2 . Go on a 15-minute Tour

Didn’t someone say that life is about the journey, not the destination?     1     when you are focused only on getting to the next meeting, starting your next class period, or hurrying to send an email, you’re missing all of the people between Points A and B.

To commit some time to the journey, take some time to walk around where you work and notice your surroundings.     2     Also, some of the smaller yet critical social clues that exist right under your nose will be concentrated on again.

    3     Things to look for include the look and feel of people’s work spaces, the timing of when different people move around the office, and which people seek interaction versus those who stay at their desks all day.

After your first observation tour, select a different day to tour your workspace for moods. Other people’s moods can provide you with critical clues about how things are going.     4     Focus on what you see, hear, and pick up on in other people.

Schedule 15 minutes to tour your workplace twice a week for a month and be sure to avoid making too many assumptions or conclusions — just simply observe.     5    

4 . Tonal languages use pitch (音调) to distinguish words that otherwise might sound the same. In Mandarin, for instance, mă means horse whereas mã means mother. Nontonal languages like Spanish sometimes include pitch changes to suggest emotion, for example, but not to change a word’s meaning.

As a Mandarin speaker and musician, Jingxuan Liu wondered about the crossover (融合) between language and music. While studying at Duke University, Liu helped analyze the musical abilities of nearly half a million people from 203 countries. Her colleagues had launched an online game in which participants completed several musical tasks, including identifying matching melodies at different pitches and finding beat tracks that fit songs’ rhythms.

On average, native speakers of the 19 represented tonal languages were better at the melody task compared with speakers of 29 nontonal languages. And the effect wasn’t small a tonal first language strengthened melodic understanding by about half the amount that music lessons did, which was also surveyed. But tonal languages speakers tended to be worse at the rhythm task.

Humans must be choosy about what they pay attention to. Pitch patterns are quite important in tonal languages, which might explain the balancing act in music. “You’ve got a finite resource of attention, and you’ve got to divide up that somehow,” says study coauthor Courtney Hilton, a scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Prior research on language and music often compared just two tongues, usually English and Mandarin. But other cultural influences, such as Eastern and Western music styles, could have affected results. By examining a wide range of people, the new study included languages never estimated in this way and reached more generalizable conclusion.

“Our result here is showing that the language someone speaks which is an important part of culture — also shapes cognition,” Hilton says.

5 . A fourth color might be added to traffic lights to better realize the potential of self-driving vehicles, as stated in a recent paper by researchers at North Carolina State University in the US.

Autonomous vehicles can do more than just drive-they are able to sense their surroundings and upload information. A shared network gives orders to stop at a crossing based on traffic conditions.

The added white lights would be used to signal to human drivers that autonomous vehicles are managing the upcoming traffic flow intelligently. Drivers don’t have to check the traditional lights if the white one is on. “The white lights will tell human drivers to simply follow the car in front of them,” one of the study authors Ali Hajbabaie told the university’s website.

Simulated (模拟的) models showed that autonomous vehicles were able to improve traffic flow on their own. Introducing the white light also has a positive effect on reducing fuel consumption. The higher the percentage of autonomous vehicles at a crossing, the faster the traffic moves, reducing about 40 to 99 percent of the total delay time.

What kind of infrastructure (基础设施) is needed as self-driving technology thrives? In an interview with China Surveying and Mapping magazine, Liu Jingnan at the Chinese Academy of Engineering shared his answers.

To begin with, the vehicle’s network that collects data about the environment and shares the data with other vehicles needs to be intelligent. High-precision maps are needed for autonomous vehicles to plan routes in detail. They can provide both updated information on traditional maps and real-time changes, such as accidents.

For example, when driving around a curve, the navigation (导航) system in the vehicle needs to calculate the safe speed based on the map’s information. And if the area is foggy, the network has to alarm the other cars to slow down.

Other elements on the road need to be upgraded too. For example, road markings should be precise and readable for machines. Sensors should be built on sidewalks and roads to allow vehicles to predict potentially dangerous situations.

6 . Now, Earth Day is celebrated around the world. We still face many challenges, such as climate change, plastic pollution, and deforestation. But we can all make a difference.

Adeline Tiffanie Suwana was 12 when her family’s home flooded. Indonesia, her island nation, is often hit hard by floods and other natural disasters.

Adeline learned that mangrove trees play a key role in flood protection and rallied classmates to plant 200 trees during a school break. They started a group called Sahabat Alam or Friends of Nature, which works to conserve the region’s biodiversity and combat climate change.

Today. Adeline attends university, studying how businesses can help the environment.

EPS—expanded polystyrene foam—is the white, lightweight stuff used to make things like takeout food containers, foam egg cartons, and packing “peanuts”. But it takes up a lot of space and is difficult to recycle. EPS breaks into small pieces as it floats down waterways into oceans, harming wildlife along the way.

