1 . It was hard not to notice an 8-year-old kid storming in and out of his own house. “He doesn’t have a father,” said his neighbor, William Dunn. “I can probably do something for him.”

That something was fishing, a ________ Dunn’s father had shared with him. “It brought me peace and taught me how to be patient,” he said. He then took the kid fishing every weekend. Gradually he took groups of kids out to fish. Most didn’t have father figures. “They’d been through a lot, and their lives were ________,” said Dunn. “But when they were fishing, all of that disappeared. On the boat, they’d be laughing and making new friends. They just ________ the moment.”

________ by this scene, Dunn started the nonprofit Take a Kid Fishing. He and the volunteers have introduced 2,500 kids — most without fathers ________ — to the calming peace found on the water and the excitement of catching a fish.

Just as important as the fishing are the ________ Dunn forms with those kids. When they have a rough time, Dunn will talk with them, emphasizing self-respect and mental ________. One of the kids, Bella Smith, said she would forget about the past while fishing and concentrate on something positive. “Fishing is learning,” she said. “I’ve learned I ________ a better life than what I had. Whenever I feel down, I know it’s time to go fishing.”

Dunn’s father passed away this year, so fishing has ________ new meaning for him. “I have a stronger liking for it because now I’m fatherless too. There’s nothing like feeling that first pull on the line and seeing a kid light up with a smile,” said Dunn. “I feel ________ to witness that every weekend.”

2 . In most adults, learning and thinking begin to decline as early as age 30. People start to perform slightly worse in tests of cognitive abilities such as the rate at which someone does a mental task.     1    

These changes are often considered normal aging. But they may instead represent something more like the “summer slide” that some schoolchildren experience in academic progress during summer break. Recent research suggests that a pause of learning is indeed a problem causing cognitive reduction.    2    

In a three-month intervention, the researchers provided an encouraging learning environment for 24 older adults. They took at least three classes to learn three new skills. They also discussed issues related to learning barriers and motivation. Over the course these participants’ cognitive scores for memory and flexibility significantly improved. In a follow-up study, the researchers discovered amazingly that they had improved further:    3     In other words, giving these seniors a multicourse routine seemed to bring up their abilities to levels similar to those of college students.

The researchers are still investigating why cognitive scores continued to climb after the program’s end, but one possibility is that the experience encouraged these older participants to continue learning and practicing new skills. Older adults are often assumed to be on a downward slide with unrecoverable loss. “Use it or lose it,” the saying goes.    4     Decline, as we so often see it, may not be certain. That’s why we need to create enriched learning environments for adults after their formal education and job training end.

    5     Educators know how to educate children and adolescents, and we can adapt that knowledge to develop learning opportunities for adults. Societies could also provide resources and paths toward lifelong learning to ensure that everyone can benefit. Let’s shift the conversation about adults from avoiding loss and decline to learning and growing.

Gestures refer to the communication where visible bodily actions are used to communicate important messages. They include movement of hands, face, or other parts of the body. Gestures benefit our lives a lot. Take language learning.

In some languages, certain syllables (音节) within words are pronounced with markedly more weight than others, called lexical stress. Languages such as English commonly feature lexical stress. For example, the word “accent” involves more emphasis on the first syllable, “ac”, than the second, “cent”. Native speakers of Chinese, however, don’t use lexical stress and therefore find it difficult to learn languages that feature it.

Making any hand gesture could help learners recognize lexical stress, which has been proved by Xing Tian’s team. They selected 124 native Chinese speakers, who watched videos of people performing hand movements that were synced(同步的) to recordings of the same English words. In addition, they also found when more pronounced gestures matched the stressed syllable, the participants were particularly good at identifying it.

The research involved several experiments, which makes it difficult to combine the results. Nevertheless, Tian estimates that the use of gestures helped identify lexical stress between 10 and 15 percent more accurately compared with no gestures at all, and how much help depends on the nature of gestures.

A follow-up study conducted by another team exposed the same Chinese speakers to Russian words and got similar results. “Our findings highlight the functional role of gestures in enhancing speech learning, suggesting practical strategies for language teaching and learning,” the researchers write in their paper.

The benefits of gestures extend far beyond teaching and learning. Since gestures are deeply integrated into our daily lives, they deserve more of our attention.

5 . Have we reached the peak of the culture war? Looking at my social media feeds, it seems that polarised thinking and misinformation have never been more common. How am I supposed to feel when users I once admired now draw on questionable evidence to support their beliefs?

Perhaps it is time for us all to adopt a little “existential humility”. I came across this idea in a paper by Jeffrey Greenat Virginia from Common Wealth University and his colleagues. They build on a decade of research examining the benefits of “intellectual humility” more generally — our ability to recognise the errors in our judgement and remain aware of the limits of our knowledge.

You can get a flavour of this research by rating your agreement with the following statements, ranging from 1 (not at all like me) to 5 (very like me): I question my own opinions because they could be wrong; I recognise the value in opinions that are different from my own; in the face of conflicting evidence, I am open to changing my opinions.

People who score highly on this assessment are less likely to form knee-jerk reactions on a topic, and they find it easier to consider the strengths or weaknesses of a logical argument. They are less likely to be influenced by misinformation, since they tend to read the article in full, investigate the sources of a news story and compare its reporting to other statements, before coming to a strong conclusion about its truth.

Developing “intellectual humility” would be an excellent idea in all fields, but certain situations may make it particularly difficult to achieve. Greenat points out that some beliefs are so central to our identity that any challenge can activate an existential crisis, as if our whole world view and meaning in life are under threat. As a result, we become more insistent in our opinions and seek any way to protect them. This may reduce some of our feelings of uncertainty, but it comes at the cost of more analytical thinking.

