2 . “Robot, stand up” — Oscar Constanza, 16, gives the order, and slowly but surely a large frame (支架) lifts him up and he starts walking. Fixed to his shoulders, chest, waist, knees and feet, the exoskeleton (外骨骼) allows Oscar — who has a genetic neurological condition that means he was unable to move — to walk across the room and turn around.

“Before, I needed someone to help me walk ... this makes me feel independent,” said Oscar, as his father Jean-Louis Constanza, one of the co-founders of the company that makes the exoskeleton, looked on.

“One day Oscar said to me: ‘Dad, you’re a robotic engineer. Why don’t you make a robot that would allow us to walk?’” his father said in Paris. “Ten years from now, there will be no, or far fewer, wheelchairs,” he said.

Other companies across the world are also making exoskeletons, competing to make them as light and usable as possible. Some are focused on helping disabled people walk, others on applications, including making standing less tiring for factory workers. Wandercraft’s exoskeleton, an outer frame that supports but also simulates (模仿) body movement, has been sold to many hospitals in France, Luxembourg and the United States, for about 150,000 euros a piece. It cannot yet be bought by private individuals for everyday use — that is the next stage the company is working on. A personal skeleton would need to be much lighter, Wandercraft engineers said.

Just outside Paris, 33-year-old Kevin Piette, who lost the ability to walk in a bike accident 10 years ago, tries one on, walking around his apartment, remote controller (遥控器) in hand. “In the end, it’s quite similar: instead of having the information going from the brain to the legs, it goes from the remote controller to the legs,” he said, before making his dinner and walking with it from the kitchen to the living room.

3 . It all started with a tweet from a social media influencer Jérôme Jarre on March 15 after he was on a call with a volunteer in Somalia who had just seen a 6-year-old girl die after walking 90 miles with her mother in search of water. In Somalia alone, 6.2 million people are in need of help.

In his video, Jarre says that everyone is on social media from food and water companies to airlines. What if they could find an airline willing to send food and water to Somalia?

With Turkish Airlines being the only airline that flies to Somalia, he started a GoFundMe campaign (活动) called “Love Army for Somalia” and challenged viewers to post on social media #TurkishAirlinesHelpSomalia to get them to set aside one of their flights to Somalia for food.

The campaign took off, and other social media influencers joined the movement to help spread the word. Within days, many famous people joined the cause. Turkish Airlines listened and came back with an answer, saying they would keep donating (捐赠) a plane to be filled with food until the end of the famine (饥荒). This campaign received $1 million within 24 hours with the average (平均的) donation being around $28 — the highest donation of $50,000 came from Alex and Ani, a jewelry company.

The goal was to reach $1 million in 10 days and the amount (数量) of money raised in such a short time by so many people surprised Jarre. However, they don’t want this to be a one-off campaign, and to keep the campaign going they’ve come up with another hashtag, #NominatedForSomalia, and ask each donor to encourage three friends to donate through social media.

Jérôme Jarre is in Somalia right now and sharing wonderful images that will put a smile on your face and make sure help is reaching the right people.

4 . In January 2016, I was eighteen years old at the time. I was going through a _______ time because I had just finished my first year in college but I _______ several subjects. As a result, I dropped out of college and began _______ a job. One day, I came across one of the last episodes (集) of the sitcom (情景喜剧) “The Nanny”. I was _______.

I rewatched “The Nanny” and then I met a lovely girl named Hannah in an online community. We shared how much we loved the _______ and she inspired me to _______ about my feelings.

I started to _______ writing and soon enough we became writing friends. We’ve written over 90 pieces together. The bond (联系) between us was getting _______ every day; she spent a year abroad and I _______ a teaching job and started a new degree. We ________ each other through these ________ moments. When she returned home to the UK I was introduced to her family.

In March 2017, the ________ of meeting in real life was mentioned. At first we said it ________, but then it became serious and we decided that I should ________ her in January 2018.

Life, however, had other plans and I ________ to buy a plane ticket to visit her in July 2017! On the 15th July I ________ a plane and started my journey to the UK.

I can’t describe the feeling of our first hug (拥抱) — it was ________, unique, emotional (激动人心的). It was everything I’d imagined. I’ve formed such a deep ________ with her... and we’d waited for so long...

She is my best friend, and ________ her was a dream come true. She is the most important person in my life. She is wonderful and the best friend I could ________.

8 . My mother spent at least 12 hours every day rolling country cigarettes to support our family. One day she showed me her wage book, _________ me how much money she had earned. She has never been to school-she knows nothing about calculating and she uses her thumbprints to _________ a record of her earning. At the moment, I wanted to _________ her how to hold a pen to write things.

As I watched her finally _________ to write her name correctly, and her hands trembling with _________, I had a dream that I wanted to receive better education and make a _________ to this world. But my _________might be too big for a girl in a poor village, because in rural India, girls are generally considered _________and to live a life of no voice and no choice.

When I was 13, I read the autobiography of Helen Keller. I _________ her spirit and I wanted to have a college degree like her. So I fought with my father and my relatives to be sent to __________, and it worked five years later. I __________ to join in a fellowship(奖学金)program in Delhi University. After many rounds of interviews, I got into the __________ with a full scholarship. I was going to __________ of my village for the first time to study in the capital! By the time my fellowship program ended, my life had __________. Not only had I traced my lost voice, but also had a choice to make myself __________.

At the age of 22, I came back to my village to set up an institution that __________ rural youth by providing them with education, life skills and career opportunities. My work involved working with families and communities to help them understand why getting __________ is useful for everyone.

Of course, to change people’s mind is challenging. The quickest way to __________ them is by doing. When they see their kids getting a real education, getting a real __________ , they begin to change. The best example is what happened at my home -__________ education has helped me to find my voice, my self-worth and my freedom.

10 . When I was young, a friend and I came up with a “big” plan to make reading easy. The idea was to boil down great books to a sentence each. “Moby-Dick” by American writer Herman Melville, for instance, was reduced to: “A whale of a tale about the one that got away.” As it turned out, the joke was on us. How could a single sentence convey the essence (精髓) of a masterpiece with over five hundred pages?

Blinkist, a website and an app, now summarizes nonfiction titles in the form of quick takes labeled “blinks.” The end result is more than one sentence, but not by much. Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café” is broken into 11 screens of information; Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” fills 13.

Blinkist has been around since 2012. It calls its summaries “15-minute discoveries” to indicate how long it takes to read a Blinkist summary. “Almost none of us,” the editors assure us, “have the time to read everything we’d like to read.” Well, yes, of course, “So many books, so little time,” declares a poster I once bought at a book market. But I judge the quality of someone’s library by the books he or she has yet to read.

That’s because a book is something we ought to live with, rather than speed through and categorize. It offers an experience as real as any other. The point of reading a book is not accumulating information, or at least not that alone. The most essential aspect is the communication between writer and reader. The idea behind Blinkist, however, is the opposite: Reading can be, should be, measured by the efficient uptake (吸收) of key ideas. No, no, no. What’s best about reading books is its inefficiency.

When reading a book, we need to dive in, let it take over us, demand something of us, teach us what it can. Blinkist is instead a service that changes books for people who don’t, in fact, want to read. A 15-minute summary misses the point of reading; speed-reading with the app isn’t reading at all.