【推荐2】“Always” and “never”, two words opposite in meaning, tend to characterize the vocabulary of black and white thinkers. Black and white thinking means seeing the world in terms of ________. If things aren’t _____, then black and white thinkers feel terrible. What a _____ way to live! In real life, situations are almost always shades of _____, not absolute black or white. Black and white thinking ________ to exacerbate（加剧）depression, conflicts in marriage, anxiety and many other everyday _____. Give yourself and the ones you love a break and ____ the beauty of shades of gray.

When small children are learning to use words and organize their thoughts, it is _______ for them to see and ________ their world in very black and white terms. When young children feel they are not ______, they think they _______ be hated. When a child feels his/her parents don’t pay ______ attention to him/her, that child will say, “You never pay attention to me.” Developmental psychologists _______ this “primitive thinking”.

_______, adults often regress（倒退） to primitive thinking. Adults tend to regress to primitive thinking _____ they have a hard _______ and feel frustrated by their own emotions. A regression is a slipping back from mature thinking to immature thinking.

If you learn to ________ the gray thinking in the difficult experiences you encounter in your life, you will be _____equipped to come out on top. Regression is not the only conclusion when you feel stressed, angry and confused. You can start to recognize when you are ______ to black and white thinking, and then make the choice to get rid of those extreme thoughts in favor of ____ living.

【推荐1】A pirate’s life no more

HONEST souls intent on paying for the music they listened to used to have a hard time in China. In the era of compact discs, _______ was the shop which did not sell pirated（盗版的） ones. The same held true when discs turned into downloads and online streams of songs: hardly any _________ charged money.

Yet this is changing. Slowly, but _______, China is becoming a market where people pay for music. Over the past five years, digital-music revenues for the recording industry nearly quadrupled, to $195m; most of that amount comes from music streaming (see chart). That sum may still be a tiny fraction of the global total of $7.8bn, but streaming has clearly taken off in China.

Not everybody is paying: of the 600m Chinese who listen to music online only 20m have a paid subscription, which costs between 8 and 12 yuan a month. The rest _______ for nothing, but many do so on legal, advertising-supported services. “Piracy is _______.” says Ed Peto of Outdustry, a firm in Beijing offering services to the music industry.

If Chinese consumers have developed a liking for _______ listening, it is for a combination of reasons. Smartphones, which have become popular in recent years, make it easy to _______ to streaming services. Widespread use of apps such as Alipay and WeChat Pay mean that younger Chinese, in particular, are now used to making small purchases _______. And, to take advantage of the commercial opportunities in music, China’s big internet platforms have begun to fight piracy.

Not all is _______, however. The streaming market is ________ by one player: Tencent, the largest of China’s online giants, which is best known for its WeChat messaging service. According to some estimates, its market share exceeds 70%. Each of the company’s two leading streaming brands, QQ Music and KuGou, ________ hundreds of millions of users.

One cause for this market concentration is acquisitions: last year Tencent bought two big competitors. More important, ________, it has paid three major international record labels—Warner Music Group, Sony Music and Universal Music Group—a big, but unknown, sum for the ________ right to stream their music in China. This means that Tencent gets to decide which songs rivals are ________ to play.

Tencent executives say that they need such exclusivity to ensure the legitimacy of streaming services and to reduce piracy further. But having one firm have so much power “is never healthy”, says an executive at a rival firm. With the market growing quickly, the labels may ________ their deals with Tencent when they come up for renewal.

【推荐2】Unfortunately when people think of teenagers, good thoughts are not always the first to come to mind. I know I ____ not to go into my teenage daughter’s high school at the end of their day because I don’t want to be ____ in the hallways. I feel like I am running the gauntlet (冲击) sometimes! I know they are just kids in a hurry to ____ and blow off steam.

Fortunately I also get a(n) ____ to see teenagers at their best. __ my daughter and her high school band’s friendship is ____ a joy. For instance, when a fellow band member’s music folder fell on the pavement everyone ran to help ____ the music before it was blown away by the wind. They are a great group of ____. But I witnessed an event yesterday that really ____ my heart.

