A household robot called Tony was to be tested     1     in Larry’s house. Though Claire, Larry’s wife, didn’t like     2     idea at the beginning, she     3     (persuade) to let the robot company her while her husband was away on a business trip. The robot looked like a tall and handsome man with smooth hair. Though his facial     4     (express) never changed, the robot spoke in a deep and attractive voice. At the first sight of Tony, Claire felt alarmed because he seemed     5     (much) like a human than a machine. So when Tony offered to help dress, Claire felt more than     6     (embarrass).

However, Tony gradually won Claire’s trust. He took good care of Claire and even managed to rescue her when he fell off the ladder. He also helped Claire realize her dreams by     7     (make) her home elegant, giving era new haircut and changing her make-up. Therefore at the party all the guests who     8     (invite) were filled with admiration when they saw her house was     9     (complete) changed. Claire felt satisfied and recovered her confidence. And Tony said he was so attached     10     her that he hated to leave her.

4 . Nguyen Thi Thu is one of the few remaining artists practicing and constantly enhancing the traditional Vietnamese art of sculpting realistic-looking flowers out of papaya (番木瓜树) fruits.

Thu became ________ in carving various flowers from papaya fruits at the age of 15, when she ________ a class on the art of sculpting fruit. She was fascinated by the ________ art form, but then she had to ________ to Russia and stayed there for 15 years. Thu couldn’t ________ her favorite art form because she was too busy working and had no ________ to green papayas. She ________ it with all sorts of other fruits and vegetables, but nothing was quite like the papaya she ________. When she returned to Hanoi in 2009, she ________ got back into papaya sculpting, and she has been practicing the art ever since.

Over the years, Thu has ________ herself to carve various types of flowers, but her favourite by far is also one of the most ________, the chrysanthemum (菊花). Creating a single flower takes between 45 minutes and over an hour,________ the complexity of the design. “I often fall asleep thinking of how to ________ a certain flower, and then I get out of bed to practice,” Thu said.

Apart from ________ her art form during various public events and creating delicate papaya flowers, Thu also holds classes in Hanoi, as a way of ________ the traditional art form.

5 . People who experienced trauma (精神创伤) as a child or adolescent were found to be 48 percent more likely to have serious and repeated headaches as an adult than those who had not experienced trauma in their early years, according to research published in the journal Neurology. The finding came from the analysis of data from 28 studies, involving 154,739 people.

Overall, nearly one-third of the participants reported having experienced a traumatic event at least once before age 18, and 16 percent had been diagnosed as an adult with a primary headache disorder, which means that their headaches are the main problem, rather than a symptom (症状) of an underlying disease or condition.

The researchers categorized traumatic events as either threat-based (such as physical or emotional abuse, witnessing or being threatened by violence, and serious family conflicts) or deprivation-based (including neglect, financial trouble, parents’ separation, divorce or death, and living in a household with mental illness, alcohol or substance abuse). Physical abuse and exposure to family violence were among the most commonly reported traumas.

Of those who had experienced at least one traumatic event as a youth, 26 percent subsequently were diagnosed with primary headaches, compared with 12 percent of those who had not experienced trauma.

As the number of traumatic events experienced by a child or adolescent increased, so did the odds of their having headaches later in life. For example, those who had experienced four or more traumatic events were more than twice as likely to have a head ache disorder. Also, certain traumas — physical abuse and neglect — were linked to greater risk for headaches than other types of trauma.

The study found an association between trauma as a youth and headache disorder as an adult, rather than direct proof that one led to the other. But the researchers wrote that traumas experienced as a child or adolescent “are important risk factors for primary headache disorders in adulthood,” which one of the researchers described in a statement released by the American Academy of Neurology as “a risk factor that we cannot ignore.”

6 . In 2018, when Hemesh Chadalavada was 12 years old, his grandmother forgot to turn off the gas after she made herself a cup of tea. This experience caused Hemesh to invent the “Alpha Monitor”, a device designed for dementia (痴呆) patients.

He started creating this device with whatever was at home, with the help of the internet. “The first model I built was a huge box. I learnt how to make a wearable device on the internet by learning which components to use and where I could source them in Hyderabad. I started with a hardware device, after which I learnt coding online and moved to machine learning and data science, to help me perfect my device,” he adds.

The Alpha Monitor has two parts, one, a wearable watch-like device, and the second, an alarm which connects to it. “You attach the device to the patient. In case the patient throws it away or doesn’t like wearing it, you can just put it in a bag and fix it in their pocket or sock or wherever you like. Once you plug in the alarm, you will be warned for every tiny change in movement. As soon as the patient gets up or wanders away, it will warn the family members with a huge alarm sound,” says Hemesh.

