Four Historic Firsts for Women in Space You Might not Know About
First Woman in Space
Soviet cosmonaut (宇航员) Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to go to space when she was launched with the Vostok 6 mission on June 16, 1963. She was selected from a pool of 400 applicants and five finalists. She was honorarily inducted（入伍）into the Soviet Air Force so that she could join the Cosmonaut Corps. Tereshkova is the only woman ever to have been on a solo space mission.
First US Woman in Space
Sally Ride was the first American astronaut to go into orbit on June 18, 1983, as a crew member on the space shuttle Challenger for STS-7. Ride was one of 8,000 people to answer an ad in the Stanford student newspaper seeking applicants for NASA. She was chosen to join the space program in 1978. She went on one additional mission and spent a total of 343 hours in space.
First Woman to Walk in Space
The first woman to walk in space, Svetlana Savitskaya, was also a cosmonaut. She was on her second mission when she space-walked as part of the Salyut 7-EP2 on July 17, 1984. She was also the first woman to have gone into space twice.
First Teacher to go to Space
Christa McAuliffe was a teacher and a civilian astronaut from Concord, NH who was killed with six other crew members when the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986. McAuliffe was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to participate in the NASA Teacher in Space Project. She was planning on conducting experiments and teaching two lessons from space.
Children are naturally curious about the world around them. When Chase Hansen was only 4 years old, he encountered homeless people for the first time while shopping with his dad at an outdoor mall in Salt Lake City, Nevada. It's no wonder that he had a lot of questions.
"Chase looked at me and said, 'Dad, who are these people? Why don't they have a place to stay?' " John Hansen recalled. "After I explained that they had run into hard times and were homeless, I knew that we were looking at an educational opportunity. My son wanted to help them."
The father and son convinced a local Jamba Juice store to donate more than 100 smoothies (果汁) and the pair gave them out to homeless people in a park.
After that, they came up with an even better idea. "I wanted a way to get to know people better," Chase said. "So, my dad and I decided to start taking some of the homeless people we'd met out to lunch."
"A lot of people walk right past homeless people and don't see the person," he said. "I know now that they're people just like us. They want to make a connection and not feel so alone in the world."
Hundreds of lunches later, they run a self-funded charity called Project Empathy(同情) to help inspire others to meet and to create relationships with the homeless people in their neighborhoods. The organization provides a list of resources that can help homeless people with food, housing and employment.
John said that what started as a way to spend quality time with his son has turned into a passion for both of them." "Chase and I realized that the country needed an army of people to practice empathy, and that by doing something as simple as taking a homeless person to lunch, we could maybe inspire others to do the same," he said. "Any time you can help to give someone a voice, it's empowering."
"I like pigs," Winston Churchill supposedly once said. "Dogs look up at us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals. "Whether Churchill's contemporary George Orwell also liked pigs is less clear. But he, too, surely saw something in them that was lacking in other domestic beasts, for it was they who ended up running the show in novel Animal Farm. Pigs, then, are intelligent social creatures.
And, like all animals, they sometimes fight. A study just published in Animal Cognition by Ivan Norscia, a biological anthropologist at the University of Turin, in Italy, and his colleagues, looked at how a group of 104 domestic pigs went about resolving such incidents. In total, Dr. Norscia and his team studied the details of 216 pig conflicts over the course of six months.
Some pigs tend to be attackers; others tend to be victims. Who is what depends largely on weight, for, among pigs pounds mean power. The attacker might bite, kick, bump or lift the victim (or string together a sequence of those actions). Most conflicts ended in seconds, but some lasted a minute or two.
In most animal species that would be that. However, many of the pig conflicts Dr. Norscia observed had interested parties beyond the protagonists (主角). He therefore wanted to understand the role of these bystanders in resolving fights-and what this says about pigs' cognitive (认知) abilities.
Since there was usually not enough time for a bystander pig to intervene during the heat of a conflict (though this did occur), he and his colleagues looked at what happened in the three minutes directly following an aggressive interaction. Sometimes, they found, the protagonists made up on their own—for instance, by touching noses.
On other occasions, though, a third pig stepped in. Sometimes this bystander acted as a peacemaker, engaging with the attacker and reducing the number of subsequent attacks compared with what might otherwise have been expected. Sometimes, by contrast, the bystander engaged with the victim. This appeared to calm the victim down, for it reduced anxiety-related behavior such as shaking and scratching.
Our clothes do a lot for us. They keep us warm in the winter or cool while we're working out. They let us dress to impress or comfortably veg out on the couch with the TV on. But some researchers think our clothes could be doing even more. Those scientists and engineers are dreaming up new ways to make clothes safer, more comfortable or just more convenient.
Some ideas for new clothes aim to protect people from harm. One new shoe design, for example, features pop-out spikes（鞋钉）on the sole that grip the ground. This could help people keep their footing on slippery or uneven ground. A new fabric coating, meanwhile, could absorb and neutralize (中和) some chemical weapons. That coating is made from a metal-organic framework that breaks down harmful compounds. It could offer protection to people in war-tom countries.
Not all advanced clothing is designed to save lives. Some could just make clothes more comfortable. One day, for instance, you may not need to layer up to stay warm. Fabric filled with nanowires could reflect your body heat back onto your skin. Electric current humming through those metal threads could provide warmth, too. This may be especially useful for hikers, soldiers or others working in super cold conditions.
Some researchers have dreamt up wholly new uses for clothing—like turning wearers into walking power outlets. Flexible solar panels sewn into fabric could absorb the sun to recharge phones or other devices on the go. Another team threaded fabric with magnetized (磁化的) copper and silver to write data into fabrics. Such data-packed fabric could be used as a hands-free key or form of ID.
