阅读与填词stand · tract · fer

1Grandma's old clock stopped on a Monday morning. It had hung on the kitchen wall for forty years. Grandma's seventieth birthday was only ten days away, so Li Ming decided to repair the clock himself.

2That evening, he opened the back. Inside were dozens of tiny parts of different sizes. He took out a small wheel to look at it. Then he made a terrible mistake: he tried to put it back in a hurry. It slipped from his fingers and rolled under the fridge. He searched for an hour but never found it.

3The next afternoon, Ming carried the clock to a repair stand in the market. The repairer, an old man called Mr Gao, looked inside. “A wheel is missing,” he said. “Nobody makes this kind any more. But I can make one by hand. Come back in a week.”

4Ming did not wait a week. He went to the stand every day after school and watched Mr Gao cut the tiny wheel out of a piece of metal. Sometimes he was late for dinner.

5When the clock was ready, Ming offered Mr Gao all his pocket money. The old man shook his head. “Most people leave their things here and go,” he said. “You stayed and watched. Keep your money.”

6On Grandma's birthday, the clock was ticking on the wall again. Grandma stood under it and listened.

1Our school's English Speaking Contest will be held in the lecture hall on May 16. It is a great chance to use your spoken English in front of a real audience and to practise for the oral test. The top three speakers will go on to the city contest in June.

Who can take part

2The contest is open to Senior 1 and Senior 2 students. You don't need high marks in English. Sign up with your English teacher by May 6. Each class can send three speakers at most: the first three to sign up.

Your speech

3Each speaker gives a three-minute speech on the topic “A Person Who Changed My Mind”. You may hold small cards with notes, but you may not read from a full script. After your speech, the judges will ask you one question. You will have one minute to answer it.

Marks

4Judges give up to 40 marks for what you say, 40 for your language and 20 for how you speak. The time rule is strict: speakers who go over four minutes will lose five marks, and speakers who finish in under two minutes will lose ten.

On the day

5All speakers must arrive by 2:30 p.m. If you prefer to speak first, come early: speakers will be called in the order they arrive. Anyone who misses their turn will be moved to the end of the list.

1On 13 October 2022, a young bar-tailed godwit took off from Alaska. The bird was only five months old and had never made the journey before. Eleven days and one hour later, it landed in Tasmania, an island in the south of Australia. It had flown at least 13,560 kilometres without stopping once, the longest nonstop flight by a bird ever recorded.

2We know this because scientists had fixed a tiny satellite tag to the bird's lower back. The tag sent out signals that allowed them to track it across the Pacific Ocean, day and night.

3Covering such a distance might seem impossible for a bird that cannot rest on the water and does not stop to eat or drink. Godwits manage it by preparing carefully. In the weeks before they leave, they feed on small clams in the mudflats of Alaska and become very fat. By the time they take off, fat makes up more than half of their body weight. At the same time, their stomachs and other organs used for digestion shrink, because they will not be needed during the flight.

4The young bird seemed to be heading for New Zealand, the usual destination for godwits from Alaska. Over the ocean, however, it made a sharp turn and ended up in Tasmania instead. This “wrong turn” made the trip even longer, and it suggested that godwits can fly farther than scientists had believed.

5By the time it landed, the bird had probably lost half or more of its body weight. Adult godwits fly north again each spring, but they do not do it in one go. They stop first on the coasts of the Yellow Sea, between China and Korea, and spend a month or two feeding there before flying on to Alaska.

1For our history project, Ms Liu asked each of us to record an oral history: a long interview with an older person in our neighbourhood about his or her working life. My classmates found people with exciting stories. Wang Fei's neighbour had been a doctor in a distant mountain village. Chen Yu's had driven a tractor on a huge farm in Heilongjiang.

2The only retired person in my building was Mr Zhou, who lives downstairs. He had spent thirty years checking railway track, and I almost asked a retired teacher in the next building instead. Mr Zhou's job sounded so ordinary: he walked beside the rails and looked at them.

