1 . The biggest criticism (批评) of social networking is that our young people are losing their offline friends to online friends. In fact there is a lot of research that shows these criticisms are generally unfounded. Research by Allen et al. found that people are not replacing offline friends with online companions but are using them to support their offline relationships. They also found that our online friendships actually allow us to have discussions with a much more diverse set of people than in the real world and improve our psychological happiness.

However, there is one part of social networking that is deeply worrying. We find ourselves in a hyper-connected world where people access social media day and night, excited to make announcements about the tiniest details of their lives. Research is starting to show that this culture is negatively affecting not our friendships but our character.

Professor Larry D. Rosen, in his book iDisorder, presents evidence that social networking is turning us into narcissists (自恋者). He says that young people who overuse social networking sites can become vain, aggressive, and show anti-social behavior in their offline lives. But perhaps an even more disturbing effect is that one of our most basic emotions seems to be disappearing—empathy. This is the emotion that bonds us together; it allows us to see the world from our friends’ points of view. Without it, we are far less able to connect and form meaningful adult relationships.

Sherry Turkle, a professor of social sciences at MIT, suggests that people are no longer comfortable being alone. This is something confirmed by a study where 200 university students were asked to go without social media for 24 hours. Many admitted an addiction to their online social network; most complained that they felt cut off from family and friends. But being alone is a time, Turkle argues, when we self-reflect and get in touch with who we really are. It is only when we do this that we can make meaningful friendships with others. She believes, as is the title of her book, that we are simply “Alone Together”.

These potential changes in our characters are rather disturbing. If nothing is done, our young people could well be in trouble. Therefore, suggestions about ways to encourage our young people to avoid the problems of social networking should be made, so they can develop the kinds of friendships that are required to grow into well-adjusted and happy adults.

3 . “I hate New Orleans! I wanna go home!” I _______ to my mother as we moved boxes. _______, going home was not easy because my home was 1,100 miles away.

I was born and _______ in northern Virginia. Virginia was my home, and I never expected that to _______. In 2014, my family experienced a tragedy (悲剧), so my parents decided to move to my mom’s hometown of New Orleans.

Only three months after my parents made the _______ to move, I found myself moving boxes into our new house. My announcement to my mother that I _______ the new environment was partly motivated by how hot it was, but it was mostly due to the fact that I felt like my entire life had been turned upside down. 1,100 miles away from everyone and everything I had ever known, I was _______. To make matters worse, I was starting high school in two weeks. Beginning high school is a scary _______ on its own.

I spent my first few months in New Orleans, _______ wanting to go home to Virginia. But after a few months of missing home, I ________ that I had a choice. I could continue thinking about how much I missed my old home, or I could start trying to build a new home right here. I chose the latter.

As soon as I stopped giving all my attention to how much I missed Virginia, I was able to begin accepting the love that people were already giving me. I joined some clubs at school, which gave me the chance to make friends. My neighbor taught me how to cook some New Orleans food, and I found a wonderful race of fellow cooks and neighbors. Overall, I seized every possible opportunity to better myself and to rebuild my life.

4 . The Day Lisa Lost

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about the many professional athletes of today who have developed a me-first attitude. I am talking about high school sports, where lessons of life are still being learned. Here, athletes still compete for the love of the game and their teammates. Lisa Kincaid is one of them.

I first met Lisa on the volleyball court. If anyone had a right to be cocky (自大的) or proud of herself, it was Lisa. Besides being one of the best volleyball players in the USA, she became a track legend (传奇人物) . She went sixty-four national games without losing any event.

However, she felt uncomfortable talking about her achievements and would usually change the conversation to others’ performances. She often lent her shoes to someone who’d forgotten her own, or sincerely sent best wishes to competitors from different teams.

Soon after, Lisa’s impossible failure in one game impressed me a lot. Lisa’s coach told her he needed her to run the mile. She had never done so, but agreed to do what was best for the team. Lisa easily outdistanced the competition, but on the last lap she seemed to grow tired. Jane, Lisa’s teammate, passed her. Lisa managed to stay just behind Jane and followed her across the finish line. Lisa lost an event for the first time in her track career.

