_______ (根据金币上的日期), we decided that it was made five hundred years ago.
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In my opinion, Ali is clearly going to be very successful.
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I ________ that Ali is going to be very
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According to Tawanna Dillahunt and colleagues, successes in saving energy by Facebook and our liking for animals can be______.
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You are going to read a magazine article in which five people talk about railway journeys. For questions 22-35, choose from the people (A-E). The people maybe chosen more than once. When more than one answer is required, these maybe given in any order. There is an example at the beginning (0).
Which person or people
found on returning years later that nothing had changed？ 0 E
was unable to count on the train service？ 【S1】__
enjoyed the company of fellow passengers？ 【S2】__
found the views from the train dramatic？ 【S3】__ 【S4】__
welcomed a chance to relax on the trip？ 【S5】__
was never disappointed by the journey？ 【S6】__
has a reason for feeling grateful to one special train？ 【S7】__
traveled on a railway which is no longer in regular service？ 【S8】__
regretted not going on a particular train trip？ 【S9】__
used to travel on the railway whenever possible？ 【S10】__
learnt an interesting piece of information on a train journey？ 【S11】__
took a train which travelled from one country to another？ 【S12】__
says that the railway had been looked after by unpaid helpers？ 【S13】__
was once considered not old enough to travel by train？ 【S14】__
On the rails
Five celebrities tell Andrew Morgan their favourite memories of railway journeys.
A Andrea Thompson—Newsreader
I fell in love with the south of France a long time ago and try to get back there as often as I can. There's a local train from Cannes along the coast which crosses the border with Italy. It takes you past some of the most amazing seascapes. It never matters what the weather is like, or what time of the year it is, it is always enchanting. Out of the other window are some of the best back gardens and residences in the whole of France. You feel like someone peeping into the property of the rich and famous. The travelers themselves are always lively because there is an interesting mix of tourists and locals, all with different itineraries but all admirers of the breath taking journey.
B Rod Simpson—Explorer
I have enjoyed so many rail journeys through the years, but if I had to pick a favourite it would be the Nile Valley Express, which runs across the desert of northern Sudan. The one misfortune in my youth, growing up in South Africa, was missing out on a family train journey from Cape Town to the Kruger National Park. I was regarded as being too young and troublesome and was sent off to an aunt. When I came to live in England as a teenager, I still hadn't travelled by train. London Waterloo was the first real station I ever saw and its great glass dome filled me with wonder.
C Betty Cooper—Novelist
I am indebted to one train in particular: the Blue Train, which took my husband and me on our honeymoon across France to catch a boat to Egypt. It was on the train that my husband gave me a pink dress, which I though
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An English friend, Jo, has written to you for some advice. This is part of the letter you have received.
I leave school this summer and have a year free before university. I want to come to your country First I'd like to spend some time traveling. Then I'd like to find a job for three months. Please give me some advice on traveling and working in your country. Thanks, Jo
Write your letter. Do not write any postal addresses.
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The British government says Sir Michael Barber, once an adviser to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, has changed pretty much every aspect of education policy in England and Wales, often more than once. "The funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of local government, the role of national government, the range and nature of national agencies, schools admissions" —you name it, it's been changed and sometimes changed back. The only thing that hasn't changed has been the outcome. According to the National Foundation for Education Research, there had been (until recently) no measurable improvement in the standards of literacy and numeracy in primary schools for 50 years.
England and Wales are not alone. Australia has almost tripled education spending per student since 1970. No improvement. American spending has almost doubled since 1980 and class sizes are the lowest ever. Again, nothing. No matter what you do, it seems, standards refuse to budge. To misquote Woody Allen, those who can't do, teach; those who can't teach, run the schools.
Why bother, you might wonder. Nothing seems to matter. Yet something must. There are big variations in educational standards between countries. These have been measured and re-measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which has established, first, that the best performing countries do much better than the worst and, second, that the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea.
Those findings raise what ought to be a fruitful question, what do the successful lot have in common？ Yet the answer to that has proved surprisingly elusive. Not more money. Singapore spends less per student than most. Nor more study time. Finnish students begin school later, and study fewer hours, than in other rich countries.
Now, an organisation from outside the teaching fold- McKinsey, a consultancy that advises companies and governments—has boldly gone where educationalists have mostly never gone: into policy recommendations based on the PISA findings. Schools, it says, need to do three things, get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind. That may not sound exactly "first-of-its-kind": schools surely do all this already？ Actually, they don't. If these ideas were really taken seriously, they would change education radically.
Begin with hiring the best. There is no question that, as one South Korean official put it, "the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers." Studies in Tennessee and Dallas have shown that, if you take pupils of average ability and give them to teachers deemed in the top fifth of the profession, they end up in the top 10% of student performers; if you give them to teachers from the bottom fifth, they end up at the bottom. The quality of teachers affects student performance more than anything else.
Yet most school systems do not go all out to get the best. The New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, a non-profit organisation, says America typically recruits teachers from the bottom third of college graduates. Washington, DC recently hired as chancellor for its public schools an alumna of an organisation called Teach for America, which seeks out top graduates and hires them to teach for two years. Both her appointment and the organisation caused a storm.
A bias against the brightest happens partly because of lack of money (governments fear they cannot afford them), and partly because other aims get in the way. Almost every rich country has sought to reduce class size lately. Yet all other things being equal, smaller classes mean more teachers for the same pot of money, producing lower salaries and lower professional status. That may explain the paradox that, after primary school