【推荐2】In interviews, famous people often say that the key to becoming both happy and successful is to “do what you love.” But ________ a skill, even one that you deeply love, calls for plenty of drills. Any challenging activity —from computer programming to playing a musical instrument to athletics — requires ________ practice. A perfect golf swing or faultless butterfly stroke (蝶泳) takes countless hours of practice and repetitions to perfect.

Anyone who wants to have a good command of a skill must go through the ________ of practice, critical feedback, polish, and increasing improvement again, again, and again. Some people seem able to concentrate on practicing an activity like this for years and take ________ in their gradual improvement. Yet others find this kind of focused, time-intensive work to be ________ or boring. Why?

The ________ may depend on the ability to enter into a state of “flow,” the feeling of being completely involved in what you are doing. Flow states can happen in the course of any activity, and they are most common when a task has definite goals and where the individual is able to ________ their performance to clear and immediate feedback.

Csikszentmihalyi suggested that those who most ________ entered into flow states had an “autotelic personality” — a tendency to seek out challenges and get into a state of flow. While those without such a personality see difficulties, autotelic individuals see opportunities to build skills and they have low levels of self-centeredness. Such people, with their ability to focus on tasks rather than rewards have a great________ over others in developing their innate (天生的) abilities. But how can we get into flow state for an activity so that we enjoy both the process of improving skills and the ________ of being a master？

________ for those of us who don’t necessarily possess an autotelic personality, there is evidence that flow states can be ________ by environmental factors. For instance, in Montessori schools, students do not study by following direct instruction. ________, they are encouraged to develop and pursue personal interests. Competition is ________ and grading is not emphasized. Students are grouped together according to shared interests, rather than separated by ability.

While there isn’t yet a pill that can turn dull practice into an exciting activity for anyone, it is comforting that we seem to be able to advance into flow states. By giving ourselves unstructured, open-ended time, minimum distractions and task set at moderate level of ________, we may be able to love what we’re doing while we put in the hard work practicing the things we love doing.

【推荐1】Goodish News of Climate Change

Emissions of carbon dioxide (related to energy production) have stabilized, for now.

Is it a peak, a stutter or just a brief pause? Time will tell. But whatever it is, on February 11th the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental _________ which collects such data, announced that emissions of carbon dioxide in 2019 which were _________ energy had remained the same (33.3bn tonnes) as the previous year’s.

Energy-related emissions, which include those (produced by electricity generation), heating and transport, _________ for more than 70% of the world’s industrial CO pollution. The stall seems to have been caused by a(n) _________ in coal use, particularly in rich countries, combined with an increase in the use of renewable power.

As a result of this the CO2-intensity of electricity generation — a(n) _________ of how much of the gas is emitted per kilowatt hour of juice produced — fell by nearly 6.5%, to 340 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour. It had already been _________, but this is three times the average for the past decade. Such declines more than offset the _________ of increased electricity production. The average emission-intensity of power generation in 2019 was “lower than all but the most efficient gas-power plants”, according to the IEA.

This is not the first time energy related emissions have plateaued (保持稳定). Between 2013 and 2016 they hovered around 32.2 bn tonnes a year, before _________ again in 2017 as the use of coal to fuel developing economies increased.This _________ plateau was accompanied by excited declarations that such emissions had peaked. Similar __________ have been made this week, perhaps also prematurely. __________ changes in coal use, a sluggish economy may have played a part and the data show that milder than usual weather caused a perceptible drop in emissions from several countries with large, carbon-hungry economies.

The news is also __________ by the latest data from the Amazon rainforest. This, one of the world’s largest woodlands, has acted __________ as an absorbing sponge (海绵)for CO2 by removing it from the atmosphere through photo-synthesis. Researchers at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research have shown that a vast part of the south-east of the Amazon, about one fifth of its area, has lost its __________ to soak up the gas and is now a net source of emissions into the atmosphere instead. This land has been widely deforested, so the result is little __________. But it is disappointing.

【推荐1】Space X announced a new ________ on Tuesday for a venture that will send four tourists deeper into orbit than any private citizen before them, in a mission that could take place next year and easily cost more than $100 million.

The company signed the deal with Space Adventures, which is based in Washington and ________ as an intermediary(中介)to send eight space tourists to the International Space Station, or ISS, via Russian Soyuz rockets.

The first of these was Dennis Tito, who paid $20 million for an eight-hour stay on the ISS in 2001. The last to go was Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte, in 2009.

The new tourists would be carried on Space X’s Crew Dragon ________ , which was developed to transport NASA astronauts and is ________ to make its first crewed flight in the coming months.

Space Adventures said the mission would ________ five days, flying up to four passengers into space to Earth orbit.

“This is a free-flyer mission. No visit to the ISS. It will attempt to reach two to three times higher ________ than the station,” said Eric Anderson, founder of Space Adventures.

