I had run away from home after finishing high school. My parents had insisted I go to college, but I was tired of school. I hated it. I was determined not to go. And, besides, my father was too strict. I had too many chores to do around the farm. I haled the work!

There had been a quarrel between my father and me. I threw some things into a bag and left angrily, as my father shouted after me, “If you leave, don’t come back!” My mother cried openly, and I had seen those tears during a hundred sleepless nights.

Then it was time to write a letter to my father.

It’s been more than a year now. I’ve traveled east to west. I’ve had dozens of jobs. None of them amounted to very much. Always the same questions: “How much education have you got?” It seems they always want college men for the good jobs.

Dad, you and Mother were right about everything. I know now that the work on the farm didn’t hurt me, and I’m convinced I need college. I’m also convinced that both of you loved me.

Dad, I’ve learned a lesson. I want to come home. I know you said if I left, I couldn’t come back, but I’m praying you’ll change your mind. I want to come home and be a part of the family again.

Give my love to Mother and the girls.

As I folded the letter and put it into an envelope, I felt a refreshing relief. It was as if a heavy load had been lifted from my shoulders. And I had to be on my way home.

I started down the desolate road—the long road home. Fortunately, a car picked me up, and it was good to have someone to talk with. The driver was a salesman and very pleasant.

“Where you going, boy?” he asked good-naturedly.

There was a long silence before I said, “Home.”

“Been away from home long?”

I smiled, a little self-conscious, and said, “One year, one month and two days.”

Having heard my story, he expressed his support for my final decision and told me something surprising.

Finally, I arrived home when. it was completely dark.

6 . History has not yet _______ what we will definitively call the postmillennial cohort (2000年后出生的人) that now _______ more than 60 million people in the U.S. These kids and _______ with no concept of life _______ the Internet have so far been called the App Generation and Generation Z. They’ve been referred to as Homelanders, having grown up under the ghost of terorism. They’ve also been _______ the Plurals, for their historic diversity, as well as the Founders, at least by MTV.

Whatever we _______ naming them, marketers and academies are turning their attention to this group, which has billions in _______ and is already shaping the culture. This generation is growing up “totally and utterly connected,” says California State University psychologist Larry Rosen. Experts like Rosen have concerns about these kids’ Google-inspired expectations that everything be _______. They worry about their inability to _______ even five seconds of boredom. And they worry about the demands that come with ________ several identities online, from Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat. “There’s so much pressure on young people, who are still ________ their identities, to present this crystallized, idealized identity online,” says the University of Washington’s Katie Davis.

Historian Neil Howe sees ________ with the Silent Generation, the spoilt, risk-avoiding, “nice” generation of kids who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, although some marked differences are found. Today’s youths are also coming of age among geopolitical trouble and fears about the economy, he says, ________ schools emphasize an intense far-reaching sensitivity to other kids. He suspects this ________ will be known for being well behaved and perhaps boring the culture by playing it safe. “There are typical examples that occur repeatedly,” Howe says, “even if they go by different ________.”

7 . The high-tech revolution has inspired a pleasure endless stream of new and exciting electronic products that we just can’t live without. In fact, the speed of technological innovation can make last year’s must-have this year’s junk. And that’s the problem.

The average life span of a personal computer has been shortened to around 18 months and this has nothing to do with worn-mice or damaged disk drives. Simply put, electronic products can become out of date before you’ve even figured out how they work.

So what happens to all those old keyboards, monitors, organizers and CPUs? Most are stored away in a warehouse (仓库), taking up valuable space. But many end up in landfills, and that is where the trouble really begins. Computer monitors can contain up to 3.5 kg of dangerous waste once they are no longer in use.

Unfortunately, this problem is not going to disappear anytime soon. In fact, it is growing by the minute. In Japan alone, people throw away some 20 million TVs, washing machines, refrigerators and air conditioners each year. What is to be done with all this techno-trash?

One way to reduce waste is to avoid throwing away in the first place. Many companies reuse parts from old products in new models. This is not cheating-it makes both environmental and economic sense. Cannon, for example, has adopted a philosophy known as “kyosei”, meaning “living and working together for the common good?” — a goal of achieving balance between the environment and the corporate (公司的) activities. The company has even gone so far as to say that environmental assurance should come before all business activities, and that companies unable to achieve such assurance do not deserve to remain in business.

As part of that effort, the company has started a global recycling program with a goal to reduce, reuse and recycle more than 90% of its used products. In 1999, for example, Cannon collected 128, 000 copying machines and 12, 175 tons of toner cartridges (色粉盒) in Japan, Europe and the United States.

Some argue that electronic garbage can also be controlled during the design phase. This concept, called “design for the environment”. Not only does this make environmental sense, but it saves the customer money. IBM, meanwhile, recently planned programs in Canada and the US that, for a small fee, will take back not just an IBM but also any manufacturer’s computer. Depending on the age and condition, the equipment will then be either donated to charity, or broken down for reusable parts and recyclable materials.

9 . When you ask people to judge others by their speech, a trend emerges: Listeners dislike disfluency. Slow talkers producing loads of ums and pauses(停顿)are generally perceived as less charming. But science tells us there may be even more to disfluency.

Disfluencies do not occur in arbitrary positions in sentences. Ums typically occur right before more difficult or low-frequency words. Imagine you’re having dinner with a friend at a restaurant,and there’re three items on the table: a knife, a glass, and a wine decanter(醒酒器). Your friend turns to you and says, “Could you hand me the...um...” What would you assume they want? Since it’s unlikely that they will hesitate before such common words as knife, and glass, chances are you’ll pick up the decanter and ask, “You mean this?”

This is exactly what we demonstrated through controlled eye-tracking studies in our lab. Apparently, listeners hear the um and predict that an uncommon word is most likely to follow.Such predictions, though, reflect more than just simple association between disfluencies and difficult words; listeners are actively considering from the speaker’s point of view. For example, when hearing a non-native speaker say the same sentence but with a thick foreign accent, listeners don’t show a preference for looking at low-frequency objects. This is probably because listeners assume non-native speakers may have as much trouble coming up with the English word for a common object, like a knife, as for unusual ones and can’t guess their intention.

In another experiment, listeners were presented with an atypical speaker who produced disfluencies before simple words and never before difficult words. Initially, participants displayed the natural predictive strategy: looking at uncommon objects. However, as more time went by, and they gained experience with this atypical distribution of disfluencies, listeners started to demonstrate the contrary predictive behavior: They tended to look at simple objects when hearing the speaker say um.

These findings represent further evidence that the human brain is a prediction machine: We continuously try to predict what will happen next, even though not all disfluencies are created equal.