1 . Is loyalty in the workplace dead?

Just recently, Lynda Gratton, a workplace expert, proclaimed that it was. In The Financial Times, she said that it had been “killed off through _________ contracts, outsourcing, automation and multiple careers.”

It’s sad if this good virtue is now out of place in the business world. But the situation may be more _________. Depending on how you _________ it, loyalty may not be dead, but is just playing out differently.

Fifty years ago, an employee could stay at the same company for decades, said Tammy Erickson, an author and work-force consultant. Many were _________ longtime employment along with health care and a pension.

Now many companies cannot or will not hold up their end of the bargain, so why should the employees hold up theirs? Given the opportunity, they’ll take their skills and their portable retirement accounts elsewhere. These days, Ms. Gratton writes, _________ is more important than loyalty: “Loyalty is about the future - trust is about the present.”

Ms. Erickson says that the quid pro quo (交换物，报酬) of modern employment is more likely to be: As long as I work for you, I promise to have the relevant skills and _________ fully in my work; in return you’ll pay me _________, but I don’t expect you to care for me when I’m 110.

For some baby boomers, this _________ has been hard to accept. Many started their careers _________ that they would be rewarded based on tenure (任职).

A longtime employee who is also productive and motivated is of enormous value, said Cathy Benko, chief talent officer at Deloitte. On the other hand, she said, “You can be with a company a long time and not be highly committed.”

Ms. Benko has seen her company shift its ____________ to employees’ level of engagement - or “the level at which people are motivated to deliver their best work” - rather than length of tenure.

Then there are the effects of the recent recession. Many people - if they haven’t been ____________- have stayed in jobs because they feel they have no choice. Employers may need to prepare for disruptions and turnover when the job market improves.

If the pendulum(摇摆不定的事态或局面) shifts, how will businesses persuade their best employees to stay? ____________ may do the trick, but not always. Especially with younger people, “you’re not going to buy extra loyalty with extra money,” Ms. Erickson said. ____________, employers need to make jobs more challenging and give workers more creative space, she said.

Loyalty may not be what it once was, but most companies will still be better off with at least a core of people who stay with them across decades.

If loyalty is seen as a ____________ to keep workers of all ages fulfilled, productive and involved, it can continue to be cultivated in the workplace - to the ____________ of both employer and employee.

Brain typing

When you move, sense, speak or do just about anything, your brain generates a specific corresponding pattern of electrical activity. Brain typing under development can use these impulses to restore movement in some who have paralysis, a loss of control of the body caused by an injury to the nerves.

This advanced brain implant can let individuals with impaired limb movement create text using the mind-no hands needed. Such technology could potentially benefit millions of people worldwide who cannot type or speak because of impaired limbs or vocal muscles. But this technique let people generate just 40 characters per minute, far lower than the average keyboard typing speed or roughly 190.

Thus, some scientists have a hesitation about this new research: while restoring communication via written letters is intuitive, it may not be the most efficient efficient means of doing so. “Why not teach the person a new language based on simpler elementary gestures?” One of them asks, “This could both boost the speed of communication and, crucially, decrease the mental effort and attention needed. “

For now, Willett, a research scientist, is focusing on brain typing together with his team. He admits that analyzing what someone intends to say is still a major challenge facing researchers, given that individuals generate speech more quickly than they write or type. “It's been a hard problem to decode speech with enough accuracy and vocabulary size to allow people to have a general conversation.” Willett says. “But we' re now excited that we can decode handwriting very accurately. That is a great breakthrough.”

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Why modern music should quieten down

Quietness may be underestimated values in pop music.     1     (look) up “the loudest band in the world” and you will be confronted with a large number of rock giants from Manowar who proudly achieved a sound pressure level of 139 dB to Motor-head. The pickings are slim     2     we substitute “quiet” for “loud”.

In a way, increasing the volume of a song makes biological sense, something the music industry       3     (exploit) since the jukebox era. There is an organ in the inner ear called sacculus that in linked to a region of the brain     4     (associate) with pleasure and react to low-frequency vibrations over 90 dB.

On the other hand,     5     (focus) sorely on loudness ignores the infinitely more subtle appeal of being quiet. A French band called “Air”,     6     twenty-years collection was released on June 10, are masters of the art. As any teacher knows, quietness can be more effective than shouting to make people pay attention. Air employed this gentle persuasion on Moon Safari, an album that attracts the listener       7     the peaceful sound of rain and muted drums. Even when Air do increase the volume, the vocalist's voice remains one of     8     (gentle) noises in pop. Given its warmth and peacefulness, it is no coincidence     9     the album was a favourite among clubbers after a night out. It is a time when the desire for kindness, companionship and warmth prevails.

So forget the “loudness war”. Manowar     10     be happy with their 139 dB, but they are comprehensively defeated by fireworks, which reach 145 to 150 dB when they explode, and the call of the blue whale, which goes all the way up to 188 dB. Now that' something to shout about.

