1 . My friendship with the students in a primary school in Uganda started on a shaky ground. The _________ of not being understood was hidden within, for they spoke a language different from that of mine and mine too fell on deaf ears.

I greeted them with a wide smile, and when I spoke further, they replied with ice cold _________ . A reminder echoed in my mind: you must live through it to get to them. So I gave it another try. I spoke _________ English with hand gestures and a bit of dancing. If all failed, the smile would _________ . Soon we picked up and then the _________ of the learners came into play. At the mention of a name, trembles and face covering were the response I got. I decided to _________a desk with a team each day during group work to get closer. After school, I accompanied them home.

_________ we became friends. They were even _________ of my favorite fruit, avocado (牛油果). If I didn’t get one on my desk, it would find me wherever I was. My slippers were worn out. One night I left them out as no one could steal a pair of slippers in that state. The next morning, I was ready to drag my slippers on as usual and I was surprised they had been _________ . Wow!

The little things we do for each other bring us great joy and warmth. We don’t have a proper spoken language, but we are fluent in the language of __________.

3 . Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent (盛行的) myths. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by your ability to solve complex problems; to read, write and compute at certain levels; and to resolve abstract equations quickly. This vision of intelligence asserts (明确肯定) formal education and bookish excellence as the true measures of self-fulfillment. It encourages a kind of intellectual prejudice that has brought with it some discouraging results. We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is very good at some form of school discipline is “intelligent”. Yet mental hospitals are filled with patients who have all of the properly lettered certificates. A truer indicator of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day.

If you are happy, if you live each moment for everything it’s worth, then you are an intelligent person. Problem solving is a useful help to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent. You are intelligent because you have the ultimate weapon against the big N. B. D. — Nervous Break Down.

Intelligent people do not have N. B. D.’s because they are in charge of themselves. They know how to choose happiness over depression, because they know how to deal with the problems of their lives.

You can begin to think of yourself as truly intelligent on the basis of how you choose to feel in the face of trying circumstances. The life struggles are pretty much the same for each of us. Everyone who is involved with other human beings in any social context has similar difficulties. Disagreements, conflicts and compromises area part of what it means to be human. Similarly, money, growing old, sickness, deaths, natural disasters and accidents are all events which present problems to virtually all human beings. But some people are able to make it, to avoid immobilizing (固定的) depression and unhappiness despite such occurrences, while others collapse or have an N. B. D.. Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don’t measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of humans we know; also, the rarest.

4 . Vaccines (疫苗) may soon make their first film appearance. Led by expert Maria A. Croyle, researchers have developed a thin sheet that preserves vaccines for long periods without using the cooling system. This means the carefully cooled small bottles now used to ship vaccines could potentially be replaced by lightweight films that can be mailed in an envelope and stored on a shelf.

Croyle’s laboratory began developing the technology in 2007. Inspired by amber’s ability to preserve the DNA of insects, the researchers set out to create their own version of the substance by mixing “a lot of sugar and a little bit of salt, much like hard candy,” Croyle explains. The vaccine-containing film is administered by mouth - sweet news for many who dislike needles.

The film is tailored to suit each specific vaccine candidate and provide a protective coating. “We’ve learned over time that the key to really stabilizing whatever the film holds is to have it intermixed with all the components,” Croyle says, adding that the process is quick and uses affordable, standard equipment. “We really wanted to come up with something that would be transported to developing countries.”

Immunization (免疫) programs depend heavily on keeping vaccines cold (2℃-8℃) as they are transported, sometimes over thousands of kilometers to far-away locations. Delivery can be difficult and costly, and transport delaying can cause the vaccines to be ineffective.

But this new product can store live viruses, bacteria and antibodies for several months at 20℃. In a paper published in Science Advances, the scientists show that the live viruses in one vaccine were preserved in the film even after 36 months. They also find that a flu vaccine suspended in their film compares favourably with a traditional flu shot. “The study demonstrates early proof of concept for an exciting platform for vaccine product development,” says Lisa Rohan, who was not involved in the study. She also notes that each vaccine type would need a custom formulation (配方) for future stages of development.

Finding partners to mass-produce for clinical trials is the researchers’ most pressing problem, Croyle says. They are also exploring packaging methods to keep their films stable up to 40℃.

