【推荐1】Whenever Michael Carl, the fashion market director at Vanity Fair, goes out to dinner with friends, he plays something called the “phone stack” game: Everyone_______ their phones in the middle of the table; whoever looks at their device before the check arrives _______for dinner.

Brandon Holley, the former editor of Lucky magazine, had trouble _______ her iPhone when she got home from work. So about six months ago, she _______putting her phone into a milk tin the moment she walked in. It remains there until after dinner. And Marc Jacobs, the fashion designer, didn’t _______ to sleep close to a beeping gadget. So, he_______digital devices from his bedroom—a house rule he _______ with audiences during a recent screening of Disconnect, a film that dramatizes how technology has alienated(使疏远) people from one another.

As smartphones _______to make their way into our lives, and wearable devices like Google Glass_______ our personal space even further, overtaxed users are exploring their own device-free zones. Whether it’s a physical barrier(no iPads at the dinner table) or a conceptual one (turn off devices by 11 p.m.), users say these disconnecting __________ are improving their relationships---and__________their brains.

“Disconnecting is a luxury that we all__________,” said Lesley M. M. Blume, a New York writer who keeps her phone away from the dinner table at home. “The expectation that we must always be__________to employers, colleagues and family creates a real obstacle in trying to __________private time. But that private time is more important than ever.”

A popular method for disconnecting is to choose a box for your cellphone, like the milk tin that MS. Holley uses. “__________my phone is buzzing or lighting up, it’s still a distraction, so it__________in the box.” said Ms. Holley. Others choose new__________. “No screens after 11 p. m.” said Ari. Melber, a TV host. “We found the evenings were more __________and we were sleeping better.” he added.

Sleeping is a big factor, which is why some __________ to leave their phones out of their bedrooms. “I don’t want to sleep next to something full of phones and emails.” said Peter Som, a fashion designer, who keeps his phone charging in the living room overnight. “It __________is a head-clearer and distinguishes daytime and sleep time.”

【推荐2】“Nature and Nurture”（遗传还是环境）

People have wondered for a long time how their personalities and behavior are formed. However, it is not easy to explain why one person is intelligent and another is not, or why one is cooperative and another ___________.

Social scientists are of course___________interested in these types of questions. They want to explain why we possess certain ___________ and exhibit certain behavior. There are no clear answers yet, but two___________ schools of thought on the matter have developed. ___________ one might expect, the two approaches are very different from each other, and there is a great deal of debate between ___________ of each theory. The controversy(争论) is often referred to as “nature and nurture”.

Those who ___________ the “nature” side of the conflict believe that our personalities and behavior patterns are ___________ determined by biological factors. That our environment has little, if anything, to do with our abilities, characteristics and behavior is___________ to this theory. Taken to an extreme, this theory states that our behavior is predetermined to such a great degree that we are almost completely governed by our ____________.

Supporters of the “nurture” theory, or, as they are often called, ____________, claim that our environment is more important than our biologically based instinctsin determining how we will act. A behaviorist, B. F. Skinner, sees humans as beings whose behavior is almost completely ____________ by their surroundings. The behaviorists’ view of the human being is quite mechanistic(机械论的). They state that, like machines, humans respond to____________ stimuli(刺激) as the basis of their behavior.

Socially and politically, the results of these two theories are ____________. In the US, for example, blacks often score below whites on intelligence tests. This leads some “nature” supporters to conclude that blacks are genetically ____________ in status than whites are. Behaviorists, ____________, say that the differences in scores are due to the fact that blacks are often robbed of many of the educational and other environmental ____________ that whites enjoy, and that, as a result, they do not develop the same ____________ that whites do.

Neither of these theories can yet fully explain human behavior. As a matter of fact, it is quite ____________ that the key to our behavior lies somewhere between these two extremes and that the debate will ____________for a long time is certain.

【推荐3】Speaking two languages can actually help reduce some effects of aging on the brain, a new study has found.

Researchers tested how long participants needed to _______ from one cognitive (认知) task to another, something that’s known to _______ longer for older adults, said lead researcher, Brain Gold, an expert at the University of Kentucky, “It has great effects these days because our population is _______ gradually,” Gold said. “Seniors are _______ longer, and that’s a good thing, but it’s only a good thing _______ a certain degree that their brains are _______.”

