【推荐1】Shortcut to hard work

For those of us who sat through endless piano lessons as children, or spent summers learning a foreign language while our friends played outside, we probably never thanked our parents for those experiences.

However, we weren’t just put through endless extra-curricular (课外的) activities just so our elders could enjoy some free time. In fact, the best time to learn sound-based skills such as languages or music is at a young age. As the brain is still developing, it’s the perfect time to take in certain information.

But thanks to a new discovery by researchers at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, US, adults may also be able to learn a new sound-based skill just as well as younger people can.

Using mice as test patients, the researchers found that the adult brain of both mice and humans—produces high levels of adenosine (腺甘酸), a chemical that slows down the ability to learn from sound. In younger brains, adenosine levels are much lower.

After finding a way to stop the brain from producing as much adenosine, the mice became more aware of sounds and were able to tell the difference between different notes played to them. This ability was previously unknown of in mice.

The researchers believe that if a drug is developed to slow down adenosine production in adult humans, it will unlock the ability to learn sound-based skills easier.

“These results offer a promising strategy to extend the same window in humans to acquire language or musical ability,” co-author Stanislav Zakharenko wrote in the study.

It’s also believed that the findings could help people with serious medical conditions such as tinnitus (耳鸣), or those who have suffered a stroke (中风).

If the researchers eventually go on to develop the drug, however, this probably won’t mean that we could become masters of the violin or speak fluent Italian after taking a few pills.

Like everything in life worth doing, time, patience and hard work will probably still be needed if we want to take on a new sound-based skill.

1. What is the main purpose of the first two paragraphs?

A．To lead up to the new discovery by scientists.

B．To describe the unpleasantness of learning sound-based skills.

C．To explain the need to learn sound-based skills at a young age.

D．To prove that it’s never easy to pick up a sound-based skill.

2. The researchers discovered from their studies that a high level of adenosine ________.

A．usually exists in younger brains

B．made mice more sensitive to sounds

C．helped mice improve the ability to learn from sound

D．stopped mice developing sound-based abilities easily

3. According to the text, the findings could help ________.

A．children learn language more easily

B．adults develop musical skills better

C．people with tinnitus recover completely

D．protect people against a stroke

4. What message does the author intend to convey in the last two paragraphs?

A．He is pessimistic about the drug being developed.

B．Everything worth doing deserves to be done well.

C．He is hopeful that the new drug will make it easy to master new skills.

D．There is no replacement for time and effort when it comes to learning new things.

【推荐3】What the Next Era of Globalization Will Look Like

Editor: You talk in the book about how fragile many global supply chains have become. Why would a less globalized, more localized supply chain tend to be more resilient?

Rana: Well, for starters, you have proximity (亲近).    1    . We had these “just-in-time”, “efficient” supply chains that were built, taking products around the world. It saves big companies a lot of money as long as nothing is going wrong in the world. But when anything goes wrong, be it a tsunami, be it a geopolitical event, be it a war, a trade war, a cold war, a hot war, you get problems.     2    

Also, I would say when I think of resiliency, I think of sustainability. And well before the pandemic or the war in Ukraine, companies were actually already starting to think about localization for all kinds of reasons.     3    . The wage productivity arbitrage(工资套利)was losing its appeal. Wages were rising enough in the east so that the arbitrage didn’t make as much sense as it used to.

Finally, you are starting to have environmental concerns where companies are being asked to consider, “Okay, how many units of carbon are you expending to tote X product to Y location?” All of this was sort of pushing that notion of localization for resiliency.

Editor:     4    . Why not use antitrust(反垄断)to encourage more competition-but keep supply chains globalized?

Rana: I don’t see them as an either-or proposition; I see them as ideas that work hand in hand. Let me give you an example: Right after the pandemic hits, everybody goes into lockdown, suddenly nobody’s eating out. Restaurants are closed; grocery stores have huge lines in front of them. And yet there are no products on the shelves. You can’t find tomato sauce, you can’t find juice. There are all these strange gaps that start to appear. And you might say, “Well, why is that?”

A．Whereas when you have more localized systems, you just don’t have those sorts of problems of hauling things halfway around the world.

B．In markets where you did have more localized agriculture or greater use of community farm programs or farmers markets, you didn’t have that problem.

C．You write that monopoly (垄断)is a source of weakness, because it means companies and consumers rely on a single source.

D．One of the messages in my book that I’m really trying to get across is place matters: The world is not flat; the world is bumpy(颠簸的).

E．One of which is that the sort of cheap capital for cheap labor model between the U. S. and Asia didn’t really work.

F．An efficient market theory would say that prices of commodities always reflect all available information about the supply and demand.