【推荐2】About five years ago, when the first generation of wearable fitness trackers became popular, they were announced as the _______of a revolution. Health experts and business people alike said that giving people _______ to real-time calorie-burning and step-count data would inspire them to lose weight, eat better and most importantly _______more. But even as the U.S. market for _______ devices hits $7 billion this year, there’s evidence that their promise isn’t quite paying off.

The U.S. has an exercise problem, _______ 28% of Americans aged 50 and over considered wholly _______. That means 31 million adults move no more than is necessary to perform the most basic functions of daily life. Wearables, experts_______, were going to change that. But limited academic research has been done to figure out whether wearables _______people’s behavior in the long term. The research that does exist isn’t _______. For a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers wanted to see whether activity trackers would help overweight people lose more weight over two years than if they just did a weight-loss intervention alone. They didn’t. “We found that just giving people a device doesn’t mean it’s going to ________ something that you think it’s going to lead to,” says John Jakicic, the author of the study, from the University of Pittsburgh. “These activity trackers don’t engage people in strategies that make a ________ in terms of long-term change”

Another new study ________ a different challenge: user ________. By the end of a yearlong study of 800 people, just 10% of participants were still wearing the trackers, according to, Eric Finkelstein, a professor at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. “We didn’t find that Fitbits really have much of an effect,” he says. This may well be because people expect trackers to do something they’re not designed to do—________, force them to change their behaviors. “There’s __________among people about their function, a measurement tool and an intervention,” Finkelstein says. A scale counts pounds, for example, ________it won’t teach you how to eat less. “When people put these devices on, they might interact with the app for the first few weeks, maybe the first few months, but there comes a point where that starts to fall off,” says Finkelstein.

To be ________, some of the costlier and higher-tech wearables have features baked into them ________ encourage users to move more, says Shelten Yuen, Fitbit’s vice president of research. Among them are: shaking sensors, movement reminders and social-media combination, all designed to ________ users to make better health choices every day. But more research will be needed to determine whether or not these features or others like them— could ________ improve people’s health and fitness levels.

【推荐3】Technology is connecting us in ways never seen before in human history. How will that change our societies, our relationships, ourselves?

That’s the question that ________ Michael Wesch. The last time communications technology had such a wide-ranging impact was 500 years ago with the invention of the printing press. Being able to print texts instead of writing them by hand ________ the world. It changed the way people could communicate with each other. Suddenly, multiple copies of books could be made quickly and easily. As more books became ________, ideas spread much more rapidly. But what will be the impact of digital technology, the most powerful ________ tool we have ever seen?

Michael Wesch argues that communication is ________ to our relationships, so it follows that a change in the way we communicate will change those relationships. Wesch, a university professor, explores digital communication in his work. ________, Wesch and his students look at social networking and other interactive Internet tools like YouTube. When people create and share personal videos on YouTube, anyone anywhere can watch them. Wesch says that this ________ some people feeling a sort of deep connection with the entire world. But it’s not a ________ relationship; it’s not the same as the connection you feel with a member of your family. In fact, as Wesch says, it’s a relationship without any real ________ that you can turn off at any moment. So does it make sense to talk about a YouTube “community”?

Wesch himself ________ the impact of digital media when he created and posted his own short video on YouTube. It attracted immediate attention and has been viewed millions of times. In his video, he tells us that webpages get 100 billion hits a day and that a new blog is started every half second. He asks us to ________ the power of this technology and how we use it. What could we do with it? What is its potential?

________ the university, in the real world, Wesch believes it’s crucial for people to be able to use the new environment of digital media for the greatest possible impact. “It’s the ________ of our times that we are now so connected we fail to see it. I want to believe that technology can help us see relationships and global connections in ________ new ways. It’s pretty amazing that I have this little box sitting on my desk through which I can talk to any one of a billion people. And yet do any of us really ________ all the potential that’s there?

【推荐3】In the middle of 2023, a study conducted by the HuthLab at the University of Texas sent shockwaves through the fields of neuroscience (神经科学) and technology. For the first time, the thoughts and impressions of people _______ to communicate with the outside world were translated into continuous natural language, using a combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and brain imaging technology. This is the closest science has yet come to _______ someone’s mind.

Losing the ability to communicate is a deep cut to one’s sense of self. _______ this ability gives the patient greater control over their lives. But it could also give other entities, such as corporations, researchers and other third parties, a(n) _______ degree of insight into, or even control over, the lives of patients. The NeuroRights Foundation, based at Columbia University in New York, argues that new rights surrounding neurotechnologies will be _______ for all humans to preserve their privacy, identity, and free will. The potential _______ of disabled patients makes this a particularly important problem.

