Nowadays, more and more teenagers use smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices more than ever before. And the amount of time they spend on these devices is only likely to increase in the future. But are all these changes good? We sometimes call children who are able to use mobile devices and technology easily digital natives. They can text, email, get Wi-Fi, and download. Some experts say that long periods of time spent chatting to friends online, playing video games and listening to mp3s, for example, may possibly change how their brains work. Then there is the question of privacy. All this online activity creates a digital footprint. Every time we share a photo or a post on social media, and every time we search for something on the Internet, information about our activity is stored somewhere. Our inability to control what happens to our children's digital footprint and their personal privacy has big possibilities. It might become normal for companies to ask their employees for their social media qualifications. We are also becoming more aware that companies and governments may be able to 'listen in' on our communications. So it is important to make our children aware of the possible results of over sharing. Another area where the digital world may have a big effect is in education. One worry is that kids who spend a lot of time online at home are sometimes unable to socialize properly with other children when they are at school. Other experts point out that, when it comes to children and technology, the children are the experts, not the teachers. They say that we should stop seeing online as 'bad' and offline as 'good' and there is evidence of innovative work in some schools. So, do we really need to rescue our children from the dangers of the digital world? Which of the following can summarize the main idea of the text? A) Do we need to rescue our kids from the digital world? B) Should children learn to use digital technology? C) Are there changes in children's school life? D) Should teachers accept changes in our life?
A
Throughout the history of the arts, the nature of creativity has remained constant to artists. No matter what objects they select, artists are to bring forth new forces and forms that cause change-to find _ where no one has ever seen or experienced it before. Landscape is another unchanging element of art. It can be found from ancient times through the 17th-century Dutch painters to the 19th-century romanticists and impressionists. In the 1970s, Alfred Leslie, one of the new American realists, continued this practice. Leslie sought out the same place where Thomas Cole, a romanticist, had produced paintings of the same scene a century and a half before. Unlike Cole who insists on a feeling of loneliness and the idea of finding peace in nature, Leslie paints what he actually sees. In his paintings, there is no particular change in emotion, and he includes ordinary things like the highway in the background. He also takes advantage of the latest developments of color photography to help both the eye and the memory when he improves his painting back in his workroom. Besides, all art begs the age-old question: What is real? Each generation of artists has shown their understanding of reality in one form or another. The impressionists saw reality in brief emotional effects, the realists in everyday subjects and in forest scenes, and the Cro-Magnon cave people in their naturalistic drawings of the animals in the ancient forests. To sum up, understanding reality is a necessary struggle for artists of all periods. Over thousands of years the function of the arts has remained relatively constant. Past or present, Eastern or Western, the arts are a basic part of our immediate experience. Many and different are the faces of art, and together they express the basic need and hope of human beings. What is the author's opinion of artistic reality? A) It will not be found in future works of art. B) It does not have a long-lasting standard. C) It is expressed in a fixed artistic form. D) It is lacking in modern works of art.
B
Q: American children are not the only couch potatoes with nearly one third of children globally spending 3 hours a day or more watching TV or on computers, according to the study of over 70,000 teens in 34 nations. From Argentina to Zambia, Regina Guthold of the World Health Organization in Geneva and her colleagues found most children were not getting enough exercise and that it made no difference whether they live in a rich or a poor country. "With regards to physical levels, we didn't find much of a difference between rich and poor countries," Guthold said, "Growing up in a poor country doesn't necessarily mean kids get more physical activities." The researchers defined adequate physical activity as at least an hour of exercise outdoors for at least 5 days a week. Children spending 3 or more hours a day watching TV, playing computer games or chatting with friends were classified as sedentary. The researchers found only a quarter of the boys and 15 percent of the girls were getting enough exercise by these definitions. A quarter of boys and nearly 30% of girls were sedentary and didn't get enough exercise with girls less active than boys in every country aside from Zambia. Girls from India were the most active with 37 percent meeting exercise recommendation, while girls from Egypt were the least active with 4 percent getting enough exercise. Children in Myanmar were the least sedentary while the most sedentary nations were St .Lucia and the Cayman Islands. People show deep concern for kids' lack of physical activity in various nations. Why do they have a low level of physical activity? Guthold speculated that urbanization could be a factor as well as easy access to cars and TVs. If you are sedentary, you _ . A) are a diligent student spending much time doing homework B) have at least an hour of exercise outdoors 5 days a week. C) like watching TV and playing computer games D) spend longer hours sitting or lying without moving
A: D
(Q).
Each new school year brings fresh reminders of what educators call the summer learning gap. Some call it the summer learning setback. Put simply, it means the longer kids are out of school, the more they forget. The only thing they seem to gain is weight. Most American schools follow a traditional nine-month calendar with winter and spring breaks and about ten weeks of summer vacation. Some schools follow a year-round calendar. They hold classes for about eight weeks at a time, with a few weeks off in between. The National Association for Year-Round Education says there were fewer than 3,000 such schools at last count. They were spread among forty-six of the fifty states. But many experts point out that the number of class days in a year round school is generally the same as in a traditional school. Brenda McLaughlin is a research director at the National Centre for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University. She says studies of year-round schooling have not found strong learning gains. Lead researcher Paul von Hippel said, "Year round schools don't really solve the problem of the summer learning setback. They simply spread it out across the year." Across the country, research shows that students from poor families fall farther behind over the summer than other students. Experts say this can be prevented. They note that many schools and local governments offer programmes that can help. However, calling such programmes "summer school" could be a problem. The director of the summer learning centre at Johns Hopkins, Ikon Fairchild, said research with groups of different parents in Chicago and Baltimore found that almost all strongly disliked the term "summer school". In American culture, the idea of summer vacation is connected to beliefs about freedom and the joys of childhood. The parents preferred other terms like "summer camp, "extra time" and "hands-on learning. Compared to those in traditional schools, students in the year-round schools _ . A) perform better and learn more B) have much less time for relaxation every year C) have generally the same number of class days D) hold more classes and have more weeks off
(A).
C