1 . For Evan Harrison, a wildlife photographer, there was never any doubt about what she would do for a living.

“I am ________ about animals and the environment,” says Harrison. “Being able to ________ animals and their world is not only about educating people, but also about ________ that animals need to have their world intact (完好无损的) to survive.”

Harrison studied photography in school, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Photographers need to know more than just how to take a picture, ________ Harrison also took courses to learn how to use software.

“________ how to use software to edit your picture is important,” she says. “You could have the million-dollar shot; but if you do not know how to edit it ________, it will make no difference how ________ it is, if it does not look good.”

Harrison also stresses that ________ school can provide the foundation, becoming a professional photographer is also about learning on the job.

“My first job was with a nature conservation group that ________ to document the wildlife in a marsh (沼泽) area. I had to quickly ________ not only the equipment and proper clothing I needed, but also gain an understanding of the environment I was about to ________ in.”

Some of Harrison’s jobs take her to different parts of the world, which ________ she must educate herself about the people and the culture to make ________ easier. “Communicating with people is very important; it can often mean the ________ between getting a good shot and a great shot of an area,” she ________.

2 . On Thursday, June 28th, California passed the country’s toughest online laws. Starting January 1st, 2020, this law will allow consumers to ask an online organization what data is being held about them, why they require this data, and if there is any other company the organization will be sharing the data with. They can also request the removal of this information, and choose not to take part in the sale of personal data.

Many people reacted very favorably towards this new law, but big organizations like Google are against it. So why did California decide to create stricter online laws?

A man named Alastair Mactaggart, who is a real estate developer, spent more than 3 million dollars and secured more than 600,000 signatures on a ballot initiative. Ballot initiatives are petitions (请愿书) that are put to a public vote after receiving a certain number of signatures.

In an article from National Public Radio, Mactaggart recalled the moment when he became a privacy advocate. About four years ago, during a party, he asked a Google engineer whether he should be worried about his online privacy. The engineer responded by saying that “If you just knew how much we know about you, you’d be really worried.”

California’s lawmakers, to his relief, rushed to pass the bill. The law that was passed in June was close enough to the ballot initiative so Mactaggart agreed to withdraw it.

People believe that this new law will make companies more accountable for how they handle their information. However, it is not without loopholes (漏洞).

Under this new law, companies won’t be able to sell people’s personal information, but they can still “share” it. In the next few months, this new law could be modified. Companies such as Google are constantly trying to change the law in their favor, since data is a huge asset (财产) for these large enterprises.

The state’s lawmakers are expecting to create “clean-up laws” after the first 18 months the law goes into effect. We will have to wait and see how the law develops as it gets changed.

4 . Sofonisba Anguissola is considered to be a Late Renaissance child because she was born in 1532. During the Renaissance young men received formal schooling. Young women, however, were not provided with the same educational opportunities. Young Italian women were expected to learn homemaking skills and marry by the time they were thirty. Sofonisba was extremely fortunate that her father recognized her artistic talents and arranged for her to be taught painting along with female skills of needlework and homemaking.

At the age of fourteen she began classes with Bernardino Campi, a Cremona portrait (肖像) painter. When Sofonisba was twenty-two, her father arranged for her to study in Rome, and through his contacts, Sofonisba was introduced to Michaelangelo. She met with Michaelangelo informally so he could critique her work and provide her with some of his sketches (速写) for copying.

While Sofonisba was studying in Rome, Spain’s King Philip II invited her to move to Madrid and become the Queen’s art instructor, which was a milestone (转折点) in Sofonisba’s painting career. From then on, she could paint full time. Sofonisba lived there for fourteen years, giving the Queen lessons in drawing and completing portraits of the King, Queen and their children.

Sofonisba is considered a Mannerist painter. Mannerist paintings show complex compositions (构图) and emotions. Often painted in informal settings, Sofonisba’s portraits were realistic and showed expression, natural emotion, and interpersonal relationships. Several of her portraits were self-portraits, painted at various stages in her life by using a mirror to perfect different methods of painting. Sofonisba gave many of her paintings as gifts because her social status would have made it inappropriate for her to sell her works of art. Unfortunately, most of her works have been destroyed or lost over the years but several still survive in Western Europe. Sofonisba was fortunate to have had the advantage of her family’s wealth and support to learn, practice, and develop the art of portrait painting.

Cashmere Nicole was a struggling single mother, juggling (兼顾) her nine-to-five job and family life and battling breast cancer when she started her side business, Beauty Bakerie, a beauty brand. Started in her kitchen, the brand is currently sold in over 100 countries worldwide. “You can only find the things you truly love by exploring, by trying things,” says Nicole when interviewed about her achievement. “If we aren’t trying, we aren’t giving ourselves the best shot at finding the one thing that we’ll enjoy doing.”

Gerard Adams founded Fownders, a digital and in-classroom learning platform for entrepreneurs (企业家). Adams thanks his mentor (顾问), Tony Robbins, for much of his success. “Find a good mentor and get started,” he says. “We wouldn’t be anywhere as far as we are today without good mentorship.” Through Fownders, Adams provides mentorship to entrepreneurs.

