Let Kids with Cancer Be Kids Again!
We care about the needs of kids with cancer
Camp quality originated in 1983 in Sydney, Australia. The camp was created to give kids with cancer and their family a place to interact with other children and have an extraordinary summer. Activities are designed with kids in mind such as swimming, fishing, arts and crafts, and even the beloved campfires.
Companions and volunteers
The safety of campers and staff(员工)is of top priority to Camp Quality Arkansas. Each staff member is required to attend a training session. Within these sessions, each potential staff member gets to know the program and then a decision is made to decide whether he or she will fit best in the camp.
"In all of our volunteers we look for adults who can lead with their own actions and have a child-like spirit. This ability to have fun is essential to the success of the camp. While the companions work directly with the campers, we are always on the lookout for volunteers to fill the positions of RNs, certified lifeguards, photographers, and kitchen staff," said Amber Dovel, volunteer coordinators at Camp Quality Arkansas.
A unique function of the camp is that for each kid a companion is assigned. A companion is a reminder of "hope, courage, and happiness, not only during the week of camp, but all year round," according to the official website.
Contact us
For more information visit www.campqualityusa.org or contact Director, Chris Jennings at Chris. Jennings@camoqualityusa.org.
Do you often feel that you aren't taking in as much of the joy around you as you could? I recently caught myself feeling this way, and based on a suggestion by John Horton, coauthor (合著者) of The Inner Game of Stress, I put myself on a 30-day life-appreciation course.
The only assignment each day was to go outside and appreciate life.
So I started by taking in the beauty around me. During the first few days, I was able to appreciate my surroundings, although it was an intellectual appreciation, not an emotional one.
After the first week, it was more uncomfortable to lie in bed and think about things than it was to get up and see them for myself.
If you often wake up feeling anxious or depressed, or if you don't look forward to each day, then you need to try this course for yourself.
It's an inner workout that you can do anywhere. It may not change your life, but it will adjust your attitude, and that's pretty helpful in this crazy world.
I have always believed in ending the day on a positive note by writing a word or two in a gratitude journal and saying something sweet to my wife about the day we shared.
Now, I have a new morning habit. It hasn't changed my routine one bit, but it has changed the way I look at the world.
Creating a new habit isn't about perfection – it's about getting what you want by creating a change in your behavior and thinking.
So now, while I'm making my coffee in the morning, I'm also appreciating what I have.
It's quick, fulfilling, and a much better way to start my day than looking at my phone or computer.
And because of this, my attitude is better, as I've already begun my morning on a positive note rather than a problematic one.
The idea here is that if you can appreciate your life, it actually changes the way you feel about it.
Appreciation will give you more energy to live the way you would like to live.
As a means of improving our mood, it's highly underrated (被低估的). The easy task of appreciating what we have simply makes life better.
Depression(抑郁) can be a destructive illness, plaguing millions of people worldwide with feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and fatigue. Despite numerous antidepressant drugs, as many as a third of patients don't respond to medication. This has forced doctors to be more creative in finding different treatments for the condition.
In the past two decades, researchers have tied depression to a seemingly unrelated condition: inflammation(炎症), the body's natural response to stress. It could rise from injury or inflection, or even emotional issues like an unhappy marriage or problems at work. Some amount of inflammation is generally beneficial, as it increases production of cytokines(致癌因子)，proteins that help us heal and protect us from the effects of overwork.
But excessive cytokine levels, and the inflammation they bring on, could come at a cost—a number of studies suggests that high levels of cytokines could contribute to depression.
Cytokines can reach the brain several ways: directly through the blood-brain barrier or indirectly by binding to nerve fibers elsewhere, which send signals to the brain to produce the inflammation molecules. In the brain, cytokines can disturb the production and release of several important signaling chemicals, including serotonin, dopamine and glutamate, which help control emotion, appetite, sleep, learning and memory. It's though that a lack of serotonin activity in the brain causes depression; most antidepressants increase the activity. But cytokines also have been shown to activate stress hormone signaling in the brain, which man also serve to develop depression.
