【推荐1】How do people choose between right and wrong? Some trust their own judgment. Others _________ ideas of the moral teachers. But these are _________ figures. Who can we turn to as a(n) _________ in the 21st century?

_______ “Doctor Disgust”. That is the _________ that the public and fellow scientists have given him in the United States. His real name is Dr Paul Rozin. And he thinks that he has _________ the reason why people find certain things disgusting and other things _________, and this also explains why people think that certain things are wrong and other things are right.

He found that three-year-old children are _________ to drink a glass of fruit juice with a dead insect in it. They sometimes want to cat the insect _________.When they get a little older, the children ____________ that the insect is taken out. But they ____________ drink the juice. By the time they get to six or seven, they ____________ to drink the juice at all. They have learned to be disgusted.

According to Dr Rozin, the feeling of disgust becomes ____________ as we are under the influence of the ____________ around us. As children grow, they learn from their parents that certain things should not be put in their ____________. Then they learn that other things should not be ____________. As they come under the influence of the wider community, this sense of disgust ____________. Certain ____________ of behaving, and even certain ideas become disgusting. This is ____________ we eventually learn to choose between right and wrong. We do not learn morals from great ____________, but from each other.

【推荐3】Speaking two languages can actually help reduce some effects of aging on the brain, a new study has found.

Researchers tested how long participants needed to _______ from one cognitive (认知) task to another, something that’s known to _______ longer for older adults, said lead researcher, Brain Gold, an expert at the University of Kentucky, “It has great effects these days because our population is _______ gradually,” Gold said. “Seniors are _______ longer, and that’s a good thing, but it’s only a good thing _______ a certain degree that their brains are _______.”

Gold’s team compared task-switching of younger and older _______, knowing they would find slower speeds in the _______ population because of previous studies. _______, they found that older adults who spoke two languages were able to switch mental gear (齿轮) ________ than those who didn’t.

First, Gold and his team ________ 30 people, who were either bilingual (双语的) ________ monolingual (单语的), to look at a series of colored shapes and ________ with the name of each shape by pushing a button. Then, they ________ the participants with a similar series of colored shapes and asked them to respond with what ________ the shapes were by pushing a button. The bilingual people had the ________ to respond faster to the shifting prompts (提示).

Researchers then gathered 80 more people for a second ________; 40 bilinguals and 40 monolinguals. This time, researchers used FMRI machines to ________ brain activity during the same shape-and color-identifying ________. Gold and his team found that bilingual people had different brain activity than their monolingual peers.

“Learning a second language in childhood was thought of as ________,” Gold said. “Actually, it’s beneficial.”

【推荐2】A recent article in The Wall Street journal says that Chinese students in American universities are not getting the most out of their educational opportunities. The article says that _______ Chinese students work hard, many are not acquiring the soft skills that come with fully participating in campus life.

Soft skills refer to things like socialization and learning to be _______. These are the skills students develop by _______ socially with American and other international students and by learning how to handle problems in a new _______ and make their own decisions. A large number of Chinese students, _______, tend to self-segregate, that is, they just _______ other Chinese students and _______ the campus culture and even the wider American culture that surrounds them.

Jocelyn Jia, a 22-year-old from Hainan studying at the university of north Carolina at Chapel Hill, says, “If you just come to study and hang out with Chinese people, all you bring back to China is the _______. It’s just a piece of paper. That’s it” Jocelyn studies hard, but she likes to _______, too. She’s taking every opportunity to make American friends and experience things she couldn’t have at a(n) ________ university.

Chinese companies want to hire “haigui” like Jocelyn. Ken Chen of a consulting firm in Shanghai says an American college education teaches you how to socialize, develop your ________ and know how to think and solve problems. Mr. Chen says these are the kinds of people he is looking for.

An American education isn’t ________, though. It can cost as much as U.S. $200,000 for a four-year program. But Charlotte Fan, a graduate of Duke University from Shanghai, says the ________ was worth it. She’s now working for an American company and, in the Wall Street Journal article, is quoted as saying. “I’ve learned a lot and changed a lot in college, not just to learn knowledge, but more importantly the way of thinking, creativity, communication—the soft skills you never learn from ________ but learn from day-to-day life and from interacting with all the smart kids around you in school. Those sorts of things are what a Chinese education doesn’t ________.”

【推荐3】More than half the world’s population live in cities, and by 2050 the UN expects that proportion to reach 68%. This means more homes, roads and other infrastructure. Such a construction ________ does harm to tackling climate change, though, because making steel and concrete generates around 8% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions. If cities are to ________ and become greener at the same time, they will have to be made from something else.

As it happens, Chicago might become part of the ________. In recent years, as architects have become increasingly interested in modern timber (木材) — construction methods, wooden buildings have been getting steadily ________. The current record is held by the 85-metre-tall Mjostarnet building in Norway, completed in 2019. But this would be ________ by the River Beech Tower, a 228-metre building proposed for a site beside the Chicago river.

As the AAAs meeting heard this week, wood is one of the most ________ sustainable alternatives to steel and concrete. It is not, however, everyday wood but a material called engineered timber, composed of different layers for specific purposes. Besides engineering the shape of a component, designers can arrange the grains (纹理) in the layers to provide levels of ________ that equal steel, in a product that is up to 80% lighter. Engineered timber is, ________, usually assembled into large sections of a building in a factory. That cuts down on the number of ________ that have to be made to a construction site.

All this ________ to carbon-dioxide emissions. Michael Ramage of the University of Cambridge told the meeting of a 300-square-metre four-storey wooden building that generated 126 tonnes of CO₂. Had it been made with ________, emissions would have risen to 310 tonnes. If steel had been used, they would have topped 498 tonnes. Indeed, from one point of view, this building might actually be viewed as “carbon ________”. When trees grow, they lock carbon up in their wood — in this case the equivalent of 540 tonnes of CO₂, representing a long-term reduction of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

If building with wood takes off, it does raise concern about there being enough trees to ________. But with sustainably managed forests that should not be a problem, says Dr Ramage. A family-sized apartment requires about 30 cubic metres of timber, and he estimates Europe’s sustainable ________ alone grow that amount every seven seconds. Nor is fire a risk, for engineered timber does not burn easily, because the inner cores of large ________ timbers are protected by a charring (炭化) layer if burnt.