4 . In this age of social media, everyone has followed the review trend. Nearly every business or website persuades customers to leave reviews as they can drive traffic to the site or business. The online business directory Yelp, which gets 178 million monthly visitors, invites anyone with a cellphone to leave a review of a business or restaurant. But by no means are negative reviews always honest. Some people threaten to give a bad review to extort (敲诈) discounted or free food from a restaurant. Some then follow through when their demands are not met.

But there are two sides to every story. One Denver chef decided to respond to bad reviews at his restaurant. As it turned out, some customers who left bad review s deserved bad reviews themselves. One customer’s terrible review claimed that the food at the restaurant was so awful that he didn’t eat a single bite. The chef looked through the monitor and found clear evidence that he had eaten every bite! In response, the chef called out the dissatisfied customer in his own negative review. Since the chef started responding to all his negative reviews, business at his restaurant has nearly doubled.

Telling people what you think of them as the result of a bad review can backfire on you, especially when a bad review is justified. Reviews are important because 94 percent of diners read online review s before they decide where to eat.

But bad reviews appear for many reasons. The reviewer may be having a bad day, or the chef may be sick and the substitute (代替者) couldn’t fill his shoes, so the cuisine suffered. Or perhaps the service wasn’t as good as usual. The worst-case scene is that the reviewer wants to punish the restaurant on purpose for some slight, real or imagined. So one or two bad reviews need to be taken with a grain of salt. Many negative reviews, however, indicate a problem.

So what is a restauranteur to do? First give an honest assessment of any negative reviews. Take a step back and ask if the writer has made any valid points. Are there areas for improvement? If the answer is yes, make adjustments. Reviewers themselves need to be honest and constructive. The goal should be to improve the situation, not just blow off steam.

5 . Memories are funny, aren’t they? You can be going along, minding your business, and then, all of a sudden, a memory pops into your head. Sometimes memories are triggered (触发) by a song that reminds you of the setting where you first heard it. Or it may be a smell that makes you think of a delicious meal with your friends or family. Perhaps hearing kids arguing makes you remember an unhappy situation with childhood friends. These spontaneous (自发的) memories can be “sweet,” or they might be “sour.” Did you ever wonder what’s going on in your brain that makes your memories produce positive or negative emotions?

Researchers at the Salk Institute for Biologica Studies in California have made a discovery that could help to uncover this secret. The explanation is a bit technical (for those of us who are not brain scientists), but basically it all focuses on a single molecule (分子) called neurotensin (神经降压素). Our surrounding environment is constantly presenting our brain with stimuli (刺激). The molecule neurotensin acts as a key indicator of whether an experience is labeled as positive or negative, depending on the nature of the stimuli. Our brain subsequently associates similar stimuli with the pleasant or painful memory that we experienced.

The study by the Salk Institute was published in the journal Nature. The focus of their experiments was the brain circuitry of laboratory mice. After a sound was played, the mice received either a pleasant swallow of sugary water or, an unpleasant electrical shock or puff of air. The researchers discovered that neurotensin was the signal that associated the sound with reward or with punishment When the gene (基因) that regulates neurotensin was removed from the mice’s brains, they had more difficulty connecting the sound with the sugary water. However, the negative responses were enhanced.

Understanding how neurons in the brain respond to neurotensin could have influences on one’s mental health. Addictions may be caused by overly high levels of neurotensin (connected with positive rewards). On the other hand, depression and anxiety can result when decreased levels of neurotensin allow negative responses to dominate. Thus, regulating neurotensin could help to maintain mental stability. One other thing: The research study showed that the brain may tend to be a pessimist, focusing on fearful memories that cause negative emotional responses.

Perhaps insights into neurotensin will help us have fewer sour memories and more sweet ones.

A few years ago, Nike decided to create a new uniform that would help athletes to go faster. The aim was     1     (reduce) wind resistance. The Swift Suit is made from several different fabrics. Since its creation, many world-class athletes     2     (run) in the Swift Suit. The famous athlete Cathy Freeman     3     (wear) her full-length green and silver suit when she competed in the 400 metres sprint (短跑) at the Sydney 2000 Olympics and won gold.

8 . Samuel worked in the town’s bookstore. His life had been predictable and boring. But one sunny morning, the bookstore owner _________ that the shop would be closing for good. Samuel’s heart sank, and he found himself facing an _________ future. Yet a ray of hope emerged — an opportunity to start anew.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he thought, _________ the courage to break new ground. With a newfound determination, Samuel decided to go after his dream of becoming a _________.

