3 . There is growing interest in East Japan Railway Co. ltd, one of the six companies, created out of the privatized national railway system. In an industry lacking exciting growth ________, its plan to use real-estate assets in and around train stations ________ is drawing interest.

In a plan called “Station Renaissance” that it ________ in November, JR East said that it would ________ using its commercial spaces for shops and restaurants, extending them to ________ more suitable for the information age. It wants train stations as pick-up ________ for such goods as books, flowers and groceries ________ over the Inter. In a country where city ________ depend heavily on trains ________ commuting, about 16 million people a day go to its train stations anyway, the company ________. So, picking up commodities at train stations ________ consumers extra travel and missed home deliveries. JR East already has been using its station ________ stores for this purpose, but it plans to create ________ spaces for the delivery of Inter goods.

The company also plans to introduce ________ cards—known in Japan as IC cards because they use integrated circuit for ________ information ________ train tickets and muter passes ________ the magic ones used today, integrating them into a/an ________ pass. This will save the company money, because ________ for IC cards are much less expensive than magic systems. Increased use of IC cards should also ________ the space needed for ticket vending.

4 . Yang Haoran, born into a family of cotton farmers, spent his childhood playing in the cotton fields. He ______ how hard his parents had to work using conventional farming methods, as well as how automation has ______ productivity and saved labor.

Having finished university, Yang became a ______ farmer himself. However, unlike his parents, his experience has been very ______ ; he manages over 200,000 square meters of cotton fields and always ______ new ways to improve efficiency through technological ______ .

In 2018, he saw the great business ______ of using drones (无人机) in farming and established his own company, which ______ 13 drone operators, all of whom are post-90s workers like Yang himself. “We are like a big family, with members from different ethnic groups,” Yang said ______ .

In peak growing season, they move their ______ in a skillful way over the fields while in the off-season, they train local farmers to ______ drones. To date, Yang’s team has trained hundreds of local farmers. “This will enable them to ______ new technologies, allowing them to ______ the advances in modern agriculture,” he said.

Yang’s ______ does not end there. He has recently taken up a precision (精准) farming project, which uses drones to collect data for spectral analysis (光谱分析), and transmit real-time data on crop growth and soil moisture to the irrigation and fertilizer equipment for precision ______ .

5 . An airline loses two suitcases belonging to two different travelers, Lucy and Pete. Both suitcases happen to be the same and also contain ________ antiques. An airline manager ________ to compensate for their loss figures that simply asking them for the price is hopeless, for they may ________ it. Instead, he has them write down the price as any dollar between 2 and 100 ________ so that they cannot negotiate with each other. If both write the same number, he will pay each of them that amount. If not, he will assume that the person writing the higher number is ________ and pay both of them the lower number with a ________ and a punishment-the person writing the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for ________ and the other will get $2 less instead. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44. What numbers will Lucy and Pete write?

________, Lucy’s idea is that she should write the largest possible number, which will earn her $100 if Pete’s similarly ________. Soon, it strikes her that if she wrote 99, she’d make a little more — $101. But surely this ________ will also occur to Pete, who will choose 99 too. Continuing with this line of ________, when both are unwilling to lose money or get less than the other, they will end up writing down the ________ price of the antique. Experimental studies conducted by economists, however, ________ this narrow view of reason. In their studies, most participants pick $100 or a number close to it, either without thinking the problem through or tending to believe they’ll ________ the “unreasonable” number. By doing so, participants ultimately get a much bigger ________ Based on this, researchers have concluded that people appear to have a natural tendency towards cooperation, which favors seemingly unreasonable but beneficial strategies.

6 . “Blame My Brain” by Nicola Morgan, reviewed by Rosalie Warren

As someone who constantly blames my brain for all sorts of things (not my fault — my brain did it!), I was _______ by the title of Nicola Morgan’s book and only slightly disappointed to learn that it was _______ teenagers. Since I have many days when I feel that I am barely out of my teens (though the mirror, sadly, does not bear this out), I decided that the book might still be relevant to me, and indeed to my relationships with my no-longer-teenage children.

The subtitle is “The amazing teenage brain revealed” and amazing is, I soon _______, exactly what the teenage brain is. I learned that one of the things that _______ to the brain in our early teenage years is a flurry of growth of the dendrites (connections between neurons), followed a few years later by a major pruning session where many of the relatively unused connections are culled and the remaining ones are strengthened and coated with a fatty myelin layer ready for adult life. Not _______, all this activity is not without its downside for the person “within”, and it goes along way towards _______ why teenagers can be so difficult to live with and to cope with themselves.