Gold’s team compared task-switching of younger and older _______, knowing they would find slower speeds in the _______ population because of previous studies. _______, they found that older adults who spoke two languages were able to switch mental gear (齿轮) ________ than those who didn’t.

First, Gold and his team ________ 30 people, who were either bilingual (双语的) ________ monolingual (单语的), to look at a series of colored shapes and ________ with the name of each shape by pushing a button. Then, they ________ the participants with a similar series of colored shapes and asked them to respond with what ________ the shapes were by pushing a button. The bilingual people had the ________ to respond faster to the shifting prompts (提示).

Researchers then gathered 80 more people for a second ________; 40 bilinguals and 40 monolinguals. This time, researchers used FMRI machines to ________ brain activity during the same shape-and color-identifying ________. Gold and his team found that bilingual people had different brain activity than their monolingual peers.

“Learning a second language in childhood was thought of as ________,” Gold said. “Actually, it’s beneficial.”

【推荐1】From Teen Activist to TIME’s Person of the Year

With her selection, Greta Thunberg, the famous 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, has become the ______________individual ever to be named Time’s Person of the Year.

While the magazine has a long record of   ____________the power of young people, the ____________have never before selected a   _____________. The _____________individual to hold the record for youngest person of the Year was 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh in 1927.

Thunberg gained international attention for   ____________world leaders for their inaction in the   ____________crisis in a viral speech she made at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in September. She criticized world leaders again at the COP25 (联合国气候变化大会)conference last week.

“Thunberg has become the   ___________   voice on the biggest issue facing the planet,” Time editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal wrote.

At the age of eight, when Thunberg first learned about climate change, she was   ___________that adults did not appear to take the issue   ____________. It was   _________       for her to take_______   in her own life; she stops herself   ____________flying, eats no meat or dairy and she has a shop stop, meaning that she doesn’t buy new things.

On August 20, 2018, Thunberg decided that it was time for her to take her ________ to the next level and_______________. She _____others to launch climate-change strikes around the world last year. She ________school and sat down _____________Sweden’s parliament (议会) with a self-made banner “school strike for climate.” She also invited more than two million students across 135 countries to join her _____________   “Fridays for Future” _______by staging walkouts at their own schools. This past March, Thunberg was nominated(提名) for the Nobel Peace Prize.

【推荐2】She looked up at me sadly, her pain unbearable obvious. I _______her as she swam silently around the small pool, surrounded by people she didn’t know. The top left corner of her yellow shell was _______, and her flippers(鳍状肢)were filled with cuts and scars. Then she swam slowly to others.

I couldn’t help but think that these_______ creatures looked as though they were war heroes wounded in battle, but they weren’t. They were just a group of innocent sea turtles that had been injured by _______ humans.

Earlier that day, our group of forty high school students had learned that those endangered sea turtles were being _______all the time_______water pollution, litter, and careless boaters and fishermen. We were taught how to _______ the deaths and injuries of this species and to encourage others to conserve our ocean life and environment.

I had always been conscious of the damage our environment was suffering_______I had never truly been given the opportunity to _______the devastating(毁灭性的)effects of environmental destruction until I observed that ____________. Seeing a picture or movie of these animals cannot truly capture the____________ on their faces. Now that I have witnessed the____________caused by the pollution and people’s carelessness. I try to encourage my peers to ____________ their daily habits to ____________the environment by recycling, conserving water and energy, or ____________ time and money to help save endangered animals. I stress to them that we need to start saving our environment now ____________it’s too late. We must fight for those creatures that cannot____________for themselves because we have only one world to live in and one____________ to save it. Now I will always be that person ____________that ice cream wrapper flying crazily in the wind just because I hate the thought of even one piece of____________on the ground.

【推荐3】One evening, Catherine was at home as usual. As her ________ swung between what she was going to do with her life and her dinner plans for the evening, she was unexpectedly ________ by an urgent call from her sister “Get over here! Turn on NBC and cheek these guys out. They are just like you.” One Facebook message and a phone interview later, Catherine ________ herself on a bus with 8 strangers in the middle of the sweltering desert of Utah, picking up trash and ________ awareness of zero-waste and climate change.