With all the evidence implicating inflammation in depression, doctors have been anxious to test anti-inflammatory drugs as a potential treatment. Four small studies published between 2006 and 2017 by research groups in Europe and Iran found that adults diagnosed with depression who took aspirin or another anti-inflammatory drug called Celecoxib, along with an antidepressant, got more relief from feelings of sadness, hopelessness, guilt and fatigue compared with those taking an antidepressant alone. However, Andrew Miller, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University, thought something was wrong in these small, limited studies. None of them looked at whether the participants had to have high levels of cytokines before they'd see a benefit from anti-inflammatory drugs. "Unfortunately, much of the field has fallen into the trap of viewing inflammation as the be-all, end-all," Miller says. He and his colleagues wanted to see whether the effect of these drugs was limited to the depression patients with high cytokine levels, or if it helped all people diagnosed with depression.
( ①—⑤ represent Para 1—5 )
B . 
C . 
D . 
I come from a large family of nine brothers and sisters, and all of us have kids of our own. On each Christmas night, our entire family gathers at my oldest sister's home, exchanging gifts, watching the nativity skit put on by the smaller children, eating, singing and enjoying a visit from Santa himself.
The Christmas of 1988, my husband Bob and I had four children. Peter was eleven, Leigh-Ann was nine, Laura was six and Matthew was two. When Santa arrived, Matthew parked himself on Santa's lap and pretty much remained dazzled by him for the rest of the evening. Anyone who had their picture taken with Santa that Christmas also had their picture taken with little Matthew.
Little did any of us know how precious those photos with Santa and Matthew would become. Five days after Christmas, our sweet little Matthew died in an accident at home. We were lucky to have strong support from our families and friends to help us through. I learned that the first year after a death is the hardest, as there are so many firsts to get through without your loved one. Birthdays and special occasions become sad, instead of joyous.
When our first Christmas without Matthew approached, it was hard for me to get into the holiday spirit. Bob and I could hardly face putting up the decorations or shopping for special gifts for everyone. But we went through the motions for Peter, Leigh-Ann and Laura. Then, something extraordinary happened to raise our spirits when we didn't think it was possible.
We were just finishing dinner when we heard a knock on the front door. When we went to answer it, no one was there. However, on the front porch was a card and gift. We opened the card and read that the gift-giver wanted to remain anonymous; he or she just wanted to help us get through a rough time by cheering us up.
In the gift bag was a cassette of favorite Christmas music, which was in a little cardboard Christmas tree. The card described it as being "a cartridge in a pine tree," a twist on the "partridge in a pear tree" verse in the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas." We thought that it was a very clever gift, and the thoughtfulness of our "elf"(精灵) touched our hearts. We put the cassette in our player and, song by song, the spirit of Christmas began to warm our hearts.
That was the beginning of a series of gifts from the clever giver, one for each day until Christmas. Each gift followed the theme of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in a creative way. The kids especially liked "seven swans a-swimming," which was a basket of swan-shaped soaps plus passes to the local swimming pool, giving the kids something to look forward to when the warm days of spring arrived. "Eight maids a-milking" included eight bottles of chocolate milk, eggnog and regular milk in glass bottles with paper faces, handmade aprons and caps. Every day was something very special. The "five golden rings" came one morning just in time for breakfast — five glazed doughnuts just waiting to be eaten.
We would get calls from our family, neighbors and friends who would want to know what we had received that day. Together, we would chuckle at the ingenuity and marvel at the thoughtfulness as we enjoyed each surprise. We were so caught up in the excitement and curiosity of what would possibly come next, that our grief didn't have much of a chance to rob us of the spirit of Christmas. What our elf did was absolutely miraculous.
Each year since then, as we decorate our Christmas tree, we place on it the decorations we received that Christmas while we play the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas." We give thanks for our elf who was, we finally realized, our very own Christmas angel. We never did find out who it was, although we have our suspicions. We actually prefer to keep it that way. It remains a wondrous and magical experience - as mysterious and blessed as the very first Christmas.
Last summer over 12,000 fans were at Wembley Arena in London, shouting and cheering. Thousands more were watching online. It was esports, or competitive computer gaming.
Millions of people in the UK play computer games for fun. Some of them have become professional gamers, playing games as their full-time job. They practice for ten or more hours a day, five or six days a week. They do exercises like typing something and trying to type it faster and faster. They also study videos of other players and plan ways to beat them.
