1 . For nearly two decades, a thin, sun-burnt postal worker could frequently be seen carrying packages along a dangerous mountain trail in the Taihang Mountains.

The 10-kilometer-long route, which is between 20 centimeters and 1 meter wide, is known as the “cat road” by locals, meaning that it is so dangerous that only cats could walk on it. Whereas, Zhao Yuefang, a postal worker in Ewu township in Huguan county, Shanxi province, had to walk the route every day to deliver mail.

Every day at the crack of dawn, he would start his journey along the “cat road”. From picking up the day’s post to delivering it to villagers and returning along the same route, it took Zhao four days. During rainy and snowy seasons, the mountain road, part of which hugs the cliffs, would become slippery and dangerous. One day in the winter of 2003, the “cat road” was covered in thick snow and he slipped off the trail. Fortunately, he was able to stop his sharp descent by grabbing a tree branch and slowly managed to climb to safety.

By 2012, Zhao had walked more than 300,000 km and delivered over 800,000 pieces of mail. Born and raised in the deep mountains, Zhao truly understands the significance of mail deliveries to villagers. “They depend on the mail to keep in touch with the outside world,” he said. “Their sheer joy written on their face while receiving any post struck me,” he added.

In 2012, a 67-km-long tourist highway was built and gone were those days when Zhao risked his life to walk on the “cat road”. But Zhao was even busier than before. “The number of packages I handle daily now exceeds the number I used to deal with in the past,” said Zhao, adding that villagers are turning to online shopping and ordering more and more goods by post.

The Peasants (II)

At noon they hoe up weeds;

Their sweat drips on the soil.

Who knows the rice that feeds

Is the fruit of hard toil!

Food is a necessity for survival. But do you know how much work goes into producing it? The poem The Peasants (II),     1     (write) by Li Shen, a Tang Dynasty poet, shows     2     (we) the hardship of the peasants.

The first two lines describe a common scene     3     peasants are working their lands at noon with the sun     4     (hang) high in the sky, sweat dripping. In the last two lines, the poet     5     (direct) points out that the rice we eat is the fruit of peasants’ hard work.

Simple as the poem is in its language, it is profound in the theme, reminding people     6     the significance of treasuring food. According to the FAO, an estimated 1.3 billion tons of food, or one-third of     7     total food produced for human consumption, is wasted globally each year. Therefore, it’s highly suggested that every grain of rice     8     (value). In China, we have adopted a law on food waste     9     (offer) legal backing to the country’s efforts which not only safeguard food security     10     promote the traditional virtue of thrift (节俭) as well.

Next time you want to throw away food, please think twice.

I clearly remember the day I walked into class with a big change — my very first pair of eye glasses and I was the first to wear glasses in my primary school. I was filled with excitement, eager to show them off to my friends. I had chosen pink framed glasses, thinking they would look fantastic on me.

I had never worn glasses before, so selecting them felt like a fun shopping experience. I got to pick the shape I liked and even chose a pretty pink and purple colour combination.

The reason behind getting the glasses was my poor eyesight. I couldn’t copy words and proper grammar from the blackboard because I sat at the back of the class, and everything was too vague for me to see. My friend would read aloud every phrase to me so that I could write them down, like a parrot.

Wearing those glasses was like stepping into a 3D cinematic world. I could see everything as clearly and each tiny detail felt like a delightful surprise.

However, on the day I wore my glasses to school, everyone’s reaction to my transformation was beyond my expectation. All the boys laughed and even teased me. Some kind-hearted girls forced a smile and told me that my glasses looked good on me, but I knew they didn’t. They all lied.

Though I needed those glasses more than I wanted them, yet I started to dislike my new glasses in the following week. A month passed, my classmates still weren’t used to seeing me in glasses and I took them off during the lunch break or when the classes were dismissed. However, little did I know that my decision to wear them would change the lives of many of my friends.

One Monday, one of my friends looked at me with curiosity.

A week later, I was shocked to see the same friend return to school with a pair of glasses.

