1 . If you are at all typical, listening takes up more of your waking hours than any other activity. A study of persons of varied occupational backgrounds showed that 70% of their waking moments were spent in communication. And of that time, writing took 9%, reading absorbed 16%, talking occupied 30%, and________accounted for 45%. Other surveys underscore the large amounts of time that people in different walks of life spend in listening. It is important to listen effectively because of the sheer amount of it that you do each day.

________, many of the most important aspects of your life are greatly influenced by your skills or________of skill in listening. The quality of your friendships, the ________of your family relationships, your effectiveness at work these depend, in large measure, on your ability to listen.

Unfortunately, few people are good listeners. Even at the purely informational level, researchers claim that 75% of oral communication is________, misunderstood, or quickly forgotten. Rarer still is the ability to listen for the deepest meaning in what people say. How________, but how common, to talk with someone about subjects of intense interest to oneself ________to experience the choking realization that the other person was not really listening and that his responses were simply________and mechanical.

A major reason for the poor listening in our society is that most of us receive a very rigorous early training in non-listening. The therapist Franklin Ernst says that "from the earliest years of life, a person's________ activity is the most heavily trained of all activities... The person's listening ... is more attended to than his bowel training, his bladder activity, or his genital activity." Ernst points out that the typical child, in his most impressionable years, receives a steady________of anti-listening regulations. ________say things like:

“Pretend you don't notice."

“Don't take it so seriously.”

“He didn't mean what he said.”

“We don't listen to those things in our family.

The typical parent not only________these anti-listening comments, he demonstrates them daily in his own life. By word and________we are taught to be non-listeners in our childhood.

Most of us have been trained to be poor listeners. Yet ________we spend more time listening than doing anything else, and the quality of our listening greatly affects both the personal and the________dimensions of our lives.

2 . Did Tea and Beer Bring About Industrialization?

Professor Macfarlane has spent decades trying to understand the mystery of the Industrial Revolution. Why did it happen in Britain at the end of the 18th century?

Macfarlane compares the question as a puzzle. He ________ that there were about 20 different factors and all of them needed to be present before the revolution could happen. The chief ________ can be found in history textbooks. For industry to ________, there needed to be the technology and power to drive factories, large urban populations to provide cheap labor, a ________ economy, and a political system that allowed this to happen. All these factors must have been necessary but not sufficient to cause the revolution. Most historians, however, are ________ that one or two missing factors are needed to solve the puzzle. The missing factors, Macfarlane supposes, are tea and beer.

Historians had noticed one interesting factor around the mid-18th century that required the ________. Between 1650 and 1740, the population in Britain didn’t increase, but then it grew rapidly. The population burst seemed to happen at the right time to provide labor for the Industrial Revolution. But why? When it started, it was ________ efficient to have people living close together. People got diseases, particularly from human waste. Some historical records ________ that there was a change in the incidence (发病率）of waterborne disease at that time. Macfarlane thought whatever the British were drinking must have been important in ________ disease. The English drank beer for a long time, and they were protected by the strong antibacterial agent in hops (啤酒花), which were added to make beer. But in the late 17th century a tax was ________ on malt, a basic ingredient of beer. The poor turned to water and gin, and in the 1720s the death rate began to rise again. Then it suddenly dropped. What caused this?

Macfarlane looked to Japan, which was also developing large cities at the same time. Waterborne diseases were far fewer in Japan than in Britain. Could it be the ________ of tea in their culture? Macfarlane then noticed the history of tea in Britain provided an extraordinary ________ of dates. Tea was relatively expensive until Britain started direct trade with China in the early 18th century. By the 1740s, about the time the infant death rate was falling, and the drink was common. Macfarlane ________ the fact that water had to be boiled, together with the stomach-purifying properties of tea so clearly ________ in books, meant the breast milk provided by mothers was healthier than it had ever been. No other European nation drank tea so often as the British, which, by Macfarlane’s ________, pushed other nations out of the race for the Industrial Revolution.