With pen in hand and a blank page before him, Samuel poured his soul out onto the paper. He _________ tales of adventure, love and self-discovery. As he wrote, he gave life to the characters that danced across the page. _________, an unexpected opportunity presented itself. A local publishing house, charmed by Samuel’s stories, offered him a _________ to share his work. He took a leap of faith and said yes!

“Out with the old and in with the new” became Samuel’s pet phrase. The once-shy clerk _________ a confident author. His books found their way into the hands of readers near and far, touching hearts and igniting (点燃) passions.

Samuel’s _________ didn’t come without challenges, but he remembered the saying, “When one door closes, another opens.” Each closed door became an opportunity for growth and a stepping stone to even greater achievements. With each book he composed, he turned over a new leaf. His journey reminded everyone that starting anew was not just surrendering(屈服)to the unknown. It was an invitation to __________ a life filled with purpose and fulfillment.

9 . Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love, to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives, and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others?

One answer is psychological distance. According to the Construal Level Theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the “psychologically distant” category. It's also possible to induce a state of “psychological distance” simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person’s perspective, or by thinking of the question as if it were unreal and unlikely. In this new paper, by Lile Jia and colleagues at Indiana University, scientists have demonstrated that increasing psychological distance so that a problem feels farther away can actually increase creativity.

Why does psychological distance increase creativity? According to CLT, psychological distance affects the way we mentally represent things, so that distant things are represented in a relatively abstract way while psychologically near things seem more concrete. Consider, for instance, a corn plant. A concrete representation would refer to the shape, color, taste, and smell of the plant, and connect the item to its most common use—a food product. An abstract representation, on the other hand, might refer to the corn plant as a source of energy or as a fast-growing plant. These more abstract thoughts might lead us to contemplate other, less common uses for corn, such as a source for ethanol, or to use the plant to create mazes for children. What this example demonstrates is how abstract thinking makes it easier for people to form surprising connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, such as fast-growing plants (corn) and fuel for cars (ethanol) .

In this most recent study, Jia examined the effect of spatial distance on creativity. Participants performed a creative generation task, in which they were asked to list as many different modes of transportation as possible. This task was introduced as having been developed either by Indiana University students studying in Greece (distant condition) or by Indiana University students studying in Indiana (near condition) . As predicated, participants in the distant condition generated more numerous and original modes of transportation than participants in the near condition.

10 . We now live in an age of instant images and emoji, when 10,000 copies of a picture can be spread around the world in seconds by sliding a finger half an inch across a phone screen. This would have been unbelievable and unimaginable 20 years ago. But it is in the world of hand-copied manuscripts (手稿) 1,000 years old or more that the digital revolution has had some of its most profound and obvious beneficial effects. What may have taken three years to write out can today be printed out in three seconds. There are now tens of thousands of once unique documents which have been digitized and placed online for anyone to access all around the world, and this is a vast, democratizing wonder.

Take the Parker Library in Cambridge, which contains the scholarly works during the Reformation (宗教改革时期) and collected by Matthew Parker. It has been digitized in a project with Stanford University, and in 2018 the site was opened to all comers to browse after 10 years behind scholarly paywalls. What is astonishing is not just the texts themselves, but the pictures: the illuminations (插图) on some of the manuscripts show off the fertility and vividness of the medieval imagination.

Digitized collections of these sorts cannot entirely substitute for real libraries. To touch with your own hand a parchment (羊皮纸) from a medieval monk is an experience no screen can offer, but it is one which must always be restricted to a lucky few. There are some things so old and fragile that even being looked at may damage them. The caves at Lascaux had to be closed to protect the paintings from the breath of tourists and replaced by a virtual display.

Yet in some ways these copies are better than the originals. Reproductions of a high enough quality make obvious de tail that’s invisible to the native eye. What’s more, digital collections can be gathered on one screen from across the globe. The International Dunhuang Project reunites on screen tens of thousands of Buddhist scrolls and artifacts in western China. What is possible with this one collection should fairly soon be possible with all the scholarly digitized manuscripts of the world. The hope is to bring them under one system of classification so that they can quickly be searched and sorted no matter where they came from and where they now are stored.

The world may always prefer cat gifs to ancient manuscripts, but the translation from parchment to pixels (像素) reminds us of the humanistic optimism with which the web came into the world, and shows that much of it was not misplaced at all.