5 . On a hot afternoon Rhiannon was driving her old van down the highway. As she ________ her window to let in some fresh air, her car registration paper blew off the sun visor (防晒板) and onto the floor inside. When leaning down to ________ it, she accidentally drifted into oncoming traffic. In panic, she over-corrected and pulled the ________ sharply in the other direction. ________, the van rolled over three times, and Rhiannon was thrown onto the road, lying in the middle of the road and bleeding, nearly ________.

A medical student witnessed the accident and came to her ________. He covered Rhiannon with his coat and gave her emergency first aid, including ________ the wound on her left arm before the ambulance arrived.

________, Rhiannon was rushed to a hospital where an emergency room doctor spent hours ________ all the pieces of windshield (挡风玻璃) from her arm, and gave her three dozen stitches (缝针).

Luckily, Rhiannon was saved. Not for the bandage, she would not have ________long enough for the emergency personnel to arrive. Though Rhiannon didn’t know him, she was grateful to the medical student who saved her life. So she ________ the words online, “It’s a pity that I don’t know your name. If you happen to see or hear this story and recognize yourself, thank you for your kind ________.”

Rhiannon also had a message for the other ________ heroes, “Please consider this a pay-it-forward letter of ________— a letter from the ________ you helped who, for whatever reason, couldn’t thank you themselves.”

7 . One day, you might be ordering your favorite pizza from a robot.Researchers at a university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, are working on creating a pizza-making robot.

“Robots are basically preprogrammed to repeat the same actions over and over,” says David Held, a robot expert from Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the members of a pizza-making team．But making pizza has challenges.For instance, the flour (面粉) will become squishy when meeting water, with a shape that can change in many ways.Also, pizza-making requires many steps—such as rolling and cutting—and several tools, including a rolling, a knife and so on.In what order should the steps be done? Which tools should be picked, and when? “If you need to do a cooking task, there are several levels that you have to reason about,” Held says.Once people get the hang of it, “We don’t even need to think about exactly how we’re doing it- it sort of just happens.But robots can’t really “understand what to do on their own”.

To start, the team used a computer to consider how a robot could lift, fatten, gather, move and cut dough (生面团).The method has two levels of robotic reasoning: one that thinks how it should approach the overall task, and the other that thinks how it should move its “hands” to perform each action．The result was better than with the usual programming techniques.“We got a little bit closer to the right shape than the former methods,” Held says．“‘But there’s still a lot of room for improvement.”

For now, people will continue to make pizza the old-fashioned way: with their own hands.Sill, a pizza-making robot is a good goal.And if a robot could deal with dough, it could also work with other objects that can change shapes.“You can imagine robots helping in hospitals, or robots that clean up toys in day cares,” Held says.“The general goal is to eventually have robots that can help with whatever the task may be.”

9 . According to a new study by Tampere University in Finland, making eye contact with a robot may have the same effect on people as eye contact with another person. The result predicts that interaction between humans and humanoid robots will be surprisingly smooth.

With the rapid progress in robotics, it is expected that people will increasingly interact with so-called social robots in the future. Despite the artificiality of robots, people seem to react to them socially. For instance, people may sense different qualities, such as knowledge ability, sociability and likability in robots based on how they look or behave.

Previous surveys have been able to throw light on people’s sensory ability of social robots and their characteristics, but the very central question has remained unanswered. Does interacting with a robot cause similar reactions to people as interacting with another human?

Researchers at Tampere University investigated the matter by studying the physiological (生理的) reactions that eye contact with a social robot produces. In the new study, the research participants sat face to face with another person or a humanoid robot. The person and the robot looked either directly at the participants and made eye contact or avoided their gaze. At the same time, the participants’ skin conductance (电导率), which reflected the activity of the autonomous nervous systems, the electrical activity of the cheek muscle reflecting positive affective reactions, and the heart rate reduction were measured.

The result showed that all the above-mentioned physiological reactions were stronger in the case of eye contact when compared to averted gaze (转移目光). This result is shared with both another person and a humanoid. Eye contact with the robot and another human focused the participants’ attention and brought about a positive emotional response.

“Our result shows that the non-linguistic (非语言的), interaction-regulating signals of social robots can affect humans in the same way as similar signals presented by other people. Such evidence allows us to assume that as robot technology develops, there may be no barrier to interaction between social robots and humans,” says doctoral researcher Helena.