1 . By the age of seven months, most children have learned that objects still exist even when they are out of sight. Put a toy under a blanket and a child that old will know it is still there, and that he can reach underneath the blanket to get it back. This understanding, of “object permanence”, is a normal developmental milestone, as well as a basic tenet of reality. It is also something that self-driving cars do not have. And that is a problem. For a self-driving car, a bicycle that is momentarily hidden by a passing van is a bicycle that has ceased to exist.

This failing is basic to the now-widespread computing discipline that has arrogated to itself the slightly misleading moniker of artificial intelligence (AI). Current AI, based on the idea of machine learning, works by building up complex statistical models of the world, but it lacks a deeper understanding of reality. Similar techniques are used to train self-driving cars to operate in traffic. Cars thus learn how to obey lane markings, avoid other vehicles, hit the brakes at a red light and so on. But they do not understand many things a human driver takes for granted—that other cars on the road have engines and four wheels, or that they obey traffic regulations (usually) and the laws of physics (always). And they do not understand object permanence.

In a recent paper in Artificial Intelligence, Mehul Bhatt of Orebro University, in Sweden, describes a different approach. He and his colleagues took some existing AI programs which are used by self-driving cars and bolted onto them a piece of software called a symbolic-reasoning engine.

Instead of approaching the world probabilistically, as machine learning does, this software was programmed to apply basic physical concepts to the output of the programs that process signals from an autonomous vehicle's sensors. This modified output was then fed to the software which drives the vehicle. The concepts involved included the ideas that discrete objects continue to exist over time, that they have spatial relationships with one another-such as “in-front-of” and “behind”—and that they can be fully or partly visible, or completely hidden by another object. The improvement was not huge, but it proved the principle. And it also yielded something else. For, unlike a machine-learning algorithm, a reasoning engine can tell you the reason why it did what it did. A machine-learning program cannot do that. Besides helping improve program design, such information will, Dr Bhatt reckons, help regulators and insurance companies. It may thus speed up public acceptance of autonomous vehicles.

Tony Randall stars as the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in the director Frank Tashlin’s extravagant 1965 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “The ABC Murders,” infusing the sleuth’s punctilious style with     1    nerdiness. When Poirot turns up in London to see his tailor, he learns that a circus clown named Albert Aachen has been killed, and he decides to solve the case. Then a bowling instructor named Betty Barnard is murdered, and Poirot     2     the killer of working his or her way through the alphabet. Tashlin transforms the mystery into a giddy parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s films: borrowing his highly inflected, riotously     3     visual styles, Tashlin creates a sort of live-action cartoon, with distorting     4    yielding disorienting juxtapositions, whether from the explosive results of a dish of kidneys flambé or during balletic capers at a bowling alley. In an intricate set piece, Tashlin transforms a casino’s glossy formalities into a theatre of horror, though his subject isn’t bloody murder but its irresistibly macabre, media-friendly allure—the power of such tales to liberate creative energy and     5    the oppressive dullness of daily life an invigorating jolt.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Amazon and playing Sept. 3 on TCM.)

Russell Crowe teams up with the director Ron Howard for the story of the boxer James J. Braddock, who fell from     6    during the Great Depression, only to claw his way back and snatch the world heavyweight title in 1935. Crowe lends the character a     7    dourness (冷酷), refusing to turn Braddock’s bewildering comeback into a victory parade—a good thing, too, for without that unsmiling restraint the whole saga might sound too good to be true.

Braddock is presented as a man without sin; his wife, Mae (Renée Zellweger),     8    a rosy-cheeked optimism even when food is scarce; and their children form a group portrait of well-scrubbed     9    . Anybody whose memory resounds to “Raging Bull,” with its bedevilled hero, will feel badly shortchanged by this picture, yet Howard is the right man for     10    simplicity, and his casting is on the money. Braddock’s opponents are gratifyingly bisonlike, and Paul Giamatti, looking natty in a gray plaid suit and tie, has a ball in the role of Joe Gould, the trainer who stood by his man. Released in 2005.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 6/6/05.) (Streaming on Amazon, HBO Max, and other services.)

