1 . Born into a poor farmer’s family in Meixi township in 1960, Liang Ruirong suffered polio (脊髓灰质炎) when he was a child. This physical disability ______ his life.

After failing the college entrance examination, he made a ______ working in fields. After about a year, Liang seized the ______ chance to become a full-time employee at a _____ factory in a neighboring town. Modest and ______, he was promoted to workshop director after five years. Over time, the idea of ______ his own company began to take shape. “I didn’t have the money,” he said. “I had to ______ it from friends.”

During the first few years, Liang traveled with the delivery truck to ______ customers with the bamboo products in person. “To save on ______, I often slept in the truck at night,” he said.

Liang never forgot about the ______ he had gone through. As company chairman, he created jobs on the processing lines, which do not require much physical ______. To make sure that as many people as possible could ______ his success, the company establishes a charity which ______ 250, 000 yuan to Meixi township.

Liang’s company is now well-known for environmentally friendly bamboo products. For Liang, the company has   ______ to the world, showing that it is possible to ______ the right balance between economic development and environmental protection, making money and benefiting society.

3 . “I’ll be there in a few minutes. I’m playing a game with a friend, a guy named Snoopy,” my 15-year-old son shouted from his room. “Oh, what is Snoopy’s real name?” I asked. “I have no idea,” he said. “Where is he from?” I continued. He responded, “I think somewhere in Canada. Oh, wait, it doesn’t even matter because Snoopy just left the game and he has been replaced with a robot.” “Your friend is replaced by a robot?” “It doesn’t matter, Dad. It happens all the time! The game continues.” My son doesn’t mind playing with a person or a robot, which is typical of gamers these days. I wonder whether the face-to-face experience of friendship that I grew up with will be lost by our ohildren.

Aristotle, the great Greek thinker and educator. has pointed out that shallow friendship is easily formed but also easily quit because such bonds are weak and uncerturn. Deep friendship, by contrast, is when you care for your friend for his sake, not for any benefit you can get. This is selfless friendship. You can have only a couple of these friends because they require lots of time and effort. You must make sacrifices (牺牲) for each other.

Presence in friendship requires “being with” and “doing for”. Perhaps the most typical feature of deep friendship is “doing for”, as my friend has my back in trouble or brings me soup when I’m sick. Only strong bonds have the power to motivate real sacrifices. But it is unclear why online “friends” would bother to do the hard work of friendship. When I asked my students whether they had people in their lives who would bring them soup when they were sick, they laughed at my Stone Age question and said they’d just order soup online.

Digital life fills and absorbs waking life time so that people do not join in example cases of friendship, like sports, collective arts, free range childhoods, etc. In this way, digital life may produce false friendships.

4 . John Dewey

Birthplace: Burlington, Vermont, United States

A faithful advocate of progressive education and liberalism, the American philosopher was the founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. John Dewey’s famous writings included The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology and Human Nature and Conduct. According to him, passion for knowledge and intellectual curiosity were central to a teacher.

Savitribai Phule

Birthplace: Naigaon, India

Savitribai Phule was a revolutionary social reformer who devoted her life to educating girls and bringing about gender (性别) equality in the face of resistance from the conservative Indian society. Phule, who was illiterate (文盲的) until her marriage, went on to become a teacher, an achievement accomplished first by an Indian woman. With her husband, she founded schools for girls in Maharashtra.

Maria Montessori

Birthplace: Chiaravalle, Italy

Maria Montessori was an Italian educator and physician best known for developing the Montessori method of education, a student-friendly method, which is being used in several public and private schools around the world. In 2020, she was nominated (提名) by Time magazine as one of their Top 100 Women of the Year.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Birthplace: Geneva, Switzerland

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a Genevan philosopher, composer, and writer. His political philosophy influenced aspects of the French Revolution. He also helped develop modern economic, political, and educational thought. His writing inspired a complete change in French drama and poetry. His works also influenced such writers around the world as Tolstoy.

6 . The organic foods have gained a lot of popularity as they are being considered as healthier and tastier. A fair number of people advocate a large-scale shift to organic farming from conventional agriculture. But this might not seem well-founded.

Since the mid-19th century, conventional industrial agriculture has become incredibly efficient on a simple land to food basis. Conventional farming gets more and more crop per square foot of land, which can mean less wilderness needs to be transformed to farmland.