For these reasons, Greenat defines “existential humility” as the capacity to entertain the thought of another world view without becoming so defensive and closed-minded. So how could we achieve it? This will be the subject of future research, but the emotion of awe (a feeling of great respect and admiration) may offer one possibility. One study found that watching awe-inspiring videos about space and the universe led to humbler thinking, including a greater capacity to admit weaknesses.

Perhaps we could all benefit from interrupting our despair with awe-inspiring content. At the very least, we can try to question our preconceptions before offering our views on social media and be a little less ready to criticize when others disagree.

6 . The streets and roofs of cities all absorb heat, making some urban areas hotter than rural ones. These “urban heat islands” can also develop underground as city heat spreads downward, and subway tracks and other subsurface infrastructure(基础设施) also constantly radiate warmth into the surrounding earth.

A new study of downtown Chicago shows underground hotspots may threaten the very same structures that give off the heat in the first place. “Without anyone realizing it, the city of Chicago’s downtown was deforming,” says study author Rotta Loria, an environmental engineer.

Humans aren’t the only potentially affected. “For a lot of things in the subsurface, it’s kind of ‘out of sight, out of mind’,” says Grant Ferguson, a geologist. But the underground world is full of creatures that have adapted to subsurface existence such as insects and snails. As the temperature rises because of climate change and underground urban development, scientists are keeping eyes on the potential implications for underground ecosystems.

But the question of how underground hotspots could affect infrastructure has gone largely unstudied. Because materials expand and contract with temperature change, Rotta suspected that heat coming from underground could be contributing to wear and tear on various structures. To understand how underground temperature difference has affected the ground’s physical properties, he used a computer model to simulate(模拟) the underground environment from the 1950s to now—and then to 2050. He found that by the middle of this century, some areas may lift upward by as much as 0.50 inch or settle by as much as 0.32 inch, depending on the soil makeup of the area involved. Though these may sound like small displacements, Rotta says they could cause cracks in the foundations of some buildings, causing buildings to fall.

Kathrin Menberg, a geoscientist in Germany, says these displacement predictions are far beyond her guesses and could be linked to the soft, clay-heavy soils. “Clay material is particularly sensitive,” she says, “It would be a big issue in all cities worldwide that are built on such material.”

Like climate change above the surface, underground changes occur gradually. “These effects took decades to develop,” Ferguson says, adding that increased underground temperatures would likewise take a long time to dissipate on their own. “We could basically turn everything off, and it’s going to remain there, the temperature signal, for quite a while.”

But Ferguson says this wasted heat energy could also be reused, presenting an opportunity to both cool the subsurface and save on energy costs. Still, this assumption could fail as aboveground climate change continues to boost underground warming. However slowly, this heat will gather beneath our feet. “It’s like climate change,” Rotta Loria says. “Maybe we don’t see it always, but it’s happening.”

7 . You’ve raced to the supermarket only to realise you’ve left the shopping list home. You need to memorise which groceries to pick up before you forget. Thankfully, there’s a memory aid that’s perfect for the job: the peg-word method.

What is the peg-word method?

It employs a set of pre-determined words, regarded as peg words, for the to-be-remembered information. Peg words act as a structure to help you remember particular items. Essentially, you’re hanging information you need to recall on these pegs, which allows it to be recalled quickly and easily.

Initially, to use this method, you will have to remember the peg words as well as the numbers:

The next step is to create associations between the information you need to remember and the item linked with the corresponding number. If the first item, for instance, is milk, then you need to visualise the milk and a bun(小圆面包) together. The more unusual you can make your image, the more likely you are to remember it. In this case, you could imagine a bun drinking a glass of milk.

Why is it useful?

As the case shows, it is most useful when it comes to remembering lists and you can recall the listed items easily in order. Another way to use this memory aid is to memorise important numbers, like phone numbers or dates. For instance, you need to remember that William Shakespeare was born in the year 1564. First, change that number to bun-hive-sticks-door. Then imagine a story to help you remember the series:

William Shakespeare put a bun in a beehive to coat it in honey, but he didn’t like how sticky it became so he threw it at a door.

The peg-word method has been wildly recognized as a helpful memory aid. For more information, please visit https://jojomemory.com/.

The Terracotta Army (兵马俑) was found in 1974 near Xi’an. It is formed of more than 8,000 sculptures, which     1     (bury) alongside the emperor Qin Shi Huang more than 2,200 years ago. Now, researchers have recreated the shoes of one soldier and analysis of them     2     (suggest) that shoes worn by the terracotta sculptures were surprisingly flexible and slip resistant. If the recreated shoes     3     (true) reflect the real ones, they can help build a better picture of     4     Qin dynasty soldiers wore and how this might have aided them in battles.

Harbin,    1     (know) for its ice and snow festivals, became very popular last winter. An increasing number of tourists rushed to the “Ice City of China” to experience the best of ice and snow culture. Besides the frosty delights, the city still has much more     2     (offer) all year around, including its traditional European-style architecture, unique cuisine and cultural events. The city’s individual attractions make     3     a must-see spot no matter the weather.

Zhao Chuang is a science artist working in Beijing,    1     job bridges science and art by painting and sculpturing ancient extinct species. Zhao reproduces each element described in papers on the history of life in an artistic way, and the     2     (blank) in scientific research are filled by his logic and imagination. His painting of a prehistoric flying animal became the cover of important scientific journal Nature in 2006, a highlight in his career     3     a science artist.