全国高考英语补充阅读写作训练——纽约时报原版精选素材（1）

全国高考英语补充阅读写作训练——纽约时报原版精选素材（1） 题目 Burly Bears Will you vote in the Fat Bear Week contest? The 2018 winner was 409 Beadnose.Credit...Katmai National Park and Preserve Each year, people vote for the heftiest brown bear at the Katmai National Park and Preserve in southern Alaska. The Fat Bear Week contest, which highlights the animals’ dramatic weight gain in advance of winter hibernation, runs through Oct. 6. and is a way to raise awareness about the wildlife in the park and preserve. Have you heard of this unusual and lighthearted “contest?” What do you think of Katmai’s novel way to market its park? If you were on the committee to promote a local park or other public institution near you, how might you borrow this idea and tweak it for your area? What could you ask the public to vote on that would raise interest? 参考答案 1. I think this is a genius idea. I've never heard of it before. National Parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite are probably not going anywhere anytime soon, but Katmai, which is all the way up in Alaska probably doesn't get enough visitors. If I were on a committee to market a park, I would basically do the same thing, but with something unique to the park. You could do something like happiest prairie dog, or smallest deer. Marketing doesn't have to be necessarily good either, the public could vote on stupidest visitor to raise awareness about how to be safe around wild animals. Katmai's plan is a great one. 2. Up until now, I have never heard of The Fat Bear Week contest. After reading about it I think that Katmai National Park and Preserve are on to something and that this is a admirable way to publicize their park and gain more visitors. Gaining weight for the long hibernation during winter:brown bears appear very fluffy in the near weeks of hibernation, as well as very adorable. The park did a fabulous job of using animals in their park and a fun activity to publicize their park to the people in hopes of drawing more visitors to it. This idea can be used in my local area, just with a different animals or plants specific to where I live, such as the most obese squirrel or even the biggest maple leaf. Overall, this innovative idea can be used to publicize many parks across America, and even the world. 3. From the quick snippet of the Fat Bear Contest alone, I am tempted to further investigate the various “Bulky Bears” within the National Park. I think this idea of exhibiting the National Park’s adorable and amusing wildlife to the public encourages their further investment in the park and its inhabitants. If I were on a committee to promote a local park near me I would create some sort of scavenger hunt. I would attempt to capture the attention of the group with the largest lack of interest in the subject, teenagers. What are two things teenagers (especially girls in the Midwest) desire to do in their free time? 1. Take pictures of themselves and their friends. 2. Spend time with friends on an excursion other than someone’s basement. In response to these specific desires, I would create a scavenger hunt that requires the hunters to discover various aspects of nature specific to the park, such as an uniquely marked tree or a native flower species. Once the participates found an object which the clue alluded to, they would take a photo in front of it and upload it to the park’s website, specifically for the scavenger hunt, to reveal the clue for the next object. I think this would attract many self centered and bored teenage girls to parks in need of visitors. 4. This unusual contest is unfamiliar to me, but was designed well. Just a quick synopsis was enough to get me interested in the park and the bears. The marketing is genius, and should be applied to other parks. In my local parks, a “favorite squirrel” or “best looking bird” competition can be held. This will at least spread awareness of the park, while also encouraging people to visit the park in order to participate in the competition. It is also an opportunity to learn about the squirrels’ own behaviors, or the nesting patterns of different bird species. Educating people on these topics will help create an understanding for the common, but mysterious aspects of parks around the country. 补充阅读训练 The Votes Cast, a Fat Bear Is Crowned Each year, people vote for the heftiest brown bear at the Katmai National Park and Preserve during the Fat Bear Week contest. Like a rite of fall, the Katmai National Park and Preserve in southern Alaska celebrates its fattest brown bears. The park holds Fat Bear Week, an online competition that highlights how intensely the bears eat, stuffing themselves with sockeye salmon at the Brooks River to gain weight for winter hibernation. The event began as Fat Bear Tuesday in 2014, and expanded into a weeklong contest a year later to raise awareness about the wildlife in the park and preserve, the home to about 2,200 brown bears. “People love bears and they love a good competition,” said Amber Kraft, a spokeswoman for the park, which stretches about 4.1 million acres and is about 290 miles southwest of Anchorage. “This year, in particular, Fat Bear Week is a nice break from everything else going on,” she added. Last year’s contest drew more than 