【推荐1】A farmer wanted to sell some baby dogs. He painted a _________ advertising (做广告) them and then set about nailing (用钉子钉牢) it to a post beside his yard. As he was driving the last nails into the post, he felt a sudden _________ on his trousers. He looked down into the eyes of a little boy. “Mister,” he said, “I want to buy one of your little dogs.”

“Sure,” said the farmer.

And with that he let out a whistle, “Here, Dolly!” he called.

Out from the doghouse and down the road ran Dolly the mother _________ by four little balls of fur. The little boy _________ his face against the fence. His eyes danced with _________.

As the dogs _________ their way to the fence, the little boy noticed something else moving inside the doghouse. _________ another little ball appeared, this one _________ smaller. In a somewhat _________ way the little dog began hobbling (蹒跚) towards the others, doing its best to __________.

“I just want that one,” the little boy said, pointing to it.

The farmer said, “He is not a wise __________ as he will never be able to run and play with you like these other dogs would.”

With that the little boy __________ from the fence, and began rolling up one leg of his __________. In doing so he showed a steel brace (钢支架) running down both sides of his leg. “You see, sir, I don’t __________ too well myself, so I know he will need someone who __________ him,” he said.

The world is full of people who need someone that understands.

【推荐3】City air is in a sorry state. It is dirty and hot. Outdoor pollution kills 4.2m people a year, according to the World Health Organization. Concrete and tarmac, meanwhile, absorb the sun’s rays rather than reflecting them back into space, and also _____ plants which would otherwise cool things down by evaporative transpiration (蒸腾作用). The never-ceasing _____ of buildings and roads thus turns urban areas into heat islands, discomforting residents and worsening dangerous heatwaves.

A possible answer to the twin problems of pollution and heat is trees. Their leaves may destroy at least some chemical pollutants and they certainly _____ tiny particles floating in the air, which are then washed to the ground by rain. Besides transpiration, they provide _____.

To cool an area effectively, trees must be planted in quantity. Two years ago, researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that American cities need 40% tree _____ to cut urban heat back meaningfully. Unfortunately, not all cities — and especially not those now springing up in the world’s poor and middle-income countries — are _____ with parks, private gardens or a sufficient number of street trees. And the problem is likely to get worse. At the moment, 55% of people live in cities. By 2050 that share is expected to reach 68%.

One group of botanists believe they have at least a partial _____ to this lack of urban vegetation. It is to plant miniature simulacra (模拟物) of natural forests, ecologically engineered for rapid growth. Over the course of a career that began in the 1950s, their leader, Miyawaki Akira, a plant ecologist at Yokohama National University in Japan, has developed a way to do this starting with even the most _____ deserted areas. And the Miyawaki method is finding increasing _____ around the world.

Dr Miyawaki’s insight was to deconstruct and rebuild the process of ecological succession, by which _____ land develops naturally into mature forest. Usually, the first arrival is grass, followed by small trees and, finally, larger ones. The Miyawaki method _____ some of the early phases and jumps directly to planting the kinds of species found in a mature wood.

Dr Miyawaki has _____ the planting of more than 1,500 of these miniature forests, first in Japan, then in other parts of the world. Wherever they are planting, though, gardeners are not restricted to _____ nature’s recipe book to the letter. Miyawaki forests can be customized to local requirements. A popular choice, _____, is to include more fruit trees than a natural forest might support, thus creating an orchard that requires no maintenance.

If your goal is to better your _____ surroundings, rather than to save the planet from global warming, then Dr Miyawaki might well be your man.

【推荐1】The last complete ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has collapsed(倒塌).The Milne Ice Shelf is _______ Ellesmere Island,Canada.The shelf lost _______ 40 percent of its area in just two days at the end of July.

Above normal air temperatures,offshore winds and open water in front of the shelf are all parts of the _______ for its break-up.The shelf area shrank(缩小）by about 80 square kilometers.By comparison,the island of Manhattan in New York _______ about 60 square kilometers.Temperatures in the polar area have been _______ intense(强烈的).Summer in the Canadian Arctic this year has been 5 degrees Celsius_______ the 30-year average.That has _______ smaller ice caps,_______ can melt quickly.As a glacier disappears,more bedrock is left _______.This then speeds up the melting__________. A research camp,including instruments for measuring water flow through the ice shelf,was lost when the shelf at Ellesmere Island collapsed.