3 . Making predictions hinders the brain’s ability to remember the present moment, new research suggests. The hippocampus, a brain structure usually ________ with remembering events, also uses experiences to make forecasts (neuroscientists call this ‘‘statistical learning”). ________ scientists writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA have now demonstrated that the latter function can disrupt the former.

Researchers showed participants a series of photographs on a screen without telling them that some image categories always ________ others: mountains always came immediately after beaches, for example. The subjects were intended to ________ learn these associations and begin to expect these pairings. Later, the participants were shown the same photos again, mixed in with new examples, and were asked if they had ________ any of them before. They accurately recalled seeing ________ images at a much better rate than the “predictive” ones (like the beach pictures).

The scientists repeated this process while scanning participants’ brains with functional MRI. Each image category prompted a distinct neural activity pattern, and the ________ for “predictable” categories were seen in the hippocampus when the corresponding predictive category was displayed. ________, this effect’s strength in fMRI corresponded inversely with participants, memory task scores. “The more evidence for prediction we saw, the ________ their memory was for those predictive items such as a particular beach scene, ” says study lead author and Yale University cognitive neuro scientist Brynn Sherman. This suggests that predictive images triggered the hippocampus to shift gears toward ________一 and away from encoding a new memory.

The study is among the first to demonstrate how making predictions ________ human memory. Scientists previously suspected that the hippocampus had a role in statistical learning but had not known how it ________ with memory formation. “This paper is a really nice demonstration of the ________ where the hippocampus is doing both these things,” says University of Virginia cognitive neuroscientist Nicole Long, who was not involved in the research.

The team says this trade-off occurs because remembering and predicting both use some of the same ________ pathways. In the paper, the authors compare it with “using one’s right foot to operate both the brake and gas pedals in a car . . . but not both at the same time.” This setup could prevent memory redundancies and thus ________ brainpower.Sherman says: a successful prediction would contain the same information as an actual outcome.

The brain circuitry that makes all this possible still requires further research, Long says. For instance, she wonders how much repetition is needed before the hippocampus shifts from recording to predicting and whether it is possible to train the structure to improve both modes in tandem.

4 . “Physicists, fascinated by mathematical beauty, are failing to solve new problems.” High- class physicists no longer care about physical reality-nor should they. “Science is over.”

Those are simplified but not entirely misleading summaries of recent books by Sabine Hassenfelder (Lost in Math) , Richard Dawid (String Theory and the Scientific Method) and John Horgan (The End of Science) , _______. I get asked about these books and their _______ message frequently. For theoretical physicists they are bitter criticism, since they argue that today's physics has gotten itself into a _______.

But they disagree in their descriptions of the problem. Ms. Hassenfelder argues that physicists need to pay more attention to reality, Mr. Dawid that they can safely ignore it. Mr. Horgan, _______, thinks that physicists' time is past and they should do something else instead. What's going on here?

Opinions may differ about the current health of physics, but no reasonable person can _______ that it has been a hugely successful enterprise. Without revolutionary 20th-century breakthroughs in quantum physics (量子物理学) and relativity (相对论) , modern technology -including GPS, nuclear power and much more- would be literally _______.

In the latter part of the 20th century our theoretical understanding reached a very high plateau (稳定期) . The so-called Standard Model of particle physics offers complete and _______ equations (方程) for the behavior of ordinary matter under ordinary conditions (allowing a very generous_______ of the word “ordinary”) .

The theoretical framework of the Standard Model was in place by the 1970s, which predicted and _______ remarkable new discoveries and observations, notably including experimental confirmation of the existence of quarks (夸克) . It is a peak of human achievements.

But this grand success is bittersweet. In earlier times, research that added to or changed the theoretical foundations of physics also had practical uses and benefits. Today, however, discoveries in fundamental physics are ________ to have a significant impact in engineering, chemistry or biology, precisely because we already have well-tested foundations that seem more than adequate for those applications. The physical principles that empower 21 st-century technologies had all been ________ by the 1950s.

When you have reached a high plateau, further improvement gets more difficult. Yet there are still wonderful ________ for new discoveries and technological innovations. We can apply our existing physical knowledge to make innovative and useful things, like computers that make full use of the richness of the quantum world to store and process information more effectively. However, important theoretical questions remain to be answered. ________, we still haven't got a clear picture of what most of the universe, measured by mass, is made of.

