Future living: what will the home of tomorrow look like?

What will our homes be like in the future? Growing cities, shrinking living spaces, and climate change are major challenges     1    (face) urban planners and architects. We’re sharing three trends with you     2     will shape the home we live in tomorrow.

Energy efficient and carbon neutral

One of the greatest challenges for homes of the future is our increasing energy consumption, something that cannot be covered by fossil fuels going forward.     3     the impact of climate change becoming notable, it’s perfectly understandable that the buildings of the future could function as environmentally friendly power plants. Solar collectors and heat storage systems allow     4     are known as “plus-energy buildings” to produce 100 percent renewable energy for emission-free operation.

The trend to downsizing

Living more efficiently not only means improving energy use and reducing one’s own carbon footprint, but also building to save space. Rooms     5    (design) to be multifunctional when there’s not a dedicated room available for every potential purpose. Modular and flexible furnishing systems that can be adapted to the individual floor space and room zones will replace     6    (fix) structures, ensuring that there’s room for everything even in a small space.  

Trends for living and working under one roof

Over the last few months, the office     7    (become) a feature in many people’s homes. For a number of years now, the home office has been evolving from a make-do desk into a comfortable long-term solution. This development means we need to ask     8     how we should construct our living spaces to allow us to concentrate and work productively.  

    9     you rent or own your own home in the future, what’s clear is that the home of tomorrow will be smarter, more flexible, and more sustainable. It will offer us space     10    (live), sleep and work both indoors and outdoors.

Science fiction     1    (regard) by many people as a mirror through which our future can be     2    (free) imagined and explored. The Three-Body Problem     3    (write) by Chinese writer Liu Cixin is one of those astonishing     4    (predict) about the future. The work was first published in a Chinese sci-fi magazine in 2006 and printed as a three-volume book in 2008. When the first volume was translated into English by Chinese-American author Ken Liu, it attracted attention around the world,     5    (become) the first Asian winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The book     6    (represent) many themes such as space exploration, alien contact, AI, and the future of humans.

The Three-Body Problem begins with the stories of two unrelated people, Ye Wenjie and Wang Miao. Ye is recruited to join     7     secret project in a remote area of China,     8     has been set up to contact alien life forms. In the other story, set 20 years later, Wang Miao gets caught up in a popular online game called “Three Body”, in which people live on an unknown planet     9     three suns. But Wang discovers it is more than a game — it uncovers a great danger threatening human existence. How are these two people’s stories connected? And how will their behaviour change Earth’s future and the civilisations of other planets? Answers to all these questions are waiting to     10    (discover) when you go on reading.

World leaders are planning to return to the moon in the near future. Two companies have also made a decision     1     (support) space travel. They will give 30 million dollars to the first members who send a vehicle to the moon and send video back to Earth over the Internet. In addition to     2     (make) a lot of money, the winners will also make history. In the 1400s, Spanish leaders     3     (give) Columbus money to explore the world; in return, they learned about a whole new part of the world. Today’s lunar explorers are similar. Who knows     4     they will discover?