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Overlooking the Davis—Gant Varsity Soccer Field, a bed of overturned soil waits for further development. In a few years, this area will become a natural habitat and a playground for animals and residents. This peaceful area didn't appear naturally, but through planning and action taken by Catlin Gabel's Tiny Forest project launched by teacher Patrick Walsh.

Forests typically take hundreds of years to mature, with four stages of growth. "Tiny forests flatten out time through the planting of all four layers (层)," Walsh explained. The end result is a fast-growing, native forest in about 20 years. Over 600 plants from 43 species will be planted in the tiny forest, the first one in Oregon.

Walsh was inspired to build a tiny forest after hearing about this idea, which emerged in Japan and has taken hold in North America. He shared his vision with seniors in his class. The seniors researched tiny forests and made a proposal resulting in Clean Water Services donating 60 trees and $5,000 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Armed with these resources, Walsh and the students started working. "Something I didn't really expect was the outpouring of students' enthusiasm. Seeing students from all grades volunteered to contribute to the ‘dirty work' really blew me away," Walsh said.

Senior Megan Cover has been at the school since the first grade. "I'll graduate after working on this project, which is surely sad, but it's really rewarding and great to be a part of this project and to do my bit. We're creating this educational space for many young kids," Cover said.

Walsh summed up his goal of the project, which is to build a place where students can enjoy and learn about nature. "The forest will obviously not solve climate change, but it will deserve the efforts if the kids think about climate change and remember the importance of reforestation and trees when they look outside at the forest."

Stargazing Festivals in 2023

As more areas grow brighter with light pollution, national parks across the country have become dark-sky havens. Every year, they host events like stargazing festivals to get travelers excited about astronomy.

·Bryce Canyon National Park—June 14-17

Situated in southern Utah, Bryce Canyon earned its dark-sky title in 2019. The 35,835-acre park is an ideal place to stay up late. This year, its annual astronomy festival includes guided stargazing sessions, lectures and "star stories" presentations, family-friendly activities, and even a performance by strings musicians in the northern Arizona-based Dark Sky Quartet.

·Shenandoah National Park—August 11-13

Conveniently located within a day's drive from two-thirds of Americans, Shenandoah National Park's night sky festival is a relaxing way to engage in astronomy. The nearly 200,000-acre park will host ranger talks, public stargazing sessions, lectures, presentations, and activities for kids. Staff are still working on this year's full schedule.

·Great Basin National Park—September 14-16

Great Basin is one of the least crowded national parks, making it the perfect place to quietly appreciate the mysteries of the universe. Its annual astronomy festival is scheduled for this fall and includes guest speakers, constellation (星座) talks, observatory tours, and a photography workshop. During the festival's unique "Art in the Dark" program, participants will get to paint in low-light conditions and experiment with how their eyes perceive color.

·Joshua Tree National Park—October 13-14

Joshua Tree National Park, as the International Dark Sky Association notes, is the "nearest convenient place to go stargazing under a relatively dark sky" for the 18 million people who live in the Los Angeles area. It became an official dark sky park in 2017, and each year, it hosts a night sky festival in the fall. As luck would have it, this year's dates overlap with an annular "ring of fire" solar eclipse. From Joshua Tree, the moon will appear to cover between 70 and 80 percent of the sun.

As a young boy, I was innocent. Every vacation I looked forward to two things—seeing my grandpa and hearing his wonderful stories. My grandpa was a very good storyteller. He had worked various jobs when he was young and wove ( 编 织)his adventures and misadventures into fantastic tales. These wonderful tales colored my childhood.

As I grew up, I had to admit that Grandpa's stories went on a little long, even a little boring and gradually lost their magic. However, not wanting to upset him, my brother and I would sometimes take turns sitting in the living room, listening to grandpa tell his stories.

When my grandpa was approaching 91, he suffered from serious memory-loss. It was kind of what doctors called dementia (痴呆),probably the earliest stage of Alzheimer's disease (阿尔兹海默症). Following the doctor's directions, we moved him into a Sunrise Assisted Living Community, where he could get a better care. After that, grandpa hardly came to our house.

