2 . Future living: what will the home of tomorrow look like?

What will our homes be like in the future? Growing cities, shrinking living spaces, and climate change are major challenges     1    (face) urban planners and architects. We’re sharing three trends with you     2     will shape the home we live in tomorrow.

Energy efficient and carbon neutral

One of the greatest challenges for homes of the future is our increasing energy consumption, something that cannot be covered by fossil fuels going forward.     3    the impact of climate change becoming notable, it’s perfectly understandable that the buildings of the future could function as environmentally friendly power plants. Solar collectors and heat storage systems allow     4     are known as ‘plus-energy buildings’ to produce 100 percent renewable energy for emission-free operation.

The trend to downsizing

Living more efficiently not only means improving energy use and reducing one’s own carbon footprint, but also building to save space. Rooms     5    (design) to be multifunctional when there’s not a dedicated room available for every potential purpose. Modular and flexible furnishing systems that can be adapted to the individual floor space and room zones will replace     6    (fix) structures, ensuring that there’s room for everything even in a small space.   

Trends for living and working under one roof

Over the last few months, the office     7    (become) a feature in many people’s homes. For a number of years now, the home office has been evolving from a make-do desk into a comfortable long-term solution. This development means we need to ask     8     how we should construct our living spaces to allow us to concentrate and work productively.   

    9     you rent or own your own home in the future, what’s clear is that the home of tomorrow will be smarter, more flexible, and more sustainable. It will offer us space     10    (live), sleep and work both indoors and outdoors.

3 . What Makes a Nobel Laureate?

Are there any predictors that point to who will be selected as Nobel laureates?

Is brilliance in childhood a predictor? When the 2006 chemistry laureate, Roger Kornberg, was asked what he wanted for Christmas, he said, “A week in the lab.”     1    . Mario Capecchi (medicine, 2007) was an abandoned child on the streets of wartime Italy.

    2    . Five of Enrico Fermi’s (physics, 1938) postdoctoral students went on to win the Nobel Prize. Otto Warburg (medicine, 1931) advised an American doctoral student, “If you wish to become a scientist, you must ask a successful scientist to accept you in his laboratory.”

Experts often recommend that people specialize in one field of work or research to maximize their chances of success.     3     If you look at the careers of Nobel Prize winners, you’ll find that they are unusually likely to be “creative polymaths.” That is, they purposely integrate formal and informal expertise from widely varied disciplines to yield new and useful ideas and practices.

There remains one quality that is essential. It is what Leon Lederman (physics, 1988) called “compulsive dedication.”     4    . Take Marie Curie (physics, 1903; chemistry, 1911) and her husband Pierre (physics, 1903). The Curies were assigned a shed with a leaking roof and a dirt floor, where they worked for years, freezing in winter and sweltering in summer. “And yet,” Marie Curie wrote in her biography of her husband, “it was in this miserable old shed that the best and happiest years of our life were spent, entirely dedicated to work.”

5 . Our culture has caused most Americans to assume not only that our language is universal, but that the gestures we use are understood by everyone. We do not realize that waving good-bye is the way to ask a person from the Philippines to one’s side, or that in Italy and some Latin-American countries, curling the finger to oneself is a sign of farewell.

Those private citizens who sent packages to our troops occupying Germany after World War II and marked them GIFT to escape duty payments did not bother to find out that “Gift” means poison in German. Moreover, we like to think of ourselves as friendly, yet we prefer to be at least 3 feet or an arm’s length away from others. Latins and Middle Easterners like to come closer and touch, which makes Americans uncomfortable.

Our linguistic and cultural blindness and the informality with which we take notice of the developed tastes, gestures, customs and languages of other countries, are losing us friends, business and respect in the world.

Even here in the United States, we make few compromises to the needs of foreign visitors. There are no information signs in four languages on our public buildings or monuments; we do not have multilingual guided tours. Very few restaurant menus have translations, and multilingual waiters, bank clerks and policemen are rare. Our transportation systems have maps in English only and often we ourselves have difficulty understanding them.

When we go abroad, we tend to cluster in hotels and restaurants where English is spoken. The attitudes and information we pick up are conditioned by those natives—usually the richer—who speak English. Our business dealings, as well as the nation’s diplomacy, are conducted through interpreters.

For many years, America and Americans could get by with cultural blindness and linguistic ignorance. After all, America was the most powerful country of the free world, the distributor of needed funds and goods.

But all that is past. American dollars no longer buy all good things, and we are slowly beginning to realize that our proper role in the world is changing. A l979 Harris poll reported that 55 percent of Americans want this country to play a more significant role in world affairs; we want to have a hand in the important decisions of the next century, even though it may not always be the upper hand.

