Animal-rights activists often complain that cute beasts get more sympathy than ugly ones. If so, one would think a lovely creature like the mink (貂) would be easy to protect. Yet in the Netherlands, mink is the only animal     1     can still legally be farmed for their fur. That is about to change. On August 28th the government brought forward to this year a ban     2     mink-farming that had been scheduled to take effect in 2025. The timetable was sped up not because mink had become more adorable,     3     because they can contract COVID-19 and spread it to humans.

Dutch farmers normally raised about 2.5 million minks a year,     4     (make) the Netherlands the world’s fourth-largest producer after Denmark, China and Poland. In April, a couple of minks and the farm hands who tended them     5     (diagnose) with COVID-19. Genetic tracing showed that at least two workers had probably been infected by mink, rather than the other way around. The affected animals were destroyed and stricter hygiene rules were imposed, but by summer the virus had spread to a third of the country’s farms.

That was a win for the Netherland’s Party for the Animals, which has four seats in the 150-member parliament. In 2013,     6     helped pass the law that gave mink farmers until 2025 to get out of the business. Some members of parliament claim that the compensation     7     (pay) for destroying the infected minks was higher than the market price for their fur.

Fur farmers say modern standards allow minks to be raised humanely, and     8     they are not a big reason for the spread of the virus. But minks tend to live by themselves instead of living in groups; animal-rights advocates say they cannot be raised humanely in small cages. As for COVID-19, the worry is     9     mink could serve as a medium for it to attack human immunization (免疫) programs. The industry’s value is modest, and polls show the public overwhelmingly opposes it. “In a democratic country, that widespread belief     10     translate into a political decision to ban fur farming,” says Esther Ouwehand, leader of the Party for the Animals. The farmers accept they are shutting down. The remaining argument is over money.

When we talk about healthy brain ageing we are really discussing one of two things: how to minimise ongoing damage to the hardware of the brain, mostly by keeping its blood supply as good as possible; or how to improve the operation of the brain’s software. Many ways of doing this have been suggested, but few have _______ weight behind them. There is currently no magic bullet to protect the brain, but one area that has been best researched, and about which we can say with reasonable _______ , “this will help”, is mental activity.

There is plenty of evidence that older people who stay mentally active, by learning a new language, doing crosswords or taking part in other _______ challenging activities, preserve full cognitive function for longer. They have spent more time doing cognitively demanding activities over a lifetime, and they are, to some extent, buffered (缓冲) from the _______ effects of brain ageing and degenerative (退行性的) diseases. We call this buffer “cognitive reserve” — a(n) _______ reservoir of brain function that can _______ from the consequences of brain damage, allowing us to continue to perform well. _______, people with a higher IQ, longer education or cognitively challenging employment have been found to have a(n) _______ risk of developing dementia. This is despite the fact that their brains actually show normal amounts of age-and disease-related _______.   In fact, studies have found that people with higher cognitive reserve who do get dementia exhibit less severe symptoms even when they have more brain damage than those with lower cognitive reserve.

Yet there’s still much to discover about the _______ of cognitive reserve for optimising the brain’s resilience. The more we understand about its role in protecting our brain and how to boost our reserve, the more effective we will be in designing _______ to keep the human brain healthier for longer.

The good news is that cognitive reserve isn’t _______ to those who have the IQ of a genius or who’ve devoted their life to theoretical physics. We think it can be _______ throughout life for everyone. _______, taking part in cognitively challenging activities, learning new skills and continuing to “use it or lose it” probably apply no matter how old you are. Crucially, it’s never too late to _______.

The train was at a standstill, some twenty minutes outside Kolkata, when an unexpected stroke of luck presented Piya with an opportunity to go for a seat beside a window for some fresh air. She had been sitting in the stuffiest part of the train compartment, on the edge of a bench: now, moving to the open window, she saw that the train had stopped at a station called Champahati.

Looking over her shoulder, Piya spotted a tea-seller on the platform. Reaching through the bars of the window, she called him with a wave. She had never cared for the kind of chai, Indian tea, sold in Seattle, her hometown in the USA, but somehow, in the ten days she had spent in India she had developed an unexpected taste for milky, overboiled tea served in earthenware cups. There were no spices in it for one thing, and this was more to her taste than the chai at home.

She paid for her tea and was trying to get in the cup through the bars when the man in the seat opposite her own suddenly turned over a page, jolting her hand. She turned her wrist quickly enough to make sure that most of the tea spilled out of the window, but she could not prevent some from spilling over his papers.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” Piya was very embarrassed: of everyone in the compartment, this was the last person she would have chosen to injure with her tea. She had noticed him while waiting on the platform in Kolkata and she had been struck by the self-satisfied tilt of his head and the way in which he stared at everyone around him, taking them in, sizing them up, sorting them all into their places.

“Here,” said Piya, producing a handful of tissues. “Let me help you clean up.”

“There’s nothing to be done,” he said testily (暴躁地). “These pages are ruined anyway.”

For a moment she considered pointing out that it was he who had knocked her hand. But all she could bring herself to say was, “I’m very sorry. I hope you’ll excuse me.”

“Do I really have a choice?” he said. “Does anyone have a choice when they’re dealing with Americans these days?”

Piya had no wish to get into an argument so she let this pass. Instead, she opened her eyes wide and, in an attempt to restore peace, came out with, “But how did you guess?”

“About what?”

“About my being American? You’re very observant.”

This seemed to do the trick. His shoulders relaxed as he leaned back in his seat. “I didn’t guess,” he said. “I knew.”