3 . Picture yourself driving down a city street. Suddenly you see something in the middle of the road ahead. A torn paper bag, a lost shoe, or something else? You'll quickly determine the actions that best fit the _______-what humans call having“common sense”.

However, _______ “obstacles” that no human would ever stop for, AI self-driving vehicles are likely to apply the brakes unexpectedly.The challenges for self-driving vehicles won’t be solved by giving them more training data or rules for what to do in unusual situations. To be trustworthy, these vehicles need common sense to solve the object-in-the-road problem: broad _______ about the properties of objects and an ability to _______ adapt that knowledge in new circumstances. You can predict, _______, that while a pile of glass on the road won’t flyaway as you approach, birds likely will. From this _______ the term “common sense” seems to _______ exactly what current AI systems cannot do.Their lack of a _______ of commonsense makes them susceptible to unpredictable errors, which humans will never make.

Today’s AI systems use neural networks, algorithms(算法) trained to spot patterns, based on data gathered from extensive collections of human-labeled examples.This _______ is very different from how humans learn. We humans seem to come into the world with inborn knowledge of certain basic concepts--including the ideas of objects and events and the nature of space. We aren’t even ________ that we have it, or that it forms the basis for all future learning. A big lesson from decades of AI research is how hard it is to teach such ________ to machines.

The history of planting common sense in AI systems has largely focused on cataloging human knowledge: manually programming and ________ stereotyped(模式化的)situations. But all such attempts face a possibly fatal ________. Much of our instinctive knowledge is unwritten,unspoken,and not even in our conscious awareness.

A US AI research agency recently launched a programme. It challenges researchers to create an AI system that learns from “experience” in order to acquire the cognitive abilities of an 18-month-old baby. It might seem strange that ________ a baby is considered a grand challenge for AI, but this reflects the gulf between AI's success in specific fields and more general intelligence. If we can figure out how to get our machines to learn like children, perhaps after some years, these young “commonsense agents” will finally become teenagers--ones who are sufficiently sensible to be ________ with the car keys.

4 . There have been countless books and television series on living with teenagers, yet parents don’t seem to have _________ how to get their children to pick up their clothes from the bedroom floor, or even clean their room occasionally. It might be difficult to accept, but a new approach to dealing with rude or difficult teenagers is for parents to look at their own _________.

“The key to getting teenagers to respect you is to respect them first,” says Penny Palmano, who has written a best-selling book on teenagers. “You can’t _________ to treat them the same way that you have been treating them for the previous 12 years: they have opinions that count. Imagine if you’d spent two hours getting ready to go out for the evening and someone said, ‘You’ve not going out looking like that, are you?’ You’d be very _________. You’d never say that to an adult, because it shows a total _________ of respect.”

Palmano, who has a daughter aged 19, has even allowed the girl to hold several teenage parties at her home. “I’ve found that if you have brought your kids up to do the right thing, and then _________ them to do it, usually they’ll behave well,” she says. “I make them sandwiches and leave them alone. But I make it clear that they have to clear up any mess. I’ve never had a(n) _________; in fact, the kitchen was sometimes cleaner than I’d left it.”

She agrees that teenagers can be annoying: enjoying a world that is free of responsibility, yet _________ for independence. She doesn’t think, however, that they are _________ to annoy you. Until recently, scientists assumed that the brain finished growing at about the age of 13 and that teenage problems were a result of rising hormones and a desire for independence. But it turns out that the region of the brain that controls judgement and emotions is not fully __________ until the early twenties.

“This would explain why many teenagers can’t make good decisions, control their emotions, priorities or concentrate on several different things at the same time. __________, they may find it difficult to make the right decision between watching television, ringing a friend, or finishing their homework. It means that they do not __________ do the wrong thing just to annoy their parents,” says Palmano.

