Participating in art competitions is essential for students to gain formal recognition and impress college admission officers. Today, we have a list of art competitions on regional, national, and international scales.
EarthX Eco-Art Competition
It invites young artists aged 5-22 to create 2-D or 3-D art that illustrates the theme: Protectors for the Planet. The theme can be interpreted in various ways, including individuals taking action towards a more sustainable planet, or highlighting the efforts of environmental leaders working to sustain ecosystems.
Deadline: March 8, 2024
The Children's Drawing Contest
Sponsored by International Certification Organization Network, the contest, whose theme this year is "Passing on Our Precious Earth to The Future", invites children aged 7-15 worldwide to draw the kind of natural environment they would like to live in. 48 winners will receive special memorabilia. All entrants will receive a participation prize. Medium: Drawings with any type of paint, pastel, etc.
Deadline: May 31, 2024
Science without Borders Challenge
The competition is open to children and young people under the age of 16. We welcome entries from both groups and individuals to create art to promote public awareness of the need to preserve, protect, and restore nature. The theme is "The Sixth Extinction" and you can focus on the protection of endangered species. Acceptable media include paint, pencil, marker, crayon, ink, felt, and oil pastel.
Deadline: April 8, 2024
The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards
The Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the longest-running literary and art competition in the US, provides opportunities and academic awards for creative young people to express their talent. The theme this year is "Tell Your Climate Story". Students in the 9th to 12th grades can submit poetry, fiction and nonfiction to show their understanding of environmental issues.
Deadline: June 10, 2024
Ms. McIntyre, 38, worked as a publisher. She suffered brain cancer and her health got worse despite some medical treatment. But she realized that in a way, she was luckier than some other people. She had insurance to help pay for her medical care. But Ms. McIntyre and her husband, Mr. Gregory, knew that many people with cancer face tough decisions because of the costs of medical care and wind up owing far more than they can pay.
Though her health was failing, Ms. McIntyre decided to help pay off the medical debts of as many people as she possibly could. The couple began donating money to a group called RIP Medical Debt, which is committed to working to pay off the unpaid medical debts of others. The group can pay off medical bills for about 100 times less money than they cost. In other words, for every 100 donated, the group can pay off 10,000 in unpaid medical bills.
Unfortunately, Ms. McIntyre passed away before long. Mr. Gregory posted a message for Ms. McIntyre on her social media accounts. "If you're reading this, I have passed away," the post began. Then the post explained, "To celebrate my life, I've arranged to buy up others' medical debts and then destroy the debts."
The couple had set up a page on a website to raise money for this purpose. They had hoped to raise about $20,000. Nevertheless, Ms. McIntyre's last post attracted a lot of attention. The donations on her web page quickly passed the total goal. In less than a week, the site had raised 10 times more than expected and the donations are still coming in. By November 22, 2023, Ms. McIntyre's web page had raised over $627,000, or enough money to pay off about $60 million in medical debts.
Mr. Gregory planned a special event in December to celebrate Ms. McIntyre's life and to announce how many millions of dollars of medical debts her efforts had paid for.
One by one, prejudices are disappearing in the West. People may hold private suspicions that other people's race or sex makes them inferior—but to say so openly is totally taboo(禁忌). One old prejudice remains undisturbed, though. Just ask a childless person.
They are not charged to special taxes, as they were in Soviet Russia; nor are they driven from their homes, as they still are in some poor countries. The childless nonetheless come in for a lot of criticism. Some point out that non-parents are failing to produce the future workers who will pay for their pensions. Childless politicians are charged with not having a proper stake in society. "He talks to us about the future, but he doesn't have children!" complained Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founder of the National Front party, of Emmanuel Macron, who went on to win the French presidency. Similar attacks on Theresa May and Angela Merkel also failed but researchers find that many voters quietly agree.
If non-breeders are selfish, they have a strange way of showing it. They are more likely to set up charitable foundations than people with children, and much more likely to donate money to good causes. According to one American estimate, the mere fact of not having children raises the amount a person leaves to charity by a little over $10,000. The childless are thus a small but useful counterweight to the world's parents, who stop social stability by passing on their social and economic advantages to their children.