One weekend before my grandpa's birthday, I came to visit him. Seeing grandpa sitting in his armchair, dull-looking, I was filled with mixed feelings. I wheeled grandpa to the sunshine in the courtyard, talking to him. He couldn't express himself clearly, but I listened to him patiently and carefully just as I used to be a little boy.

It was then that I noticed a box with some old photos in it. I picked one up, in which my brother, several boys in our neighborhood, and I were playing basketball, wearing basketball jerseys (球衣), with grandpa cheering us on ten years before.

注意：

1.词数150左右：

2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。

My mind flashed back to those beautiful memories.

A bright idea for grandpa's birthday came to my mind.

注意：1）词数80左右（开头已给出，但不计入总词数）；2）可适当增加细节，使行文连贯。

Dear Mike，

I'm sorry to hear that you are feeling upset these days.

Yours,

Li Hua

In the past three months, the performance of "Secret Box from the Tang Dynasty" in Xi'an  (become）a hit. Two young actors act as Fang Xuanling and Du Ruhui,  were two prime ministers（宰相）of the Tang Dynasty. During the performance, the actors dress in ancient clothes and speak like the ancients. They invite tourists （take）part in a question-and-answer game. The funny conversation between the actors and the tourists  （make）the performance very popular.

The questions in the game are often so "difficult"  most tourists can only win a consolation prize（安慰奖) of taking photos with the actors. Sometimes some "wise" people  (successful) pass the "test", but the prizes are just cotton swabs, batteries or other everyday objects. This often makes tourists laugh loudly. The show, （last）about 40 minutes, has four performances each night.

"We've been doing this talk show for a while. If tourists can't answer our  (question), we will find ways to have fun talks with them to cover their awkwardness," says Chen Yufei, the actor who plays Du Ruhui.

Wang Ze, who play s Fang Xuanling, says that although he doesn't have a "doctoral degree" as some tourists jokingly call it, he still feels the pressure of playing the knowledgeable prime minister of the Tang Dynasty. This keeps him learning different things, from historical stories, poems,  songs and brain teasers（脑筋急转弯).

The actors of the "Secret Box from the Tang Dynasty" hope that tourists can learn more about Chinese culture through these （influence）activities.

Cycling becomes more popular nowadays. Some may argue that it brings tiredness but it's nothing,1 with the joy of climbing huge mountains or seeing splendid sights. My cycling career of 13 years ended when I was 75. Though I am now no longer2 enough to bear the long days and big climbs, I have my3 . 

It was easy to meet different people with4 during the trips, where I got to5 the very best in people. In 2007,a stranger stopped her car alongside me to make me a most welcome cup of tea. In 2014,a couple6 me their place to spend the night.

The support and comfort they gave was a(n)7 change from the long hours I had spent alone on the bike. As each trip8 its end, I gradually forgot the long hours of riding. Happy memories of the trip9 took the place of the pain and failure I experienced.

Meanwhile, cycling gave me much time to10 sufferings I went through in my life. Time11 everything. Cycling also taught me to like who I am. I finally realized that I had more courage than I ever imagined, which was12 in these trips. No matter how far the13 was, I could get there without any support.

These were the adventures of my life, and they were14 memories. With cycling, the success or failure15 not on luck or conditions but on me alone.

How to Learn Faster

Learning and remembering new knowledge or information completely takes time, but don't you wish there is an easier way to remember it?

Read it out loud

Hearing yourself repeat the information helps you remember it easier. .  Go slowly through the text so you don't skip over anything important. Try pointing at the words as you read them to help you to remember even better. The more you read the information loud, the easier you can remember it.

Quiz （测验） yourself so you see what topics you still need to review. After you've read through or practiced something, test your memory by reciting everything you just learned. If you need to remember keywords or phrases, try writing down their definitions without looking them up.

Take handwritten notes

You're more likely to remember something you've written down. If you're in a class, listen carefully and write down the keywords and phrases. If you're learning something online or from a book, rewrite what you read. .

Teach the information to someone else

Explaining something helps you keep the main points. Have one of your friends listen to you as you try to teach them the subject you've been learning. .Since you have to actively recall the information you're teaching, it's beneficial for you to learn and remember the information.

Most environmental pollution on Earth comes from humans and their inventions, such as cars or plastic. Today, car emissions (排放物) are a major source of air pollution leading to climate change, and plastics fill our ocean, creating a significant health issue to marine (海洋的) animals.

