Passage 1

I have personally come to understand that “empowerment” is not a lesson that can be taught by way of textbooks or lectures, projects or field trips, and not even by way of principles and inspirational teaching. It must be taught by personal examples.

When we ask our students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, or those, who face a personal lifestyle that is in direct conflict with the principles that we teach, we have to be willing to show them how to overcome, how to make the transition from one state of being into the next, and how to be empowered. We must make the lesson of empowerment come to life, in a real, up-dose and personal way. And the only way this can be done is when we allow ourselves to become living examples of what we teach.

Preparatory School for Global Leadership (PSGL) is a school that I started because I believed that I had a method, a way of teaching and learning that would empower the urban disadvantaged children. But as I sit back and think about it now, PSGL was a school that I started so that I would showcase empowerment to a group of students (and staff) who needed a real life, an example of how to grow beyond one's current circumstances.

When I reflect on my journey of starting the school, I realize that every step along the way was personally teaching about empowerment. It is one thing to teach it, but it is another to live it. Unless we experience empowerment on a personal level, we cannot help students learn it, circumvent obstacles as they arise and develop and employ the new skills needed to function to be empowered.

How can we get in the face of a student and push him to a place that is foreign and scary, asking him to become greater than his environment? We can't, why? Because we do not know what it lacks like, we do not know what it feels like. Our role as a teacher becomes technical, causing us to miss out on the spirit of truly good teaching, where one teaches with relevancy, authenticity and experience.

When I look at the faces of these students, I know that my process of starting the school was for them. When I became what I taught, when I empowered myself in spaces where there was no one there to empower me, when I chose to succeed without excuses, I became a living lesson.

These students saw me and our staff as extensions of the lessons we were trying to teach. Our lives, not by our perfection, but by our effort, showed students how to apply what we taught.

Passage 2

Cats have the widest hearing range of nearly any mammal: not only can they perceive sound in what we define as the “ultrasonic” range, they can also appreciate all the bass Dr Dre can throw at them. They can swivel their whiskers forwards while hunting to provide a kind of short-range radar. And they can see exceptionally well in the dark thanks to a reflective surface behind the retina that bounces light back, giving it a second chance to hit a photoreceptor. They see more distinct images per second than we do.

Dog partisans will appeal to the dog's allegedly superior intelligence—though if that was the primary criterion for choosing a pet, one would expect to see a lot more crows and squid on leads around town. In fact, cats are rather cleverer than commonly assumed, as the biologist and animal-behavior expert John Bradshaw shows in his new book. They can even be trained to an extent which was news to me.

Bradshaw's book mixes pellets of cat lore with accounts of feline evolution, anatomy, genetics and development from newborn kittens to adulthood, plus descriptions of cat-psychology experiments in the laboratory, many of which he has conducted himself. Some of the most interesting parts indicate holes in our current scientific knowledge. “Many mother cats try to move their litters at least once before they wean them,” he observes, “but science has yet to find out why”. No one knows why cats go crazy for catnip, nor why they are able to classify shapes according to whether they are closed or open. Kittens, meanwhile, may also use special movements of their tails to signal playfulness, but so far no scientist has been able to decode these. As far as potential research projects go, decoding the tail-language of playing kittens must be about the interesting unsolved problem in science.

The cat is an apparently phlegmatic beast, but Bradshaw points out that cats experience strong emotions, and sometimes might be suffering in silence. They aren't particularly sociable, and cats who are housed with others who weren't litter-mates, perhaps by well-meaning owners who think they need the company, can become chronically stressed.

Luckily, then, cats probably aren't aware that today they are once again hate-figures, the furry target of spittle-spraying ecologists who, armed with dodgy statistics, accuse cats of wildly “murdering” all the country's songbirds. It's a bit more complicated than that, Bradshaw shows. Rats also kill songbirds, and cats keep their numbers down; while the RSPB says the disappearance of habitat is a far more important factor in the decline of songbird populations than predator numbers. But we could at least, Bradshaw suggests, reverse the counterproductive selection pressure we currently exert on the domestic cat when we neuter house cats before they reproduce. This means, he explains, that the “friendliest, most docile” cats are prevented from leaving any descendants, while wildcats—which are more suspicious of humans and better at hunting—will leave more offspring. Unintentionally, we are causing cats to evolve into animals society won't like as much. Cat-haters probably won't appreciate this book, but anyone else might. It is written in a friendly and engaging way, has helpful tips for cat owners, and is packed with excellent cat facts. Why, you might have wondered, do cats get stuck up trees? Because all their claws face forwards, none can be used as brakes on the descent. We all know how good cats are at twisting mid-air to land on their feet, but they have an even more impressive trick: some cats adopt a “parachute”position during a long fall, with all four legs stuck out to the side, before coming back to the landing position at the last moment. This cat-parachute pose, Bradshaw calculates, limits the falling speed to a maximum of fifty-three miles an hour, enabling some cats to fall from high-rise buildings and walk away unhurt. I'd like to see a dog try that.

下面是一节高中英语课堂教学片段实录。

T: Arm yourself with sunscreen, sunglasses and a hat in a period of hot weather.

S1: How can you arm yourself? You already have two arms. How do you put on more?

T: Can we figure out the meaning of “arm” from the text? Look for another place where the word “sunscreen” appears.

S2: In this sentence: “Health experts warned people, when outside, to apply sunscreen with a sun protection factor...”.

S3: So I think “arm yourself” is kind of “apply”.

S1: Oh, that makes sense. Is he right?

T: I could answer you, but I'd like you to find out the meaning of “arm” in the

dictionary...

T: Got it? Can you explain it in English?

S4: Yes, it's a verb, different from the noun “arm”, meaning to provide yourself or others with weapons or to provide what you need for a task.

T: Nicely done!

语言素材：

Writing

① Think of someone famous that you admire a lot, for example, an artist, a musician or a writer.

② Write two or three paragraphs about his or her life. Below are some suggestions to help you.

③ Write about：

Where he/she was born and where he/she lived as a child.

His/Her family.

How he/she became famous.

His/Her songs/music/painting/novels/poems...

To show he/she has been in...

Your opinion of his/her work. Explain why you like him/her.

What you think will happen to him/her.

Whether he/she will continue to be successful.