To make farming more efficient, conventional agriculture uses a significant amount of synthetic fertilizer each year, and all that nitrogen (氮) enables much faster plant growth. However, the cost is paid in vast polluted dead zones at the mouths of many of the world’s rivers, because much of the nitrogen ends up running off the soil and into the oceans. This also makes conventional farming one of the major threats to the environment.

To weaken the environmental impact of agriculture, improve soil quality as well as produce healthier foods, some farmers have turned to organic farming. Environmentalists have also welcomed organic food as better for the planet than the food produced by agricultural corporations. Organic practices — refusing artificial fertilizers and chemical pesticides—are considered far more sustainable. Sales of organic food rose 7.7% in 2010, up to $26.7 billion — and people are making those purchases for their moral senses as much as their tongues.

Yet a new meta-analysis in Nature does the math and comes to a hard conclusion: organic farming produces 25% fewer crops on average than conventional agriculture. This is definitely a downside of organic farming, especially when global population is still growing rapidly.

In the Nature analysis, scientists performed an analysis of 66 studies comparing conventional and organic methods across 34 different crop species, from fruits to grains. They found that organic farming delivered a lower output for every crop type, though the difference varied widely. For crops like fruit trees, organic trailed (落后于) conventional agriculture by just 5%. Yet for major grain crops and vegetables — all of which provide the world’s main calories-conventional agriculture outperformed organics by more than 25%.

What that means is that while organic farming may be more sustainable than conventional agriculture, there are trade-offs (此消彼长) with each. So an ideal global agriculture system may borrow the best from both systems rather than upholding merely organic or conventional practices.

7 . Just a year ago, Sarah fulfilled the dream of owning her own bakery, which was very popular in the local and provided a well-off life for Sarah and her family. But last February, all fell apart, after a car accident left Sarah disabled. “I could barely talk or move,” she sobbed.

Darkness and depression drowned Sarah, help seemed out of reach; she couldn’t afford a psychologist. Even worse, she had no health insurance.

So her doctor suggested a mental-health app which offers free chatbot service. It is described as a “friendly” and “mental” tool, asking the patient some questions, like “How are you feeling?” or “What’s bothering you?”After the patient responds to the questions, the computer analyzes the words and phrases in the answers, and then delivers supportive messages which have been prewritten by trained human psychologists.

That is how Sarah found herself on a new frontier of technology and mental health. Advances in artificial intelligence are increasingly being looked to as a way to help people who suffer from mild depression or anxiety.

There are, of course, still plenty of doubts about whether machines can read or respond to the human emotions accurately. “Artificial intelligence is still not at a point where they can copy the complexities of human emotions, let alone imitate mental care,” a psychology professor in a mental health center said.

However, supporters of chatbot treatment say the approach may also be the only realistic and affordable way. It meets a huge worldwide need for more mental healthcare at a time when there are simply not enough professionals to help all the people who could benefit.

8 . When I was seven, my father gave me a watch, Timex. It was my first watch. I loved it, wore it for years, and haven’t had another one since it stopped clicking a decade ago. Why? Because I don’t _________ one. I have a mobile phone and I’m always near someone with an iPod or something like that. All these _________ tell the time — which is why, if you look around, you’ll see lots of empty _________; sales of watches to young adults have been going down since 2007. But while the _________ men have realized that they don’t need them, others _________ are spending total fortunes on them. Brands (品牌) such as Rolex and Philippe command shocking _________, up to £250,000 for a piece.

This is _________. These days all watches tell the time as well as all other watches. Expensive watches come with extra _________ but who needs them? How often do you dive to 300 metres into the sea or need to find your _________ in the South Pole? So why pay that much of five years’ school fees for watches that allow you to do these things? If justice were done, the Swiss watch industry should have __________ when the Japanese discovered how to __________ accurate watches for a five-pound note.

Watches are now categorized as “investments”. A 1994 Philippe recently sold for nearly £350,000, while 1960s Rolexes have gone from £15,000 to £30,000 plus in a year. But a watch is not an investment. It’s a(n) __________ for self-satisfaction, a matter of fashion. Prices may keep going up. But when fashion moves on, the __________ of that £350,000 beauty will __________ find his pride and joy is no more a good investment than my __________ Timex.