There are also brain-based explanations of why teenagers need so much sleep, why they don’t tidy their rooms, why they come _______ when the rest of the world is going to sleep and why some of them, at least, are risk-takers. There’s stuff about alcohol and drugs and why such things are not good for the brain, but all of it is written in a very _______ and understanding way that I think teenagers will warm to.

Nicola Morgan is not a neurologist or a _______ scientist, but she clearly had done a great deal of research and ________ experts including Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and Professor Susan Greenfield, among many other eminent names in the field. Morgan has a gift for simplifying and explaining ________ subject matter with a light but precise touch, and she is careful to ________ between established facts and theories and speculations of her own and other people’s.

There’s plenty of humour and a good few well-deserved digs at the stupidity of parents and other well-meaning but misguided adults, which teenagers will ________. There are diagrams, tests, photos relating to questions like What emotions can you recognize? Do you ________ other emotions with anger? What kind of thinker are you? Which mental tasks do you find comparatively easy or difficult? There’s also sound advice for addiction, self-harm, depression and other ________ illnesses, and some pointers towards recognizing when you may need to seek help.

The illustrations by Andy Baker are great, too. And oh yes — there’s some interesting discussion on the differences between girls’ brains and boys’, if there are any. You’ll have to read it to find out...

7 . Apple has unveiled its delayed iPhone 12 line of smartphones in a range of sizes with new designs and 5G connectivity. Unveiled as part of a online-only event, which was ______ by more than a month due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the new iPhones mark some of the biggest changes to Apple’s smartphones since the iPhone X in 2017.

iPhone 12

The midrange model is simply called the iPhone 12 and is a(n) ______ replacement for Apple’s most popular phone from last year, the iPhone 11.It has a new and improved 6.1in OLED screen that ______ the LCD technology used on its predecessor. The iPhone 12 has a new 12-megapixel dual-camera system on the rear with ______ and ultrawide lenses and the True Depth selfie camera from Face ID on the front, all of which can now use Apple’s Night mode for low-light photos. The body of the phone is aluminum like its predecessor, while the ______ is glass. The phone is 11% thinner than the previous model and has new Ceramic Shield screen glass technology, which has four times the ______ performance of previous display glass for fewer smashed screens.

iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max

The smaller high-end iPhone is called the iPhone 12 Pro and has a similar 6.1in OLED screen to the iPhone 12- larger than the 5.8in screen of the iPhone 11 Pro from 2019. The largest smartphone ______ by Apple will now be the new iPhone12 Pro Max which has a 6.7in OLED screen-0.2in larger on the diagonal than the previous iPhone 11 Pro Max. Both iPhone 12 Pro models have improved triple-camera systems on the back with ultrawide, normal and new telephoto lenses, plus a lidar-based depth-sensing scanner that can ______ the distance of objects up to 5 metres away and aids in autofocus. A similar technology was ______ on the iPad Pro in March and is designed for augmented reality experiences.

Home Pod Mini

Alongside the new iPhones, Apple has launched a new, smaller version of its Home Pod smart speaker, ______by the Siri smart assistant, which it hopes will help it better ______ with Google and Amazon’s dominant smart speakers. The ______ Home Pod sounded very good, but was let down by Siri’s limited capabilities and Apples ______ of music services to just its own. The new Home Pod Mini has the same S5 processor as the Apple Watch Series 5 to control playback and the sound ______ by the speaker’s single down-firing driver and two passive radiators. The new speaker also has proximity detection for nearby iPhones equipped with Apple’s U1 chip and Siri can now differentiate between different people via their ______ print.

8 . In Nairobi, Kenya, Richard Turere, a twelve-year-old Maasai boy, had come up with a surprising invention. His family raised cattle, and one of the biggest __ was protecting them at night from lion attacks. Richard had noticed that a still campfire didn’t fear the lions, __ walking around waving a torch did seem to work. The lions were apparently afraid of __ lights! Richard had somehow taught himself __ by messing around with parts taken from his parents’ radio. He used that knowledge to __ a system of lights that would turn on and off in order, __ a sense of movement. It was built from scrapyard (废弃场) __ —solar panels, a car battery, and a motorcycle indicator box. He installed (安装)the lights and the lion attacks __.

News of his invention spread and other villages wanted in. Instead of seeking to __ the lions as they had done before, they installed Richard’s “lion lights”. Both villagers and pro-lion(亲狮的)environmentalists were __ .

Because of his invention, Richard won a(n)__ to one of Kenya’s best schools, and was __ to give a TED Talk. He got on an airplane for the first time in his life and __ to Long Beach, California. As he walked onto the TED stage, you could tell he was nervous, but that only made him more__ . As Richard spoke, people were focusing on every word he said, and every time he smiled, the audience __ . When he finished, people just stood and cheered.