What are the kindest things that have ever been done for you? Once, years ago, I made a list, on a late night flight to my hometown.

My sister had called to tell me that our mother was dying and that if I wanted to say goodbye, I needed to get there fast. So I made calls to cancel work and hurried to catch the last flight out.

After takeoff, the lights went down and I felt empty and alone.

What do you do when you get lonely and there’s no one to hold you? How do you fill a hungry heart?

I took out a notebook and listed all the kindnesses that I’d ever been given.

Five hours later, when we landed, I closed the notebook and rushed to the hospital to say goodbye to my mother.

Making that list of kindnesses that night helped me in the days ahead to do the things I needed to do and be the daughter I wanted to be.

Kindness heals and fills an empty heart. It’s a gift, once and for always.

Last night it was cold and rainy, so I wrapped myself up in a blanket. Warm then, I recalled being 7 years old in Mrs Harrison’s second grade class.

That morning, I’d worn my new shoes to school. I loved the shoes and all the way to school on the bus couldn’t stop looking at them. But when I stepped off the bus, my right foot--- and my new right shoe – went deep into a puddle of water.

Mrs Harrison saw the water I was dripping into class. She said, “Give me those shoes and warm your feet by the fire.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

“No trouble! We all hit a puddle now and then!”

I don’t know if she remembered it. But I do. It warmed my feet for a few hours. But it has warmed my heart for a lifetime.

Often, acts of kindness seem to be the simplest. But they become beautiful beyond all singing of it if they are remembered with thankfulness and passed on from one needy soul to another.

1.The author thinks listing kindnesses can _________.

A. help kill time when she feels lonely.

B. remind her how lucky she was as a child.

C. make her think that she was not as good as others.

D. remind her to be a good daughter.

2.The author mentioned her experience in second grade mainly to ______.

A. express her thanks to Mrs Harrison

B. show that children always love new shoes

C. encourage teachers to care more about their students

D. say that small acts of kindness can mean a lot to someone

3.According to the passage, we should _______.

A. remember these acts for a lifetime.

B. spread kindness to those in need.

C. speak about the kindness to other people.

D. make a list of kindnesses and repay them.

4.Why does the author think kindness is a gift for always?

__________________________________________________________________________

US poet Allen Ginsberg once said, “Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original(独创的) human mind.”

To know the special ability of poetry to catch the human spirit, World Poetry Day is held by the United Nations on March 21 each year.

The magic of poetry lies in the connection built up through words between the writer and the reader. When we read a poem, we often imagine what the poet was thinking when they wrote it, or what they were doing at the time. These thoughts let us connect with the words better, as if we’d written the poem ourselves.

But in the age of artificial intelligence (AI,人工智能), would a poem still mean as much if it weren’t written by a human at all? Today, computers can create all kinds of texts, including research papers, books, news stories and even poems.

In 2013, Australian researcher Oscar Schwartz and his friend Benjamin Laird created a website called “bot or not”, where readers can read poems and guess whether they were written by a human or a computer. During a recent speech at TedX Sydney, Schwartz said that all over the years, some of the website’s poems were able to fool(欺骗)65 percent of human readers into thinking they were written by a human.

By creating the website, Schwartz and Laird hoped that people would doubt the difference between humans and machines – and be able to tell what makes us human.

“The human mind is not a cold, hard fact,” Schwartz said during his speech. A computer may be able to create poems that are correct in both grammar and style, but it wouldn’t be able to get the same meanings and feelings across as a human poet could. In fact, now AI software creates poems based on ones that have already been written by humans. As Schwartz noted, “The computer works like a mirror that reflects (反映) any idea of a human.”

1.The purpose of the first three paragraphs is to ___________.

A. introduce where World Poetry Day comes from.

B. show how popular poetry is around the world.

C. show the importance and beauty of poetry.

D. give some tips on enjoying poetry.

2.What did the data(数据)from “bot or not” show?

A. Computers are better than humans at writing poetry.

B. Computers can also produce poems of high quality.

C. Readers don’t really care whether the poems were written by humans.

D. Few readers can tell poems written by computers from those by humans.

3.According to the article, computers can’t match humans in creating poems because they_____.

A. fail to use the correct grammar and style

B. can’t create poems that are meaningful

C. can’t show feelings as well as humans

D. only know how to follow humans’ poems

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