Have you ever forgotten to lock the door of your house? Or, have you ever forgotten to switch    1     the TV or computer? These kinds of things happen to us all the time. However, in the not-too-distant future, we will be living in smart homes     2     will lock the door for us when we     3    (be)away. We will be using     4    (advance)technology every day for automatic control of just about everything in our home. The future home will use integrated sensors (集成传感器 )    5    (tell)when you leave home and then go into an energy-efficient mode.     6    addition, your smart home will be monitoring your health. If you start to have sleep or weight     7     (problem),it will send a warning to your phone. It will also give you some     8    (suggest).Smart homes will be able to prevent serious damage from accidents. If there is a short in the     9     (electricity)wiring, your smart home will detect it and provide you with the relevant information. Nevertheless, it will take some years     10     most new homes begin to use this new technology.

Science fiction     1    (regard) by many people as a mirror through which our future can be     2    (free) imagined and explored. The Three-Body Problem     3    (write) by Chinese writer Liu Cixin is one of those astonishing     4    (predict) about the future. The work was first published in a Chinese sci-fi magazine in 2006 and printed as a three-volume book in 2008. When the first volume was translated into English by Chinese-American author Ken Liu, it attracted attention around the world,     5    (become) the first Asian winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. The book     6    (represent) many themes such as space exploration, alien contact, AI, and the future of humans.

The Three-Body Problem begins with the stories of two unrelated people, Ye Wenjie and Wang Miao. Ye is recruited to join     7     secret project in a remote area of China,     8     has been set up to contact alien life forms. In the other story, set 20 years later, Wang Miao gets caught up in a popular online game called “Three Body”, in which people live on an unknown planet     9     three suns. But Wang discovers it is more than a game — it uncovers a great danger threatening human existence. How are these two people’s stories connected? And how will their behaviour change Earth’s future and the civilisations of other planets? Answers to all these questions are waiting to     10    (discover) when you go on reading.

5 . When I was a boy growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s, we had a milkman delivering milk to our doorstep. His name was Mr. Basille. He wore a white cap and drove a white truck. As a 5-year-old boy, I couldn’t take my eyes off the coin changer fixed to his belt. He noticed this one day during a delivery and gave me a quarter out of his coin changer.

Of course, he delivered more than milk. There was cheese, eggs and so on. If we needed to change our order, my mother would pen a note — “Please add a bottle of buttermilk next delivery” — and place it in the box along with the empty bottles. And then, the buttermilk would magically (魔术般) appear.

All of this was about more than convenience. There existed a close relationship between families and their milkmen. Mr. Basille even had a key to our house, for those times when it was so cold outside that we put the box indoors, so that the milk wouldn’t freeze. And I remember Mr. Basille from time to time taking a break at our kitchen table, having a cup of tea and telling stories about his delivery.

There is sadly no home milk delivery today. Big companies allowed the production of cheaper milk, thus making it difficult for milkmen to compete. Besides, milk is for sale everywhere, and it may just not have been practical to have a delivery service.

Recently, an old milk box in the countryside I saw brought back my childhood memories. I took it home and planted it on the back porch (门廊) . Every so often my son’s friends will ask what it is. So I start telling stories of my boyhood, and of the milkman who brought us friendship along with his milk.

9 . Futurologists predict that life will probably be very apparently distinct in 2050 in all the fields of activity, from entertainment to technology.

First of all, it seems that TV channels will have disappeared by 2050. Instead, people will choose a programme from a ”menu“ and a computer will send the programme directly to the television. Today, we can use the World Wide Web to read newspaper stories and see pictures on a computer thousands of kilometers away. By 2050, music, films, programmes, newspapers and books will come to us by computer. We will also be able to see, smell and touch the things that we see on television.

In transport, cars will run on new, clean ”gas“ and they will go very fast. Cars will have computers to control the speed of the car and there won’t be any accidents. Today, many cars have computers that tell drivers exactly where they are. By 2050, the computer will control the car and drive it to where you want to go. Space planes will fly all over the world and people will fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo in just two hours.

In technology, robots will have replaced people in factories. Many factories already use robots. Big companies prefer robots-they do not ask for pay rises or go on strike, and they work 24 hours a day. By 2050, we will see robots everywhere—in factories, schools, offices, hospitals, shops and homes.

Last but not least, medicine technology will have conquered many diseases. By 2050, we will be able to help blind and deaf people see again and hear again. Scientists will be able to produce clones of people and decide how they look, how they behave and how much intelligence they have.