The key to __________ for all, Palmano believes, is calm negotiation and compromise (妥协). If you want your teenagers to be home by 11 pm, explain why, but listen to their arguments as well. If it’s Saturday, you might __________ agreeing to midnight (rather than 1 am, which is what they had in mind). If they are up to 20 minutes late, don’t react angrily. __________, ask if they’ve had a problem with public transport and let it pass; they’ve almost managed what you asked.

5 . Gone are the days when a mother’s place was in the home: in Britain women with children are now as likely to be in paid work as their unburdened sisters. Many put their little darlings in day care long before they start school. Mindful that a poor start can spoil a person’s chances of success later in life, the state has intervened ever more closely in how babies and toddlers are looked after. Inspectors call not only at nurseries but also at homes where youngsters are minded; three-year-olds follow the national curriculum. Child care has increasingly become a profession.

For years after the government first began in 2001 to twist the arms of anyone who looked after an unrelated child to register with the schools, the numbers so doing fell. Kind but clueless neighbours stopped looking after little ones, who were instead herded into formal nurseries or handed over to one of the ever-fewer registered child-minders. The decline in the number of people taking in children now appears to have halted. According to data released by the Office for Standards in Education on October 27th, the number of registered child-minders reached its lowest point in September 2010 and has since recovered slightly.

The new lot are certainly better qualified. In 2010 fully 82% of nursery workers held diplomas notionally equivalent to A-levels, the university-entrance exams taken mostly by 18-year-olds, up from 56% seven years earlier, says Anand Shukla of the Daycare Trust, a charity. Nurseries staffed by university graduates tend to be rated highest by inspectors, increasing their appeal to the pickiest parents. As a result, more graduates are being recruited.

But professionalization has also pushed up the price of child care, defying even the economic depression. A survey by the Daycare Trust finds that a full-time nursery place in England for a child aged under two, who must be intensively supervised, costs £194 ($310) per week, on average. Prices in London and the south-east are far higher. Parents in Britain spend more on child care than anywhere else in the world, according to the OECD, a think-tank. Some 68% of a typical second earner's net income is spent on freeing her to work, compared with an OECD average of 52%.

The price of child care is not only eye-watering, but has also become a barrier to work. Soon after it took power the coalition government pledged to ensure that people are better off in work than on benefits, but a recent survey by Save the Children, a charity, found that the high cost of day care prevented a quarter of low-paid workers from returning to their jobs once they had started a family. The government pays for free part-time nursery places for three-and four-year-olds, and contributes towards day-care costs for younger children from poor areas. Alas, extending such an aid during stressful economic times would appear to be anything but child’s play.

6 . Word on the street is that gossip is the worst. An Ann Landers（安·兰德斯, 知名专栏作家）advice column once characterized it as "the faceless demon that breaks ________and ruins careers" The Talmud（describes it as "three-pronged tongue" that kills three people: the teller, the ________, and the person being gossiped about. And Blaise Pascal observed, not unreasonably, that if "people really knew what others said about them, there would not be four friends left in the world."________as these indictments（控告）seem, however, a significant body of research suggests that gossip may in fact be healthy.

It's a good thing, too, since gossip is pretty common. Children tend to be seasoned gossips by the age of 5, and gossip as most researchers understand it--talk between at least two people about ________ others-accounts for about two-thirds of conversation.

Despite dodgy（躲闪）reputation, surprisingly ________share of it--as little as 3 to 4percent-is actually malicious（蓄意的）. And even that portion can bring people together. Researchers at the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma found that if two people share negative feelings about a third person, they are likely to feel closer to each other than they would if they both felt ________about him or her.