My ____ had a band competition at a nearby high school. Her band was the ____ one to play and before they could play their last selection, the lights in the hall flashed and then ____.

The atmosphere in the large, dark space was ____. The band, sensing this, started ___ _some of the familiar songs that they sing in the stands during football season. The ____ started clapping and singing along. It was quite the experience, sitting in total ____ singing and clapping with dozens of people like it was a(n) ____ thing.

I was so ____ to be able to experience this firsthand. My daughter is a senior and so this was one of her last ____ in high school. It was really a(n) ____ inspirational experience. And I will keep it in my mind forever.

【推荐3】High school students who take music courses score significantly better on math, science and English exams than their non-musical peers, according to a new study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology.

School administrators needing to cut budgets often look first to music courses, because the general belief is that students who devote time to music rather than math, science and English, will_______ in those disciplines.

“Our research proved this belief _________   and found the more the students engage with music, the better they do in those subjects,” said UBC (University of British Columbia) education professor and the study’s principal investigator, Peter Gouzouasis. “The students who learned to play a musical instrument in elementary and_______ playing in high school not only score significantly higher, but were about one academic year ahead of their non-music peers with regard to their English, mathematics and science skills, as measured by their exam grades, _______   their socioeconomic background, race, previous learning in mathematics and English, and gender.”

Gouzouasis and his team _________   data from all students in public schools in British Columbia who finished Grade 12 between 2012 and 2015. The data ___________, made up of more than 112,000 students, included those who completed at least one standardized exam for math, science and English. Students who studied at least one instrumental music course in the regular curriculum counted as students_______   music.

The researchers found the _______ relationships between music education and academic achievement were       more pronounced for those who took instrumental music rather than vocal (发声的) music. The findings suggest skills learned in instrumental music_________ very broadly to the students’ learning in school.

“Learning to play a musical instrument and playing in a band is very________,” said the study’s co-investigator Martin Guhn, an assistant professor in UBC’s school of population and public health. “A student has to learn to read musical notes, develop eye-hand-mind coordination ( 协 调 ), develop keen listening skills, develop________   skills for playing in a band and develop discipline to practice. All those learning experiences, and more, play a role in________ the learner’s cognitive capacities (认知能力), executive functions, and motivation to learn in school.”

The researchers hope that their findings will be brought to the________ of students, parents, teachers and administrative decision-makers in education, as many school districts over the years have emphasized mathematics and literacy________ other   areas   of   learning,   particularly   music.   “However,   the   amusing   aspect   is   that________ education can be the very thing that improves all-around academic achievement,” said Gouzouasis.

【推荐1】After my public lectures on evolution, someone in the audience asks, “Are we still evolving?” People want to know if humans are getting taller, smarter, better looking or more athletic. My answer is truthful but _______: We’re almost certainly evolving, but we don’t know in what _______ or how fast.

We’ve seen some evolution in our species over the past few millennia, but it was detected by reconstructing history from DNA sequences. For example, we know that during the past 10,000 years, several populations of humans — those keeping sheep, cows or goats for milk— gained the ability to digest dairy products. This quality was _______ in our earlier ancestors who, after babyhood, never encountered milk. And in the past 3,000 years, Tibetans have acquired _______ adaptations that allowed them to develop well in their high-altitude, low-oxygen home. But these well-documented changes are limited to particular populations, so the _______ for recent evolution of our entire species, remains not much.

The authors of “Evolving Ourselves” _______. Not only, they claim, are we evolving faster than ever, but we’re doing it to ourselves. Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans argue that humans have _______ evolution — not just in our own species but virtually in all species: “For better or worse, we are increasingly in charge. We are the primary drivers of _______. We will directly and indirectly determine what lives, what dies, where, and when. We are in a different phase of evolution: the future of life is now _______.”

