【推荐1】Four years ago, my wife and I decided to delay our son’s entry into kindergarten. The _______, usually for students with summer- or later-in-the-year _______, is known as “redshirting”, which means some students are six when they start kindergarten _______ five.

Parents opposed to redshirting _______that older students are given _______ advantages over the kids starting “on time” in terms of physical _______ and maturity, and_______ that the advantages in better grades.

_______, our decision wasn’t _______better grades or getting a leg up on the 5-year-old ________. We had never heard of the term “redshirting” then. Our decision was about being ________. As a late-spring birthday myself, I remembered my own________ trying to keep up with kids who were older than me. The desire to ________ I belonged socially overshadowed my interest in________. I didn’t want that for my son.

My wife and I aren’t normally overprotective parents, but when it came to this decision we saw no ________not to err on the side of caution. It’s been four years, and honestly, I don’t know if redshirting has made a ________ in his education. But I can tell you that my kid loves school. Unlike what my parents had to ________ during my time in school, we’ve never had tears during morning drop-off, we’ve never had to________ him to go to school under protest, and it’s never taken two hours to ________ 20 minutes’ homework. School has been a relatively easy and ________ experience in our household.

【推荐2】In today’s American society, background checks have become a routine part of hiring process, employers use them to ______________ potential workers, judging whether they are qualified for the posts. Through background checks, employers can also make sure that the information applicants provide is truthful, which ______________ the applicants’ moral quality.

Then what do background checks investigate? Many include a review of the employee’s employment history trying to confirm whether the employee has ever been fired or forced to ______________ . Employers also pay attention to the length of unemployment, afraid that long-time ______________ from work may bring negative influence to the employee’s performance. Sometimes, an applicant’s residential history is also an issue. Jobs with state or local governments often require that the employee live in certain areas, reducing the chances for them to have contact with ______________ people. Besides living near the work place is always welcome as it saves time and fares on ______________ . Another item which can’t be neglected is the applicant’s criminal history as in whether he has ever been arrested or put into prison. Although ______________ like traffic ticketing or queue jumping are usually pardoned, breaking a criminal law is rarely ______________ and, in most cases, is sure to result in the ending of the employment. Then comes the social history. A background check that involves the applicant’s social history is ______________ needed for government posts or employment in finance and law industries that require greater self ______________ . A small mistake in these posts may result in huge loss. The investigation usually checks drug use, family relationships and social contacts, in order to ______________ hiring someone unsuitable for the posts. Background investigators who ______________ social history may interview neighbors and professional references ______________ by the applicant.

Finally in the field of education background, an application form may ask for copies of licenses or university diplomas to show the applicant’s ______________ performances. In many instances, an education background check is so ______________ about details that investigators even confirm the date on which the employee earned his degree to determine if it agrees with the information the employee provided on his application.

【推荐3】Sometime last year, Michael Blonder began giving out reusable fabric bags (布袋) with each purchase instead of disposable plastic bags at A. L. Goodies General Store. It is a souvenir shop Blonder _______ on Main Street.

The move, Blonder said, was in anticipation of (预期某事的发生) a ban on plastic bags, _______ the city has not made an effort to do so in more than a decade.

Eight states around the country have already _______ them. And in neighboring Montgomery County and Washington, D.C., fees have been levied (征收) to _______ consumers away from using the single-use plastic bags that can _______ their way into nearby waterways, _______ storm drains and getting stuck in tree branches.

On Monday, Annapolis Alderman Rob Savidge introduced a _______ that would prevent any _______ in the city — who owns grocers, convenience stores and others — from _______ plastic bags at the point of sale. The Annapolis bill also _______ a 20-cent fee for each paper bag that’s issued only for ________ businesses — those with a footprint of 20,000 square feet or more.

Savidge hopes the bill will cut off the public’s ________ on plastic bags and help clean up pollution. But a city bill does not become a(n) ________ until more procedures a done.

“A ban is a(n) ________ part of environmental protection,” said Rick Kissel, the former vice-chair of the Anne Arundel County Sierra Club. He recommended a delay in placing the ban so customers could ________.

【推荐1】When Chris Ulmer first started teaching children with special needs, he could not have imagined the journey this job would take him on. In the three years he spent with his students, Ulmer discovered that these kids didn’t. ________ have special needs, they were all special people in every other ________ as well.

