3 . Recently I was very busy and I needed a timeout. So I decided to drive to the supermarket and pick up dinner instead of doing my usual ______.

In the supermarket, I took fat and juicy chicken and some warm cornbread. As the cashier began processing my items, I______my bag for my credit card. However, I realized my wallet was not there. In______, I told the cashier I had left my money at home and apologized sincerely, offering to______my items to where I______them. Just at that moment the supermarket owner appeared, saying “Please, take everything home and______the dinner. It’s on the house tonight!” I tried to______the lovely offer but he______a dark chocolate bar near the counter and said, “Here! Take this, too!” His act of______lifted everybody present. I thanked him______for making my day.

When I approached home, as I______into my driveway, I saw my next-door neighbor had just mowed my lawn (草坪). He was putting on the finishing touches, clearing the cut grass. Feeling______, I jumped out of my car and asked him how much he wanted for his ______, to which he replied,“Nothing at all. The lawn needed doing.” He______me off summarily as he returned to his home. A second scoop of good______had landed in my lap, which again reminded me kindness is everywhere in the world.

5 . Standing in the store, I looked at the painting supplies excitedly.

“Are you sure these are what you want for your birthday?” my husband asked _________.

“I’m very sure. I really want to give it a _________,” I replied. I was smiling with _________. He looked at me hesitantly and _________ his head.

_________, this was a secret I’d kept for a while. Every day, my husband went to work. I’d look after my son, clean the house and prepare dinner. It had been a decade since I took any time to pursue my own _________. I had become a drudge (苦工). I wanted excitement and creative expression, but mostly I wanted colors. So I _________ the most interesting supplies.

“I have a feeling that you’re going to put all these in a toolbox and never _________ them again,” my husband said.

For the first month, he was _________. I put the supplies into a toolbox. I admired them every day, but I couldn’t seem to find the time to start painting. I found one reason or another not to __________.

One day, when my son caught me __________ the toolbox again, he asked curiously, “Mommy, when are you going to __________?”

“No __________ day than today,” I announced and brought out all the materials.

From then on, my house seemed to never be perfectly clean, but my life was full of __________. Most importantly, I no longer felt like a drudge. I had a new __________.

6 . On the 100th anniversary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), red tourism has gained popularity among tourists who flood in to visit historic sites with a modern revolutionary heritage.

Jinggangshan

This is one of the most crucial and splendid chapters of history of establishing Red China as well as a unique and wonderful ecosystem, which is covered with rich forest, rugged peaks and several memorials to the Red Army. The best time to visit is between April and October, with the most temperature timing April and May when the large azaleas (杜鹃花) bloom.

Open: 8:00-17:00 (Feb. 16-Nov. 15). 8:00-16:30 (Nov. 16-Feb. 15)

Xibaipo

It is an old revolutionary base where the leadership of the Communist Party of China was stationed, drawing up the blueprint for a new country. A memorial hall was built to honor the memory of this site. The lake and the hill here add brilliance and beauty to each other and form pleasant scenery.

Open: Tuesdays to Sundays 9:30-17:00 (Xibaipo Memorial Hall)

The Nanhu Revolutionary Memorial Hall

A new exhibition is held with updated display approaches, including phantom imaging (全息影像) and oil painting, which are used to improve visitors' experiences. The exhibition shows four stages of the CPC from its establishment to its achievements.

Open: Tuesdays to Sundays 8:30-18:00 (closed on Mondays)

Former Site of the Editorial Department of New Youth

New Youth started the New Culture Movement and spread the influence of the May Fourth Movement. The site was briefly based in Beijing but moved back to Shanghai in 1920 and also served as the office for the Communist Party of China Central Committee in the 1920s.

Open: Thursdays to Tuesdays 9:00 - 11:30, 13:30 - 16:30 (closed on Wednesdays)

7 . A hungry badger (獾) searching for food seems to have uncovered what turned out to be hundreds of Roman coins in a Spanish cave, according to a new study.