＂It was only a __________ of time,"said Mark Serreze,director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. His study showed the ice caps were__________ to disappear within five years.Their disappearance was __________ last month,when NASA satellite images of the area showed a complete lack of snow and ice.Serreze's __________ trip to the Arctic was many years ago."When I was there in the 1980s,I knew every square inch of those ice caps,"Serreze said."You have the good __________.It's like your first girlfriend.I want her back."

【推荐3】“What's all this tree-planting for? " I was asked when I began writing about restoring(修复) a piece of land I had _________ in Somerset. The truth is, I just love trees. And I am not _________ “As I get older, all I really _________ is to plant trees ,” Prince Charles says in a BBC programme in which he is _________ in the wood he planted on the day Prince George was born.

We have inherited _________ and wonderful trees in our cities and villages. They were planted, or self-sown, years, even centuries ago. We take them for granted, _________ the creatures living among them, remain in ignorance of the _________ trees are doing us (cleaning the air, for example) and cut them down for _________. Yet we keep a feeling of _________ for them. This may account for the __________ the government faced in 2010 when it sought to sell off publicly owned woods, and for the wide support the Woodland Trust (a tree-protecting charity) __________.

Trees need __________, which is why I, a city-resident, bought my Somerset woodland in 1999. At that time, climate change was already well proved, __________ my hopes of planting long-lived oaks and pines gradually ________ anxiety about their chances. Tree diseases new to the UK, wind, drought and flood were all putting them at __________.

But I did not __________ things to move so fast. The woodland is good, and the new trees are growing like mad, but the creatures are __________. The rabbits have disappeared(due to some disease, perhaps?) and the owl has moved. The bees and butterflies are still there but in smaller ________. If this can happen in my wood that is __________ pesticides (杀虫剂)and herbicides (除草剂) , it surely indicates we need to give nature the chance to restore its own ________. Meanwhile, I love my wood, and tree-planting has also done wonders for restoring my balance between town and country.

【推荐1】Psychologists like Stephen Reicher from the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. suspect that crowds have a positive impact on the health of the individuals within them. Actually, what their research shows is that crowds are _________ to society. They help form our sense of who we are, they help form our relations to others — they even help determine our _________ well-being.

Reicher and his colleagues came to the largest Hindu festival, the Kumbh, to test the idea that crowds are beneficial and to confirm the healthful effects of the festival on its participants. Before the start of festival, his researchers went out into the Indian countryside to question a group of _________ attenders about their mental and physical health. They also questioned people who didn’t plan to attend. The researchers _________ to question both groups a month after the festival had ended. Those who stayed in their villages reported no real change over the period of the study. Those who attended it, on the other hand, reported a 10 percent _________ in their health, including less pain, less anxiety and higher energy levels. What’s more, the good effects lasted long afterward.

Why should belonging to a crowd improve your health? The psychologists think _________ identity is the cause. “You think in terms of ‘we’ rather than ‘I’,” explains a colleague of Reicher’s. This way of thinking _________ human relationships. Members of the crowd support one another, competition becomes cooperation, and people are able to achieve their goals in a way they wouldn’t be able to _________.

Unfortunately, in spite of the mutual support so _________ elsewhere at the Kumbh, 36 people died in a stampede (踩踏) at the train station there after the festival. Somehow the crowd had lost its ____________. Reicher wrote that one possible cause was that the people no longer formed a psychological crowd. They no longer saw those around them as fellows, but rather as ____________ for seats on a train.

____________, before this tragedy, Reicher had interviewed a villager who was asked to describe the feeling in the crowd at the station. “People think they are more powerful than you, they can push you around,” she said. She was then asked to describe the feeling in the Kumbh: “People ____________ you. They treat you in a polite manner.” The stampede was an example of what can happen when the psychological cooperation of a crowd ____________.

Incidents such as the stampede are rare at the festival, and this one is unlikely to discourage people from attending the event in the future. The police will undoubtedly learn from this experience and make the station safer. But in crowds as large as those at the festival, individuals must put their ____________ in the power of psychological cooperation. In other words, “Love thy (your) neighbor.” One day, it could even save your life.