200,000 votes, Ms. Kraft said. This year’s competition, which began on Sept. 30 and ran through Oct. 6, when a victor was named, attracted about more than 600,000 votes. The crown for the fattest bear in Alaska went to Bear 747 — an adult male named for the mammoth jet plane.Bear 747, nicknamed the Earl of Avoirdupois, was voted the heftiest out of 12 contestants. In the final round on Tuesday, he defeated a bear named 32 Chunk, with more than 47,000 votes to about 28,800. “This year he really packed on the pounds, looking like he was fat enough to hibernate in July and yet continuing to eat until his belly seemed to drag along the ground by late September,” the park said in its announcement. The bear is one of the largest and heaviest at the park. He was estimated to weigh more than 1,400 pounds in 2019, and the park said he looked about just as plump this year. “747 would like to thank the salmon for such high concentrations of fat, the clean cold water of the Brooks River for being a fabulous host, and all the little bears he pushed out of the way to gain access to the best fishing spot of them all,” the park said. How it works Park rangers have created a March Madness-like game out of the contest by pitting pairs of bears against each other — for votes — and asking the public to choose their favorite heavyweights. This year, to allow more people to take part, voting moved off Facebook and onto a website hosted by explore.org, a network that includes more than 150 live nature webcams. The bear with the most votes advances to the next round. (The losers can, well, go back to eating.) What does the champ win? A moment of social media fame, and also the likelihood of surviving winter. To show the bears’ drastic weight gains, the park shows photos of them before and after they began packing on the pounds this summer. Each summer, park staff members usually identify about 40 bears along the Brooks River, Ms. Kraft said, adding that only brown bears regularly inhabit the park. “Taxonomists currently consider brown bears and grizzly bears to be the same species,” she said, distinguished mainly by brown bears’ access to coastal food and grizzlies’ inland habitat. Bears and their admirers Park staff members assign the bears numbered names, like 480 Otis, so that they can identify and monitor them, and some of the most frequently seen bears get nicknames, too. Each year, the officials detail biographies for the bears, listing their age, gender and offspring, and they set up a live webcam that shows the bears fishing (and entertains people online).On social media, the bears have fans who root for them as they go about their bear lives. Using the hashtag #fatbearweek, some superfans have even dressed up as their preferred bear. One such fan, Kimberly Daggerhart of Asheville, N.C., wore a bear costumefor Halloween last year to celebrate 435 Holly, the season’s winner. “She is large and in charge and she seems to be a great mom to her cubs,” said Ms. Daggerhart, 35. “I think this contest is so popular because it’s one of the few remaining wholesome events we can all participate in. It’s fun to cheer for these bears!” Ursine all stars This is Bear 747’s first Fat Bear Week win. Last year’s winner, 435 Holly, tried to defend her title. “She is fat. She is fabulous,” the park announced after she won last year. “Long live the Queen of Corpulence!” Holly, described as a “medium-large adult” on her bio, has won over some fans with her strong maternal instincts. She has reared several litters of cubs, making her “one of the more experienced and tolerant mother bears at Brooks River,” it said. In 2014, she adopted a lone cub into her family and raised the cub alongside her own. This, Ms. Daggerhart said, made Holly “all-around fantastic.”In 2018, a bear named 409 Beadnose won the fattest title. “Her radiant rolls were deemed by the voting public to be this year’s most fabulous flab,” the park declared that year. She also won in 2015. Another fan favorite and repeat winner is 480 Otis, a male bear who was estimated to weigh more than 900 pounds in 2019. He has additional bragging rights for being the inaugural Fat Bear Tuesday champ in 2014, and the winner in 2016 and 2017. The meat of the competition Once the bears curl up in their dens to begin hibernation, they will not eat or drink for months, losing about a third of their body weight. Their survival rests on having a large amount of stored fat, meaning the brown bears have to eat a year’s worth of food in six months in a process known as hyperphagia. “Excessive weight gain is key to a bear’s survival,” Ms. Kraft, the park spokeswoman, said. One of the more easily accessible foods the bears find at the park is sockeye salmon, which go through the Brooks River in large numbers every year. From late June to mid- October, as the fish swim upstream to spawn, dozens of bears gather to feast at the river, a 1.5-mile long waterway that winds between two lakes. “Some bears can eat more than 40 salmon in a day,” Ms. Kraft said, noting that a salmon is between 2,500 and 6,000 calories. The bears also subsist on berries and grass. Brown bears can put on up to four pounds of weight a day and, as hibernation begins, the largest adult males can weigh more than 1,200 pounds.