3One Sunday I set my phone on Mr Zhou's kitchen table, put my questions in order and pressed “record”. At first he gave short answers. Then I asked what he used to carry to work.

4He went into the next room and came back with a small hammer. “Every day I walked twenty kilometres of track and hit the rails with this,” he said. “A good rail rings. A cracked one sounds dull.” He tapped the metal leg of a chair to show me. “After a few years, you can hear the difference without thinking.”

5He told me about a winter night when he heard a dull note near a bridge. The rail there had been laid only a week before, but there was a crack in it. He ran back along the track and stopped the next train with a red lamp, just a few minutes before it reached the bridge.

6The interview lasted almost two hours. When I played part of it in class, nobody said a word. Afterwards, Ms Liu asked if Mr Zhou would visit our school and bring his hammer.

1Nearly 1,900 years after it was completed, the Pantheon in Rome is still covered by its huge round concrete roof, and some ancient Roman aqueducts still carry water to the city. Many modern concrete structures, by contrast, have begun to fall apart after only a few decades. How did Roman builders create a material that has lasted so long?

2For a long time, experts gave most of the credit to the volcanic ash that the Romans mixed into their concrete. Another feature received far less attention. Roman concrete is full of small white pieces of lime, most only a few millimetres across. Such pieces are not found in modern concrete, and they were generally dismissed as merely a sign of careless mixing or poor-quality materials.

3Admir Masic, a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), found that explanation hard to accept. If the Romans had put so much effort into making an outstanding building material, he asked, why would they put so little effort into mixing it properly? There had to be more to the story.

4His team, which included researchers from the US, Italy and Switzerland, studied the pieces closely. They concluded that the Romans had mixed quicklime directly into their concrete. Quicklime gives off a great deal of heat when it meets water, and this “hot mixing” produced the white pieces and left them weak and quick to react with water. When a crack forms in the concrete, it tends to run through the pieces. Water that gets into the crack dissolves some of the lime, which then hardens into calcium carbonate and fills the gap. In effect, the concrete repairs itself.

5To test the idea, the researchers made hot-mixed concrete from both an ancient recipe and a modern one, cracked the samples on purpose and ran water through them. Within two weeks the cracks had closed completely, and water could no longer flow through. A sample made without quicklime never healed.

6The discovery has potential uses today. Making cement produces about 8 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, so concrete that lasts longer and needs replacing less often could help cut that figure. In 2023, the team said it was working to bring its self-healing cement to market.

1At our school's art show last spring, a boy from Senior Two displayed a piece of calligraphy so bold and smooth that people stood in front of it for minutes. I kept hearing the same comment: “He's a natural.” I happen to know that he picked up a brush for the first time only two years ago. Since then, he has practised for three hours almost every night. Nobody mentioned that. Without realizing it, almost every visitor had mistaken two years of hard work for a gift.

2We love naturals. In a 2011 study, the psychologist Chia-Jung Tsay played two short clips of piano music to more than 100 trained musicians. Each clip came with a short description of the pianist. One pianist was described as a natural talent; the other, as someone who had reached the same level through years of hard practice. The musicians rated the “natural” as more talented and more likely to succeed. What they did not know was that both clips came from the same recording by the same pianist. Yet when asked directly, these same musicians said that training mattered more than talent.

3This preference does real harm, especially to students. If effortless success is what we admire, then effort starts to look like a weakness. So students hide it. They announce “I didn't even study” before a test, and they quietly throw away the drafts that show how hard they worked. Worse, those who find a subject difficult may infer that they simply lack the potential for it, and stop trying at exactly the point where practice would begin to pay off.

4Some will object that talent is real: a few people are born with extraordinary gifts, and no amount of practice will turn most of us into concert pianists. That is true; people do differ in what they can achieve. But nobody chooses the talent they are born with. The work is the only part that is actually up to us.

5So here is a small suggestion. The next time a friend does something impressive, don't call it a gift. Ask how long it took. You will probably hear a more interesting story, and you will be praising the one part of it that your friend actually chose.