【推荐2】The true purpose of a business, Peter Drucker said, is to create and keep customers. "Customer value" has several definitions. I use the ______ to mean the total lifetime value of a company's customer base. Companies can increase this value by ______ more customers, earning more business from existing ones, keeping them longer, making their experience simpler through digital improvements and so on. Visionary leaders have long understood the importance of ______ on customer value rather than pursuing short-term profits or quarterly earnings, and they've become enduring customer loyalty leaders in the process. It's worth noting that a number of loyalty-leading companies are able to ______ shareholder pressure, or avoid it altogether.

Companies can ______ customer value in a variety of ways: To increase ______, software companies sometimes charge corporate customers change fees that can raise the total cost of ownership to as much as three times the original price. To reduce operating costs, restaurant chains sometimes ______ frozen and precooked ingredients in place of fresh and made-to-order food. The resulting profits may look good on the income statement. Such strategies may even lead to short-term earnings growth. But they also ______ potential customers and encourage disloyalty.

Given the importance of customer value, leaders should track it as much as they track other key assets, such as buildings, machinery, and marketable securities. They also should reveal it in their quarterly and annual earnings reports so that investors can make ______ judgments about company performance and how it compares with that of industry peers. But most companies ______ believe that measuring customer value is too difficult or costly. They continue to rely on a centuries-old accounting tradition that emphasizes physical and financial assets, and neither income statements nor balance sheets offer much ______ into the value of a company's customers.

As investors wake up to the importance of customer value, however, many growth-stage companies now direct investors' attention to ______ in growing the value of their customer base. Some public companies increasingly report various types of customer value metrics. One of the UK's top energy suppliers E.ON, ______, reports year-over-year customer counts in its financial report. "As a customer-focused company," E.ON noted, "we see customer value as crucial to our success."

This is a start, but because there are no customer-value reporting standards or requirements, investors still have a(n) ______ picture. The minority of companies that do provide customer value information decide for themselves what to disclose. ______, firms may calculate customer metrics differently or change them to tell a desired story, or simply stop reporting them if they fail to go with the company's preferred narrative.

【推荐3】The economic case for regifting

Despite its pleasures, gift giving can be problematic.

A recipient wants items A and B (say, a hat and gloves) yet receives items C and D (say, a scarf and mittens). Another recipient wants C and D, yet receives A and B. The___________ seems simple: The two recipients can simply pass along the gifts they received to each other.

The ___________ however, is more complex. People in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour, for instance, used such words as guilty, lazy, thoughtless and disrespectful in describing their___________ about regifting. Popular culture casts it as taboo, as well.

Getting stuck with gifts we do not want is no small problem. Consider that the National Retail Federation calculated that the average holiday-season___________in the U.S. last year spent more than $1,000 on gifts. In a survey across 14 countries in Europe, meanwhile, 1 in 7 said they were unhappy with what they received for Christmas, yet more than half simply kept the gifts.

Why can’t more gifts be passed along to people who ___________them?

Our research with Francis J. Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, suggests the shame associated with regifting is largely ___________. Indeed, our research consistently tells us that people overestimate the negative consequences.

We conducted a study in which we asked people to imagine themselves either as a ”giver,” who gives someone a gift card and later ___________it has been regifted; or as a “regifter,” one who receives the gift and gives it to someone else. The latter group saw more offense. Regifters tended to assume the original givers would be ___________ when they found out. The general ___________ of the original givers, however, was: It’s your gift, do what you want with it.”

Next, we tried to shed light on just how serious the perceived offense is. We asked two group —again givers and regifters—to____________ regifting a hypothetical (假设的)wristwatch with throwing it in the trash. For the original givers, regifting the watch was a much less offensive act than trashing it. The regifters, however, ____________ assumed that the givers would find both equally offensive.

Finally, given that the feared offense looks more imagined than real, we turned our attention to how people might be____________ to break this taboo.

For this part of our research, we invited to our lab at Stanford people who had recently received presents and divided the people into two groups. When we gave the first group an opportunity to____________that present, 9% did so.

When we gave the second group the same opportunity, we added that it was ‘“National Regifting Day,” a real____________that happens each year on the Thursday before Christmas. It wasn’t really National Regifting Day, but the group didn’t know that: 30% of them agreed to regift.

Everyone has received bad gifts in their lives, and we generally accept that we will receive more in the future. Yet for some reason, we believe that we give only good gifts.

Our research offers a simple solution to the problem of ____________ gifts. This holiday season, consider regifting, and encourage people who receive your gifts to do the same if what you give them isn’t quite what they hope for.