2 . Last summer at a bookstore, my son Henry was fascinated by the cover of the first novel from Peter Brown’s middle-grade trilogy (三部曲). He then finished it in just two days. “Dad, why did The Wild Robot have to be so sad?” He tearfully asked me.

The story is set on a remote island, where a robot named Roz learns to survive and communicate with the island’s creatures, and becomes part of the community. For my son, it was the first book he discovered on his own; the first to impact him with the mix of tragedy (悲剧) and joy.

When I finished the book, I knew why Henry loved it. In our book club discussion, he described how Brown’s pictures and words had made the story feel real. When talking about its final scenes, where Roz leaves to find repairs for her injured body, Henry cried again. His previous reading experiences had cheerful, “happily-ever-after” endings, but this book introduced him to the beauty of complex emotions. I tried to explain how sadness can enhance the meaning of happy moments, but failed to fully convince him.

Once our discussion ended, Henry requested to buy The Wild Robot Escapes and instantly fell in love with it. He read the first two books repeatedly, so you can imagine his excitement when we finally got a copy of The Wild Robot Protects.

We both agree it is worth the wait. Roz leaves the island again to stop an underwater threat: “the poison tide.” Brown expertly balances between breathtaking adventure and unsettling ideas- not just happiness and sadness, but also, given the climate-change undercurrents, hope and despair.

And, here’s something special about Roz: her physical clumsiness and confusion about life, conveyed through her expressive eyes and downturned mouth. Her story reflects the challenges of surviving in a strange place, much like a child’s journey. Readers love Roz. They learn from her. Even better, they learn alongside her. Roz gave Henry the power to push through the first book’s sad parts, getting him ready to appreciate that, sometimes, sadness isn’t a bad thing to feel.

3 . A new study on 26 chimpanzees (黑猩猩) from zoos around the world found that chimpanzees can recognise family members and long lost friends even after decades of separation.

The participating chimpanzees were given juice while staring at a screen flashing side by side photos of other chimps. One animal from each pair of photos had lived with the group for at least a year, while the other was a stranger. An eye-tracking camera recorded where the participants were looking and for how long. Data showed their eyes rested longer on familiar groupmates, suggesting “rich recognition of each other.”

There is also evidence that they became more intent when shown a picture of a chimpanzee with whom they’d had more positive interactions, compared with conflicting relationships.

In the most impressive case, a 46-year-old chimpanzee named Louise repeatedly demonstrated “intense” attention upon seeing photographs of her sister Loretta and nephew Erin, whom she hadn’t seen in more than 26 years. The team said Louise’s results represent the longest-lasting social memory documented in any non-human animal to date.

“We tend to see ourselves as unique special creatures with incredible intellectual (智力的) capacities that are very different from other animals on earth,” said Laura Simone Lewis, a postdoctoral fellow in Berkeley’s psychology department and lead author of the study. “This study is showing us how similar we are to chimpanzees.” She noted that the findings support the theory that long-term social memory in humans and modern day chimps has come from “our last common ancestor that lived somewhere between 5 to 7 million years ago” who also likely had long-term social memory.

Now that they have definitive evidence that these endangered species possess long-term social memories, researchers have more questions, including whether chimpanzees miss the individuals they’re no longer with, especially their friends and family. “Our study doesn’t determine they are doing this, but it raises questions about the possibility that they may have the ability to do so,” Lewis said.

6 . Yang Haoran, born into a family of cotton farmers, spent his childhood playing in the cotton fields. He ______ how hard his parents had to work using conventional farming methods, as well as how automation has ______ productivity and saved labor.

Having finished university, Yang became a ______ farmer himself. However, unlike his parents, his experience has been very ______ ; he manages over 200,000 square meters of cotton fields and always ______ new ways to improve efficiency through technological ______ .

In 2018, he saw the great business ______ of using drones (无人机) in farming and established his own company, which ______ 13 drone operators, all of whom are post-90s workers like Yang himself. “We are like a big family, with members from different ethnic groups,” Yang said ______ .

In peak growing season, they move their ______ in a skillful way over the fields while in the off-season, they train local farmers to ______ drones. To date, Yang’s team has trained hundreds of local farmers. “This will enable them to ______ new technologies, allowing them to ______ the advances in modern agriculture,” he said.

Yang’s ______ does not end there. He has recently taken up a precision (精准) farming project, which uses drones to collect data for spectral analysis (光谱分析), and transmit real-time data on crop growth and soil moisture to the irrigation and fertilizer equipment for precision ______ .

8 . I never thought that I had to move to another state at 14. I was doubly _________ for I had just lost my father.

My family got _________ in giving away all the things we could not carry with us. On top of the _________ was a wooden cradle (摇篮). Cradles are _________ meant for newborns, but my mother decided to _________ this big one to my friend Sara as she used to love playing in it.

Soon I got _________ with the new schedule of school, adjusting to the new city. Times fled quickly until I _________ the news of Sara’s marriage. My thoughts wandered about her and our good _________ in the native town of Kerala.

I happened to _________ the town after 20 years. What a (n) __________ -Sara’s daughter was sleeping in the very cradle from my mother. I also came to know Sara was __________ on her mother’s decision to donate this cradle and she refused. Sara, even today, treats this gift as a blessing and a sign of __________ from my mother to her. She now __________ the cradle to other babies and fetches it when they start walking.

“This is not just a material thing; this indicates our strong __________. The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its __________,” Sara said.

9 . It’s one of Hollywood’s favorite stories: human beings use only 10 percent of their brain, and awakening the remaining 90 percent allows otherwise ordinary human beings to display extraordinary mental abilities. Scarlett Johansson becomes a superpowered Kongfu master in Lucy (2014). And in Limitless (2011) Bradley Cooper writes a novel overnight. But the truth is that we use all of our brain all of the time.

How do we know? For one thing, if we needed only 10 percent of our brain, the majority of brain injuries would have no obvious consequences, since the damage would affect parts of the brain that weren’t doing anything to begin with. We also know that natural selection discourages the development of useless structures. Tougher immune systems, stronger muscles, better looking hair—just about anything would be more useful than having a head full of useless tissue.

We’ve been able to back up these logical conclusions with hard evidence. Imaging techniques allow doctors and scientists to map brain activity in real time. The data clearly shows that large areas of the brain—far more than 10 percent—are used for all sorts of activity, from seemingly simple tasks like resting or looking at pictures to more complex ones like reading or doing math.

So how did we come to believe that 90 percent of our brain is useless? The myth is often incorrectly attributed to (归因于) 19th-century psychologist William James, who proposed that most of our mental potential goes untapped. But he never made clear a percentage. In reality, the concept most likely came from the American self-help industry.

Obviously, this is bad news for anyone hoping to find the secret to becoming a genius overnight. The good news, though, is that hard work still works. There is plenty of reason to believe that you can build brainpower by regularly working at challenging mental tasks, such as playing a musical instrument, doing arithmetic, or reading a novel.

Yuan Longping,     1     (know) as the “father of hybrid rice”, was one of China’s most famous scientists. Yuan Longping was born in 1930 in Beijing. When he was young,     2     concerned him most was that farmers often had poor harvests so he chose to study at Southwest Agricultural College and graduated in 1953. Working     3     a researcher, Yuan developed the first hybrid rice in 1974 through intense effort. Yuan’s     4     (innovate) has helped feed not just China, but many other countries. Because of his invaluable contributions, Yuan Longping received numerous     5     (award) in China and abroad