Archaeologists (考古学家) first discovered several coins laying on the ground at the entrance to a small cave in the woodlands outside Grado in northern Spain in April 2021. The researchers suspect that the coins were unearthed by a badger from a nearby den (兽窝) after a heavy snow which made it harder for animals to find food. The hungry badger probably got into the cave looking for food but came across the coins instead.

After fully exploring the cave, researchers collected 209 coins dating to between the third and fifth centuries A.D. “To date, this is the largest amount of Roman coins found in n cave in northern Spain,” the researchers wrote in their paper. They described the discovery as an “exceptional find”.

In the late 1930s, a collection of 14 gold Roman coins, known as the Chapipi treasure, was also found in the same woodlands. The researchers believe that local people may have buried their coins to keep them safe during a period of intense political instability in the region. The most recent coin in the newly-discovered Grado collection dates to A.D. 430, which was after the Suebi—a group of Germanic people originally from modern-day Germany and the Czech Republic—pushed the Romans out of Spain in A.D. 409, according to El Pais.

The researchers suspect that the newly-discovered coins are part of a vaster treasure and will return to the cave for further exploration to look for more coins and evidence that the cave may also have been the home of displaced Roman people. “We want to know if it was a one-off hiding place, or if there was a group of humans living there,” lead researcher Alfonso Fanjul Peraza told El Pais.

9 . What makes a word real? Who has the power to make those kinds of official decisions about words? Those are the questions many people have in mind. When most people say a word isn’t real, what they mean is that it doesn’t appear in a dictionary. That, of course, raises some other questions, including, who writes dictionaries?

Now, dictionaries are good resources, but they are changeable. If you ask dictionary editors, what they’ll tell you is that they’re just trying to keep up with people as people change the language. They’re watching what people say and what people write and trying to figure out what’s going to stick and what’s not going to stick.

Every January, dictionary editors go to the American Dialect Society Meeting every year, where among other things, they decide on the word of the year. There are about 200 or 300 people who come. Some of them are the best known linguists(语言学家) in the United States. In the past, some of the winners have been “staycation” to describe a vacation spent at home and “tweet” to describe a post made on the social networking service Twitter.

So how does a word get into a dictionary? It gets in because people use it and people keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to people. If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it’s real. That word might be informal and that word might be a word that you think is illogical(不合逻辑的) or unnecessary, but as long as people are using the word, it is real. I hope that what you can do is to find language change not annoying but fun and interesting, just the way dictionary editors do. I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it alive.

10 . It’s an attractive idea: by playing online problem-solving, matching and other games for a few minutes a day, people can improve such mental abilities as reasoning, verbal skills (语言能力) and memory. But whether these games deliver on those promises is up for debate. “For every study that finds some evidence, there’s an equal number of papers that find no evidence,” says Bobby Stojanoski, a cognitive (认知的) psychologist at Western University in Ontario.

Recently, in perhaps the biggest real-world study of these programs, Stojanoski and his team found 8,563 volunteers. First, participants filled out an online questionnaire about their training habits and which, if any, program they used. Some 1,009 participants reported using brain training programs for about eight months on average, though durations ranged from two weeks to more than five years. Next, the volunteers completed 12 cognitive tests assessing memory, reasoning and verbal skills. They faced memory exercises, spatial reasoning tasks, pattern-finding puzzles and strategy challenges.

When researchers looked at the results, they saw that brain trainers on average had no mental edge over the other group in memory, verbal skills and reasoning. Even among those who had used training programs for at least 18 months, brain training didn’t boost thinking abilities above the level of people who didn’t use the programs.

“No matter how we sliced the data, we were unable to find any testimony that brain training was associated with cognitive abilities,” says Stojanoski. That held true whether the team analyzed participants by age, program used, education or socioeconomic status (地位)—all were cognitively similar to the group who didn’t use the programs.

“Brain training may be beneficial in specific situations, but real world may be the best brain trainer,” says Elizabeth Stine-Morrow, a cognitive aging scientist at the University of Illinois. While it’s possible to improve mental abilities, Stine-Morrow advocates practicing those skills in different real-life situations, “That’s a much better use of one’s time than sitting at a computer and doing little tasks.”