The charge that childless people fail to pull their weight in population is correct, but is less serious than it appears. Those who do not have children do put pressure on public pension systems. Governments have to do unpopular things like making pensions less generous, as Japan has done, or accepting more immigrants, as some Western countries have done. But to sustain public pensions in the long term, countries do not actually need more parents. What they need instead is more babies. It is possible to combine a high rate of childlessness with a high birth rate, provided people who become parents have more than one or two children. That was the pattern in many Western countries a century ago. Ireland, yet another country with a childless leader, still manages it today.
The childless also do everyone else a favor by creating wonderful works of art. British novelists have been especially likely to have no offspring: think of Hilary Mantel, P.G Wodehouse and the Bronte sisters. In September last year Britain put Jane Austen on its ten-pound note. That decision was controversial, though it was hard to see why. Few people have written as shrewdly about money or about families even though Austen did not marry, and had no children.
Minimizing the environmental damage that new roads cause is generally regarded as a good thing. But to do that, it helps to understand just how new roads cause the damage of which they are accused.
Recently, a group of researchers led by Dr. Gonzalez conducted an experiment and proved that immigration is good for the health of animal populations. A road destroys only a small part of the habitat, thus destroying just a few local populations of creatures. So the argument that road-building itself is bad for biodiversity is not self-evidently correct. Those who nevertheless hold this view say that apparently separate local populations of animals are, in fact, parts of much larger populations connected via migration.
According to this theory, when a local population struggles to move about – because of an epidemic, for example – individuals from neighboring communities can fill the gaps.
The implications of the theory are straightforward. Cut local populations off from each other and each is more likely to disappear. And roads are good at doing just that. Testing the theory with experimental roads, however, would be expensive. Dr. Gonzalez's brainwave was to do the whole thing on a much smaller scale.
The team studied moss-covered rocks. On some rocks the researchers left the moss untouched; on others they made "roadways" across to leave the moss isolated. After waiting six months, they found that in the disturbed habitats nearly all the bug population had declined compared with undisturbed moss, and 40% of the species had become extinct.
The real test came in the second part of the experiment. In this, the researchers removed moss much as before, but they left narrow moss paths to bridge the no-bug's-land between islands. The islands with bridges did far better than isolated islands – a result that supports the notion that population exchange is necessary to keep an ecosystem healthy.
Whether these results can be translated to large-scale ecosystems remains uncertain. But if they can, they would cause more, not less, concern about the ecological effects of road-building. On the other hand, they also suggest a way out. In Britain, tunnels are often built under roads for animals of regular habits, such as badgers(獾), to be able to travel their traditional routes without having to fight with traffic. Extending that principle, perhaps special bridges might be a cheap way of letting man and nature rub along a bit better.
Want to start a habit? Big behavior change can come from setting small goals.___We pressure ourselves to go big. Instead, we should think small. The idea is to make these behavior changes so small that they're easy to do.
First, you take any new habit you want, and you scale it back so that it's super-tiny. In the case of wanting to reading more, that might mean reading one paragraph. In the case of meditating(冥想), it might be taking three calming breaths.___So even when you're in a rush or you're sick or you're distracted, it's so tiny that you can still do it.
___. Ask yourself, what does this habit come after? For example, reading might come after you sit down on the subway. That might be the perfect time for you to open a book and read a paragraph. Now, you can read more if you want.
In addition to making it tiny and then using an existing routine to remind you of it, activate your brain by calling up a positive emotion, by celebrating—whether that's raising your arms, doing a little dance or singing a song in your head.___.
You make these changes and feel successful.___So you begin to think, "Oh, I'm the kind of person who tidies up", "I'm the kind of person who meditates" or "I'm the kind of person who reads." You find other opportunities to tidy up or meditate or read. So the habit naturally spreads to other parts of your life.
