2 . What will the future be like? Will the world be greener and more beautiful? Will people live more happily and more conveniently? Probably people will lead a better life.

The Spring Festival, the most important Chinese holiday when everyone returns home has caused headaches for millions of Chinese. More than 2 billion people travel at the same time, making getting travel tickets and the journey arduous. But in several decades, the Spring Festival travel may not be a problem at all. China plans to build more than 120,000 kilometers of railway and a fast transportation network that will serve 90% of the population.

And because most of China will be cities, people will not have to go to other places to find jobs, so it will no longer be a problem. In the future, new information about timely events will be sent by humans or even robots to personal web tools through the Internet. That means only digital (数字化的) newspapers can be seen. Readers can discuss topics with journalists and editors. Information will move faster.

Oil is running out faster than expected. But scientists have found something else for oil as fuel. Coal, natural gas, solar power, nuclear power and even water can take the place of oil as sources (来源) of energy.

Schools will go electronic. Everything will be in the computer and students will not need to bring books to school. They will find information on the Internet. A computer will be the students’ library, schoolbag and connection to the outside world. There will be robot teachers, who will check homework on computers and communicate with the students’ parents through emails. And school buses will be like spaceships, comfortable and safe.

However, what can the future actually become? It remains to be seen.

Have you ever imagined     1    (live) in 2200, about 200 years from now? A recent study describes robots, underwater cities and holidays in space. City planners, experts on space and architects    2     (ask) to give their ideas of life in 2200. According to them, the way people live, work and play will be totally different     3     how we do these things today. They also said that over twenty years ago, people couldn't imagine how the Internet     4     the smartphones would change our lives. But today, both have changed the way we communicate, learn and do daily things, and the changes in the next century will probably be even     5    (great).

Those     6    (question) in the research said that people might not go to the office in the future but would work at home instead. People will have advanced 3-D printers that will enable    7     to download a design for furniture or a food picture and then to "print" the sofa, table or pizza at home.    8     will also be less need for visits to the doctor. People will have a home health capsule that will "diagnose"    9    the problem is and provide various treatment.     10    (hopeful), they will also be going into space for holidays to get resources that have been used up on earth.

6 . What if we had the power to control time, instead of moving from the past to the present to the future? What if we could jump and travel through time in a machine? What if we could go wherever and whenever we pleased?

The mysterious puzzle of time has kept people debating its nature for hundreds of years. Science fiction writers have turned it into imaginative stories. Some scientists have even attempted to explain it using math, trying to make the dream of time travel come true.

Albert Einstein said that time and space are one thing called “spacetime.” He said there are three dimensions in space: height, width and depth. A scientist named Hermann Minkowski added time as a fourth dimension.

Einstein introduced two ideas that have led to theories about the possibility of time travel. The first is relativity. The idea of relativity is that the force of gravity causes space to bend, which causes time to twist. The second idea focuses on special relativity. The idea is that a traveler moving super-fast through flat spacetime will enter the future. Einstein considered time “relative” because it is measured based on where we are on Earth or in space.

Stephen Hawking believes that a time machine will never be built. If it were possible, he thinks we would already know. If a time machine could be built, how come no one from the future has invaded us?

The first science fiction story with this theme is The Clock That Went Backward by Edward P. Mitchell, which was published in 1881. Since then, thousands of books, films and television shows have explored the idea of time travel, in which some tools such as phones, watches, photographs and old books take travelers backward and forward.

Will time travel ever happen? Who knows? Most important is to keep your eyes open and have a sense of wonder.

7 . You’ve probably heard that brick-and-mortar retail(实体零售) is in trouble. Even industry giants are closing hundreds of stores. Given retail’s gradual change from physical stores to mobile and e-commerce(电子商务), you may be wondering, “What will retail look like in the future?” Nobody knows. But here are a few things you can expect to see based on current technology.

Super-fast delivery is coming. Today, the normal practice is two-day delivery. But if you’ve been paying attention, you know that’s changing. In fact, up to 25% of consumers said that they would abandon their orders if one-day delivery wasn’t available. Of course, that’s just the beginning. Two-hour delivery is coming in the foreseeable future, and Amazon has already been trying 30-minute delivery.

Your kitchen will resupply itself. You won’t have to worry about running out of essentials like coffee, pet food or snacks because your containers will sense stocks(库存) and replace those items without you having to lift a finger. No more waking up to find your coffee store is empty or last-minute rush to the grocery store because you forget to buy pet food.

Know exactly what’s in stock and where to get it. Have you ever gone to a store hoping to buy something, only to learn that it was out of stock? A new feature from Google Home allows people to ask the Google Assistant to find in-stock products at the closest store. For example: “Google, where can I find the Nintendo Switch console?” The assistant will tell you how many stores have it right away and how close they are. Of course, it isn’t currently available for all stores in all locations, but you can already see the future when it has become standard.

Convenience, experience, and options-retail will take on a new look.

9 . Is there anybody out there? For centuries humans have wondered although the ways in which we have gone about this have varied. As we have gained a greater understanding of the universe, our searches have taken on more concrete(具体的) forms. Questions about aliens(外星人) have become a subject for science rather than science fiction.

Now new cooperation between the Very Large Array (VLA) observatory in New Mexico and the SETI Institute in California means that our curiosity about whether aliens exist can be closer than ever before to being satisfied. Data from the VLA’S 28 radio telescopes, used to scan a vast area of sky, will be fed through a special supercomputer that will search for distant signals.

How likely it is that a signal will be found, and what this might mean, are hard questions to answer. SETI’s existing projects have not discovered any signals from other planets so far. But recent discoveries in space and Earth sciences have provided some encouragement for those who are enthusiastic about the possibility, however remote, of detecting other civilizations.

Once it was thought that our solar system could be unique. Since the discovery of the first exoplanet (a planet beyond the solar system) in the 1990s, thousands more have been located. Around one in five stars is now thought to have a planet in their orbit(运行轨道) in a so-called “habitable(适合居住的) zone”—that is, at a distance from the star where the temperature means that life is theoretically possible.

Are Earth’s 7.5 billion humans, along with billions of other animals and plants they share their home with, on their own in the universe? If there is another life form somewhere, could it be as intelligent as humans? Or could it threaten them? I think all of these need further exploration. As explorations of Mars continue, and a new set of observations from the James Webb Space Telescope are set to begin, our interest in the possibility of alien life appears as much as before.