1 . When I was a little girl, every time when my dad was repairing something, he would ask me to hold the hammer. Then we could have a time for a _________ with each other.

I grew up and left home for the college, and since then, he had been _________ me every Sunday morning. Later, when I bought a house, my dad was _________ it by himself for three days in the 30℃ summer _________. All he asked for was to hold his paint brush and _________ to him.

Several years ago, he was _________ me. He spent hours _________ a swing set for my daughter. He asked me to bring him a cup of tea and have a talk with him, but I had to _________ for a trip, so I did not have time for any long conversations.

One Sunday morning, we had a telephone talk _________ , and I noticed that my dad kept forgetting some things we discussed __________. Few hours later came a call. He was in hospital with an aneurysm(动脉瘤). Immediately I bought a ticket for the __________ and by the time I got to the hospital, my dad had passed away. Now it was he who did not have __________ for a talk with me.

After his __________ , I learned more about him, and I realized how little I knew about his deepest __________ and dreams. All he ever asked me was my time, but now he has all my __________ every single day.

3 . As you read this, pause to reflect on your recent interactions. As a politician, husband, and father, I encounter various spoken language styles: analytical or chatty, formal or informal, pointed or gentle, cooperative or decisive. Talk is the currency of politics. It is our way of negotiating, debating, and persuading. Talk is also the currency of learning-how we develop our ideas, deepen our thinking and share our feelings.

That’s why I want speaking skills, sometimes called “oracy”, to play an important part in Labor’s plans for a reformed school curriculum (课程).

Employers value speaking skills equally with reading and writing. The ability to speak well and express yourself should be something every child should master. But the curriculum doesn’t allow us to provide this. This is short-sighted. An inability to express your thoughts fluently is a key barrier to getting on and doing well in life.

Oracy is in part about good public speaking and debating skills, but in reality, it’s about teaching young people to make strong arguments, choose wise words, understand their audience, form meaningful social connections, and use facial expressions and body language to convey their message. Above all else it’s about finding your voice. To work out who you are and what you believe. If reading opens up a world of imagination and possibility, then speaking and listening opens up a lifetime of empowerment-a chance for those who feel invisible in their own country to be heard. It is about the confidence to speak out, to call out injustice or harm.

And the other side of speaking is listening, which can also be taught. Listening, truly listening, develops tolerance and understanding. And as parents we can play our part. We’ve all been there, at mealtimes, silent as we all stare at our devices. Our job, all of ours, is to get off our screens and give young people, and adults, the gift of listening.

So, oracy―speaking and listening―needs to be placed firmly at the heart of school life.

Gather together a couple of good friends and take a leisurely walk through the streets—this is     1     many youngsters in China enjoy doing when they visit a new city.

To them, Citywalk means roaming (漫步) around the city on foot. It can be a special     2     (guide) trip for a small group of people,     3     simply a leisurely walk for one or two to explore new areas, sticking to the key point: avoiding famous scenic spots and big crowds to gain     4     more inclusive experience of the places they visit.

Citywalk not only offers a way for young people to interact with a city but also     5     (provide) them with a new social scene. Xiao Yiyi, a Citywalk     6     (enthusiastic), launched her Changsha route on her social media account, including more offbeat sights like historical sites and even a stop-off     7     (sample) the local cuisine. Many tour guides also try to expand their influence online,     8     (share) their experiences to attract potential customers.

Citywalk is offering a positive change to urban travelers as they can     9     (well) choose the experiences that fit in with their interests and needs. At the same time, Citywalk represents an opportunity for tour guides and travel service providers to offer a more tailored,     10     (profession) service to meet ever-changing market demands.

9 . With the explosion of chatbots like ChatGPT driving the tech boom, many people have considered the fear in mind: will AI replace human beings? Discussion in the media would have us believe that such fear is unnecessary. However, the runaway success of a Chinese AI-powered digital portrait generator (生成器) has ignited such fears again, especially among social media users.

Users of the mobile app need to pay 9.9 yuan ($1.4) and upload at least 20 recent portraits each to get a digital clone, which can be used to create different types of portraits fit for ID purposes, formal occasions or even everyday lifestyle.

According to an online survey from lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu, 72% of the users preferred the photo created by the generator to those created by a renowned professional portrait photography chain in China. Facial expressions, lighting, overall appearance ... the whole range of technical aspects seemed superior. Take me for example, most importantly, I didn’t need to spend more time and money in dressing up and striking unnatural poses in front of a group of unfamiliar people. I could get various photos at the price of, say, a cup of Starbucks coffee, without having to step out of my home.

So, in the next step, will photographers, image specialists and such people lose their jobs? Unlikely.

Tech without the human touch has its own shortcomings. I soon discovered that many of my friends also tried out the app, and their portraits had the same or similar poses and costumes etc.— a kind of one-size-fits-all setting. Which is to say that homogenization (均质化) makes offline photo studies a necessity still. It’s too early to say that AI portrait apps will replace offline photo studios.

Some people feel AIGC (生成式人工智能) may be just a passing tech trend. A real-world assessment took place between AI doctors and human doctors in June. To everyone’s surprise, human doctors scored an average of 7.5 out of 10, while AI doctors scored 7.2. AI doctors’ recommendations, however, were found to be 96 percent as good as those of top-level physicians.

Ma Ting, a professor of neuroinformatics said when doctors make decisions based on patients’ diagnoses, they consider multidimensional data, which are difficult for AI to access and assess. “To fully allow AI to move from its general understanding to advanced intelligence, we still need more research, more data and more intelligent algorithms.” Ma said.

10 . Empathy and generosity are two qualities that arguably make the world go round. But a study suggests that the willingness to help crashes when people get too little sleep.

To prove it, researchers conducted three experiments designed to examine the issue from the individual to the societal scale.

In the first experiment, researchers performed functional magnetic resonance (磁共振) imaging scans of the brain and questioned 24 adults after an eight-hour-sleep night and after a sleepless night. When they rested well, the participants scored well on a helping behavior test. But after sleep loss, 78 percent had less of a desire to help others, even when it came to friends and family. The scans showed that areas of the brains associated with social cognition — our thought processes related to other people — were less active with sleep loss.

The second experiment tracked 136 healthy adults over four nights and asked them questions about helping the following day. The effect held for them, too.

To test the effects on a societal level, the researchers then looked at a database of 3 million charitable donations given between 2001 and 2016. They found that immediately following the beginning of daylight saving time (DST 夏令时)— a notorious sleep disrupter — donations dropped 10 percent. The effect wasn’t found in data from Hawaii or Arizona, however, neither observe DST.

Why bother studying how helpful people are when we don’t get enough shut-eye? “We’re starting to see more studies, where the effects of sleep loss don’t just stop at the individual, but extend to those around us,” said Eti Ben Simon, a scientist who co-wrote the study, in a news release. “If you’re not getting enough sleep, it doesn’t just hurt your own well-being, it hurts that of your entire social circle, including strangers.”

There’s a silver lining to all that ungenerous behavior, the researchers write: Unlike personality quality, sleep can be modified — and both getting enough and helping others do the same might make for a better world.