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Not all famous national parks are on land. Some national parks are marine parks. One good example of this is the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in Australia. (stretch) over 2,300 kilometers, the Great Barrier Reef is considered one of the natural wonders of the world. It is the largest structure in the world made by living creatures. A wide variety of tropical wildlife also (make) the reef its home.

Since the Great Barrier Reef is just below the surface of the water, it is an excellent place (see) nature, and millions of people travel there every year. The park was created in 1975 to protect the reef overdevelopment and fishing.

Unfortunately, the (big) danger to the Great Barrier Reef is something park (manage) cannot stop — global warming. Rising ocean temperatures are causing some coral to die the colourful reefs to turn grey. Hundreds of years ago, people could not imagine that there would ever be a time forests would be cut down, oceans would become(pollute), and wildlife would face extinction.

Facing the problems of environment pollution and overdevelopment, some national parks have been set aside to protect both natural features and wildlife. protection of natural areas has attracted much media attention, and now more and more people are supporting the idea of eco-friendly development.

—— Yes, but I think it's            than the one we did last quarter, which had even stricter rules and a larger scope.

My father holds this1 responsible for his lifelong love of literature. As a busy labourer, he has regarded reading books as an almost sacred2 . He feels a strong, perhaps, irresistible3 to read frequently and a lot.

I don't think my father4 to hand the advice down to me. He's not the sort to give advice and I'm not the sort to5 it. But I find it's because the advice is delivered6 that it is most likely to be listened to.

I like this advice "reading first 50 pages", for the generosity and respect it extends to a book's7 and his or her craft. A reader, it suggests, needs a little8 to adapt to a book's particular tone and voice. Meanwhile, this advice gives a person permission to9 reading. Nobody, it implies, need force themselves to struggle through a book they're not10 .

I particularly like the11 advice to return to a book "when you feel ready for it." It's a12 that reading is naturally relational and that the readers need time.

Even when I'm more than ready to stop reading by page 50,13 the exercise feels worth doing. Just like stopping swimming halfway makes the muscles in my legs ache14 it uses them in a different way from cycling. But in both cases, it's a satisfying kind of hurt because it's a15 of getting stronger.

One significant recent achievement in the field of talking computers is virtual personal assistants(VPAs) on mobile phones. If you tell a mobile phone VPA that you want to schedule a lunch with a friend, it can set the appointment in your phone in seconds. The VPA can also hold a basic "conversation" and has earned fame for its elementary sense of humour. Still, the humour is preprogrammed and can be triggered only when human users speak certain key words.

While the potential for "real" communication between a human and a machine may seem exciting, this possibility concerns some people. Some experts worry about people's attachment to these machines and fear that the art of successful human-to-human conversation will be undeveloped in younger generations. They worry that people won't be able to display the right emotion or tone in conversations because they haven't been practising those skills. Others fear that machines will take over functions that were traditionally performed by humans, such as customer service. Another concern often associated with the development of new technology is the invasion of privacy (侵犯隐私). When people use certain speech-recognition applications, they leave behind an audio track of their speech. When you ask a VPA for directions, your speech is sent and saved to a remote server for processing. This digital trail may lead to data mining, or the collection of large quantities of personal data.

For now, however, the continuing evolution of speech-recognition software is worth expecting. Leading companies in the field hope to make human communication with machines as seamless as possible, just like communicating with another human.