1 . A man got depressed about life. In spite of all his ________, he got nothing but failure. Feeling ________, he left everything and relaxed himself in the woods, where he met a farmer. The man shared his ________ with the farmer.

“Do you see that fern (蕨类植物) and bamboo there?” the farmer said, pointing towards two ________. He told the man that when he planted the fern and the bamboo seeds, he took very good care of them. Within a short period of time, the fern ________ grew from the earth. However, ________ the bamboo seed had been watered for years, it did not outwardly grow as much as an inch. But the farmer did not ________ the bamboo seed and continued to ________ it. By the fifth year, a tiny sprout (嫩芽) grew out of the ________. And within six months, the tree grew a hundred feet tall.

“So, did the bamboo tree lie quietly for four years only to grow rapidly in the ________?” the farmer asked. The answer is quite ________. The little tree was growing underground, developing a root system which was ________ enough to support its potential for outward ________ in the fifth year and beyond.

“Did you know that you had been ________ all the time and that you were growing strong roots?” said the farmer. Hearing the farmer’s words, the man ________ the value of hard work.

7 . Music exists almost every human culture on earth. The oldest discovered musical instruments date back over 40,000 years to the Stone Age.     1     It originated alongside language in early human communication. Why did music become so well connected into the human experience over the long history? Evolutionary psychologists say it gave significant survival advantages to our ancestors.

In prehistoric times, music promoted tighter social bonding between group members. Singing and drumming together released chemicals like dopamine and endorphins, inducing positive emotions that strengthened social connections.     2     This can also help to claim identity and territory (领土).

Early music likely aided communication too. Rhythmic drumbeats and calls organized the actions and movements of groups during hunts or battle. Singing while working made labor less boring. Mothers may have sung primitive tunes to children as an early form of emotional communication.

    3     Group member’s beating drums and making noise during the night signaled that they were alert (警觉的) and ready to fight surprise enemy. Young night watchmen sang to indicate they were awake. Soldiers guarding territory used instruments to send warning calls across longer distances.

In all these ways, music increased survival chances in human evolution. Natural selection then embedded (嵌入) the capacity for music into our biology. Supporting this, scientists have discovered specific regions of the brain devoted to musical processing. Children have an inborn ability to detect musical patterns and different tonal pitches.     4     So next time you find yourself singing along to an easy tune, remember you are using an evolutionary heritage which goes through thousand years! Music is part of what makes us unique human. In the past, our Stone Age ancestors sang and drummed because it increased survival.     5    

8 . Some people travel because they want to go to warm places for winter vacations or because they want to visit art museums in Europe. But other people travel simply because they have a passion for it.

Luisa Yu, a 79-year-old woman, fell in love with travel as a young girl in the province of Leyte in the Philippines when she watched movies. “I saw the beautiful scenery, the rivers and the mountains, and that fascinated me,” Yu said. “That’s why I always thought someday I would go to these places and travel.”

At 23, as an exchange student studying medical technologies in the US, Yu decided that she wanted to visit all of the countries in the world, but visa restrictions (限制) didn’t allow her to travel outside of the country.

It took Yu 15years to get her admission allowing her to travel internationally and there were times when she worked three jobs to save money to travel. She eventually took a part-time job as a travel agent, which gave her many more opportunities to travel to new places around the globe.

For the past 50 years, Yu has been visiting countries across the world, even some that are very difficult to get into. She has tried dog meat when she visited the DPRK, explored the beaches of Somalia, and even skydived in Dubai when she was 73. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t go to Somalia, that’s dangerous,’” Yu said. “If I want to go somewhere, nobody can stop me. I want to do everything.”

Yu achieved her goal to visit all of the 193 countries that are recognized by the UN, in November 2023. To date, there have only been around 400 people who have set out to achieve this amazing cause.

Yu’s advice to people who love to travel is to just do it. “Don’t wait for anybody. If I keep on waiting, it will never happen, because the opportunity sometimes comes only once,” she said.

9 . Taking between 9,000 and 10,000 steps per day appears to reduce the risk of an early death or heart-related event, adding reason to an idea that has been considered as unscientific.

The exact origin of the commonly held belief that people should aim for 10,000 steps a day is unclear, but it has been linked to a marketing plan promoting pedometers (计步器) in Japan. Now, a study by Matthew Ahmadi at the University of Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues suggests the figure could hold some truth.

The team studied more than 72,000 participants, with an average age of 61, in the UK Biobank study as they wore a movement-tracking accelerometer (加速度计) on their wrists for one week. “We were able to know their daily steps,” says Ahmadi. The participants were then tracked for an average of just under seven years.

During that time period, 1,633 people died and 6,190 heart-related events occurred. After adjusting other factors that could influence the risk of illness or death over that period—such as diet quality, smoking and doing other forms of exercise, the researchers found out that the best number of steps per day appears to be between 9,000-and 10,000, with the benefits then starting to tail off. Doing so was linked to a 39% lower risk of dying during the follow-up period and a 21% lower risk of a heart-related event. “It does appear to support the belief that the originally non-evidence based 10,000 steps target may indeed be about right,” says Dale Esliger at Loughborough University in the UK.

However, while the study was “extremely well designed” with “careful methods and statistical analysis”, Esliger says wrist-worn accelerometers aren’t always the best indicator of step count. The researchers also didn’t consider the number of steps taken per minute. “It’s possible that around 6,000 steps performed at a higher pace may be just as health protective as 10,000 slower steps,” says Esliger.

10 . Flaco the owl (猫头鹰) is gone, but his life had all the elements of a classic hero’s story, not soon forgotten. Flaco lived a dozen years in a comfortable cage in the Central Park Zoo where little happened and less was needed. His life was a safe existence without freedom. Then, a year ago, someone released him.

On Friday, when he died of injury, perhaps from a collision (碰撞) with a Manhattan apartment building’s glass windows, his death offered us a chance to reckon with the question at the heart of many a hero’s journey: Can we put a price on freedom?

Flaco’s liberation from his cage came at a cost — he spent the final year of his life free, but threatened from all sides by a booming city. Was it worth it?

Almost from the moment he was released, Flaco became a symbol of hope for many of the people who followed his story and recognized parts of themselves in him. Some saw him as the symbol of the American dream, an outsider who had come to Manhattan and made a life for himself here, like millions of others who arrived penniless and unconnected in search of freedom.

As a result, he flew around the city. We were terrified that he’d succumb to (屈服于) the dangers of city life. Flaco had no experience living outside a cage, and New Yorkers initially doubted his chances of survival. We worried that he’d eat a rat with enough poison in its system to kill him. But Flaco never looked back. Perhaps freedom itself was the home he’d discovered.

And though we feared for him, his new life excited us. How many of us, our circumstances familiar and sale, are too frightened to seek our more fully realized selves?

How many of us, viewing our confinements as nothing out of the ordinary, have long stopped wondering what our wings are for?

Have we not all desired a life beyond the range of the one we lead? Flaco showed that our desire is not misplaced. His choice proved a truth that given a chance, living things choose freedom of movement.