2 . We all have memories of what our fathers enjoyed, and all the fun we had with him: travelling, reading, or exploring the neighborhood hiking trail. Each of us has treasured stories and memories of times with dad.    1    

The charm of storytelling,the fun of traveling, the immersion in a book...these are the gifts of a lifetime my father helped me unwrap.    2    All the stories he narrated to engage us and all the travels we took with him opened up a whole new world to me which was like a breath of fresh air in my life.

My father, turning 75 this year, is still a storyteller, but his exploration of the world has turned virtual. Like almost all children, I spent my twenties walking away from his stories since I was always “occupied with my work.”    3     August all expectations, I hear the unsaid health concerns and the frustration at no being able to do everything the way he used to. In contrast, I have travelled farther than he could take us, and read books much more than he ever had time outside his working hours.

    4    That lies in the things he points at and in the activities he helps us manage. He gifts us expediences of strength and courage that power us forward into the big wide world — a world he walks with us so as to better assure that we will be able to explore and navigate its nettles (荨麻) without being held back by our fears or worries.

Have you ever put your ear to a seashell and heard the waves whooshing in there? On the outside, it is a hard shell — pitted, untidily edged and boldly patterned.    5    They seem to have a tough shell, and you have to put them to your heart and listen for the waves of what they feel and whatever it is that they have left unsaid.

6 . Steph Clemence always intended to go to college. But life has a(an) _________ throughout her early childhood years to _________ barriers. Growing up, she led a nomadic (漫游的) life because her mother, who remarried several times, was always on the _________. By the time of high school, Steph had lived in 25 places.

When her stepfather died in a car accident, leaving her mother to support three daughters on a(an) _________ income, paying for college became a serious question. But she still tried to figure out what to do with a life so _________ her plan for schooling.

The _________ came one afternoon when she was cleaning her bedroom. She _________ a thick document where she found a handout titled “Mrs. Clark’s Book List” by her high school English teacher Dorothy Clark.

It wasn’t homework, but it could be a(an) _________ for those not able to receive higher education due to _________ problems like her. The teacher had spent months creating a list of 153 books whose contents would be as __________ as a two-year study at an arts college.

Steph studied the list. Each of those books __________ her to learn more. The reading list was also a(an) __________ in her everyday life, even __________ with her on vacations to find out the next book. She never did get to college, but has now only four books left before __________ the list. She wishes she could thank Mrs. Clark for how reading the __________ on the list has changed her life.

7 . In looking through your social media, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed pictures accompanied by texts. The pictures are likely made possible by a text-to-image program called DALL-E. For example, Twitter user posted a tweet with the text, “To be or not to be, rabbi holding avocado, marble sculpture.” Then a matching picture appears below.

The AI models come from Google’s Imagen software as well as OpenAI. a start-up backed by Microsoft. On its website, OpenAI calls DALL-E “a new Al system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.” But most of what’s happening in this area is coming from a relatively small group of people sharing their pictures. That’s because Google and OpenAI have not made the technology broadly available to the public.

The text-to-picture services identify the most important parts of a user’s text and then guess the best way to picture those terms. There’s generally a text box, a button to start the generation process and an area below to display images. To indicate the source. Google and OpenAI add watermarks in the bottom right comer of images from DALL-E and Imagen.

Engineers trained the models on various collections of words and pictures from the web. OpenAI recognizes the potential for harm that could come from a model. To avoid the risk, employees removed violent content from training data, and there are filters（筛选）stopping DALL-E from producing images if users submit（提交）violent or illegal content.

Boris Dayma, a developer from Texas spelled out the problems in an explanation of their software. Despite the risks, Dhariwal, a research scientist at OpenAI, said it could open up creative opportunities for individuals and could help with commercial applications for dressing up websites. Results should continue to improve over time.

8 . Picture the scene: you’ve spent years working towards a very specific goal. You’ve put in countless hours of work and made many efforts along the way, but now that you’ve got there it doesn’t feel quite like you imagined. Instead of celebration, you feel emptiness, confusion and doubt.

Welcome to the anti-climax. The often-experienced but seldom-discussed downside of achieving life’s biggest milestones. Many of us work tirelessly towards our goals. We may spend our lives dreaming of the day we get married, publish our first hook or buy our first home. However, oftentimes, when we achieve these things it doesn’t feel quite as expected. In fact, the achievement of these goals feels a bit of a letdown.

So why do we often experience an anti-climax with big goals, even though we’re happy to achieve them? “An anti-climax can be an unexpected by-product of a milestone achievement. Usually, the more significant the milestone, the greater the anti-climax may be. The intensity（强度）of an anti-climax often relies on what we expect of this achievement.” says Rachel Vora. a psychotherapist（心理治疗师）.“The journey to achieving a milestone can he exciting and tiring in addition to giving us a sense of purpose and focus. Therefore, when this disappears overnight. we can often feel lost and confused, in spite of feeling proud of our achievement.

When this happens it can contribute to a mixture of emotions. We often falsely believe that we’ll feel completely different afterwards or that our feelings of low self-worth will disappear, but this is rarely the case. “Clients（客户）often present to me with an extremely great sense of ‘is this it?’ and ‘what now?’.” says Vora. “These feelings of confusion and disappointment, if let ignored, have the potential to cause clients to be in low spirits, or even worse.”