Athletes in Lisa’s track program needed to earn a set amount of points to gain a varsity letter (校队标志微章). Lisa knew that Jane needed to finish first to earn a letter for the first time. Without Lisa, Jane would make it. Lisa remembered all this as she lined up for the start of that race. It suddenly struck me why she wore a slight smile on her face after having “lost” for the first time ever. Jane finally received her first varsity letter. And Lisa? On that day, the day she lost, she earned my respect and admiration.

5 . My adult son walked to the table this morning for breakfast and opened his arms to me. I opened my arms too and gave him a big hug just like I do every morning. And this time when I did, a beautiful memory came back to me. It is ________ how one simple act of love can forever ________ one’s soul.

My Italian Granny had been a big hugger when I was a boy, but my mom had grown up in a more ________ household. She hugged me sometimes but less often as I grew into my teenage years. By the time I was a teenager then, except for my Granny, I didn’t hug anyone.

When I was sixteen, I left on a trip with a group to ________ a Seminary College in the Mid-West. And on our way there, we also stopped by an old Monastery. As we entered, we were ________ there by the largest monk I had ever seen. He was over six and a half feet tall with huge arms and a ________ voice. And as he greeted us, he gave each one of us a HUGE HUG. When my own turn came, I felt scared but ________ in and hugged him back. I felt a warmth in my heart. Later that day I began to wonder why I had ever stopped giving and receiving hugs when they brought so much ________. When my own children were born then I ________ to never stop hugging them and telling them I loved them.

What use are arms, after all, if we can’t use them to hug each other. What use are lips if we can’t say “I Love You!” God gives us ________ ways to share our kindness and delight here. Let’s use them all to share our love.

7 . If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go in darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal (夜间活动的) species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s light. This is a basic evolutionary fact, even though most of us don’t think of ourselves as diurnal beings. Yet it’s the only way to explain what we’ve done to the night: We’ve engineered it to receive us by filling it with light.

The benefits of this kind of engineering come with consequence called light pollution whose effects scientists are only now beginning to study. Light pollution is largely the result of bad lighting design, which allows artificial light to shine outward and upward into the sky. Ill-designed lighting washes out the darkness of night and completely changes the light levels and light rhythms to which many forms of life, including ourselves, have adapted. Wherever human light spills into the natural world, some aspect of life is affected.

In most cities the sky looks as though it has been emptied of stars, leaving behind a vacant haze (霾) that mirrors our fear of the dark. We’ve grown so used to this orange haze that the original glory of an unlit night—dark enough for the planet Venus to throw shadow on Earth—is wholly beyond our experience, beyond memory almost.

We’ve lit up the night as if it were an unoccupied country, when nothing could be further from the truth. Among mammals alone, the number of nocturnal species is astonishing. Light is a powerful biological force, and on many species it acts as a magnet. The effect is so powerful that scientists speak of songbirds and seabirds being “captured” by searchlights on land or by the light from gas flares on marine oil platforms. Migrating at night, birds tend to collide with brightly lit tall buildings.

Frogs living near brightly lit highways suffer nocturnal light levels that are as much as a million times brighter than normal, throwing nearly every aspect of their behavior out of joint, including their nighttime breeding choruses. Humans are no less trapped by light pollution than the frogs. Like most other creatures, we do need darkness. Darkness is as essential to our biological welfare, to our internal clockwork, as light itself.

Living in a glare of our making, we have cut ourselves off from our evolutionary and cultural heritage—the light of the stars and the rhythms of day and night. In a very real sense light pollution causes us to lose sight of our true place in the universe, to forget the scale of our being, which is best measured against the dimensions of a deep night with the Milky Way—the edge of our galaxy—arching overhead.

8 . In 2008, Calvin Lowe’s four-year-old son Tyler needed to have a serious operation.

On the appointed day of the operation, he and his wife brought Tyler to Children’s Hospital Colorado in Denver. “As we sat in the waiting room, waiting for someone to call us back to the operation area, there was a lot of _______ in our hearts,” Lowe remembered.