The wearable device monitors body temperature, pulse, and detects movement, falls and more. It works using a gyroscope sensor to detect even the slightest movement and health sensors for pulse and temperature. It works without Wi-Fi or bluetooth and has a range of 1-2k m, according to Hemesh. It can also be connected to an app for children staying far away to monitor their parents’ movements.

“The happiest I’ve ever been is seeing how the device actually works for patients with Alzheimer’s. It gives me incredible happiness to see the small impact I’ve managed to create in the lives of these families,” smiles the youngster.

8 . The next generation of scientists and inventors is already finding approaches to address society’s problems. A group of high school students and their instructor report a solution to the problem of lead (铅) pollution in drinking water — an inexpensive faucet (水龙头) attachment that removes this poisonous metal. Unlike conventional filters currently on the market, theirs includes a container made of eco-friendly plastic and indicates when it’s “used up” by turning the tap water yellow.

“A few years ago, I saw a video of a woman in Michigan turn on her tap water, and it came out brown.” says Rebecca Bushway, the project’s principal investigator. “That made me think — because there’s really no safe level of lead in drinking water, wouldn’t it be nice to have a water filter that could tell you your water is polluted, well before it turns brown because of lead?”

Bushway, as a science teacher, wondered aloud to her chemistry class if there was a little filter that they could make from inexpensive components to easily remove lead. The students were excited about the idea, and they started thinking about the project in 2020.

The students discussed designs for an attachment to screw (用螺丝固定) a filter onto a sink’s faucet. Then in the spring semester of 2021, they 3D printed the attachment and a 3-inch-tall filter housing, using eco-friendly plastic. They filled the containers with some chemical powder. Next, the students added a tiny spectrophotometer (分光光度计) with a single-wavelength LED to the bottom of the filter container. They installed an indicator light that turns on as soon as the detector identifies the yellow color of the lead iodide (碘化铅).

The team’s goal is to make and sell their filters for less than $1 each. Because the housings use eco-friendly plastic, the cost could trend a little higher, but the material would help reduce the overall environmental impact of the filter.

The process of developing the filter has been very fulfilling. “Ultimately, this experience has shown students they can make a difference to somebody, and that there are problems they can fix with science,” said Bushway.

9 . The summer after my freshman year college, I had to get my first job. This was probably one of the _________ tasks I have ever had to do. I had never held a job when I was in high school because my parents wanted me to put all my _________ into my studies.

At first, it was very hard. I filled out dozens of _________ but got no calls back in the first two weeks. It made sense because I had _________ no job experience. All I could _________ was that being a high school graduate and a year of college.

However, halfway through the third week, I finally got a call back from one of the places I _________. We had set up a meeting time, and after my _________, I was more than ready to start working the following Monday. I was _________ at the chance of working for my wages.

When I started, it was very clear that I was not _________. I made mistakes with orders and often __________ sales promotions (推销). My parents made a bet I would not __________ the first two weeks, and I would be back looking for more __________. However, I stuck with it.

After working a while, I got better at orders, and always __________ the cheaper options for customers. A couple of weeks later, I had been told by the manager that I had __________ the award of the best employee of the month. It taught me a lot about responsibility and gave me the __________ of working.

10 . When Jean Armour Polly, a former librarian, first introduced the idea of having computers in libraries in the early 1980s, she was met with pushback. “People teased and said, Why would you go to a library to use a computer?” she said. Even when the Internet rolled around, many librarians felt they were supposed to be the only gatekeepers of knowledge and information.

Polly got interested in the potentials of technology early on. In the mid-1970s. she had taken free computer classes. In 1981, Polly managed to secure an Apple II Plus into Liverpool Public Library in New York, she helped it create its own bulletin board system. By 1992, libraries were offering free internet to the public, a year after the first website was introduced to the public.

Since the Internet was hard to use back then, Polly along with local librarians would help library-goers take their baby steps online. “We didn’t have all the graphic interfaces (界面) like we have now, and we didn’t even have Google. So you really needed somebody to hold your hand,” Polly said. Polly would also go around attending library conferences about the Internet, excitedly speaking to anybody who would listen about the resource.

Wilson Library Bulletin, a library magazine. asked Polls to write a beginner’s article foe librarians explaining what the Internet was and how to use it. She needed a good metaphor as to what navigating the Internet felt like in the early days. Her mousepad happened to have a picture of a surfer and said “information surfer”, a phrase that was already floating around. The words just clicked for her. “Surfing the Internet” was published in the summer of 1992, quickly becoming viral as a catchphrase after Polly put the article up online.

In 2019, Polly was admitted into the Internet Hall of Fame for promoting the use of computers in public libraries.