2 . I grew up in Michigan and have loved boats since I was young. I’d go out on my dad’s fishing boat, and every birthday I’d get a miniature boat with a viewing window. In Michigan, we’re _________ by lakes and I soon discovered that I loved diving and _________ skipped school days for the beach.

Three years ago, I _________ put forward an idea of running glass-bottom boat tours to an investor. It started in 2018. At present, My sons _________, manning the deck(甲板)and phones. We head out on the Cheboygan river and Lake Huron. We sail past lots of places of_________, with a historian on board explaining the history. We often scan the river to see what we can find.

One weekend this year, I met a _________ client. I thought I should find something to show him and managed to find a giant shell. Then I saw a green bottle. I swam to my boat, took a photo and then opened the bottle. It was full of water and had a paper inside. I _________ the paper and saw the date —November 1926. We were all amazed. The note_________: “Return this paper to George Morrow.” I was so excited to have found it.

We made sure to keep the paper safe. Before leaving the harbor, I posted a picture on my Facebook page and didn’t expect what followed.

The next morning, my phone _________ with messages. While I was driving home, I got a phone call from Michele Primeau. She told me she was George Morrow’s daughter. I didn’t believe her __________. She said her dad would float notes in bottles when he went on vacation or __________ them in walls when redecorating. She __________ he had posted this one on his 18th birthday.

In autumn, Michele came to visit. She brought some of his writing and the handwriting matched. She __________ I keep the message and the bottle.

It now sits in a display case in my shop. That Facebook post now has 87,000 __________. In a hard year, the discovery has brought purejoy.__________a Scuba diver(水肺潜水员), this feels like a lifetime achievement.

3 . Sometimes a book comes along that isn’t just “interesting” or “well done”— it’s a book where it seems like the author looked into your brain and wrote a book specifically for you. A book like that for me was released this week. It’s called 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet, written by editor Pamela Paul.

Paul lists 100 things we used to do that the Internet has either changed or taken over completely: writing letters, print newspapers, the joys of being bored, and not having all the knowledge in the world in your pocket.

As I’m a longtime accumulator of random knowledge, certain entries on the list—Being the Only One, Figuring Out Who That Actor is—hit me where live; remembering detailed facts is no longer   nearly as impressive when everyone has the capability to find the answer in seconds.

On and on the list goes, with every minor shift adding to the pile. What this book does so well is illustrate the growth of that pile; while any individual item might be no big deal, the collected set is significant. It’s a list of ways in which the world now is different from the world then.

Obviously, Paul isn’t saying that everything back then was better. Time marches on, after all. and it’s tough to argue against the many benefits that the Internet has brought into our lives. But that isn’t really the point. It’s not about whether it used to be better. It’s that it used to be different.

100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet is a fun read for those of us who share some of Paul’s memories and experiences. We remember what it was like and we like to remember. The landscape has shifted, and no doubt it will shift again as technology’s advancement continues apace. This book serves as a reminder of the simple truth that when gains are made, sometimes something is lost.

4 . Living in a city is a well-known risk factor for developing a mental disorder, while living close to nature is largely beneficial for mental health and the brain. A central brain region, the amygdala (大脑杏仁核) involved in stress processing, has been shown to be less activated during stress in people living in rural areas, compared to those who live in cities, hinting at the potential benefits of nature. “But so far the hen-and-egg problem could not be resolved, namely whether nature actually caused the effects in the brain or whether the particular individuals chose to live in rural or urban regions,” says Sonja Sudimac.

To achieve causal evidence, the researchers from the group examined brain activity in regions involved in stress processing in 63 healthy volunteers before and after a one-hour walk in Grunewald forest or a shopping street with traffic in Berlin. The results revealed that activity in the amygdala decreased after the walk in nature, suggesting that nature elicits beneficial effects on brain regions related to stress.

“The results support the previously assumed positive relationship between nature and brain health, but this is the first study to prove the causal link. Interestingly, the brain activity after the urban walk in these regions remained stable and showed no increases, which argues against a commonly held view that urban exposure causes additional stress,” explains Simone Kühn, head of the group.

The authors show that nature has a positive impact on brain regions involved in stress processing and that it can already be observed after a one-hour walk. This contributes to the understanding of how our physical living environment affects brain and mental health. Even a short exposure to nature decreases amygdala activity, suggesting that a walk in nature could serve as a preventive measure against developing mental health problems and reducing the potentially disadvantageous impact of the city on the brain.