When a nurse called the family back, Lowe’s fears _______. A young doctor walked into the room and told the couple that he would be _______ the operation. As the doctor began to _______ how the operation would proceed (进行), Lowe’s mind went to the worst possible _______. But then the doctor did something _______. He looked both Lowe and his wife in the eye, put a _______ hand on each of their shoulders, and said, “Today, your son is my son.”

After the operation was over, the doctor came back out to the family with a big smile and said, “Our son is just fine, and you can see him here in a few minutes.”

Tyler is now 19 years old and hopes to become a professional photographer. All these years after the operation, Lowe still thinks about the young doctor’s kindness. “I will never forget that,” Lowe said. “Because that was indeed a _______ of stress then. I can’t tell you how _______ we both were for what he said to us that day. It was very ________ and meaningful.”

9 . New research confirms that human footprints found in New Mexico are probably the oldest direct evidence of human presence in the Americas, a finding that upends what many scientists knew about human habitation and migration (迁徙).

The footprints were discovered at the edge of an ancient lakebed in White Sands national park. According to the new paper published in the journal Science, they date back to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago. Actually, the estimated age of the footprints was first reported in Science in 2021, but some researchers raised concerns about the dates. Questions focused on whether seeds of water plants used for the original dating may have absorbed ancient carbon from the lake — which could, in theory, throw off radiocarbon dating (碳14年代测定) by thousands of years. But the new study presents two additional lines of evidence for the older date range. It uses two entirely different materials found at the site, ancient pollen (花粉) and stone grains.

The reported age of the footprints challenges the once conventional wisdom that humans did not reach the Americas until a few thousand years before rising sea levels covered the Bering land bridge between Russia and Alaska, perhaps about 15,000 years ago. “This is a subject that’s always been controversial (有争议的) because it’s so significant. It’s about how we understand the last chapter of the peopling of the world,” said Thomas Urban, an archaeologist (考古学家) at Cornell University, who was involved in the 2021 study but not the new one.

Thomas Stafford, an independent archaeological geologist in New Mexico, who was not involved in the study, said he “was a bit suspicious (怀疑的) before” but now is convinced. The new study isolated about 75,000 grams of pure pollen from the same stone layer that contained the footprints. “Dating pollen is laborious but worthwhile,” said Kathleen Springer, a research geologist at the US Geological Survey and a co-author of the new paper.

Ancient footprints of any kind can provide archaeologists with a quick look of a moment in time. While some archeological sites in the Americas point to similar date ranges — including necklaces carved from giant animal remains in Brazil — scientists still question whether such objects really indicate human presence. “White Sands is unique because there’s no question these footprints were left by people,” said Jennifer Raff, a scientist at the University of Kansas, who was not involved in the study.

10 . Growing Roots

When I was growing up, I had an old neighbor named Dr. Gibbs. He didn’t look like any doctor I’d ever known. When Dr. Gibbs wasn’t _______ lives, he was planting trees.

The good doctor had some interesting theories on planting trees. He believed in “No pains, no gains”. He never _______ his new trees, which was _______ many people. Once I asked why. He answered that watering plants spoiled them, and that if you water them, each following tree generation will grow weaker and weaker. So you have to make things _______ for them. He talked about how watering trees made for shallow roots, and how trees that weren’t watered had to grow deep roots in search of water. I came to understand that he meant deep roots were to be _______. I planted a couple of trees a few years back and I took good care of them. Two years of _______ has resulted in trees that expect to be waited on hand and foot. Whenever a cold wind blows, they shake and tremble their branches. Funny things about those trees of Dr. Gibbs’. The lack of water seemed to _______ them in ways comfort and ease never could.

I used to pray for my sons that their lives will be easy. But lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to _______ my prayer. I know my children are going to meet _______, and I’m praying they will be strong. The prayer for comfort is seldom met. What we need to do is to pray for deep roots, so when the winds blow, they won’t be __________ away.