7 . Strengthen Bonds With Your New Pet

Welcoming a new pet can be a magical moment for a lot of families. Unfortunately, many new pet owners struggle to bond with them. The following steps may help.

This should go without saying but spending time with your pets can greatly help you form a strong relationship. Pets love to be included in every activity of their humans, whatever the activities are.     1     Cats love playing with yarn (纱线) balls and fishing pole toys. Dogs are outgoing and usually love playing games with tennis balls such as fetch. So it’s also important to learn what type of play your pet enjoys.

Most people forget that training and teaching them tricks is a healthy outlet as well.    2     Whether you’re teaching them simple commands like ‘sit’ or something more complex like ‘turn around’ or ‘bow’, they’re sure to enjoy your company and will love you all the more for your attention, company and praises. Pets also love being rewarded with treats.     3     Moreover, when they begin to anticipate treats for good behaviour, they are more likely to be on their best behaviour, further making you and your pets grow closer.

One more thing to notice is that taking care of a pet can be a wonderful experience and also be quite frustrating. For new pet owners, it can be confusing, especially if you don’t understand what your pet needs or wants at any given time.     4     This might take a day or two, or might take months. But eventually, you will reap what you sow.

8 . If a scientist sees a unicorn (独角兽), she’ll probably want to see more than one before telling the world about her discovery. But sometimes one unicorn is enough.

In 2007 an astronomer named Duncan Lorimer reported finding a new kind of astronomical event. It was a brief stream of energy so powerful that it could reach Earth from a galaxy billions of light-years away. He called it a fast radio burst (FRB). This remarkable find, if real, could make huge contributions to the study about universe. He predicted there would be many more – but that year, he spotted just one.

It’s not unheard of for one event to kick off a whole new field of scientific inquiry. Still it’s rare. When Lorimer’s paper came out in the journal, it was not surprising that many were skeptical. “Sometimes, what seems like a remarkable scientific discovery turns out to be an error in the data,” some commented.

Later, a young graduate student was assigned the task of finding more FRBs. Using the same radio telescope Lorimer once used, she found more bursts that just looked like FRBs. But because of the ways they appeared in the telescope data, she was virtually certain that they were some other kind of radio interference and gave them another name: perytons. As years ticked by and no more FRBs were discovered, some astronomers began to conclude Lorimer had found nothing more than an unusual example of one of these perytons.

Good news: in 2011, there was a report of a second FRB. Four more were found in 2013. Bad news: all of them came from the same Lorimer’s radio telescope. But ultimately, in 2014, there was a report from another radio telescope. More discoveries started showing up from other telescopes on a somewhat regular basis. At last the conversation about FRBs shifted – from whether they were real to where they came from.

Years of research have passed by since then. Now, Victoria Kaspi, a physics professor and principal investigator on the FRB team, predicts that once the more advanced telescopes come online in 2024, the location and distance of most FRBs detected can be found out, which will provide “golden opportunities for astronomers to study the large-scale structure of the universe”.

Finally, this “unicorn” story came to a somehow surprising end. Several years ago, a team reanalyzed the same data from the radio telescope by which Lorimer found the first FRB. There was one more that they had previously missed. Since then, other teams have analyzed even older data and found FRBs in those datasets too.

“They were just sitting there, waiting to be discovered by better techniques,” Lorimer says.

9 . Mathematics has an image problem: far too many people are put off by it and conclude that the subject just isn’t for them. But one of the biggest problems is how maths is ________, as cold and dry.

I have a different approach which is to relate abstract maths to questions of politics and social justice. I have taught fairly maths-phobic (恐惧) art students in this way and have seen their attitudes ________. They now believe maths is ________ them and can genuinely help them.

At a basic level, maths is founded on logic, so when I am teaching logic, I use examples from ________ events rather than the old-fashioned type of problem. Instead of studying the logic of a statement like “all dogs have four legs”, I might discuss the statement “all immigrants are illegal”.

But I do this with specific mathematical structures, too. ________, I teach a type of structure called an ordered set, which is subject to an order relation such as “is less than”. We then study and ask which functions are “order-preserving”. A typical example might be the function that takes a(n) ________ number and maps it to the number obtained from multiplying by 2. We would then say that if x < y then also 2x < 2y, so the function is order-preserving.

________, rather than sticking to this type of dry mathematical example, I introduce issues like privilege and wealth. If we think of one ordered set with people ordered by status, we can make a function to another set where the people are now ordered by ________ instead. If someone has a higher status, are they automatically wealthier? We can also ask about working hours and ________: if someone works more hours, do they ________ earn more? The answer there is clearly not.

My approach is controversial because, traditionally, maths is supposed to be ________ and apolitical (与政治无关的). I have been ________ by people who think my approach will be off-putting (令人烦恼的) to those who don’t care about social justice. However, the dry approach is off-putting to those who do care. In fact, I believe that all academic disciplines should address our most important issues. Abstract maths is about making thorough logical arguments, which is linked to everything. I don’t ________ that students agree with me about politics, but I do ask that they construct thorough arguments to back up their thoughts and develop the crucial ability to analyze the logic of people they ________.

Maths isn’t just about numbers and equations (方程式); it is about studying different ________ systems. We can apply it to balls rolling down different hills, but we can also apply it to pressing social issues. I think we should do both, for the sake of society and to be more inclusive towards different types of students in maths education.

What’s Good About Social Network

Do you remember when social media felt good? When friends got reunited years after graduation? But then came all the fake news, targeted advertising, and fear of leaking personal information... You began questioning     1     why you had spent all the time on it. This was     2     happened to many, including me. Though social media was always something I needed, the life when it was needed for sheer entertainment has gone.

But occasionally, I     3     (remind) how powerful a tool it always is. It remains unparalleled in its original, uncommercialized mission     4     (serve) as a connector of people and a facilitator of friendship. I’m thinking about this after having just returned from breakfast with my friend, Rob. I     5     (not see) him since I was 16. We fell out of touch because he lived in Scotland while I lived in London, two opposite ends of this country. But last month I ran across something when I was browsing through Facebook. It was a photo of a little girl     6     I didn’t know, winning first prize in a school talent show. A photo unusually     7     (post) by Rob, which was his first post on Facebook, was tagged with the name of the school his daughter attended, which was not in Scotland, but just five miles from my house.

Were it not for social media, I would never have known that Rob had moved to my neck of the woods. Both of us were amazed at how incredible it was that we’d spent years living so near, shopping in the same grocery stores, taking the same commuter buses and going to the same cinema, without ever     8     (bump) into each other. Truth is,     9     we had, I’m not sure I would have recognized him without his profile picture. So     10     all the considerations and criticisms about how social media disturbs our lives, it is nice to know that it’s still worth pressing Like. Anyway, social media is irreplaceable to us.