英语 热门试卷

B

Born in the State of New York on May 14th, 1984, Mark Zuckerberg was an instant success. In his high school years, he was considered one of top students in the classics, before moving into the arts, sciences, and literature, again picking up high marks and receiving academic praise. It earned him admission to Harvard University.

As a rebellious yet relatively quiet student, he created a website called Facemash in the university– an instantly controversial website that encouraged students to rate each other based on appearance.

The site was controversial for several reasons. The first was its illegal use of photographs, which the university and students took issue with. The second was its controversial nature – not every student like being ranked based on their appearance. The third was its huge resource use – while it was hosted on Harvard servers, it was the most popular page in the university’s entire network.

Zuckerberg was soon forced to shut the site down, but its popularity and controversy had made him consider its future potential. He soon turned the simple site into a personal one for Harvard students, encouraging them to network with their peers at the college. It was then, together with his two friends, that they launched “The Facebook”, which immediately spread to other colleges and grew into a public service that anyone could access in the United States, whether to network with friends and family, or to play games.

The company has been criticized frequently, nevertheless, Zuckerberg has remained true to his initial vision – to create a website that the entire world can use to communicate openly and easily with one another and to keep the user experience clean and pure. The end result is one of the world’s biggest online businesses.

Although its true value is debatable, it’s safe to say that Facebook, and its creator Mark Zuckerberg, are two of the twenty-first century’s most influential, controversial, and potentially powerful figures.

A

When you're on the go, your best friend and resource can be your phone. In the age of smart phones, apps are like guiding stars: They can point you in the right direction for a hotel, list expenses, send postcards, and much more. When used together, these apps can be the basic travel tool, placing a wealth of information at your fingertips no matter where you are on the planet. U.S. News Travel has picked the essential travel apps, known for their utility and reliability. Best of all, they cost absolutely nothing.

Trip It

Your Personal Travel Agent

Be your own travel agent and plan every detail of your trip—from car rental to accommodating restaurants—with Trip It. You can make travel schedule by hand, or simply forward the email confirmations of your flight, rental car, train tickets, and hotels to plans.

Weather Free

Your Go-To Meteorologist(气象学者)

Stop trying to explain the weather forecast on the evening news (particularly when it's in a foreign language). The Weather Free app informs you (in English) of the climate in various locations. It features the local weather, and other key factors that will inform your decision about what to wear before stepping outside.

Goby

Your Event Guru

When you're in a foreign city, you sometimes look around and ask: Where are all the people? Goby has the answer. This app pinpoints the neighborhood hot spots (including museums, hotels, eateries, and more) in your neighborhood. But its true value comes in finding nearby events. You'll discover concerts, plays, and more right around the corner.

C

Have you ever found yourself in this situation: You hear a song you used to sing when you were a child – a bit of nostalgia(怀旧) or “blast from the past,” as we say. But it is not a distant childhood memory. The words come back to you as clearly as when you sang them all those years ago.

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh studied the relationship between music and remembering a foreign language. They found that remembering words in a song was the best way to remember even one of the most difficult languages.

Here is what they did. Researchers took 60 adults and randomly divided them into three groups of 20. Then they gave the groups three different types of “listen-and-repeat” learning conditions. Researchers had one group simply speak the words. They had the second group speak the words to a rhythm, or beat. And they asked the third group to sing the words.

All three groups studied words from the Hungarian language for 15 minutes. Then they took part in a series of language tests to see what they remembered.

Why Hungarian, you ask? Researchers said they chose Hungarian because not many people know the language. It does not share any roots with Germanic or Romance languages, such as Italian or Spanish. After the tests were over, the singers came out on top. The people who learned these new Hungarian words by singing them showed a higher overall performance. They did the best in four out of five of the tests. They also performed two times better than those who simply learned the words by speaking them.

Dr. Katie Overy says singing could lead to new ways to learn a foreign language. The brain likes to remember things when they are contained in a catchy 3, or memorable 4, tune 5.

Dr. Ludke said the findings could help those who struggle to learn foreign languages. On the University of Edinburgh’s website Dr. Ludke writes, “This study provides the first experimental evidence that a listen-and-repeat singing method can support foreign language learning, and opens the door for future research in this area.”