At school our children are taught to add up and subtract but，extraordinarily，are not shown how to open a bank account—let alone how to manage their finances in an increasingly complex and demanding world.

Today the parenting website Mumsnet and the consumer campaigner Martin Lewis have joined forces to launch an online petition(请愿)to make financial education a compulsory element of the school curriculum in England.Children from 5 to 16 should be taught about everything from pocket money to pensions，they say.

And that was exactly the plan enshrined(铭记)in the Children，Schools and Families Bill that was shelved by the government in the so-called “wash-up” earlier tlus month.

Consumer and parent groups believe financial education has always been one of the most confusing omissions of the curriculum.As the Personal Finance Education Group(PFEG)points out，the good habits of young cluldren do not last long.PFEG predicts that these young people will“find it much harder to avoid the serious pitfalls that have befallen many of their parents’generation unless they receive good quality financial education while at school.”

The UK has been in the grip of the worst financial recession for generations.It does seem odd that—unless parents step in—young people are left in the dark until they are cruelly introduced to the world of debt when they turn up at university.Chris Tapp，from money education charity Credit Action，puts it succinctly(言简意赅地):“It’s like we’ve been sending out people to drive without first giving them instruction—and then being shocked when they crash.It’s a no-brainer.Everybody needs to manage money and use financial products wisely and I wholeheartedly support this call to the next government—whatever colour it may be—to ensure that giving every child the opportunity to learn about finance is of the utmost priority after the election.”

In a recent poll of over 8 000 people，97% supported financial education in schools，while 3% said it was a job for parents.I am in favor of the majority.And what do you think—is it up to parents to encourage good habits or should financial education be entrusted to schools？

What can we infer according to Martin Lewis？

I'm going to talk about the preserving of fruits here. At the end of every summer,as the heaps of fresh fruit start to dwindle（减少）at the farmers'markets,the____1____to preserve it all pulls strong.　　As much as I love the idea of a pantry(食品储藏室) full of homemade jams,jellies,I____2____have the patience for serious canning. But there is another,easier way: boozy(含酒的) fruit. The basic___3____is simply to mix fruit and sugar with enough hard spirits to keep the fruit well soaked,and let it sit.You can ____4____the liquid as a drink and eat the sweet fruit over ice cream or cake. It is about the simplest preserving method to____5____the life of fruits apart from freezing. And not surprisingly,it's lately become somewhat of a____6____among the legion of DIY canners and fervent gardeners looking to make the most of seasonal____7____.

For Amy Pennington,a professional gardener in Seattle,“There's drying,salting,and canning,but preserving with alcohol is the lowest grade of entry for beginning canning enthusiasts.becauseit's hard to____8____ up.

Unlike making jam,which you can eat right off the stove,the____9____to it is that putting up fruit in alcohol is the slow road to dessert.The raw spirits and fnut need some____10____to get acquainted,traditionally from the end of summer harvest until Christmas.

空白处9应填

A new study shows that students learn much better through an active，iterative(迭代的)process that involves working through their misconceptions with fellow students and getting immediate feedback from the instructor.

The research was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia(UBC)，Vancouver，in Canada，led by physics Nobelist Carl Wieman.In this study，Wieman trained a postdoc，Louis Deslauriers，and a graduate student，Ellen Schelew，in an educational approach，called “deliberate practice，”that asks students to think like scientists and puzzle out problems during class.For 1 week，Deslauriers and Schelew took over one section of an introductory physics course for engineering majors，which met three times for 1 hour.A tenured physics professor continued to teach another large section using the standard lecture format.The results were dramatic: After the intervention，the students in the deliberate practice section did more than twice as well on a 12-question multiple-choice test of the material as those in the control section.They were also more engaged and a post-study survey found that nearly all said they would have liked the entire 15-week course to have been taught in the more interactive manner.

“It’s almost certainly the case that lectures have been ineffective for centuries.But now we’ve figured out a better way to teach”that makes students an active participant in the process，Wieman says.The “deliberate practice”method begins with the instructor giving students a multiple-choice question on a particular concept，which the students discuss in small groups before answering electronically.Their answers reveal their grasp of the topic，which the instructor deals with in a short class discussion before repeating the process with the next concept.

While previous studies have shown that this student-centered method can be more effective than teacher-led instruction，Wieman says tlus study attempted to provide “a particularly clean comparison...to measure exactly what can be learned inside the classroom.”He hopes the study persuades faculty members to stop delivering traditional lectures and “switch over” to a more interactive approach.More than 55 courses at Colorado across several departments now offer that approach，he says，and the same thing is happening gradually at UBC.

How does Wieman look at the traditional lectures according to the third paragraph？

When travelling overseas，do you buy water in plastic bottles or take your chances with tap water?Imagine you are wandering about on a Thai island or __26__ the ruins of Angkor.It's hot so you grab a bottle of water from a local vendor.It's the safe thing to do，right?The bottle is __27__ ，and the label says "pure water".But maybe what's inside is not so __28__ .Would you still be drinking it if you knew that more than 90 percent of all bottled water sold around the world __29__ microplastics?

That's the conclusion of a recently __30__ study，which analysed 259 bottles from 11 brands sold in nine countries，__31__ an average of 325 plastic particles per litre of water.These microplastics included a __32__ commonly known as PET and widely used in the manufacture of clothing and food and __33__ containers.The study was conducted at the State University of New York on behalf of Orb Media，a journalism organisation.About a million bottles are bought every minute，not only by thirsty tourists but also by many of the 2.1 billion worldwide who live with unsafe drinking water.

Confronted with this __34__ ，several bottled-water manufacturers including Nestle and Coca-Cola undertook their own studies using the same methodology.These studies showed that their water did contain microplastics，but far less than the Orb study suggested.Regardless，the World Health Organisation has launched a review into the __35__ health risks of drinking water from plastic bottles.

空白处27.应填

长城
说到中国文化，不能不提到长城。从公元前7世纪到公元16世纪，在大约2 200年的时间里，先后有19个朝代修建过长城，所修的长城长达10万千米以上。主要的长城修建工程是在秦代、汉代和明代完成的。现今存有遗迹的主要是明长城，从东边入海口的山海关(Shanhai Pass)开始，一直到沙漠深处的嘉峪关(Jiayu Pass)，全长约6700千米。长城是世界历史上最伟大的工程之一，其建造时间之长、参与人数之多、工程难度之大，在世界上无出其右。