With a deep ________ of the environment and a desire to make a ________, Catherine, Davey, and a group of self ________ environmental pick-up artists” went on a coast to coast road side trash pick-up. As they walked sometimes only ________ 0.9 miles on an entire day they ________ and steadily made their way across the United States for three years, picking up a total of 201,678 pounds of trash.

Catherine and Davey ________ wonderful stories of hope and inspiration with us that fueled their efforts to continue their journey. After spending weeks silently ________ how she would have enough money to fly home for her two-week spring break, Catherine found a blank, unidentified envelope ________ with S850 cash in the desert, just enough to get her home and back. After their bus ________ outside of Denver, they unexpectedly got ________ and arrived in Yosemite National Park three weeks later, just in time for the “Yosemite Facelift” where volunteers from all over the state came together with a ________ of cleaning up trash all over the park. Together, their team learned to simply devote themselves to their task, and surrender to the journey.

【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】How many people can speak English? Some experts estimate that 1.5 billion people—around one-quarter of the world’s population—can communicate reasonably well in English.

Never in recorded history has a language been as __________ spoken as English is today. The reason why millions are learning it is simple: it is the language of international business and __________, the key to prosperity. It is not just that multinational companies conduct their business in English; it is the language in which Germans speak to Indonesians.

David Gtaddol, the author of English Next, says it is tempting to view the story of English simply as a victory for its native speakers in North America, Britain and Ireland, and Australia— but that would be a __________ . Global English has entered a more complex stage, changing in ways that the English-speaking countries cannot control and might __________ .

An important question one might ask is: whose English will it be in the future? Non-nativespeakers now __________ native English speakers by three to one. The majority of __________ in English today take place between non-native speakers. According to David Graddol, many business meetings held in English appear to run more __________ when there are no native English speakerspresent. This is because native speakers are often ___________ at ensuring that they are understood in international discussions. They tend to think they need to avoid longer Latin-based words, but in fact __________ problems are more often caused by their use of idioms, metaphors, and phrasal verbs. On one occasion, at an international student conference in Amsterdam, conducted in English, the only British representative was asked to be “less __________” so that the others could understand her.

Professor Barbara Seidlhofer, Professor of English at the University of Vienna, records spoken English __________ between speakers of the language around the world. She says her team has noticed that non-native speakers are __________ standard English grammar in several ways. Even the most fluent speakers sometimes omit the "s" in the third person singular. Many omit definite and indefinite articles where they are __________ in standard English, or put them in where standard English does not use them. Nouns that are not plural in native-speaker English are used as plurals by non-native speakers (eg, “informations”, “knowledges”, advices”). Other variations include “make a discussion”, “discuss about something”, or “phone to somebody”.

Many native English speakers will insist that these are not variations, they are mistakes. “Knowledges”and “phone to somebody” are simply __________. Many non-native speakers who teach English around the world would agree. But language changes, and so do ideas of grammatical __________ .

【推荐3】For decades, humans have torn up the natural landscape in Asia, cutting down trees to build resorts (旅游胜地) in the most beautiful locations and caging wild animals to attract tourists.

Bangkok-based hotel architect Bill Bensley is saying “_________.”

When a businessman talked with him about _________ a resort that included a zoo in Asia, he came up with a (n) _________: let’s _________ the humans and let the rare and endangered _________ wander free.

Sounds _________? Bensley is known for _________ ideas, so much so that he’s been called the “Willy Wonka of hotel design.”

At his Shinta Mani Wild resort in Cambodia _________ arrive via a 380-meter zip wire (高空滑索) over the wilderness of the South Cardamom National Park and are _________ to join Wildlife Alliance anti-poaching patrols (防盗猎巡逻).

But he’s not doing things __________ for eye-catching. Bensley is a lifelong conservationist who deeply __________ what humans are doing to the planet. That’s why he wanted to do the World Wild Project. 61-year-old Bensley says the first stage of the eight-year project, which will __________ several different top branded hotels, is expected to __________ in 2023.

The cages for __________ will actually be 2,400 hotel rooms, with a budget of generally a million __________ per room. Let’s just say the guests won’t be uncomfortable.

__________, it’s not the rooms the California-native is talking about. Having a __________ with a local official, he has got the permission to relocate abused animals from __________ in Asia, and set them free onto the __________ 2,000-hectare piece of land __________ the human zoo will be located.