Gossip may even make us better people. A team of Dutch researchers reported that hearing gossip about others made research subjects more ________positive gossip inspired self-improvement efforts, and negative gossip made people prouder of themselves. In another study, the worse participants felt upon hearing a piece of negative gossip, the more likely they were to say they had learnt a ________from it. Negative gossip can also have a prosocial（亲社会的）effect on those who are gossip about. Researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley found that once people were ostracized（排斥）from a ground due to reputed selfishness, they reformed their ways in an attempt to regain the ________ of the people they had alienated.

By far the most positive assessment of gossip, though, comes from the anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. Once upon a time, in Dunbar's account, our primate ancestors ________ through grooming（梳毛）, their mutual back-scratching ensuring mutual self-defense in the event of attack by predators. But as hominids（原始人类）grew more intelligent and more social, their groups became too ________ to unite by grooming alone. That's where ________and gossip, broadly defined-stepped in. Dubar argues that idle chatter with and about others gave early humans sense of shared identity and helped them grow ________ of their environment, thus cultivating the complex higher functioning that would ________ yield such glories of civilization as the Talmud, Pascal, and Ann Landers.

So next time you're tempted to gossip, fear not-you may actually be promoting cooperation, boosting others self-esteem, and ________ essential task of the human family. That`s what I heard, anyway.

The pressure for change is building: reactions to the Glasgow climate pact

The Glasgow climate package, aimed at ensuring the world limits global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, was     1     even by the UK hosts as“imperfect", and leaves much of the hard work on cutting greenhouse gas emissions for next year. Boris Johnson,the UK prime minister, said:“We asked nations to come together for our planet at Cop 26, and they have answered that     2     . I want to thank the leaders, negotiators and campaigners who made this pact (协议、契约）happen and the people of Glasgow who welcomed them with open arms."

"There is still a huge amount more to do in the coming years. But today's agreement is a big step forward and, critically, we have the first ever international agreement to phase down (逐步减少)coal and a     3     to limit global warming to 1.5C. I hope that we will look back on Cop 26 in Glasgow as the beginning of the end of climate change, and I will continue to work     4     towards that goal."

Al Gore,the former US vice-president,also praised the public pressure put on world leaders at the conference: “The Glasgow Climate Pact and the pledges made at Cop26 move the global community forward in our urgent work to address the climate crisis and limit global temperature rise to 1.5C, but we know this progress, while meaningful,is not enough. “We must move faster to deliver a     5     transition away from fossil fuels and toward a cleaner and more equitable future for our planet.The progress achieved in the lead-up and at Cop26 was only possible because of the power of people young and old using their voices to demand action."

Many developed and developing countries nailed the progress it represented on the world's goals .But green campaigners warned that the     6     of the climate crisis meant the world was running out of time. Frans Timmermans, executive vice-president of the European Commission,     7     up many countries' reactions, saying:“'It doesn't stop here,it only starts."

On the last-minute weakening of language about phasing out coal, Timmermans said: "Let's be clear, I'd rather not have the change. I was very happy with the language we had." But he added it was “like going from 24 carat gold to 18 carat, it's still gold...we are now making     8     steps to eliminate coal ...and that countries that are so dependent on coal are willing to be part of that agreement is astonishing".

Countries will have to return next year and the year after to     9     their targets on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Laurence Tubiana, one of the architects of the 2015 Paris deal and now CEO of the European Climate Foundation, said the outcome showed that the 2015 Paris climate agreement was working as     10    .

9 . A Mountain But not a Volcano

On September 20th the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the central banks' central bank, released data showing that corporate borrowing around the world remains at an all time high. A notable ______ is in China, where there is even more business borrowing as a share of GDP than in Japan at the peak of its bubble-related borrowing fever in the 1990s. But it is high everywhere. Corporate ______ in the rich world stood at 102% of GDP at the end of March, compared with 92% before the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. Could high levels of debt ______ the recovery in advanced economies?

