It was a cold evening and my daughter and I were walking up Broadway. I didn’t notice a guy sitting inside a cardboard box. But Nora did. She wasn’t even four, but she ___26___ at my coat and said, “That man’s cold. Daddy, ___27___ we take him home?”

I don’t remember my reply. But I do remember a sudden ___28___ feeling inside me. I had always been delighted at how much my daughter noticed in her ___29__, whether it was ___30___ in flight or children playing. But now she was noticing ___31___ and beggary.

A few days later, I saw an article in the newspaper about volunteers who picked up a food package from a nearby school on a Sunday morning and ___32___ it to an elderly person. It was quick and easy. I ___33___ us up. Nora was ___34___ about it. She could understand the importance of food, so she could easily see how ___35___ our job was. When Sunday came, she was ready, but I had to ___36___ myself to leave the house. On the way to the school, I fought an urge to turn ___37___. The Sunday paper and coffee were waiting at home. Why do this?  ___38___, we phoned the elderly person we’d been appointed. She ___39___ us right over.

The building was in a sad state. Facing us was a silver-haired woman in an old dress. She took the package and asked us to come in. Nora ran inside. I unwillingly followed. ___40___ inside, I saw that the department belonged to someone poor. Our hostess showed us some photos. Nora played and when it came time to say goodbye, we three hugged, I walked home in tears.

Professionals call such a(n) ___41___ “a volunteer opportunity”. They are opportunities, I’ve come to see. Where else but as volunteers do you have opportunity to do something ___42___ that’s good for others as well as for yourself? Nora and I regularly serve to needy people and ___43___ clothes for the homeless. Yet, as I’ve ___44___ her grow over these past four years, I still wonder—which of us has ___45___ more?

Passage 1

We can achieve knowledge either actively or passively (被动地). We achieve it actively by direct experience, by testing and proving an idea, or by reasoning.

We achieve knowledge passively by being told by someone else. Most of the learning that takes place in the classroom and the kind that happens when we watch TV or read newspapers or magazines is passive. Conditioned as we are to passive leaning, it's not surprising that we depend on it in our everyday communication with friends and co-workers.

Unfortunately,passive learning has a serious problem. It makes us tend to accept what we are told even when it is little more than hear say and rumor(谣言).

Did you ever play the game Rumor? It begins when one person writes down a message but doesn't show it to anyone. Then the person whispers it,word for word, to another person.That person, in turn,whispers it to still another, and so on, through all the people playing the game. The last person writes down the message word for word as he or she hears it. Then the two written statements are compared. Typically, the original message has changed.

That' s what happens in daily life. The simple fact that people repeat a story in their own words changes the story. Then, too, most people listen imperfectly. And many enjoy adding their own creative touch to a story,trying to improve on it,stamping(打上标记)it with their own personal style. Yet those who hear it think they know.

This process is also found among scholars and authors:A statement of opinion by one writer may be re-stated as fact by another,who may in turn be quoted by yet another; and this process may continue,unless it occurs to someone to question the facts on which the original writer based his opinion or to challenge the interpretation he placed upon those facts.

材料暂缺。

Passage 3

Good news for people who have difficulty in remembering things. A memory technique invented by the ancient Greeks has recently been proved to be able to greatly improve ordinary people's memory ability. You may even become a memory champion if you practice hard enough.

This is according to a study published in the journal Neuron. Researchers fro

Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands found that memory champions aren't all that different to us. People with an average memory can greatly improve their memory ability by using what's known as the“ mind palace” method.

The method is the secret weapon (武器) of the fictional (虚构的) character Sherlock Holmes.

In order to do this, you need to picture a place you're familiar with, such as your living room. Then, you have to remember this place in as much detail as possible as this is your own mind palace.

Suppose you want to remember a shopping list. You can start by spreading out all the items around your living room in your mind. This means each item on your list is connected with a remembered place in your living room. You travel to that remembered place as you recall the list.

To explore the effects of this method on the brain, researchers gathered 51 participants with average memory levels and no previous memory training. After 40 days of daily 30-minute training sessions (一段时间), participants doubled the amount of words they could remember - they went from recalling an average of 26 words out of 72, to an impressive 62. Four months later, even without continued training, their recall performance remained high.

“Once you are familiar with these strategies and know how to apply them, you can keep your performance high without much further training,” Martin Dresler, assistant professor from Radboud University Medical Center, told the Daily Mail.

In addition, the training also affects the way our brain cells connect. After training, the way that the participants' brain cells connect began to be like those of memory champions compared to scans(扫描检查) taken before training. Researchers believe this could be responsible for their increased memory.

But what makes this research so fascinating is that it seems to prove that the talent to store things in your mind isn't down to genes. Dresler found there was no deference in brain structure between memory champions and normal people, which means memory champions are not born with different brains.

“They, without a single exception, trained for months and years using methods to achieve these high levels of performance,” Dresler told Science Daily.

It’s clear that more studies are needed to find out what's going on here, but the “mind palace” method might be your best bet to never forget an important name, date or appointment ever again.

Passage 4

The universe likes to be shy about its age, but astronomers believe they have a pretty good idea of the range. Currently, the most widely accepted age for the universe is around 13.8 billion years, but determining the age of…well, everything, is no easy feat（功绩）.Now new studies have investigated the question using different methods-and they've come up with two different answers, separated by more than a billion years.

Because the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace, the further away an object is, the faster it appears to be moving away from us.This is expressed as the Hubble constant（哈勃常数）, and it's a key factor in figuring out the age of the universe.After all, if we can determine how fast moving away from us, we can rewind that process to its beginning-the Big Bang. Researchers from the University of Oregon set out to map the distance to dozens of galaxies. The team calculated that the universe is only 12.6 billion years old-that, you might notice is much younger than the 13.8 years usually stated.

In the second study, the method of figuring out the age of the universe is by mapping the oldest light we can detect.We are restoring the 'baby photo' of the universe to its original condition, removing the wear and tear of time and space that distorted（扭曲）the image, says Neelima Sehgal, co-author on the study.Only by seeing this sharper baby photo or image of the universe can we more fully understand how our universe was born.In doing so, the researcher determined that the universe is 13.8 billion years old-in agreement with the accepted age.

The real problem though, is that the studies disagree so wildly with each other, to the tune of a billion years. But they are not the only ones-the battle lines are commonly drawn by the methods used. Obviously, more research is heeded to determine where the truth lies.