1 . A parent’s hopes for 2030

When 2010 arrived, my son was only a year old—tiny and _________, the master of a few basic words, but still mostly the baby we’d welcomed into the world. Now my baby has grown into an _________—tall, strong, and smart, a lover of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai movies.

A _________ from now, in 2030, he will be an adult. I expect the next 10 years to fly by, and be filled with _________. As 2020 begins, I am thinking about the kind of world my son will face and experience. I _________ about him, and about all the young people of his age. So I have several hopes for the world my son and his generation will live in.

I hope we finally get _________ about climate change. Polar ice is melting. The oceans are rising. The question is _________ whether we can stop climate change, but whether we’re willing and able to do anything to _________ it.

I’m not sure what a warming planet will _________ to my son’s life. I suspect it means he will live in a world where nations and groups __________ limited resources like clean water and food, which means that the danger of climate change won’t come just from rising oceans, but from humans’ competing for control over what’s __________.

The world is always going to be full of __________ about how to solve the challenges we face. I hope, too, that my son’s generation learns to __________ justice—but to do so with a big heart and humility, recognizing our common humanity even with people who __________ us.

The world of 2030 won’t __________ itself. We are creating it now, so my final wish is that we build the kind of world we actually want our children to live in.

2 . Modern inventions have speeded up people’s lives amazingly. Motor cars ________ a hundred miles in more than an hour, aircraft cross the world within a day, while computers operate at lightning speed. Indeed, this love of ________ seems never-ending. Every year motor cars are produced which go even faster and each new computer boasts(吹嘘) of ________ precious seconds in handling tasks.

All these save time, but at a cost. When we lose or ________ half a day in speeding across the world in an airplane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfortable feeling known as jet-lag(时差). Our bodies feel that they have been ________ behind in another time zone. Again, spending too long at ________ results in painful wrists(手腕) and fingers. Mobile phones also have their dangers: too much use may transmit harmful ________ into our brains.

However, how do we ________ the time we have saved? Certainly not relax, or so it seems. We are so used to constant activity that we find it ________ to sit down and do nothing or even just one thing at a   ________ . Perhaps the days are long gone when we might listen ________ to a story on the radio, letting imagination take us into another world.

There was a time when some people’s lives were devoted simply to the cultivation(耕作) of the ________ or the care of cattle. No multi-tasking there; their lives went on at a much gentler pace. There is much that we might envy about a ________ of life like this. Yet before we do so, we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors ________ . Modern machines have ________ people from that primitive(原始的) existence.

4 . Space exploration has always been the province of ________: The human imagination readily soars where human ingenuity (聪明才智)struggles to follow. A Voyage to the Moon, often cited as the first science fiction story, was written by Cyrano de Bergerac in 1649. Cyrano was dead and buried for a good three centuries ________the first manned rockets started to fly.  

In 1961, when President Kennedy declared that America would send a man to the moon by the________’s end, those words, too, had a dreamlike quality. They resonated with optimism and ambition in much the same way as the most famous ________ speech of all, delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. two years later. By the end of the decade, both visions had yielded concrete results and________American society. And yet in many ways the two dreams ended up ________each other. The fight for racial and economic equality is intensely pragmatic (讲求实用的)and immediate in its impact. The urge to explore space is just the opposite. It is figuratively and literally otherworldly in its ________.  

When the dust settled, the space dreamers lost out. There was no grand follow-up to the Apollo missions. The technologically compromised space shuttle program has just come to an end, with no________. The perpetual argument is that ________ are tight, that we have more pressing problems here on Earth. Amid the current concerns about the federal deficit, reaching toward the stars seems a dispensable luxury—________ saving one-thousandth of a single year’s budget would solve our problems.  

