英语 热门试卷

(A)

What’s On?

ElectricUnderground

7.30pm－1.00am   Free at the Cyclops Theatre

Do youknow who’s playing in your area? We’re bringing you an evening of live rock andpop music from the best local bands. Are you interested in becoming a musicianand getting a recording contract(合同)? If so,come early to the talk at 7.30pm by Jules Skye, a successful record producer.He’s going to talk about how you can find the right person to produce yourmusic.

Gee Whizz

8.30pm-10.30pm   Comedy at Kaleidoscope

Come andsee Gee Whizz perform. He’s the funniest stand-up comedian on the comedy scene.This joyful show will please everyone, from the youngest to the oldest. GeeWhizz really knows how to make you laugh! Our bar is open from 7.00pm fordrinks and snacks(快餐).

Simon’sWorkshop

5.00pm-7.30pm    Wednesdays at Victoria Stage

This is agood chance for anyone who wants to learn how to do comedy. The workshop looksat every kind of comedy, and practices many different ways of making peoplelaugh. Simon is a comedian and actor who has 10 years’ experience of teachingcomedy. His workshops are exciting and fun. An evening with Simon will give youthe confidence to be funny.

CharlotteStone

8.00pm-11.00pm     Pizza World

Fine foodwith beautiful jazz music; this is a great evening out. Charlotte Stone willperform songs from her new best-selling CD, with James Pickering on the piano.The menu is Italian, with excellent meat and fresh fish, pizzas and pasta(面食). Book early to get a table. Our bar is open all day,and serves cocktails, coffee, beer, and white wine.

B

 Five years ago,when I taught art at a school in Seattle,I used Tinkertoys as a test at the beginning of a term to find out somethingabout my students. I put a small set of Tinkertoys in front of each student,and said:”Make something out of the Tinkertoys. You have 45 minutes today - and45minutes each day for the rest of the week.”

   A fewstudents hesitated to start. They waited to see the rest of the class would do.Several others checked the instructions and made something according to one ofthe model plans provided. Another group built something out of their ownimaginations.

   Once I had aboy who worked experimentally with Tinkertoys in his free time. Hisconstructions filled a shelf in the art classroom and a good part of hisbedroom at home. I was delighted at the presence of such a student. Here was anexceptionally creative mind at work. His presence meant that I had anunexpected teaching assistant in class whose creativity would infect(感染) other students.

    Encouragingthis kind of thinking has a downside. I ran the risk of losing thosestudents who had a different style of thinking. Without fail one would declare,” But I’m just not creative.”

  “Do you dreamat night when you’re asleep?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “So tell meone of your most interesting dreams.” The student would tell something wildlyimaginative. Flying in the sky or in a time machine or growing three heads.“That’s pretty creative. Who does that for you?”

  “Nobody. I doit.”

  “Really-atnight, when you’re asleep?”

  “Sure.”

  “Try doing itin the daytime, in class, okay?”

C

Reading can be a social activity. Think of the people who belong to book groups. They choose books to read and then meet to discuss them. Now, the website BookCrossing.com turns the page on the traditional idea of a book group.

Members go on the site and register the books they own and would like to share. BookCrossing provides an identification number to stick inside the book. Then the person leaves it in a public place, hoping that the book will have an adventure, traveling far and wide with each new reader who finds it.

Bruce Pederson, the managing director of BookCrossing, says, “The two things that change your life are the people you meet and books you read. BookCrossing combines both.”

Members leave books on park benches and buses, in train stations and coffee shops. Whoever finds their book will go to the site and record where they found it.

People who find a book can also leave a journal entry describing what they thought of it. E-mails are then sent to the BookCrossing to keep them updated about where their books have been found. Bruce peterson says the idea is for people not to be selfish by keeping a book to gather dust on a shelf at home. zxx.k

BookCrossing is part of a trend among people who want to get back to the “real” and not the virtual(虚拟). The site now has more than one million members in more than one hundred thirty-five countries.

D

A new collection of photos brings an unsuccessful Antarctic voyage back to life.

Frank Hurley’s pictures would be outstanding----undoubtedly first-rate photo-journalism---if they had been made last week. In fact, they were shot from 1914 through 1916, most of them after a disastrous shipwreck(海滩), by a cameraman who had no reasonable expectation of survival. Many of the images were stored in an ice chest, under freezing water, in the damaged wooden ship.

The ship was the Endurance, a small, tight, Norwegian-built three-master that was intended to take Sir Ernest Shackleton and a small crew of seamen and scientists, 27 men in all, to the southernmost shore of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. From that point Shackleton wanted to force a passage by dog sled(雪橇) across the continent. The journey was intended to achieve more than what Captain Robert Falcon Scott had done. Captain Scott had reached the South Pole early in 1912 but had died with his four companions on the march back.

As writer Caroline Alexander makes clear in her forceful and well-researched story The Endurance, adventuring was even then a thoroughly commercial effort. Scott’s last journey, completed as he lay in a tent dying of cold and hunger, caught the world’s imagination, and a film made in his honor drew crowds. Shackleton, a onetime British merchant-navy officer who had got to within 100 miles of the South Pole in 1908, started a business before his 1914 voyage to make money from movie and still photography. Frank Hurley, a confident and gifted Australian photographer who knew the Antarctic, was hired to make the images, most of which have never before been published.