Are players athletes? Some say no. Esports players don't need to run, jump, throw or do big physical actions. At the moment, the UK government classifies esports as kinds of games, not as sports.
But others say yes: esports are sports. Players do need some physical skills, especially hand-eye coordination, reflexes, accuracy and timing. If darts, snooker and shooting are classified as sports, then perhaps esports should be too.
And they will be an official medal sport in the Asian Games starting from 2022. Next step: the Olympics?
For many esports fans and players, though, the most important thing is that esports are growing in popularity and importance.
A. But this wasn't a football, basketball or tennis match.
B. All like playing computer games.
C. It's not easy being a professional gamer, though.
D. But are esports really sports?
E. It is certain that esports will come into the 2024 Olympics.
F. In fact, China and South Korea do classify esports as sports.
G. If esports are not as important as sports now, they definitely will be in the near future.
Clara Daly was sat on an Alaska Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles. Then a flight attendant asked an urgent question over the loudspeaker: "Does 1 on board know American Sign Language?"
Clara, 15 at the time, 2 the call button. The flight attendant came by and explained the 3. "We have a passenger on the plane who's blind and deaf," she said. The passenger 4 to want something, 5 he was traveling alone and the flight attendants couldn't understand what he needed.
Clara had been 6 ASL for the past year and knew she'd be able to finger spell into the man's palm(手掌). So she untied her seat belt, walked 7 the front of the plane, and knelt by the seat of Tim Cook, then 64. Gently taking his 8, she signed, "How are you? Are you OK?" Cook asked for some water. When it 9, Clara returned to her seat. The flight attendant 10 again a bit later because he wanted to know the time. On her third 11, she stopped and stayed for a while.
"He didn't need anything. He was 12 and wanted to talk," Clara says. So for the next hour, that's 13 they did. She talked about her family and her plans for the future. Cook told Clara how he had 14 become blind over time and 15 stories of his days as a traveling salesman. Even though he couldn't see her, she "looked 16 at his face with such 17," a passenger reported.
"Clara was 18," a flight attendant told Alaska Airlines in a blog interview. "You could 19 Cook was very excited to have someone he could speak to, and she was such an angel. And Cook said it was the best trip he'd 20 had."
For you, the "Clear and Bright" day that falls in every April might be no more than just another holiday — the fact that it comes with three days off school matters to most students more than the fact that it is part of the 24 solar terms.
But the UNESCO has recognized the importance of the 24 solar terms. This ancient system that Chinese people have used to keep track of the time of year (add) to the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity on Nov 30.
For starters, you may have heard your mom say: "The sanfu days are almost over. The heat won't be here for long." The sanfu days are a period of time that (fall) in summer, somewhere Minor Heat (in July) and Autumn Equinox (in September). The coldest days, or the sanjiu days, are similar. They cover the 27 days (follow) Winter Solstice.
In some places, solar terms guide people's lives through special foods, (culture) events and healthy living tips. For example, people from northern China are in the habit of eating dumplings on the day of Winter Solstice. And on Start of Autumn, some people treat to a big feast, especially of meat, something they call "putting on autumn weight", or tieqiubiao.
But no matter differently people celebrate the 24 solar terms, they have been here for a long time and could last forever.
According to Chinese writer and academic Yu Shicun, unlike many other examples of intangible cultural heritage – Peking Opera and Chinese Zhusuan, for example – the solar terms are neither regional (地域的) nor a type of art or skill. Instead, the system is a philosophy of time, applies to everything. And this means they are (likely) to die out.
|
人们的担忧 |
⒈过分关注自我，不愿与他人合作； ⒉害怕面对失败，容易放弃； ⒊追求享受，渴望成名。 |
|
00后的境遇 |
⒈父母期望值过高； ⒉升学就业难；社会竞争激烈。 |
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我们的长处 |
敢于挑战，… (联系自己，再谈两至三点) |
注意：
1）对所给要点，逐一陈述，适当发挥，不要简单翻译。
2）词数120字左右。开头和结尾已经写好，不计入总字数。
3）演讲稿中不得提及考生所在学校及本人姓名。
Good morning, everyone!
My topic today is "Do trust us – a generation born in the 2000s". Most of us are only-one children, who are spoiled by our parents. This causes people's concern.
Thank you for your listening!