________ by the dream to show the world what these kids have to offer, Ulmer ________ the Special Books by Special Kids project. The project was ________ planned to be an eight-chapter book featuring eight of his students. However, after his book was ________ by over 50 publishers, he decided to do it all alone. Chris ________ his own Facebook page. Then he began to ________ interviews with his students and post them on social media.

Ulmer also traveled the country to visit children coping with ________ like autism (自闭症) and brain injuries, and interviewed them about life. Not all of the children could ________ themselves with words, but Ulmer treated every single child with ________. He went into each interaction with the ________ that the person could understand him and was capable of communicating.

Through his efforts, the initial 8 video clips have ________ into a massive library of over 500 videos and the Facebook page has nearly 1.5 million fans. “Everyone has the ability to change someone’s life. It can be something as ________ as smiling, saying hello and praising someone. It doesn’t take much to make a ________,” Ulmer says.

【推荐3】Kids take risks.

According to Laurence Hammerstein, professor of psychology at Temple University, there’s not much parents can do to stop that._________ seems to be pre-programmed into young brains, especially in adolescence (青春期).

Trying to get kids not to take risks, he says. “is an uphill battle against evolution, and we’re not going to _________ it,” he says. “Going out in the world is a(n)_________ risky thing to do.” Kids have to take those risks in older to become adults. So how can parents start _________ that help kids take the healthy risks—and avoid dangerous ones?

To start with, it’s never too early for parents to encourage kids to think about _________, both good and bad. So if kids have questions about risky situations, parents can _________ questions of their own, like “Why do you want to do this? Do you think something good will happen? Do you think anything bad might happen?”

Middle school kids are approaching adolescence, when body chemistry makes them more likely to _________ risks—both good and bad. So parents can talk with them about the fact that they’re going to need to take more risks as they grow up, and start conversations about how to _________ whether something is a good risk or a bad one. This is also a good time for parents to _________ kids to think about questions like, what are the chances this will turn out well? What are the chances something might __________?

The risks high school kids are likely to take might seem __________. But Hammerstein says it’s important for parents to realize that from the kid’s point of view, “there’s a positive side that may only be __________ to the adolescent.” That’s a good place to start a conversation. Understanding what motivates a kid to take a risk can help parents direct that motivation in positive ways and kids __________ dangerous risks. Kids don’t take those dangerous risks because they don’t know better, says Hammerstein. If you ask teenagers __________ about risky behaviors, “they all know that they’re risky because they have read many articles on the psychology of risk-taking.”

__________, “while they are taking risks,” says Hammerstein, “the reasonable part of kids’ brains is often overpowered (被打败的).”So part of helping kids managing risk is helping them think about the kind of situations they do and don’t want to be in before they get into them.

【推荐1】Human beings have somehow managed to engineer the night to receive us by filling it with light. This kind of control is no different from the feat ( 壮 举 ) of damming a river. Its benefits come with_________ — called light pollution — whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design. _________ lighting washes out the darkness of night, altering light levels and light rhythms to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have_________. Wherever man-made light spills into the natural world, some aspects of life-migration, reproduction, feeding-is affected.

For most human history, the phrase “light pollution” would have_________. Imagine walking towards London on a moonlit night around 1800, when it was Earth’s most populous city. Nearly a million people lived there, _________ candles, torches and lanterns, as they always had. Only a few houses were lit by gas, and there would be no public gaslights in the streets or squares for another seven years. From a few miles away, you would have been more likely to_________ London than to see its dim collective glow.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were a(n) _________ country. As a matter of fact, among mammals (哺乳动物) alone, the number of species active at night is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet attracting them to it. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being_________ by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms, circling and circling in the thousands until they drop.

It was once thought that light pollution only affected astronomers, who need to see the night sky in all its glorious clarity. Unlike astronomers, most of us may not need a_________ view of the night sky for our work. __________, like most other creatures, we do need darkness. __________ darkness is pointless. It is as essential to maintaining our biological welfare as__________ itself; the price of modifying our internal clockwork means it doesn’t operate as it should, causing various physical discomforts. So fundamental are the regular rhythms of waking and sleep to our being that__________ them is similar to altering our center of gravity.

In a very real sense, light pollution causes us to__________ our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best__________ against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way — the edge of our galaxy — arching overhead.