6 . Dear boss — You have always tried to attract young and youngish consumers, and our consultants have always come up with new ways to label them. I don’t need to remind you that “millennials” and, increasingly, “Gen Z” are our most important markets. The trouble is that coming up with rules to define a swathe of humanity is more art than science. It is liable to apply stereotypes. Luckily you have me, and I’m here to tell you that much of what is written about marketing to today’s most prized consumers is a myth.

Social media has just changed the ways people discover brands from viewing television, newspapers and magazines to surfing Instagram and TikTok; it has weakened the power of marketing as a whole. Such is the ease with which digital natives can fact-check our tricky marketing claims that it is getting harder to build brand loyalty. Online, communication is cheap and prices are readily Googled.

There is a similar temptation to think that physical shops no longer matter. Young consumers love their Amazon deliveries. But what works best is the seamless combination of the digital and physical worlds. Remember those online-only influencer-backed beauty brands like Glossier, which took the world by storm during the pandemic? It turns out that they struggle to get repeat business and have had to pair up with physical retailers. If we want to succeed, we need to offer the best of both physical and virtual worlds.

Gen Z will consider a brand’s sustainability and social impact, but considering something isn’t surrendering to it. They are never brand-slaved. It is chiefly youngsters who buy cheap “fast-fashion” outfits to wear once and then send to landfill. Also, youngsters care less for consumer boycotts than its virtue-signaling parents, thus open to various brands. No wonder, most brands originate from youngsters with duel identities of producers and consumers.

What determines the shopping mode of a generation is their mindset. In Gen Z, lies are easily exposed online, where everyone loves a takedown and hates hypocrisy. We are people just as our young customers are and people will always buy sincerity.

Charles Darwin formulated the most successful theory in the history of biology: the theory of evolution. He was also responsible for another grand theory: the theory of emotion, which dominated his field for more than a century. Its core principle was that the mind consists of two competing forces: the rational and the emotional.     1    

We now know that, on the contrary, emotions enhance our process of reasoning and aid our decision-making. In fact, we can’t make decisions, or even think, without being influenced by our emotions.

    2     Perhaps the most important discovery regarding the role of emotion is that even when you believe you are exercising cold, logical reason, you are not. People are not usually aware of this, but the very framework (框架) of their thought process is highly influenced by what they are feeling at the time - sometimes subtly (细微地).

Consider anger, for example. Backed by the threat of attack, anger creates incentives (动机) for others to comfort the angry individual. Your mental calculations increase the importance you place on your own welfare and goals at the expense of others’. Coaches tap into anger as a motivational tool because the focus on the self encourages athletes to push themselves to achieve their goals. Anger also causes you to perceive less risk.     3    

The new view of emotion may not correspond to the way Darwin saw it, but it does support one of the basic conclusions of his theory of evolution. Humans are not as different from non-human animals as people believed. What can we learn from this? The first and most crucial step is self- awareness.     4     By studying our own emotions, we can read others’ better and communicate more effectively. Once we are in touch with our true feelings, we can take steps to manage them whenever it benefits.

8 .

________/10                                                                                Hardship                                                       Judy          May, 2020 Early on I thought this family was a bunch of complainers. But the focus of this reality show is how sweet family life was in the tough wartime era, which really touched me. But as I watched I noted that the 1940s mid-class family life was not that unbearable. Even though they didn’t have labor-saving facilities, they still had coal fire. Maybe, it’s only due to modern people’s sense of privilege that they promptly forget what immense, bodily labor was involved in the previous chore it replaced. So, the experiment was not that “real”?! Therefore, I recommend, but not highly, this show to you.

_________/10                                                                   Must See TV-Really!                                   Lily          June, 2021 For anyone interested in “Reality TV” with an emphasis on “Real”, checkout 1940’s House as soon as you can. The Hymer family from northern England spends 9 weeks living the life of a suburban 1940’s house during the infamous London blitz. Everything they use, wear, purchase, read comes from that time period - including ration books, blackout curtains, Victory gardens, and a self-built bomb shelter. What makes this   “House”   installment the best in   a long line   (see   “Frontier House”, “Colonial House”, “1900 House”) is the family’s willingness to immerse themselves in the project wholeheartedly. You as the viewer really begin to sympathize with the Hymer family’s struggles to live a 1940’s life with a 21st century mindset. I think most people will come away liking the attitude and spirit of the mother the best - she truly embodies the British spirit that was so essential and prevalent during England’s darkest hour. This is 3 hours of “history” that no one will want to end. Children would also enjoy this as there are 2 young boys (ages 10 and 7) who participate in the program wholeheartedly.