_______ this approach, Chile was the first country that adopted legislation, drafting new laws, to address the risks of neurotechnology. It not only introduced a new constitutional right to mental _______, but is also in the process of adopting a bill that bans selling neurodata, and forces all neurotech devices to be regulated as medical devices, even those intended for the general consumer.

The proposed legislation recognizes the intensely _______ nature of neural data and considers it as organ tissues, which cannot be bought or sold, only donated. But this legislation has also faced ________, with legal scholars questioning the need for new rights and pointing out that it could discourage beneficial brain research for disabled patients.

While the legal action taken by Chile is the most impactful and ________ to date, other countries are considering updating existing laws to face the new developments in neurotechnologies.

And while it is likely that the first applications of neurotech will be medical, future ________ are likely to involve consumer applications such as entertainment, as well as for military and security purposes. The growing ________ of neurotechnology in a commercial context only causes more legal concerns.

Different people, societies, and cultures will disagree on where to draw the line. We are at a(n) ________ stage of technological development. And as we begin to uncover the great potential of brain science, the need to consider their implications for legal action becomes more ________.

It is perhaps the most ironic symbol of the life on our planet. The Amazon is the world’s largest and most bio-diverse tropical rainforest and a huge trap for carbon dioxide. The harms of _________ in this vital resource are old news. But now, the time on the clock is running out. It seems that the world’s biggest rainforest is about to turn into the world’s biggest environmental _________. “We are about to collapse,” says Luciana Gati at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research. “We are in a(n) _________, we need action now.”

Gati has spent years _________ the Amazon from the air. She believes we are as little as five years from a point of no return, where rainforest begins to turn into dry land. It is also the point at which billions of tons of carbon would be _________ into the atmosphere. “It’s a nightmare,” she says.

That nightmare situation is the well-known Amazon _________ point, where the ecosystem can no longer cope with the damage of the forest cutting. Like a domino game, one brick falling will _________ the whole tower to collapse in a heap.

Warnings that this is approaching have now taken on extreme urgency. The rate of deforestation has increased sharply and is fast approaching the theoretical _________. In September, a group of more than 200 experts, including Gatti, released an assessment of the situation. The conclusion: we are on the _________ of disaster.

Scientists first began to seriously worry about a potential Amazon tipping point in about 2000, when some studies warned that a combination of climate change and deforestation could cause the rainforest to __________.

A few years later, a team of Brazilian scientists put numbers on it. They __________ that in central, southern and eastern parts of the Amazon, a loss of 40% of the forest cover from pre-industrial levels, or 3°C warming would reduce rainfall so much that the rest of the forest would die of __________ and turn into a dry land in less than a decade.

The scientists have since __________ that prediction, partly due to the global warming that has happened since 2000. The Amazon is already 1.2°C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times and is warming three times faster than the global __________. At that rate of warming, between 20 and 25% deforestation would be enough to dry up the land and destroy the Amazon completely.

“Either way, we would be wise not to exceed 20%”, says a scientist, “for the commonsense reason that there is no point in __________   the precise point of limit by tipping it.”

【推荐2】From childhood to old age, we all use language as a means of broadening our knowledge of ourselves and the world about us. When humans first ________, they were like newborn children, unable to use this ________tool. Yet once language developed, the possibilities for humankind’s future attainments and cultural growth increased.

Many linguists believe that evolution   is ________for our ability to produce   and use language. They claim that our highly evolved brain provides us with innate language ability not found in lower ________. Proponents of this innateness theory say that   our ________ for language is inborn, but that language itself develops   gradually, ________a function of the growth of the brain during childhood. Therefore, there are critical ________times for language development.

Current ________of innateness theory are mixed, however, evidence supporting the existence of some innate abilities is undeniable. ________, more and more schools are discovering that foreign languages are best taught in the lower grades. Young children often can learn several languages by being exposed to them, while adults have a much harder time learning another language once the ________of their first language have become firmly fixed.

Although some aspects of language are undeniably innate, language does not develop automatically in a vacuum. Children who have been isolated from other human beings do not   ________language. This demonstrates that interaction with other human beings   is necessary for ________language development. Some linguists believe that this is even more basic to human language ________than any innate capacities. These theorists view language as ________, learned behavior. ________, children learn language from their parents by imitating them. Parents gradually shape their child’s language skills by positively reinforcing precise imitations and negatively reinforcing imprecise ones.