【推荐2】Since its release in 2022, an artificial intelligence-powered writing tool called ChatGPT has won instant praise but has also raised ___________, especially on school campuses.

High school student Galvin Fickes demonstrated _________ entering a short command can generate a summary of Jane Eyre, a book she was assigned to read. “I think it did a pretty good job, honestly,” said Fickes. Some teachers like LuPaulette Taylor are concerned that the freely available tool could be used by students to do their homework for them and _________ learning. “The critical thinking that we all need as human beings, and the creativity, and also the benefit of having done something yourself and saying, ‘I did that,’” said Taylor, who teaches high school English at an Oakland, California, public school.

Across the U. S., school systems are choosing to _________ access to ChatGPT on their computers and networks.

Developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, ChatGPT is trained on a vast amount of language data from the Internet. When prompted, the AI generates a response using the most likely _________ of words, creating original text that _________ human thought.

“There’s no, what we call, ‘source document’, right?” she said. “Or a smoking gun to look to, to say, ‘Yes, this looks like it was _________ from that.’” Annie Chechitelli is chief product officer for Turnitin, an academic _________service used by educators in 140 countries. Turitin’s anti-plagiarism (剽窃) software checks the authenticity of a student paper by scanning the Internet for possible _________. But when AI writes text, each line is novel and unique, making it hard to detect cheating.

There is, _________, one distinguishing feature of AI writing, said Eric Wang, vice president for AI at Turnitin. “They tend to write in a very, very average way,” he said. “Humans all have personal writing styles. We are all different from average one way or another. So, we’re able to build detectors that _________ cases where an entire document or entire passage is uncannily average.”

Turnitin’s ChatGPT detector will come out later this year. Wang said keeping up with AI tools will be a (n) _________challenge that will transform education. “A lot of things that we hold as norms are going to have to shift,” he said.

AI may become acceptable for some uses in the classroom, just as calculators eventually _________. Teacher Steve Wright was impressed when his student used ChatGPT to create a study guide for her calculus class. “You know, if ChatGPT can make us _________ our hands and say, ‘No longer can I ask a student to regurgitate (机械重复) a process, but now I’m going to have to actually dig in and watch them think, to know if they’re learning’—that’s fantastic,” said Wright.

In schools and elsewhere, it seems _________ that AI will have a role in writing the future.

【推荐3】The UN’s Millennium Development Goals included the ambition that by 2015 all the world’s children would complete primary school. This has largely been _________ : nine out of ten children are now enrolled. Alas, the figure is not as _________ as it sounds. Even though most of the world’s children go to school, an awful lot of them learn pretty much nothing there. According to a recent World Bank study of seven sub-Saharan African countries, half of nine-year-olds cannot read a simple word and three-quarters cannot read a simple sentence. The reason is _________ teaching. The same study found that only 7% of teachers had the minimum knowledge needed to teach reading and writing effectively. When classrooms were _________ to see whether a teacher was present, half the time the answer was no.

Several recent studies suggest ed-tech can help. It seems to bring about bigger _________ in poor countries than in rich ones. In a study of a range of measures in poor countries, like smaller class sizes and pay rise for teachers, tech had the biggest _________.

Some of the scarce resources being spent on teachers could _________ be better spent on ed-tech. That does not mean dumping computers on schools in the hope that children will understand how to use them, a foolish act on which plenty of money has been with_________. Instead, it means providing schools with software that children can use with _________ help from an adult, that gets things right more often than the teachers do, that adjusts itself to the child’s ability, and that sends teachers hints about what they are supposed to be teaching.

Critics may wonder whether the __________ places have the necessary infrastructure (基建). But Africa is electrifying apace—in Kenya, electricity coverage has gone up from 27% to 55% of households in three years. Where electricity is not available, solar chargers can work. Schools do not __________ internet access. Devices can be taken to where there is a connection to upload or download the necessary information. __________ does not have to be a huge problem either. Tusome (“Let’s read” in Kiswahili), one of the most successful schemes, costs around $4 per child per year in Kenya, where it is being rolled out across public primary schools. The biggest issue is the government’s __________ : where it is enthusiastic, the chances of success are good.

Technology is not a cure for all. Good traditional teachers are not __________ , and are never likely to be. And authorities need to hold teachers to account. But ed-tech can help greatly by monitoring pupils and teachers alike, assisting the best teachers and, most important, __________ the failings of the worst.