“At an altitude of three times the ISS, the view is 10 times,” said Anderson. The ________ altitude of ISS orbit is about 400 kilometers.

Space XPresident Gwynne Shotwell said in a ________ : “This historic mission will ________   to making spaceflight possible for all people who dream of it, and we are pleased to work with the Space Adventures’ team on the mission.”

The capsule was designed to take astronauts from the surface to the ISS. With just nine square meters in volume, there are no ________ areas to sleep, wash or use the bathroom.

Asked about the ________ , Tom Shelley, president of Space Adventure, said, “It’s not cheap.”

The cost of launching a Falcon 9 rocket is $62 million, according to publicly available ________ . Then there will be the cost of building a fresh Dragon capsule. Could it ________ $100million?

“Your ________ is correct, I can’t comment specifically on the numbers, but yeah those are the cost components,” he said.

“We have a pretty good network of ________ individuals around the world, many of whom we know are interested in spaceflight.”

【推荐2】European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is back on Earth after spending five and a half months in orbit on the International Space Station (ISS). The Italian_______ much attention in China after she _______ some classic Chinese poems on social media with a view of the Chinese capital from space.

That view _______ Cristoforetti to dive into the Chinese classics as the ISS flew over parts of China. She quoted 4th-century poet Wang Xizhi’s Preface to Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion:

“Looking up, I see the immensity of the cosmos; bowing my head, I look at the multitude of the world. The gaze flies, the heart expands, the joy of the senses can reach its peak, and indeed, this is true happiness.” The text was _______ by photos of China taken from the space station.

Her _______spacecraft splashed down off the coast of Florida. After a medical check, she was flown to a military base in Germany, where CGTN Europe asked why she _______ that particular poem and if she was aware of the _______ it had gained.

“I have a good friend, an Italian who has lived in China for 30 years—a sinologist, very _______about Chinese literature.” she smiled, “he suggested that to me, and it sounded like a good _______ . So unfortunately, I cannot take credit for choosing it—but for choosing a smart friend.”

It is hoped that ESA astronauts will __________ their Chinese counterparts for joint__________at some point in the future. With Cristoforetti having laid some groundwork for that, ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher was full of __________for her—and positive about the __________ spirit of space exploration.

“She speaks very well in Chinese, and this post has shown that she can do this very well,” he told CGTN. “Space is __________ . There is no way to put a __________ in space—the space station, the satellites, they fly around the Earth, they __________ boundaries, cultures, religions and different divides. I think this is something that we should __________: Space is above everything. __________ there may be many __________between nations on Earth, in space, cooperation is __________.”

【推荐3】Since the start of the Space Age, private­sector (私营部门) leaders have been issuing warnings that a centralized model would damage progress on public and, especially, commercial priorities in space. For example, Ralph Cordiner, the one­time CEO of General Electric, foresaw much of the space development while forcefully arguing that, eventually, space’s “development shall be under our traditional competitive _________ system.”

The economic logic for the centralized model was clear, and for several decades it has _________ its goals. Public goods such as national security, national pride, and basic science are typically _________ if left to the market, and NASA (美国宇航局) was founded to provide them during the Cold War. Its command­and­control structure grew naturally from that _________.

Under this model, the United States has been the leading space power and NASA has occupied the technological frontier. The success of the Apollo missions, including the 1969 moon landing, inspired grand _________ of what would come next. In the early 1970s, studies of space colonization and diversified space­based economies _________.

But after the last of the Apollo missions in 1972, NASA — and thus the US space sector — struggled to find a second _________ in its space script. Part of the reason was that the tight connection between the Apollo program and competition with the Soviet Union made NASA’s budget vulnerable (脆弱的) to the sense that the mission had already been accomplished. Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin said, “After the Apollo lunar missions, America lost its love of space — there was no concentrated _________ and we didn’t have any clear objectives”.

When NASA decided that its next emphasis would be on the Space Transportation System, better known as the Shuttle, it applied largely the same _________ approach it had used in the 1960s. The first flight of the Columbia space shuttle was in 1981. Successive shuttle flights enabled two decades of achievements, including the construction of the International Space Station (ISS) and Hubble Space Telescope, which __________ American technological competence.

After two tragic accidents, with the Challenger shuttle in 1986 and the Columbia shuttle in 2003, momentum(势头)turned away from the Shuttle and the centralized model of space it __________. The shuttle program was cancelled in 2011, leaving the United States in the __________ position of not being able to launch humans from domestic soil.

An instructive contrast is provided by the __________ the US government took to the development of the commercial satellite market. In 1962, Congress created COMSAT, a for­profit, private corporation owned by common shareholders and a group of telecommunications companies. NASA was officially charged with providing __________ advice to COMSAT, and the agency was given responsibility for COMSAT’s launches. The idea behind this public­private __________ was to employ the expertise of NASA to jump­start a private communications satellite industry. It led to the rapid deployment and use — for both public and private purposes — of the vast range of satellites that dominate the space economy today.