But human ingenuity struggles on. NASA is developing a series of robotic probes that will get the most bang from a buck. They will serve as modern Magellans, ________out the solar system for whatever explorers follow, whether man or machine. On the flip side, companies like Virgin Galactic are plotting a bottom-up assault on the space dream by making it a reality to the public. Private spaceflight could lie within ________ of rich civilians in a few years. Another decade or two and it could go mainstream.  

The space dreamers end up benefiting all of us—not just because of the way they expand human knowledge, or because of the spin-off ________ they produce, but because the two types of dreams feed off each other. Both Martin Luther King and John Kennedy appealed to the idea that humans can ________what were once considered inherent limitations. Today we face seeming challenges in energy, the environment, health care. Tomorrow we will transcend these as well, and the dreamers will deserve a lot of the credit. The more evidence we collect that our species is ________greatness, the more we will actually achieve it.

5 . A parent’s hopes for 2030

When 2010 arrived, my son was only a year old—tiny and_________, the master of a few basic words, but still mostly the baby we'd welcomed into the world,_______ all his first times.

Now my baby has grown into a(n) _________—tall, strong, stout, and smart, a(n) _________ of Akira Kurosawa samurai movies.

A _________from now, in 2030, he will be an adult. I expect the next 10 years to fly by, and be filled with _________. As 2020 begins. I am thinking about the kind of world my son will_________ and experience. I _________for him, and for all the young people of his age. So I have several   _________for the world my son and his generation will live in：

I hope we finally get__________about climate change. Polar ice is melting. The oceans are __________ . The question is __________whether we can stop climate change, but whether we’re willing and able to do anything to __________ it.

I’m not sure what a warming planet will mean for my son's life. I__________ it means he will live in a world where nations and groups __________   limited resources like clean water and food, which means that the danger of climate change won't come just from warmer climate, but from other humans competing for control over what’s __________.

The world is always going to be full of __________about how to solve the challenges we face. I hope, too, that my son’s generation learns to __________justice—but to do so with big heart and humility, recognizing our common humanity(人性) even with people who __________ us.

The world of 2030 won’t build itself. We are__________ it now, so my final wish is that we build the kind of world we actually want our children to live in.

6 . I log onto a computer at the doctor’s office to say I have arrived and then wait until a voice calls me into the examination room. There, a robotic nurse ______ me onto the scales and then takes my blood pressure. Some time later, in steps the ______, who is also a robot. He notes down my ______ and gives me a prescription (处方). I pay for my visit using a credit card and return home without having met another human being. This is my terrible vision of the future, which hasn’t happened ______ yet.

I should say I really do like many aspects of ______. I am a big fan of air conditioning in summer and heaters in winter. But I am writing this because I don’t want machines to ______.

When I call my dentist’s office and actually get a human being on the line, I am ______. But when I see the introduction of yet more self-service checkout stations at the grocery store, I feel like ______ “When it comes to cashiers (收银员), make mine a(n) ______, please!”

After all, human cashiers sometimes ______ you a store coupon (优惠券) for items you are buying.

Even more than that, real-life cashiers often take an interest in particularly cute children, which can ______ young mothers’ day. A cashier may also show pity on an elderly person ______ to get that last penny out of his purse.

Machines can be ______ and cost-effective and they often got the job done just fine. ______ they lack an element so important to everyday life.

Call it the spirit, the soul or the heart. It is ______ no machine will ever have. It is human being that encourages us to smile at others, which nay be what they need at that moment.

7 . Do you know what will happen in the future? Life in the twenty-first century will be very ________ , I suppose. Many changes will take place, but ________ will the changes be?

As we all know the population in the earth is growing ________. There will be a great many ________ in the world and most of them will live ________ than people in the twentieth century.

Computers will be much smaller and ________ and there will be at least one in every ________. And ________ studies will be one of the important subjects in school then.

People will work ________ and they will have more free time for taking exercise, reading, watching TV and traveling all over the world. ________ will be much easier and cheaper. And many more people will go to ________ countries for holidays.