Many regulators were sounding the ______ about elevated company debt even before the covid19 pandemic. Since then, the hit to firm's incomes has led to a wave of rating downgrades: between March 2020 and March 2021, Fitch, a ratings agency, ______ 460 firms, or almost 20% of its corporate portfolio. While defanlts (违约) have eased this year as economies have recovered, many firms will be ______ by higher levels of debt for years to come. Even if interest rates remain ______, this "debt overhand" could affect their willingness to invest or to hire new staff.

Intriguingly, however, aftereffects from corporate debt booms rarely cause significant economic damage, even if ______ themselves suffer when firms default. A recent paper by Moritz Schularick, of the University of Bonn, and several co-authors, examines data on business cycles for 17 advanced countries over more than a century, and compares corporate debt bursts with those associated with ______ borrowing (like the 200809 financial crisis).

The authors argue that lenders often have a/an ______ to restructure old corporate loans, reducing the risk of "zombie" companies persisting, and freeing up finance to support the next recovery. For household debt, however, restructuring thousands of ______ loans is often impossible, and lenders may be more inclined to keep the loans on their books in the hope that house prices eventually ______. The risks to the economy are higher after commercial property bursts than for corporate debt where lenders mainly have their eyes on firm's cash flows. This is one reason why the property-related debt depression in China are potentially disturbing.

In much of the rich world, there are reasons to be ______ optimistic. The largest lenders are in much better health than in 2008. All of the major ______ authorities, carried out stress tests during 2020, using macroeconomic scenarios much more severe than have actually came out, but their banking systems were able to absorb large corporate losses and carry on lending. And the parts of the economy that have had the toughest time during the pandemic only account for a relatively small share of corporate debt. For example, the BIS projects that ______ will increase in the hospitality industry (酒店餐饮业) over the coming years, but they note that the sector only accounts for between 1.5% and 8% of corporate credit in the nine major economies they model.

There will be a mountain of corporate debt in many countries for some time. But that dos not mean the recovery will necessarily falter (衰退).

10 . Unwrapping your shopping to find you have bought mouldy (发霉的) bread, rotten fruit and sour milk could soon become a thing of the past, thanks to the range of emerging 'active packaging' technologies. While traditional packaging simply _______ a barrier that protects food, active packaging can do a lot more. Some materials _______ with the product to improve it in some way, or provide better information on the state it is in. _______, they may absorb oxygen inside a wrapper to help prevent food spoilage or show whether potentially dangerous foods like red meat and chicken have been stored at unsafe temperatures.

One of the new breed of packaging technologies that have just gone on the market in France is a ‘time temperature indicator’. Stores where the product has already been introduced report that far fewer consumers are returning _______ food. The indicator is basically a label that _______ the temperature a package has been kept at and for how long. The label has a dark ring around a lighter circle. The central ring contains a chemical which polymerises (聚合), changing colour as it does so from _______ to dark. If the package stays cool, the reaction is slow, but increasing the temperature speeds up the polymerization. When the inner circle darkens, it means the product is no longer _______ fresh.

Smart packaging can also control the _______ of the atmosphere inside a container. For instance, the make-up of oxygen (O2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) within packaged vegetables will influence their freshness. This can be hard to control in a sealed package, since vegetables _______ more oxygen and give off more carbon dioxide as the package gets warmer. A firm in California is trying to solve the problem with a wrapper it calls ‘Intelimer’ which changes its permeability (渗透) as the temperature changes in a way that keeps different produces at their best O2/CO2 ________.

Decay can also be ________ by controlling the environment inside a package with an ‘oxygen scavenger’(清除剂). ________, this is achieved by placing a small bag filled with iron powder in the package — any oxygen in the package is consumed by the iron as it oxidises. However, consumers don't ________ finding small bags marked ‘Don't eat in their food’, so a company in New Jersey is making a wrap that itself consumes oxygen. The ________ includes an inner layer of an oxidisable polymer (聚合物) that traps oxygen in the same way as iron.

It is predicted that between 20 and 40 per cent of all food packaging will soon be ________.