Eighth-graders Julia Bray, Luke Clay, and Ashton Cofer looked at EPS’s chemical makeup and saw that it was mostly carbon. That sparked an idea. Could they turn it into activated carbon, a material that filters toxins from water?

After 50 hours of experiments, including one that accidentally set the family grill fire, they succeeded!

When Claire Vlases of Montana was in seventh grade, she learned about plans to expand and modernize her middle school. Claire asked the school board to add solar panels to the project. The board liked the idea but said it could contribute just $25,000, one-fifth of the cost. So Claire organized a group of kids and adults who set to work raising the rest.

They asked for donations, even going door-to-door for them. And they appealed to charitable foundations too. One even donated half the cost!

After two years of hard work, the group paid for the solar panels, which now supply one-fourth of the school’s electricity needs.

A new chain of coffee shops has sprung up in the city of Wuxi, East China’s Jiangsu province, themed on the ancient Huishan clay figurine (泥人) culture—with a few modern adaptations. The Nanimomo Cafe chain has expanded     1     (rapid) since May last year and now has 11     2     (branch) in operation. The coffee shops display     3     range of figurines and related creative cultural products. In addition     4     drinking coffee, visitors can choose whether     5     (have) a go at making clay sculptures on site.

Huishan clay figurines are made from the black clay found at the foot of Huishan Mountain in Wuxi. They are said to have a     6     (record) history of more than 400 years. And they     7     (list) among the first batch (批) of China’s national intangible cultural heritage (非物质文化遗产) in 2006. In Wuxi dialect, Huishan clay figurines are pronounced nanimomo. The two most famous     8     (tradition) figurines are A Fu and A Xi, meaning “good fortune” and “joy”, and the factory has designed and produced several new figurines, such as Nani and Momo,    9     are more modern and attractive to young consumers. There are also several cute and colorful characters,    10     (carry) different types of food for which Wuxi is famous: spare ribs (排骨), peaches and steamed buns.

9 . I found a wonderful picture of Maolan karst cones online and presented it to the innkeeper. “You can’t go there,” the innkeeper ______ me. “The viewing platform has been closed due to ______ that too many visitors could cause geological damage.”

Despite our disappointment, we ______ an alternative: a seven-hour hike through the “funnel forest”. Initially, we were ______ to run the risk. However, I had ______ the tourism motto in the nature reserve: “If you don’t do it now, you won’t do it in your lifetime.” Three of our group ______ decided to venture into the forest. The innkeeper responded with a knowing ______ : “Great. Bear Grylls went there.”

The next morning, we set off with a local ______ . Rain came and went three times, and before I actually ______ to climb over the first mountain, I had already got wet to the skin. I was a walking ______ of mud and water.

Our guide, in his 50s, behaved like a botanist, introducing the locally specific plants to us, but I was hardly in the ______ . Every step sank into the muddy, sucking ground. Every log or rock in front of us was a physical ______ . “One can never reach those places without strong willpower,” I murmured, reciting that millennium-old ______ , over and over again.

Sinkholes and entrances to underground rivers kept popping up along our ______ . Thinking of them leading to an unknown world, I began to ______ the road that I can control even more.

Wandering in a green chaos without any obvious landmarks is also breathtaking.

10 . Jones Thando was a 16-year-old senior high school student, who had an idea for a new method of finding pancreatic cancer. When Jones was 15 years old, her aunt died of this kind of cancer, which_______her deeply. This disease is_______serious because there is no way to detect it as early as possible. By the time_______tests determine the patient has the possibility of cancer, it’s often too late to do anything!_______that it was often the case, Jones was determined to do whatever she can to develop a test that could_______problems as early as possible.

The way ahead seemed_______for Jones. She was_______a senior high school student, and what she_______to create was something no one else had tried. So Jones read_______about this kind of cancer, wrote a letter of advice about her idea, and sent it out to more than 500 medical ________. But only one expert, Dr. Amy Maitra ________to her timely and enthusiastically. Dr. Amy promised to cooperate with Jones and gave her some assistance as well as________to a lab.

Another great reward for Jone’s________was winning the big prize at the World Science and Technology Conference. This grand award is presented to young creators that have got a ________ idea. It’s bound to take many years to develop a new test way, ________Jones hopes the way will ________enhance people’ lives and maybe save them, so she insisted on trial and error. Luckily, Jones is not alone as a young creator.________, there were nearly 1500 other competitors for the International award, all of whom had ground-breaking________. For Jones, growing up in a family that is attracted to science and________innovative thinking offered him many advantages. But the key for Jones is that reading, experiment, survey and________are just for fun, and the possibility to enhance the world around her during the process makes it much better.