When Michael was young, he was sensitive and shy. It was a huge task for him to talk to a stranger or go downstairs to the shops. But the boy who lived in a     1     village 30 kilometers away from the city center found great pleasure in writing. He often drank a cup of coffee on a Saturday afternoon, starting with a     2     sheet of paper. “I’m interested in many kinds of writing,” he said, “from detective story to science     3     from love story to youth novel. It’s really a pleasure to use what you write     4     than what you say to express yourself.”

Michael found his talent for writing when he was 15. At that time, he was disliked by teachers for his bad academic performance and     5     from peer pressure. He liked to express himself in his diary. “No one was willing to talk to me then,” he recalled. “Sometimes they just     6     at if I had done something wrong. Actually I was at a What to do.” Then he quitted school and started writing. The young teenager wrote 10 pieces of writing in one year, most of which were     7     on the Internet. Soon his works were recognized by a lot of Internet critics and received many positive     8     from the netizens. Two years later, he was awarded the most popular webwriter by Sina. Some readers say Michael’s novels     9     his outstanding ability to explore the emotions of contemporary people, and his novels are a great     10     to people who are struggling in the society.

Scientists have proved what students have long suspected: Maths equations can actually trigger physical pain.

Regions of the brain linked with the experience of physical     1     were activated in those fearful of maths when they were presented with a tough equation, researchers have found. The higher a person’s anxiety of a maths task, the more it     2     activity in regions of their brain associated with visceral (内脏的) threat detection, and often the experience of pain itself.

However, the researchers say their study examines the pain response associated with anticipating an anxiety-provoking event, rather than the pain associated with a     3     event itself. A maths task itself is not painful but     4     the thought of it is highly unpleasant to certain people.

“Maths can be difficult, and for those with high levels of mathematics-anxiety (HMAs), math is associated with tension, apprehension (忧虑) and fear,” the researchers said in their paper titled. When Math Hurts. “    5    , this relation was not seen during math performance,     6     that it is not that math itself hurts, rather, the anticipation of math is painful. These results may also provide a potential neural mechanism to explain why (people with) HMAs tend to     7     math and math-related situations, which in turn can bias (使有偏见) (those with) high levels of mathematics-anxiety away from taking math classes or even entire math-related     8     paths. We provide the first neural     9     indicating the nature of the subjective experience of math-anxiety.

Other forms of psychological stress, such as social     10     or a traumatic break-up, can also elicit feeling of physical pain.”