There will be changes in our ________, too. May be no one will eat meat every day. Instead, they eat more fruit and vegetables without pollution. Maybe people will be ________. Work in the future will be different, too. ________ and hard work can be done by robots. Because of this, ________ people will not have enough work to do. This will be a problem.

8 . I log onto a computer at the doctor’s office to say I have arrived and then wait until a voice calls me into the examination room. There, a robotic nurse ________ me onto the scales and then takes my blood pressure. Some time later, in steps the doctor, who is also a robot. He notes down my ________ and gives me a(n) ________. I pay for my visit using a credit card and return home without having met another human being. This is my nightmarish vision of the future, which hasn’t happened ________ yet.

I should say I really do like many aspects of ________. I am a big fan of air conditioning in summer and heaters in winter. But I am writing this because I don’t want machines to ________.

When I call my dentist’s office and actually get a human being on the line, I am ________. And when I see the introduction of yet more self-service checkout stations at the grocery store, I feel like ________, “When it comes to cashiers, make mine a(n) ________, please!”

After all, human cashiers sometimes ________ you a store coupon for items you are buying.

Even more than that, real-life cashiers often take an interest in particularly cute children, which can ________ young mothers’ day. A cashier may also show compassion for an elderly person ________ to get that last penny out of his purse.

Machines can be ________ and cost-effective and they often get the job done just fine. ________ they lack an element so important to everyday life.

Call it the spirit, the soul or the heart. It is ________ no machine will ever have. It is human being that encourages us to smile at others, which may be what they need at that moment.

9 . I arrive at the doctor’s office and then wait until a computer voice calls me into the examination room. A robotic nurse _________ me and some time later, in _______ the doctor, who is also a robot. He notes down my _________and gives me a prescription (处方). I then_______for my visit using a credit card and return home without having met another human being. This is my nightmarish (噩梦般的) vision of the_______, which hasn’t happened yet.

I should say I really do like many aspects of _________. I am a big _______ of air conditioning in summer and heaters in winter. But I am writing this because I don’t want machines to _________.

When I call my dentist’s office and actually get a human being on the line, I am _________. And when I see the introduction of yet more self-service checkout stations at the grocery store, I feel like ______________, “When it comes to cashiers, make mine a(n) ______________, please!”

After all, human cashiers sometimes give you money-off coupons to ______________ you money. Moreover, ____________ cashiers often take an interest in cute children, which can ______________ young mothers’ day. A cashier may also show pity for an elderly person ______________ to get that last penny out of his purse.

Machines can be ______________ and cost-effective and they often get the job done just fine. ____________, they lack an element so important to everyday life.

Call it the____________, the soul or the heart. It is ______________ no machine will ever have. It is human being that encourages us to ____________ at others, which may be what they need at that moment.

10 . Recently we carried out a survey of 1,000 people from different countries to find out what they think _______will be like in the future. The results clearly show both our _______and fears.

The survey suggests that_______ — one of the most important human relationships — will change greatly. People will make friends through the Internet. Computers will become really_______by 2050. Even now, some people describe them as their best friends! Others, _______, say that we will become much more isolated (孤立的) from each other _______we will have little real human communication.

Education will _______ a lot too. As more and more children will be using computers in schools, certain _______, such as mental arithmetic (心算), won’t be necessary. Even writing by hand will have become a thing of the_______.

According to the survey, home life will be________. Most people believe that by 2050 robots will be doing the housework and we will be eating________food. A lot of people think that we might only cook for fun in the future. Space exploration will become increasingly________. Fifty percent of the people we talked to ________that man will regularly (定期地) visit Mars.

Pollution is something that seems to ________many people. Some fear that it will________to get worse, and that our planet will become________to live on. Others even ________that one day we' ll have to pay for clean air.

________, people seem to be quite optimistic about genetic engineering (基因工程), as they think scientists will use it to ________diseases like cancer and AIDS.

No matter how dark or bright it may seem, it is up to us to ________our planet and try to make it a better place.