Size is a major advantage- a letter-sized sheet of the film can carry more than 500 doses (剂) of vaccine, about 1/900 the weight of the same amount of traditional doses. By making it easier and cheaper to ship and preserve vaccines efficiently, Croyle says, the technology could vastly improve immunization rates the world over, particularly in middle-to-low income countries.

5 . The Wolf at the Door

Russ Fee was asleep inside his tent last summer when a series of screams shocked him awake. Throwing on his shoes, he ran out to investigate. Fee and his wife were travelling through Canada’s Banff National Park to enjoy its breathtaking beauty and awesome wildlife. It was the latter he now experienced. Although it was dark, Fee could see a neighboring tent was in a mess. Backing out was a wolf, dragging something in his teeth. That thing was a man.

Moments earlier, Elisa and Matt Rispoli, from New Jersey, were asleep with their two young children when the wolf broke into their tent. “It was like something out of a horror movie,” Elisa posted on Facebook. “For three minutes, Matt threw his body in front of me and the boys and fought against the wolf. At one point, Matt got the upper hand, pinning (压住) the wolf to the ground. But the wolf held its jaw onto Matt’s arm tightly, set its powerful legs, and began dragging Matt outside while I was pulling on his legs trying to get him back,” Elisa wrote.

It was then that Fee entered the picture. He ran at the wolf, kicking it “like I was kicking in a door,” he told ABC New York. The wolf dropped Matt and emerged from the tent. “Wolves are large,” Fee told the radio show Calgary Eyeopener. “I felt like I had hit someone that was way out of my weight class.”

Before the wolf could turn its anger on Fee, Matt, his arms bloodied, flew out of the tent to continue the battle. The men threw rocks at the wolf, forcing it back, then the Fees and the Rispolis escaped to the shelter of the Fees, minivan and called an ambulance. Matt was taken to a local hospital suffering from open wounds. Luckily, he has fully recovered. The wolf was tracked down by park officials and killed in a painless way.

As for Fee, whom Elisa called their lifesaver, he does admit to a fleeting, if less-than-heroic, thought during the heat of battle. The moment the wolf locked eyes with him, Fee says, “I immediately regretted kicking it.”

An email invitation is an electronic means of sending an invitation to a person or a group of people     1     (come) to a particular event. It is the technological version of sending an invitation by mail. Most people turn     2     this method because of various reasons. One of them is cost-effectiveness. Unlike the     3     (tradition) invitation, you have to spend a considerable amount of money to print invitations plus an additional cost to send them. By using formal email in PDF, all you need is a digital graphic print, typewritten words, and internet to send to everyone.

7 . “What kind of stuff do you write?” one student asked on my first day at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. After a decade away from the classroom, I was back to ________.

“Creative non-fiction,” I said.

It was a ________. I couldn’t remember when I’d last written a creative essay. It must have been before my volatile (喜怒无常的) mother fell ill, leaving me resigned to the idea that our story of family dysfunction would not end happily. It seemed that nothing I wrote could ________ that.

With too much time and lack of ________, I accepted a position to teach creative non-fiction.

Although I couldn’t get myself to tell my own stories, I could require that my students tell theirs.

“You’re going to be keeping a journal in this class,” I said. “And I want you to tell your stories like they ________.”

“Why?” a boy named Michael asked. “I mean, who ________ about our stories?”

Looking out at the roomful of students, I realized I didn’t have an answer.

No one said a word. I ________ that most didn’t know their stories were stories—as beautiful and hard—as their own lives.

Finally, I said, “Because it’s what you have. Stories allow us to make meaning of what we’ve been through. When you shape your experience into a story, it becomes yours and not just something that happened to you.”

Michael didn’t look ________ , but he didn’t challenge me either.

In his first essay, Michael wrote about how he grew up in one of the worst neighborhoods in Boston. He wrote about the night he was out with two friends:

The feeling of numbness (麻木) shot through my body as a car came zooming towards us. At that moment everything went blank. Both of my two mates were hit down, drenched in blood. Minutes after I witnessed that, I decided I was leaving the dangerous neighborhood and going to college.

He went on to write about how his high school teachers, who saw his ________ , helped him get into this school.

I had Michael read his essay out. After he finished, the class went so ________ that we could hear the sound of each other’s breath. After a moment, I said, “That’s why you tell your stories.”

I went home that night and picked up my journal, dusty and untouched. I found a pen and for the first time in months, I had to write.

9 . Let’s go back to Venus

Phosphine (磷化氢) in Venus’ atmosphere could be a sign that life is there. The only way to find out for sure is to go have a look.