According to the authors, we’ve replaced natural selection with what they call “________selection.” Overfishing, for example, has reduced the average size of many fish species, for taking the biggest fishes is ________ those smaller fishes.

Yet while there’s no doubt that we’re changing the planet, the claim that we’re completely changing evolution on the planet ________. Let’s take those fish that are evolving to reproduce smaller and younger for example. This ________ has been documented in many species that we eat, but this is just a minuscule fraction (极小的一部分) of the 30,000 known species of fish.

The authors speak with ________ assurance about how our species is evolving in response to nearly everything. When they claim, for example, our ingestion (摄取) of drugs and exposure to chemicals mean that “our children’s brains are evolving fast,” they are abusing (滥用) the word “________.” Our children’s brains may be changing fast in response to the new pharmacological (药理学的) environment, but change alone is not evolution.

【推荐2】A cliché is a phrase that has been used so many times that it comes out of the mouth or the computer without stirring up a wave in the mind of the speaker, the typist, the listener or the reader. The word was part of the technical term of the French printing trade in the 19th century, the name for a plate used in the printing process, and it is still used with that meaning in English and other languages. By the middle of the same century, the word was being used in French, shortly followed by English, as a simile (比喻) for ____ used expressions.

Clichés can be ____ according to whether they were originally idioms, similes and proverbs, expressions from trades or ____ phrases.

Many idioms have been so universally overused that they have been ____ — phrases like far and wide, by leaps and bounds or safe and sound. Our second category could be similes and proverbs that now fall off the ____ with little meaning, similes like as cool as a cucumber, which ____ around 400 years.

A large category is ____ from the terms of trades and professions, sports and games, and other national concerns. Many are ____ clichés, as is fitting for the British, as an island nation, with examples like to leave a sinking ship, to know the ropes, to stick to one’s guns.

Our last broad category of cliché might be phrases which were ____ when they were first coined, but have become ineffective through constant use. When a football manager, asked how he felt about the____ of his team, said that he was as sick as a parrot. Since then, it has been so overused that it has lost its ____. To explore every avenue and to leave no stone unturned are two political clichés of this class. No politician with any sensitivity for language could use either of those phrases ____, yet you hear them still, all the time.

No doubt we could specify the classes of clichés into further subdivisions until the cows come home. But there is no need to. We all agree that clichés are to be ____ by careful writers and speakers at all times, don’t we? Well, actually, no, not I. Life, and language, are so full of clichés that silence will hold the position if you ____ us the use of cliché. So many millions of people have spoken and written clichés so ____ that it is almost impossible to find ideas and phrases that have not been used many times before.

【推荐3】Which comes first, happiness or money? Are richer people happier ? And _________, how do people get richer? A recent study could tell you the answer.

The study_________ thousands of teenagers and found that those who felt better about life as young adults_________ to have higher incomes(收入) by the time they _________ 29. Those who were happiest earned an average of $8,000 more than those who were the most_________.

The researchers(研究者), from University College London and the University of Warwick, say that very   depressed(沮丧的) teens, no matter how tall or smart they were, earned 10% less than their peers(同龄人), _________ the happier ones earned _________ 30% more.

Happier teenagers have an easier time _________ school, college and the job interview, _________ because they always feel better about life. It may also be true that happier people find it easier to make friends, who are often the key to homework help or networking.

A report in June suggested that professional(职业的) respect(尊重) was more important than __________ in terms of workplace happiness. In August scientists announced(宣布) that they had found the __________ for happiness in women. Alas! The same gene(基因) doesn’t appear to have __________ effect on men. And in October researchers in the UK and in the US announced that people who eat seven portions(份) of fruit and vegetables a day report being the happiest.

If it is really true that happier kids __________ being wealthier (更富有) kids, is it necessary for parents to get their kids to do the homework? The fact is that no homework will make kids happy but surely hurt their grades(分数). Studies do show, __________, that more education __________ better-paid jobs, which may give us a deep thought.