Tamar Lucien had just $250 left to her name when she started MentalHappy. Inspired by her own struggles with anxiety, she wanted to create a business and movement that helps people overcome their own sadness and anxiety, which is done through MentalHappy’s signature “Cheerbox” filled with happiness tools.

Gray graduated from college and decided to help others find scholarship money, which is why he founded Scholly, a mobile and web app that finds students scholarship money for college and graduate school. Gray knows it takes a ton of hard work to be a successful entrepreneur. “There are no shortcuts (捷径) to success,” he says.

6 . Over 40 students with low vision study at a school in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. It was designed by Anand Sonecha, founder of an architecture company. Featuring a bright yellow entrance door, which stands out against the white walls, the school is decorated with a variety of sweet-smelling plants everywhere. Inside the classrooms, the walls feel smooth in contrast to the rough outside of the building. These all help students familiarize themselves with the area straightforwardly, without any trouble.

The school provides an open space serving as a platform for the visually-challenged students to play, perform, or celebrate festivals and the students are easy to orient themselves according to the sound, smell, sight and touch. “The idea behind the design was to make the school more accessible to the students,” Sonecha says, “They come from remote villages and towns in Gujarat, and I am eager to help them.”

During the construction, Sonecha used contrasting colors so that students could easily distinguish between the elements. Blue was used for all classroom doors, yellow for the entrance gate, black for switch buttons, and yellow and green for the furniture. All these colors contrasted with the white walls of the school, helping the students locate different elements. Different areas are of different height and width, which makes the sounds and noises change according to the echo (回音) produced in these spaces. Furthermore, he cooperated with fellow landscape architect Lokendra Balasaria to plant more than 1,000 plants of 37 species. These sweet plants have been grown not only to lead the children to move in the school through smell but also to attract butterflies and birds, and provide shade.

“The structure of the building is designed similarly to any other school building, only with a few clever elements. My intention was to avoid making it look distinct from other schools,” Sonecha explains, “I hope that there are no different schools for such students. Instead, all these elements should be added to public spaces for them. And my follow-up efforts may be there.”

8 . Ariel Procaccia has thought a lot about how to cut a cake over the last 15 years. As the father of three children, he knows how hard it is to divide a birthday cake to everyone’s satisfaction. But it’s also because Procaccia’s work focuses on exploring the mathematical rules for dividing stuff up fairly. One way to do that is to think abstractly about dessert.

For decades, researchers have been asking the seemingly simple question of how to cut a cake fairly. The answer reaches far beyond birthday parties. A mathematical problem at its heart, cake cutting connects strict reasoning to real-world issues of fairness, and so attracts not only mathematicians, but also social scientists, economists and more. “It’s a very elegant model in which you can distill what fairness really is, and reason about it,” Procaccia says.

The simplest approach is called the “divider-chooser” method, where one person cuts the cake into two equal pieces in his view, and the other person picks first. Each receives a piece that they feel is as valuable as the other’s. But when personal preferences are taken into account, even the easiest rule becomes complicated. Suppose Alice and Bob are to divide a cake, and Alice knows Bob prefers chocolate, she may knowingly divide the cake unequally so the smaller piece contains more chocolate. Then Bob will choose according to his preference, and Alice will get the larger piece. Both of them are satisfied with what they get, but the meaning of fairness changes in this situation.

The cake is a symbol for any divisible good. When cake-cutting principles are employed to settle disagreements, they are potentially helping the world find solutions. Procaccia has used fair division algorithms (算法) to model food distribution. Social scientist Haris Aziz is exploring situations ranging from how to divide up daily tasks to how to best schedule doctors’ shifts in hospitals.

Even after decades of investigation, cake cutting isn’t like a simple jigsaw puzzle (拼图) with a well-defined solution. Instead, over time, it has evolved into a kind of mathematical sandbox, a constructive playground that brings together abstract proofs and easy applications. The more researchers explore it, the more there is to explore.

10 . In a crowded migrant (移民) camp in Tijuana, Mexico, a three-year-old girl wandered ________ toward the exit. She was steps from a busy road. Estefanía Rebellón was the only person who ________ her. The writer had just driven from Los Angeles with a group of friends to drop off food and clothing to a(n) ________ organization.

It was December 2018, a time when the US-Mexico border was seeing migrants from Central America ________ violence and poverty. Rebellón rushed over to the child and took her ________. “Where are your parents?” she asked anxiously. Eventually, she and her friends found the girl’s ________ father, who had stepped away to ________ for food.

Back at home, Rebellón gathered a group of volunteer ________ via social media, and using a thousand dollars from her ________, set up a school at the Tijuana border. In five years, the pilot program has grown into the non-profit Yes We Can World Foundation, which has ________ three school buses into classrooms and established two schools.

________ by donations, the foundation’s teachers have provided a bilingual education to more than 3,000 kids. The schools ________ an official curriculum (课程) from Mexico’s education ministry. They also offer ________ courses, which help kids understand more about migration.

Rebellón has received numerous ________ for her work, including Outstanding American by Choice. As more than 6.6 million people still live in refugee camps around the world, she says she’d like to ________ the foundation’s influence and support migrant children globally.