If Mars were the popular kid in school,Venus (金星) would be the nerd sitting in the corner, largely ignored. Despite its image, Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the sun and the moon, its orbit taking it closer to Earth than any other planet in the solar system. It has nearly the same mass and size as Earth, but being closer to our star, it gets nearly twice as much heat from the sun.

However, instead of having a climate that is just a warmer version of Earth’s, Venus’ surface and atmosphere are hellish: clouds of sulphuric (含硫的) acid blanket the planet while at ground level it is hot enough to melt lead. Despite this, there is now a sign that Venus may harbour life.

Jane Greaves at Cardiff University, UK and her colleagues recently detected phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere, with one potential explanation that it is the by-product of biology. That is because the only way this gas is made on Earth is in laboratories or by microbes. Though this doesn’t mean it was produced by life on Venus, attempts to find nonbiological explanations for its presence have so far fallen short.

Our best hope for confirming or rejecting the possibility of life on Venus is to go and have a proper look. During the cold war, the USSR sent more than a dozen missions to Venus, including several landers and a pair of balloons, but these ended well before the dawn of the 1990s. Likewise, NASA hasn’t launched a mission dedicated to Venus since the late 1980s. What’s more no US mission has plumbed the depths of its atmosphere and probed its surface since the Pioneer Venus missions that departed Earth in the 1970s.

Other countries have had more recent efforts: the European Space Agency’s Venus Express orbited the planet throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s, while Japan’s Akatsuki orbiter is exploring Venus right now. But these missions were ill-equipped for detecting phosphine or life.

While Mars has been the focus of interplanetary (太阳系内的) exploration efforts of late, with some space agencies focusing on landing more craft and even people on its surface, the phosphine discovery has people looking at Venus in a new light. As NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted:“Its time to prioritize Venus.”

In the months and years to come, computer simulations (模拟) will be used to further study the possible chemistries of the atmosphere on Venus. More observations will be made (and the old ones reanalysed) and laboratory experiments will be conducted to try to identify other ways the phosphine there could be produced. However, there is no guarantee that these efforts will reveal the true nature of this substance on Venus.

A new mission to directly sample the atmosphere and surface would be a watershed moment in planetary science. It need not only look for signs of life, but also answer some of our many questions about Venus, such as why it became so different to Earth and whether it was once habitable.

Some options to do this already exist. There are two NASA missions currently vying for approval. India aims to send an orbiter to Venus in 2023 and private company RocketLab also has plans to visit in that year, hopefully with a probe passing through the planet’s atmosphere.

The discovery of phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere is a great accomplishment. The scientific endeavour it has set in motion is as if a sleeping giant has awakened and it may be just what we need to finally refocus on this neglected world. The quiet kid in the corner may yet have the last laugh.

10 . My Grandpa Forgets Who I Am

A few days ago I visited my grandfather in hospital. He has Alzhemier’s—a degenerative disease that usually starts slowly and gets worse over time. I thought I was prepared to see him. I knew chances were slim that he'd actually recognize me.

He didn’t. As a matter of fact, he had no idea that he even had grandchildren. But he was excited that somebody came to visit him. I tried to explain to him who I was. But after he told me multiple times that he didn’t have grandchildren, I gave up. And my heart broke into a million little pieces.

I was tired of explaining things to him. So I just smiled. He smiled back. It’s a genuine smile. Like a long time ago, when he’d take me by the hand and made this big world a little bit less scary for me. Now I have to take his hand.

We sat in silence for a little while, before he told me to call my grandma. This was the first time I had tried so hard to hold back tears. My grandma died four years ago and he didn’t remember. He thought she was stuck on her way to pick him up.

My grandpa used to be a strong, hard-working man. He was the person you turned to when you needed your car fixed, your tires changed or something heavy to be carried. Sadly, that man left this world a long time ago, and left behind a man that is lost and scared.

I want to help him. I want to make him feel better. I want to tell him about his old life, and how great it was. So I sat with him and I held his hand, and every once in a while I told him how good he looked and how much I liked the color of his shirt and how it brought out the blue in his eyes. I told him that my grandma was on her way whenever he asked about her, and I made sure the glass in his hand was always filled with water.

I can’t take away his pain. I can’t help him remember. I can’t make the disease go away. All I can do is hold on to the memories—hold on for both of us.