4 . Launched in 2010, iQiyi has grown used to the foreign press calling it “the Netflix of China.” Not the worst nickname, given the video-streaming pioneer's success. But Gong Yu, iQiyi's founder and boss, insists that his firm is more accurately _________ as “Netflix plus.” A bold claim for a loss-making business worth one-fifteenth as much as America's (cash-generating) entertainment powerhouse with a market value of $214 bn. Still, Mr Gong has a_________.

Like Netflix, iQiyi offers customers a catalogue of licensed and original content. Unlike Netflix, which relies almost entirely on subscription fees, iQiyi has _________ revenue streams. “Membership fees,” which start from 19.8 yuan ($2.87) a month, _______ just over half of iQiyi's 7.4 bn yuan in revenues in the second quarter. The rest came mainly from an online store (which sells “entertainment-related merchandise), mobile-gaming, an e-book business and advertisements: iQiyi operates a “freemium” model which allows users to stream some content free of charge _________ that they agree to watch ads.

Conveniently for iQiyi, which does little business outside its home market, Netflix is blocked in China, under laws that _________ a lot of foreign content. But that is not to say that China is free from the streaming wars of the sort between Netflix and rivals like Disney, HBO and NBC Universal.

Far from it. Mr Gong is _________ Tencent Video, which overtook iQiyi at the end of June with 114m video subscribers to iQiyi's 105m (see chart) . Mr Gong's firm lost 14m subscribers in the most recent quarter while Tencent Video, which also runs a freemium model and_________subscribers 20 yuan a month, added Zin. Tencent Video offers a richer selection of English-language _________, including hit television series like Chernobyl and Silicon Valley. More important, the rivalry between Tencent Video and iQiyi is the war between mighty Tencent and ____________ Baidu, a search firm that is iQiyi's majority owner.

____________, as Westerners who pay for a few video subscriptions can prove, streaming is not a zero-sum game. Gigi Zhou of BOCOM International, a broker, believes the Chinese market will soon be big enough to ____________ both iQiyi and Tencent Video, which also has yet to make money. Ms Zhou expects 400m Chinese to subscribe to video-streaming platforms by 2023, up from some 300m in 2019. So long as no new rival ____________, each firm could capture around 150m, helping them spread costs over more subscribers and so turn a profit.

Before streaming peace can break out, iQiyi faces another fight. On August 13th it said it was under ____________ by America's Securities and Exchange Commission after a short-seller accused it of cooking sales data, a charge it ____________. If found guilty, it may have to delist from New York's Nasdaq exchange. The firm's stable share price implies that investors' faith in battle-hardened Mr Gong remains unshaken.

5 . Despite nutrition experts’ best efforts to educate people about the dangers of a diet filled with processed food, it appears that the world doesn’t want to listen. Medical specialists point out that, although eating too much unhealthy food is likely to be as dangerous in the long term as smoking, regular consumption of high-calorie food has somehow become more socially ________ than ever. While local authorities in some towns and cities have taken measures to fight the rise in this trend by ________ the number of fast food outlets permitted to be open at the same time, critics argue that people have every right to make their own decisions about what they eat and how they choose to live. However, the way in which we have come to eat a lot of takeaways isn’t only a(n) ________ issue of weight gain, or of buying larger clothes. The consequences of mass overconsumption should strike ________ into the hearts of everyone.

Research suggests that there is an evolutionary reason as to why people ________ overeat—it is simply part of our inborn behaviour. When humans evolved, we did not have the adequate supply of food that we enjoy today, and so eating was more about ________ than pleasure. We became more likely to choose high-calorie foods, with high fat content, that could ________ us through cold winters when the supply of nourishment became inadequate. This explains why a 600-calorie burger seems so ________ : it makes us feel well fed and inspires contentment. Processed food ________ the reward response in our brains, so we feel obliged to overeat, and not necessarily in a healthy way. Junk food acts as a trigger (触发器) for chemicals such as the ‘feel good’ dopamine to flood through the brain and cause a sensation of happiness. ________, high amounts of sugar and sodium (one of the chemicals in salt and other ingredients of fast food) cause a huge rise in blood sugar, pushing it to unnatural levels.

This occurs within the first few moments of eating a high-calorie meal. From there, routinely processing such high levels of sodium is ________. The body’s organs are pushed beyond their ________ ability to do so. The kidneys (肾脏) cannot remove all the extra salt from the blood, and thus extra sodium causes the heart to pump faster while transporting blood through the veins (血管). There are multiple dangers of high blood pressure, especially for the elderly and in the long term. Sodium ________ in such quantities can lead to dehydration, a condition whose symptoms are extremely similar to hunger, and this leads to a painful truth: as soon as you have finished your junk food meal, you immediately start to ________ another. Thereafter, the body starts to digest the food. Usually, this takes between 4 and 12 hours, but with fast food, where the fat content is so much higher, the same ________ lasts at least three days.