Many of these ideas have not yet left the lab—and they're still pretty far from hitting retail (零售) shelves. But inventors hope these and other innovations could someday let you get more from your clothes.
How to Speak English Fluently
Immerse (沉浸) yourself in English every day
The best way to quickly improve your English is to spend at least a few minutes practicing every day.
There's a special language learning method called "immersion". With immersion, you try to surround yourself with the language as much as you can in your day-to-day activities.
Accept that English grammar has a lot of exceptions
Sometimes, you can find patterns in English grammar, but other times English doesn't make sense at all. It's easy to get stuck on learning how to speak English properly if you try to find a reason for everything. So the best thing to do is just memorize the strange exceptions and move on.
Learn intonation, body language and gestures
Intonation is the "rise and fall" or tone changes in how a person speaks. Body language is how a person uses their own body to support (or go against) what they mean. Gestures are hand and body movements that work together with what someone is saying. One way to learn is to just watch how native English speakers communicate with each other.
Share your opinions online
To really learn English speaking, you need to learn how to express yourself in English. Even if you have ideas for conversations, it can be hard to know how to put them into your own words. You can practice this by participating in conversations online.
Get direct feedback
To improve your speaking, you can ask directly for feedback. Since you usually can't do this with casual conversations, it might be worth setting up a language exchange, where you can ask the person to tell you directly if any of your sentences sounds awkward or unnatural. HelloTalk also allows you to chat in English, and then your conversation partner will literally mark out your mistakes.
A. Sometimes, English is just strange!
B. There are many options for practicing your writing skills.
C. Listen carefully when someone asks you a question in English.
D. It's not easy to learn these three things because they seem very natural.
E. Posting on social media and leaving comments on articles are good approaches.
F. Studying English for an hour once a week isn't usually enough to make any real progress.
G. There are even apps for this, like Go Correct, where you can connect with English teachers.
I am a teacher in a famous co-education English medium Secondary School. Our school provides necessary 1for disabled students like a wheel-chair, lift, separate wash rooms and many more. One of our students, Kiran gradually developed "Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy", a severe muscular disease and became completely 2 on others.
When the school reopened for its new academic session in June 2017, as class teacher I found that Kiran was not 3 for his new session. I 4 for one month. Meanwhile, I enquired about his 5 with his younger sister and 6 that Kiran's condition became worse than before. With the 7 from the school authorities, I 8 him at his house along with his classmates and 9 him by giving examples of some of the most successful personalities with disabilities. They 10 even the fully functional people and claimed their 11 such as, Stephen Hawking, Hellen Keller and Stevie Wonder. Kiran's classmates 12 to help him with his studies.
Kiran now 13 his studies with the help of his teachers and classmates. At present, he is amongst one of the favorites for his teachers and fellow students. The boys of his class take 14 to play chess with him. We always try to make him 15 and bring a smile on his face.
Bungee jumping originated with an ancient adult initiation ceremony on the Pentecost Islands in Vanuatu, young men jumped off high platform with vines (葡萄藤) attached to their feet as a test of their courage and passage into manhood.
(inspire) by this, three men in England staged the first modern bungee jumps off a bridge in Bristol in 1979. This led to a number of people (make) bungee jumps for TV shows or as a way (show) off their skills, often off (extreme) famous structures such as the Eiffel Tower. One of these men, Alan John Hackett, opened up the first (commerce) bungee jumping site at the Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge in New Zealand.
Since then Hackett (open) up a large number of other bungee jumping (site) around the world and is perhaps the single person most responsible making bungee jumping a safe and popular adventure sport. Through Hackett's efforts, New Zealand has now become a center for adventure sports tourism, and people still travel from around the world to bungee jump at Kawarau Gorge.
"Mommy, can we get some cupcakes for my birthday? Please!" 4-year-old Norah said.
I hesitated about going to the grocery store on a Tuesday, Senior Citizen Discount Day. We had already celebrated Norah's big day. Her two elder sisters were also born in September, so we had one big celebration for all of them. But today was Norah's actual birthday. How could I say no?
"Okay," I said, thinking of the seniors who would crowd the aisles (过道) in the store. "But we have to be quick."
At the store I put Norah in one of the carts shaped like a car and did my best to move it to the bakery quickly. I picked up a package of cupcakes, swung to the other part of the store for birthday balloons and then got distracted by salad dressings.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Norah standing up in the cart waving excitedly. "Hi, old person! It's my birthday today," she said cheerfully.
An elderly man in his 80s stared at us stone-faced. Before I could explain that "old person" isn't exactly the best way to address someone, the man had already opened his mouth to reply to her. "Well, hello, little lady," he said. "How old are you today?"
"I'm four," Norah said, holding up her fingers. Then we chatted briefly, long enough for him to tell me that he was Dan and that he usually tried to avoid the grocery store on Senior Citizen Discount Day as well.
We went our separate ways. Several minutes later, Norah asked, "Can I take a photo with the old man for my birthday?" I felt kind of strange about asking a complete stranger to take a photo with this kid who had just called him "old person".
"Let's see if we can," I said. We went back and spotted Mr. Dan by the dairy section.
"There he is!" Norah pointed. His hair was uncombed (乱的), and he was dressed in a plaid shirt, jeans and sneakers.
"Ask him, Mommy!" Norah said.
"Okay, okay, I'll ask, honey," I told Norah, and then approached the old man.
注意：
1）续写词数应为150左右；
2）请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
| "Excuse me, Mr. Dan," I said. …… "My wife passed away months ago," Dan explained. |