In order to investigate beneficial effects of nature in different populations and age groups, the researchers are currently working on a study examining how a one-hour walk in natural versus urban environments impacts stress in mothers and their babies.

7 . Group-Centered Societies Have Just as Much Creativity

What does culture have to do with creativity? The answer could be “a lot”. For decades, psychologists trying to understand the roots of creative imaginations have looked at the ways in which two different types of cultures can come to have an effect over its artistic and _________ output. Individualistic cultures encourage people to be unique and to _________ their own interests even if doing so comes at a cost to the group overall. Collectivistic cultures are based on relationships and duties to other people. These types of cultures often _________ the individual’s wants for the needs of those who are close to them or for those in their community.

Individualism has long been thought to have a creative _________. Individualists _________ social convention, the logic goes, and that pushback supports innovation. For instance, around the world, individualistic cultures have more patents than collectivistic cultures do. _________, a new study suggests that these ideas about culture and creativity could be off base. People in collectivistic cultures actually do better with a particular type of creative thinking than those in individualistic cultures. And the findings overall reveal the shortcomings of thinking about innovation too _________.

The new work comes from comparing communities in different parts of China. Though it scores high, as a nation, on measures of cultural _________, China’s 1.4 billion people are more than just a single culture. People from areas north of the Yangtze River tend to be more _________, open to strangers and self-confident, whereas people along the river and farther south are often more inter-dependent, partial to friends over strangers and likely to try harder to __________.

In the new creativity study, researchers investigated innovation with these two groups in mind. The team used a drawing test that had been created by psychologists. They gave kids a sheet of paper with just a few basic elements printed on it: some dots here, squiggles (弯曲的线条) there, and a rectangle that suggested a drawing frame. The children got 15 minutes to use the elements already on the page to draw whatever they wanted. They could get “adaptive creativity” points for doodling in ways that connected the squiggles and lines into an original and __________ image. In addition, a judge checked whether the children chose to incorporate a small shape that could be found just outside the rectangular. This element was easy to __________, so those who included this outside-the-box detail could get points for “boundary-breaking creativity.”

The researchers gave the test to 683 middle school students from north and south of the Yangtze River. When the scientists got the scores back, they discovered that there were no differences in the children’s overall creativity. When they broke down the results into components, they found that students from collectivistic regions scored __________ in adaptive creativity while those from individualistic areas did better in boundary-breaking creativity.

The findings are also a warning against cultural chauvinism (极端民族主义). Western countries have tended to lead the way in innovation — at least as defined by the metrics (指标) we Westerners have created. Perhaps we have been __________ China’s adaptive creativity. For example, while the country may not have invented the assembly line, it is largely thanks to the __________ its people have made to this system that the country has such a thriving manufacturing sector today.

9 . Stories of immigrants attract me a lot, especially the life stories of Italians who have come to America since the 1700s. In each of these stories I see elements of my own story, that of leaving my birthplace and family and creating a new life in a different culture and in a different language.

The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of Italian literature, in the book My Two Italies Joseph Luzzi struggled to create or find his own identity from an early age. Even more problematic for him was “which” Italy to “choose,” the one he inherited(继承) from his family, poor and linked to old traditions and customs he finds rude and somewhat cruel, or the one he finds in literature and art books that show him a country with a modern literary culture.

The choice becomes even sadder as in his professional life he becomes a scholar of Italian literature and culture. He describes episodes of his youth that show the clash between the first and the second generation immigrants that are both funny and tragicomic(悲喜剧式的). These episodes highlight the daily customs his parents brought from their hometown that are in conflict with Joseph’s desire to “fit in” the American culture. Joseph’s visits to Italy as a student and then as a scholar deepen the divide between his two Italies and highlight his quest for identity.

The author’s personal changes are full of quotes and comments on the cultural and political landscape of Italy. I find that his insights on contemporary Italian cultural and political phenomena are particularly interesting. In this book, Joseph touches or comments in depth about several issues concerning Italian life, such as the relationship between dialects(方言) and the official “Italian” language, and the Southern “question” or the uneasy interaction between Northern and Southern Italians.

I enjoyed reading this book. It is personal, moving, educational and entertaining. I hope you will enioy it too!