My hero Richard Feynman joked that “Einstein was a giant: His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. Those of us who are not so tall have to choose!”But I think there is no need to be so ________. Really, the plateau we've reached is a good place to be. In fact, physics is especially exciting these days, ________ we're learning how to use our understanding of “ordinary” matter to make machine assistants - computers, sensors and drones - that will amplify and enrich our thoughts, do useful things and explore in all directions.

5 . The virtual world is full of opportunities to share with people around the world. It’s also a place where nothing is _________ and there are no “take-backs.” A lot of what you do and say online can still be found again even if you have _________ it, and it’s often something that is easy for others to access.

Research shows that a high percentage of teens receive _________ messages and requests when they’re online. These can be scary, strange, and even embarrassing. If you feel _______ by a stranger or a friend online, immediately tell an adult you can trust. It is never a good idea to _________. Any response you make is not only likely to make things worse, and might result in you saying something you wish you hadn’t.

If you are eager to let out angry comment on a message board or blog, it’s a good idea to wait a few minutes, _________ , and remember that your comments may stay up long after your temper has cooled and you have perhaps changed your mind. You might mistakenly find yourself regulated on social networks and this could _________ mean, insulting, or abusive comments toward someone else. But later you may _________ all that you have done. We’ve all heard of cyber bullying （网络欺凌）, but most people think online bullying is something people do _________. But sharing stuff or dropping random comments when we’re not face to face with someone can __________ just as much, if not more. And it can damage how others see you if they find out. __________ , a good rule to remember is that if you wouldn’t say it, show it, or do it in person, you probably shouldn’t do it online either.

Chances are that you’ve already checked your “digital __________ ” -- nearly half of all online users do. Try typing your screen name or email address into a search engine and see what comes up. That’s one way to get a sense of what others see as your online identity. In general, if you have questions about the trail you’re leaving online, don’t be afraid to ask a trusted adult. __________ , you might know more about the online world than a lot of adults do, but they have more life experience, which is something that can often be of more help. Your online identity is __________ in much the same way as your real-life identity, except that when you’re online you don’t always get a chance to explain your tone or what you mean. Thinking before you post and following the same rules for __________ behavior online as you do offline can help you avoid leaving an online identity trail you may over time come to regret.

6 . It is understandable that the plan to raise the retirement age has sparked debates, because the move involves individuals’ interests and delayed retirement has been on countries’ ________ for a long time.

The wider the debate is, the clearer the issues will be. The first misunderstanding is that the government is thinking over raising the retirement age to ________ the so-called shortfall in pension funds. The fact is, there is no such thing as a nationwide shortfall in the pension funds, because the situation varies from region to region. So we need a ________ pension system to ensure all regions have adequate pension funds.

Many countries with extra pension insurance are drawing up plans for raising the retirement age. Nowadays, people start working at a later age. So the retirement age should be extended ________ the structural changes of individuals’ life-cycle. For example, many born in the 1980s and 1990s started working at 25 or 30 due to their ________ of higher education. If such people retire at 60, they would have worked for only 35 or 30 years. And given their longer life expectancy, they’ll receive pensions for a longer period of time, putting extra ________ on the pension system.

But since delayed retirement ________ people’s interests, it must be planned carefully. First, the retirement age should be raised, once the leadership decides to do so, ________ across the country. Although rolling out pilot programs before ________ economic and social reforms made them more effective, the retirement age cannot be raised in different regions in a targeted manner, because that’ll not be helpful to ________ development in different regions.

Second, some people are against raising the retirement age because they feel they may be forced to work for a few “extra years”. As has been learned from other countries’ ________, some policies can be adopted to help accept the delayed retirement plan. ________, it should be made clear to employees that the longer they contribute to the pension funds, the higher pension they’ll draw after retirement—and early retirement will result in ________ pension.

Third, it is important to balance the interests of different groups. China’s current retirement system distinguishes between men and women, and the employees of State-owned enterprises and privately-owned companies have different opinions on delayed retirement. The new retirement policy needs to be ________ to all groups.

