2 . For the rest of March, a disease will sweep across the US. It will keep kids home from school.     1     Employees will suddenly lose their ability to concentrate.

The disease, known as “March Madness”, refers to the yearly 65-team US men’s college basketball tournament (锦标赛).     2     Teams compete against each other in a single- elimination (单局淘汰) tournament that eventually crowns a national champion.

Nearly 20 million Americans will find themselves prisoners of basketball festival madness. The fun comes partly from guessing the winners for every game. Friends compete against friends.     3     Colleagues against bosses.

Big—name schools are usually favored to advance into the tournament. But each year there are dark horses from little-known universities.

This adds to the madness. Watching a team from a school with 3,000 students beat a team from a school with 30,000, for many Americans, is an exciting experience. Two years ago, the little-known George Mason University was one of the final four teams. Many people had never even heard of the university before the tournament.

College basketball players are not paid, so the game is more about making a name for their university and themselves.     4     About $4 billion will be spent gambling (赌) on the event. According to Media Life magazine, the event will bring in $500 million in advertising income this year, topping the post-season income of every US professional league, including that of the NBA.

4 . A recent study shows that more years of school could help students get higher scores on intelligence tests. That was the finding of a study of teenage males in Norway. Now, other research shows that_______activity may help students do better in their classes.

The research comes as educators in some countries are reducing time for activities like physical education. They are using the time instead for_________subjects like math and reading.

Researchers at VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam_______the results of fourteen studies, which included more than fifty-five thousand children, aged six to eighteen.

Research Amika Singh says the studies showed a _______between physical activity and scores on subjects such as Math, English and reading. “Based on the results of our study we can conclude that being physically active is_______for academic performance.”

Ms. Singh_________some possible explanations. “There are, first, physiological explanations, like more blood flow, and so more oxygen to the brain. Being physically_______means there are more hormones produced like endorphins（内啡肽）. And endorphins make your stress level lower and your mood improved, which means you also_______better.”

Also, students_______in organized sports learn rules and how to follow them. This could improve their classroom________and help them keep their mind on their work.

The study__________some questions unanswered, however. Ms. Singh says it is not possible to say whether the amounts or kind of activity________the level of academic improvement. This is because of differences among the studies.

Also, they were mostly observational studies. An observational study is where researchers do not do controlled comparisons. They only describe what they observe. So they might observe a link that students who are more active often have better grades. But that does not__________mean being active was the cause of those higher grades. Therefore, more high-quality studies are needed to ________their findings.

Still, the general finding was that physically active kids are more likely to do better in school. Ms. Singh says schools should consider that finding before they________physical education programs.

Learning Quickly from Mistakes

Mercy Cherono is one of many very successful young athletes from Kenya. She was born in 1991 in the village of Kipajit. She is     1     (old) of six children, and some of the other children in her family are also athletes. Her father, John Koech, runs a training camp in the village. During the school holidays, the camp    2     attract over 50 trainees.

Cherono started running in primary school and continued when she went to secondary school in the nearby town of Sotik. At the age of 16, she participated in the 2007 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Cross Country Championships,     3    (hold) in Mombasa. Kenya. It was her first international event. Despite the fact     4     she finished 23rd in the junior race, she had launched herself into international athletics. In the same year, at the World Youth Championships at Ostrava in the Czech Republic, she won a gold medal in the 3,000-meter race,     5    she ran in the championship record time of 8: 53:94.

In the coming years, she continued to win gold medals at famous international championships. She is a two-time World Junior Champion in the 3,000-meter race,     6    (win) in Poland in 2008, and again in Canada in 2010. She also came in first in the 3,000-meter race at the 2009 Africa Junior Championships. However, Cherono is not just a middle-distance runner. At the 2009 World Cross Country Championships in Jordan, she won a silver medal in the junior race. She lost to the Ethiopian long-distance runner Genzebe Dibaba     7     she tried to jump too early to the finishing line. After the race, Cherono claimed, "I will not repeat that mistake again.”

The following year, at the same cross-country race, Cherono proved herself when she won a gold medal. Incredibly,     8     of the three runners-up were from Kenya, too. She and the Kenyan team came home to a hero's welcome. Her coach was excited and owed the success of the Kenyan team    9     hard training and determination." And her father said, "our child is a disciplined girl who has always taken instructions." Perhaps one day Mercy Cherono     10     (instruct) future champions.

6 . Hailing from Sweden, “plogging” is a fitness craze that sees participants pick up plastic litter while jogging adding a virtuous, environmentally driven element to the sport. Plogging appears to have started around 2016, but is now going global, due to increasing awareness and __ over plastic levels in the ocean.

The appeal of plogging is its __—all you need is running gear and a bin bag, and the feeling of getting fit while supporting a good cause. By adding regular squats(蹲) to pick up junk and carrying __ to jogging. we can assume the health benefits are increased.

Running and good causes have always gone __ — just think of all the fundraising marathon runners do. But there couldn’t be a more on-trend way of keeping fit than plogging.

Anything that’s getting people out in nature and connecting __ with their environment is a good thing, says Lizzie Carr, an environmentalist who helped set up Plastic Patrol, a nationwide campaign to __ our inland waterways of plastic pollution. There’s been a real __ in the public mindset around plastics, helped by things like Blue Planet highlighting how disastrous the crisis is,” she says.

We need to keep momentum high and the pressure up, and empower people through __ like plogging and Plastic Patrol.

The plastic Patrol app allows users to __ plastic anywhere in the world by collecting discarded items, photographing them and __ to the app, giving us a better knowledge of what sorts of plastic and which brands are being thrown out. “I’d urge all ploggers to get involved,” adds Carr.

Plogging isn’t the first fitness trend to combine running with a good cause, Here are some of our favourites:

Good Gym

Its idea is simple: go for a run, visit an elderly person, have a chat and some tea, and run back.

__ among the elderly is a growing problem in the UK. With over 10,000 runs so far, __, Good Gym is finding a solution.

Guide Running

Guide runners volunteer their time to helping blind people get __. By linking themselves together, the __ —impaired individual can feel safe while both work of a sweat.

___for the Homeless

Start-up Stuart Delivery and the Church Housing Trust collaborated last year in bringing clothing and healthy food to the homeless. Deliveries are mostly made by bike, so those who deliver keep fit while helping rough sleepers(无家可归者).