A. These big expectations are often unrealistic.
B. You start thinking of yourself in those ways.
C. It helps you feel successful and form the habit.
D. The way you think about yourself starts to change.
E. Changing our behaviors can feel like a complicated task.
F. You make it so simple that you have no excuse not to do it.
G. Then you find where it fits naturally in your existing routine.
In a crowded migrant camp in Tijuana, Mexico, a three-year-old girl wandered 1 . toward the exit. She was steps from a busy road. Estefania Rebellon was the only person who 2 her. The writer had just driven from Los Angeles with a group of friends to drop off food and clothing to a(n) 3 organization .
It was December 2018, a time when the US-Mexico border was seeing migrants from Central America 4 violence and poverty. Rebellon rushed over to the child and took her 5 .
"Where are your parents?" she asked anxiously. Eventually, she and her friends found the girl's 6 father, who had stepped away to 7 for food.
Back at home, Rebellon gathered a group of volunteer 8 via social media, and using a thousand dollars from her 9 , set up a school at the Tijuana border. In five years, the pilot program has grown into the non-profit Yes We Can World Foundation, which has 10 three tents into classrooms and established two schools.
11 by donations, the foundation's teachers have provided a bilingual education to more than 3,000 kids. The schools 12 an official curriculum from Mexico's education ministry. They also offer 13 courses, which help kids understand more about migration.
Rebellon has received numerous 14 for her work, including Outstanding American By Choice. As more than 6.6 million people still live in refugee camps around the world, she says she'd like to 15 the foundation's influence and support migrant children globally.
Chinese Food Culture
China has a food culture that has been evolving for thousands of years,___each dish carrying its own unique story.
Chinese gastronomy(烹饪学) is an art form that goes beyond just___(satisfy) your taste buds(味蕾). It's about indulging all your senses, a___(harmonious) of color, aromas, tastes, and shapes in every dish.___(historical), Chinese cultures intertwined agricultural preferences with patterns in the stars, guiding food consumption___(base) on the 24 Solar Terms.
Do you prefer the subtle savory elegance of Beijing hotpot___the fiery intensity of Sichuan's version? With its vast territory, each area in___total of thirty-four Chinese provinces and districts has its own culinary history, customs and dishes. From the fiery flavors of Sichuan to the delicate dim sum of Guangdong, each region has something unique___(offer).
But it's not just about the flavors. It's also about the favors. For example, regional breakfasts___(shape) by geography, climate and cultural practices,___other dishes have become beloved staples(主食) across the country, blurring regional lines from north to south, east to west.
1.表达歉意；
2.说明原因；
3.提出补救办法；
注意：
1.写作词数80左右。
2.可适当增加细节。
Dear Mr. Anderson,
……
When I was in middle school, my social studies teacher asked me to enter a writing contest, I said no without thinking. I did not love writing. My family came from Brazil, so English was only my second language. Writing was so difficult and painful for me that my teacher had allowed me to present my paper on the sinking of the Titanic by acting out a play, where I played all the parts. No one laughed harder than he did.
So, why did he suddenly force me to do something at which I was sure to fail? His reply: "Because I love your stories. If you're willing to apply yourself, I think you have a good shot at this." Encouraged by his words, I agreed to give it a try.
I chose Paul Revere's horse as my subject. Paul Revere was a silversmith (银匠) in Boston who rode a horse at night on April 18, 1775 to Lexington to warn people that British soldiers were coming. My story would come straight from the horse's mouth. Not a brilliant idea, but funny, and unlikely to be anyone else's choice.
What did the horse think, as he sped through the night? Did he get tired? Have doubts? Did he want to quit? I sympathized immediately. I got tired. I had doubts. I wanted to quit. But, like Revere's horse, I kept going. I worked hard. I checked my spelling. I asked my older sister to correct my grammar. I checked out a half-dozen books on Paul Revere from the library. I even read a few of them.
When I handed in the essay to my teacher, he read it, laughed out loud and said, "Great. Now, write it again." I wrote it again, and again and again. When I finally finished it, the thought of winning had given way to the enjoyment of writing. If I didn't win, I wouldn't care.
注意：
1.续写词数应为 150 左右;
2.请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
A few weeks later, when I almost forgot the contest, there came the news.
……
I went to my teacher's office after the award presentation.
……