________/10                                                                                  A bit   sinister                                               David            February, 2023 Although it’s as well made as the other PBS reality shows, this one was disturbing. Many of the hardships imposed on the Hymers are by design, not circumstance. A committee of seven or eight experts privately judges them in a star chamber and decides how strict rationing will be and how much they will be fined for infractions. Watching the children go hungry while the experts debated how much to cut the food budget bothered me. The Hymers live more like lab rats than adventurers. It’s also hard to get worked up about how much wartime Brits suffered from rationing since it was nothing compared to the hardships undergone by eastern Europeans, Asians and even their own soldiers. The show was simply too narrow in scope and sinister.

9 . In the heart of the war-torn city, where buildings stood like wounded soldiers, Emma waited inline for her weekly ration. The line moved slowly, a somber procession of gaunt (瘦削憔悴的) faces and threadbare coats. When her turn came, the ration officer handed her the allotted food with a detached efficiency. “Two loaves, half a pound of sugar, and a tin of powdered milk,” he recited. The portions seemed to shrink each week, mirroring the dwindling hope in people’s hearts.

Clutching her meager supplies, Emma hurried through the bombed-out streets, dodging craters and debris. The city, once vibrant and bustling, now lay in a hushed surrender to scarcity and fear. At home, her family’s small garden offered a sharp contrast to the desolation around. Here, amidst the rows of struggling vegetables, her father toiled.

“Dad, let me help,” Emma offered, taking the shovel from his weary hands. Together, they dug into the earth, creating a hidden cache for extra food. It was a secret they guarded fiercely, knowing that in times of shortage, even neighbors could turn against each other out of desperation.

As they worked, Emma’s mind wandered to the days before the war, when food was abundant and their garden was a source of joy, not just survival. She remembered her mother’s cooking, the aromas that filled their kitchen, the laughter that accompanied their meals. Now, each bite of their bland rations was a reminder of what had been lost.

In the evenings, the family gathered around a small table, sharing their rationed food. Conversation flowed, weaving tales of better times, igniting sparks of hope. Emma’s younger brother, Tom, would often ask, “When will we have chocolate again?” It was a question loaded with longing, not just for the sweetness of chocolate but for the return of normalcy.

Despite the hardship, they found reasons to smile. Emma’s father would recount stories from his youth, tales of adventure that seemed like fairy tales in their grim surroundings. Her mother would hum old tunes, filling their home with a semblance of warmth and normalcy.

As winter deepened, the rations grew scarcer, and the hidden cache in the garden became their lifeline. Each day, Emma and her father would check the hole, ensuring their precious supplies were safe. The hole, a mere cavity in the ground, symbolized their resilience, a refusal to succumb to despair.

10 . “Blame My Brain” by Nicola Morgan, reviewed by Rosalie Warren

As someone who constantly blames my brain for all sorts of things (not my fault — my brain did it!), I was _______ by the title of Nicola Morgan’s book and only slightly disappointed to learn that it was _______ teenagers. Since I have many days when I feel that I am barely out of my teens (though the mirror, sadly, does not bear this out), I decided that the book might still be relevant to me, and indeed to my relationships with my no-longer-teenage children.

The subtitle is “The amazing teenage brain revealed” and amazing is, I soon _______, exactly what the teenage brain is. I learned that one of the things that _______ to the brain in our early teenage years is a flurry of growth of the dendrites (connections between neurons), followed a few years later by a major pruning session where many of the relatively unused connections are culled and the remaining ones are strengthened and coated with a fatty myelin layer ready for adult life. Not _______, all this activity is not without its downside for the person “within”, and it goes along way towards _______ why teenagers can be so difficult to live with and to cope with themselves.

There are also brain-based explanations of why teenagers need so much sleep, why they don’t tidy their rooms, why they come _______ when the rest of the world is going to sleep and why some of them, at least, are risk-takers. There’s stuff about alcohol and drugs and why such things are not good for the brain, but all of it is written in a very _______ and understanding way that I think teenagers will warm to.

Nicola Morgan is not a neurologist or a _______ scientist, but she clearly had done a great deal of research and ________ experts including Professor Simon Baron-Cohen and Professor Susan Greenfield, among many other eminent names in the field. Morgan has a gift for simplifying and explaining ________ subject matter with a light but precise touch, and she is careful to ________ between established facts and theories and speculations of her own and other people’s.

There’s plenty of humour and a good few well-deserved digs at the stupidity of parents and other well-meaning but misguided adults, which teenagers will ________. There are diagrams, tests, photos relating to questions like What emotions can you recognize? Do you ________ other emotions with anger? What kind of thinker are you? Which mental tasks do you find comparatively easy or difficult? There’s also sound advice for addiction, self-harm, depression and other ________ illnesses, and some pointers towards recognizing when you may need to seek help.

The illustrations by Andy Baker are great, too. And oh yes — there’s some interesting discussion on the differences between girls’ brains and boys’, if there are any. You’ll have to read it to find out...