Yours,

Li Hua

4 . 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 ______ .

6 . 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.

7 . 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

10 . It’s possible that Chris Raven is the only person in the UK making baroque flutes (长笛). But far from having a lifetime of making instruments behind him, he started out at 70, after decades working in IT. He turns 80 in a month. Yet, in childhood, he loved woodwork. As he says: “You can plant a seed in a child’s mind. And the seed stays.”

Raven grew up in a musical household, in Chelmsford, Essex. Raven played the flute until he lost interest as a teenager. But he rediscovered his love of the instrument in his 40s when he won lessons at his daughter’s school fundraiser. Twenty years ago, he founded a flute choir.

It was after his mother died that he found his old school reports in his parents’ desk. But when he read his old reports he was taken aback: “The two subjects that I did consistently well at-which nobody seemed to spot at the time-were music and woodwork.” he says. “I made stuff as a child and I was good at it.” Rather than feeling minded to look back and wonder if he might have made different career decisions, Raven’s discovery was more a case of him noticing his gift, he says.

About 10 years ago, Raven signed up for an Irish flute-making workshop, followed by a baroque flute-making workshop. He cleared out the garage of the home, and equipped it with various tools to make flutes. His childhood passion “was revived” in baroque flutes and flute boxes.

“It’s been all-consuming,” he says. He spends at least four days a week “on my own in the workshop”. “Flute making, and box making, is not a living so much as a hobby,” says Raven. “I feel real passion and more creation about a new design.”