The debate on delayed retirement shows that reforms of social policies will face more challenges and the challenges need political wisdom and practical strategies to________.

7 . Gone are the days when big businesses were looked upon by environmentalists as enemies in the fight against global warming.

Just two weeks after U. S. President Donald Trump pulled his country out of the Paris Climate Agreement, more than 900 American firms put their _______to a “We Are Still In” open letter to the United Nations. Together, they promise to help reduce America’s carbon emissions by 26 percent by 2025, _______the Paris Climate Agreement.

_______, big businesses have been taking climate change seriously for years now. Alongside energy-efficiency measures, the strongest evidence of their _______has been the number of new wind and solar projects that they have been helping to build around the world. IT firms such as Amazon and Google have been using clean energy to power their servers (服务器). Some environmentalists now believe that big businesses could become strong _______behind the worldwide spread of renewable energy. “There used to be little action,” says Marty Spitzer of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), “Now, I see fundamental _______being made.”

More recently, this enthusiasm for environmental protection has _______from corporate headquarters to branches and suppliers, and from developed countries to emerging markets. Take Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, for example. In March 2016, it said that it would require its own operations and those along its _______chain to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by one billion tons by 2030. This is _______to taking 211 million passenger cars off America’s roads for a year. The announcement was ________by the WWF and other conservation organizations, which are helping Walmart’s suppliers work towards this goal. Apple, maker of the iPhone, has said that seven of its biggest global manufacturers have promised to power their Apple-related ________with renewable energy by the end of this year.

According to the WWF, in the United States alone, nearly two dozen of the biggest firms have committed themselves to becoming 100 percent renewable in the near future. Hervé Touati of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a clean-energy research firm, explains the ________behind this trend. Going green improves the companies’ public image and helps attract customers, staff and investors.

Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world’s biggest brewer (啤酒公司), has lots of young people among its many ________. Many of them take environmental issues seriously. Electricity, used ________in the brewing process, amounts to a tenth of its total costs. Last year, the company set out to increase the role of renewables in generating ________to 100 percent by 2025. “My generation often takes energy and clean air for granted,” said Tony Milikin, the firm’s chief sustainability officer. “The generation coming up now looks at it totally differently.”

8 . Some fifteen years ago, when smartphone apps were new and few truly understood their potentials, retailers (零售商) barely knew that consumers could browse in stores while comparing prices and ____   from other item providers through certain apps before ____ making the   purchase online. Ten years ago, brick-and-mortar (实体店) retailers had to acknowledge that showrooming existed and appeared to be a threat. That’s the year when retailers were up in arms as online giant Amazon released an “evil” promotion that encouraged consumers to visit ____ stores and use Amazon’s Price Check app at the same time. Any purchase completed through the app was given ____ discounts, which significantly stimulated sales and   ____ many shop owners to the edge of bankruptcy.

From the point on, retailers began launching strategies to combat showrooming including releasing ____ items for sale so that no reference prices from other sources are available for comparison.

“Media have reported showrooming as a big threat to physical stores,” says Casey Carl, a retailer. “However, less ____ is the fact that it is also the greatest opportunity for us.” Retailers need to accept that the act of showrooming is not illegal and any sensible buyer tends to ____ prices. As there’s nothing you can do about it, you might as well offer conveniences like in-store internet access to ____ these consumers. With caring services combined with acceptable prices, the store might actually improve the likelihood for consumers to close the deal ____.

And a showrooming study indicates that it’s wise for retailers to limit the item price to at most 5 dollars higher than what online stores charge. After all, for the majority of consumers, getting the absolute lowest price is not their ____. Many of them, instead, are willing to pay ____ in exchange for favourable shopping experiences, such as the pleasant store atmosphere, agreeable staff attitudes or even the merry music played, with a reasonable price ____, of course.

Besides, adopting a strategy of ____ channels is also essential. With many sale channels under control, retailers are sure to have access to the lowest price possible for an item. Therefore, when a customer pulls out a mobile device in store, retailers can be spared the ____ that was unavoidable for them some ten years ago.