And what about the electric light, thought to be one of the greatest human inventions of all time? Electric light can be a beautiful thing, guiding us home when the sun goes down, keeping us safe and making our homes bright. However, like carbon dioxide emissions and plastic, too much of a good thing has started to impact the environment. Light pollution, the inappropriate use of outdoor light, is affecting human health, wildlife behavior and our ability to observe stars.

Light pollution is a global issue. This became obvious when the World Atlas of Artificial Night Sky Brightness, a computer-generated map based on thousands of satellite photos, was published in 2016．Available online for viewing, the map shows how and where our globe is lit up at night. Vast areas of North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia are glowing (发光) with light, while only the most remote regions on Earth (Greenland, Central African Republic and Niue) are in total darkness. Some of the most light-polluted countries in the world are Singapore, Qatar, and Kuwait.

Sky glow is the brightening of the night sky, mostly over cities, due to the electric lights of cars, streetlamps, offices, factories, outdoor advertising, and buildings, turning night into day for people who work and play long after sunset.

People living in cities with high levels of sky glow have a hard time seeing more than a handful of stars at night. Astronomers are particularly concerned with sky glow pollution as it reduces their ability to view stars.

More than 80 percent of the world's population, and 99 percent of Americans and Europeans, live under sky glow.

Just being smart doesn't mean someone will be successful. And just because someone is less smart doesn't mean that person will fail. That's one take-home message from the work of people like Angela Duckworth.

She works at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Like many other researchers, Duckworth wondered what makes one person more successful than another. When digging deeper, Duckworth found that the people who performed best shared a quality (品质) independent of smarts. They had what she now calls grit (毅力). Duckworth developed a set of questions to test it.

In one study of people 25 and older, she found that as people age, they become more likely to stick with a project. She also found that grit increases with education. People who had finished college scored higher in the grit test than people who quit before graduation did. People who went to graduate school after college scored even higher.

She then did another study with college students. Duckworth wanted to see how smarts and grit influenced performance in school. So she compared scores on college-entrance exams, which test IQ, to school grades and someone's score in the grit test. Students with higher grades seem to have more grit. That's not surprising. Getting good grades takes both smarts and hard work.

But some people counter that this grit means success. Among those people is Marcus Credé, a teacher at Iowa State University in Ames. He recently showed the results of 88 studies on grit. Together, nearly 67,000 people took part in these studies. And grit did not predict success, Credé found.

However, he thinks grit is very similar to someone's ability to set goals, work toward them and think things through before acting. It's a basic personality quality, Credé notes—not something that can be changed.

"Study habits and skills, test anxiety and class attendance are far more strongly connected to school grades than grit," Credé says. "We can teach students how to study well. We can help them with their test anxiety," he adds. "I'm not sure we can do that with grit."

I'm a seventeen-year-old boy preparing for my A Level exams at the end of the year. In the society where my peers (同龄人) and I live, we tend to accept the rat race values. As students, we want to get good grades so that we can get good jobs. I enjoy studying and have consistently received A's in my classes. There was a year when I finished first in my class in the final exams. It was a great accomplishment.

Another one I am pleased with is that I managed to improve the relationship between Mum and Dad. Dad was a successful businessman who was rarely at home. Mum was a housewife who always felt bored and constantly nagged (唠叨) him to let her go to work. Their constant arguing bothered me, so I advised Dad that Mum would be better off with a part-time job. He agreed, and their relationship has improved since then.

My most proud achievement, however, is my successful work in the local old folks' home. My grandparents had raised me since I was a child. I wept (哭泣) bitterly when they died. Unlike many of my classmates, I do not take part in my school's community service to earn points. I enjoy my voluntary work and believe I'm contributing to a worthwhile cause. This is where I can help. I talk to the elderly, assist them with their daily life, and listen to their problems, glory days and the hardships they experienced.

Last year, I hosted a successful New Year party for the elderly and they enjoyed a great time. Many expressed a desire to attend another party the following year. When I reflect on my accomplishments, I'm especially proud of my service at the old folks' home, so I hope to study social work at university and work as a social worker in the future. I wish to be more skilled in attending to the less fortunate and find great satisfaction in it, after all.