sit at a table on the ground floor. Some study rooms are for 2-3 people and others can hold up to 6-8 people. All rooms are marked on the library maps.

    There are 40 group-study rooms that must be booked via the website. To book, you need an active University account and a valid University card. You can use a room three hours per day, nine hours at most per week.

    Storage of study material

    The library has lockers for students to store course literature. When you have obtained at least 40 credits(学分), you may rent a locker and pay 400 SEK for a year's rental period.

    Rules to be followed

    Mobile phone conversations are not permitted anywhere in the library. Keep your phone on silent as if you were in a lecture and exit the library if you need to receive calls.

    Please note that food and fruit are forbidden in the library, but you are allowed to have drinks and sweets with you.

    Stained glass (彩色玻璃) artists create different designs by making cuts on the glass to “score” it and then breaking off the pattern that they want to use in the finished product. The most difficult cut in stained glass is called an inside cut. Basically, it's a curved (弯曲的) line where you throw away the part inside of the curve. The problem with inside cuts is that the edges of the curve tend to break off when the pieces of scored glass are broken apart.

    As the artist talked about inside cuts, he said, “The glass will break into pieces if you try to cut too much off at once. The best way to do an inside cut is to slice off smaller curves piece-by-piece. In fact, it's not just the best way to do it, but it's the only way to do it.”

    How many times do you try to make a big change and cut the entire piece at once? We convince ourselves that we can do this all the time. We'll commit to transforming our diet overnight or we get inspired to launch a business in a weekend or we finally get motivated to work out and push ourselves to the edge of burning out.

    Why not approach your goals and dreams like a stained glass artist? Starting by slicing a shallow curve and breaking a small piece off, you cut a slightly deeper curve and break that off until you have your full inside cut. By slowly cutting deeper and deeper curves, you prevent the glass from breaking as it changes shape.

    Of course, change isn't easy — no matter how you do it. Slow gains are boring, but if we keep making small improvements, then pretty soon we will end up with a beautiful masterpiece on our hands instead of a bunch of broken pieces.

    We've all heard the saying: practice makes prefect! In other words, acquiring skills takes time and effort. But how exactly does one go about learning a complex subject such as tennis, calculus, or even how to play the violin? An age-old answer is: practice one skill at a time. A beginning pianist might rehearse scales(音阶) before chords(和弦). A young tennis player practices the forehand before the backhand. Learning researchers call this “blocking”， and because it is common and easy to schedule, blocking is dominant in schools, training programs, and other settings.

    However another strategy promises improved results. Enter “interleaving”， a largely unheard-of technique that is catching the attention of  cognitive(认知) psychologists and neuroscientists. Blocking involves practicing one skill at a time before the next (for example, “skill A” before “skill B” and so on, forming the pattern “AAABBBCCC”), while in interleaving one mixes practice on several related skills together (forming for example the pattern “ABCABCABC”).

    Over the past four decades, a small but growing body of research has found that interleaving often outperforms blocking for a variety of subjects, including sports and category learning. Yet there have been almost no studies of the technique in unplanned, real world settings-until recently. New research in schools finds that interleaving produces dramatic and long-lasting benefits for an essential skill: math. Not only does this finding have the potential to transform how math is taught, it may also change how people learn more generally.

    Researches are now working to understand why interleaving produces such impressive results. One important explanation is that it improves the brain's ability to tell apart between concepts. With blocking, once you know what solution to use, or movement to do, the hard part is over. With interleaving, each practice attempt is different from the last, so rote(死记硬背) responses don't work. Instead, your brain must continuously focus on searching for different solutions. That process can improve your ability to learn critical features of skills and concepts, which then better enables you to select and produce the correct response.

    A second explanation is that interleaving strengthens memory associations. With blocking, a single strategy，temporarily held in short-term memory, is sufficient. That's not the case with interleaving-the correct solution changes from one practice attempt to the next. As a result, your brain is continually engaged at regaining different responses and bringing them into short-term memory. Repeating that process can strengthen neural connections between different tasks and correct responses, which improves learning.

    Both of these accounts imply that increased effort during training, either to discriminate correct responses or to strengthen them, is needed when interleaving is used. This corresponds to a potential drawback of the technique, namely that the learning process often feels more gradual and difficult in the beginning. However, that added effort can have better, longer-lasting results.