1 . Pat Patterson, a pilot for 25 years, had never met anyone like the handsome young man in the wheelchair who faced him at the Medford, Oregon, airport on July 28, 1976. Mike Henderson, a quadriplegic (四肢瘫痪者), wanted flying lessons.

As a 22­-year-­old Coast Guardsman eight years before, Henderson had fallen off a dock and landed on a floating log, breaking two of his bones. Doctors said that he would probably never walk again, let alone fly. “Here was this doctor telling me how it was going to be,” he says, “but no one was going to limit my freedom to try.”

Henderson parked his wheelchair next to the airplane and began to climb up onto the wing. He injured his elbow on the way, and after a great struggle, finally managed to pull himself into the airplane’s pilot’s seat. In the flight office, Pat Patterson watched in disbelief. “He crawled his way up that wing!” he says. “It took him 45 minutes. When I went out, he was sitting in the pilot’s seat, bleeding from his injured elbow all over the place. When I saw him go through that much pain, I knew nothing could stop him.”

Now everything was up to the instructor and the student, and together they set about solving each problem as it arose. A small piece of carpet gave Henderson traction (摩擦力) to climb the slippery wing. A headset freed his hands from the radio microphone, and the two men developed a moving bar that enabled Henderson to operate the airplane more easily.

Three weeks and eight flying hours after the first lesson, Henderson and Patterson happily phoned Dr. Stoddard — Henderson’s physician. At the airport, as the physician looked on, Henderson quickly wheeled himself around the airplane, doing a thorough, professional ground check. With Patterson and Dr. Stoddard on board, he went through his preflight instrument check. Minutes later, engine starting, the plane rolled down the runway and took off into the gray sky.

China has many famed explorers. There was Zhang Qian,     1     traveled into Central Asia,     2     (open) corridors of trade that became the Silk Road. Zheng He was a great mariner in the 15th century. Yet these voyages     3     (undertake) under the direction of governments Xu Xiake was different.

Born in 1587, Xu Xiake grew up in a rich family. Yet he rejected the     4     （comfort) life to travel the lost world of imperial China. As one of the greatest land explorers, Xu Xiake is said     5     (travel) thousands of miles of Chinese mountains and rivers on foot in his lifetime. The written work of Xu Xiake's travel records and diaries contains some 404, 000 Chinese characters,     6     enormous work for a single author of his time. It mixes     7     (detail) of geography, botany and local history with the ratings of the Ming Dynasty lodgings (住宿).

“On the surface, Xu's travel can neither be classified as great affairs of state     8     great undertakings that changed the course of history.” writes the cultural historian Zheng Peikai. “Xu traveled to satisfy his own     9    (curious) — he traveled for the sake of traveling.”

Xu Xiake traveled across China for 34 years. Perhaps his     10    (great) journey was his last. At age 50, he traveled to the tropical frontiers of Yunnan. Hundreds of years later, we follow. Naturally, he is the father of Chinese backpacking.

7 . “Few articles change owners more frequently than clothes. They travel downwards from grade to grade in the social scale with remarkable regularity,” wrote the journalist Adolphe Smith in 1877 as he traced a coat’s journey in the last century: cleaned, repaired and resold repeatedly; cut down into a smaller item; eventually recycled into new fabric. But with the improvement in people’s living standards, that model is mind-boggling in the era of fast fashion. The average British customer buys four items a month. And it is reported that 350,000 tonnes of used but still wearable clothes go to landfills in the UK each year.

Yet the gradual revival of the second-hand trade has gathered pace in the past few years. At fashion website Asos, sales of vintage clothes (古董衫) have risen by 92%. Clothing was once worn out of necessity, and now it is simply a way of life. Busy families sell used items on eBay, teenagers trade on Depop and some fashion people offer designer labels on Vestiaire Collective. Strikingly, it has become big enough business that mainstream retailers (零售商) want a slice of the action.

For some buyers and sellers, the switch to the second-hand is born of financial difficulties. Only a few have become worried about the impact of their shopping habit on the planet. But the shift is only a partial solution. Some people worry that some mainstream brands may “greenwash” — using second-hand goods to improve their image, rather than engaging more seriously with sustainability.

However, the biggest concern may be that people keep buying because they know they can resell goods, still chasing the pleasure of the next purchase but with an eased conscience (愧疚). Boohoo, a powerful fast fashion company, has seen sales and profits rise, despite concerns about environmental problems in its supply chain that led to an investigation last year.

A new Netflix series, Worn Stories, documents the emotional meanings that clothes can have: Each old item is full of memories. Actually, a handbag from a grandmother and a scarf passed on by a father are both valuable for us. A love of style is not a bad or an unimportant thing. But a committed relationship is better than a quick flash. Can we learn to appreciate our own old clothes as well as others’?

8 . Anew study reports that a mosquito’s sense of smell is more complicated than we once thought. And it may explain why this annoying insect is so good at seeking you out at a barbecue or in your bedroom and biting you—as well as lead to new strategies to prevent the potentially deadly diseases transmitted by its bite.

Meg Younger, a neuroscientist at Boston University, is co-author of the study. She exhales(呼气)gently into one of the mosquito-filled cages. A waft of carbon dioxide blows across the insects, and they go wild. “And now, they’re looking fora target like the complex mixture of human body smell—a smell that’s attractive to the mosquitoes,” Younger explains.

In many parts of the world, this attraction isn’t merely an annoyance for humans. It’s a major health problem. Mosquitoes transmit diseases to humans. These diseases include dengue, Zika, chikungunya fever and malaria. The last disease alone causes over half a million deaths each year.

So scientists have attempted to break this attraction. But try as they might, the little mosquito has resisted. “They’re really good at what they do,” Younger says. Most of what we know about the neuroscience of smell comes from mice and fruit flies, where the wiring is fairly simple. Each neuron(神经元) in the nose has one kind of receptor(感受器) that detects a single kind of smell—say, a banana. And all the neurons with receptors for the banana smell connect to the same part of the brain. Younger and the others studied mosquito brains, where she found that each neuron has multiple receptors that can detect multiple smells.

This work could give researchers additional ways to battle the insects like developing traps that contain new smell mixtures that are more appealing than people.

“It’s an enormous study,” says Josefina del Marmol, a neurobiologist at the Harvard Medical School. She says there’s more work to be done to check. neuron by neuron, that each one actually responds to all the smells it has receptors for. But regarding the central finding, she says, “It really does change a lot about what we know of how insects perceive the world.”

9 . Mary Dickins had been a member of the audience at poetry nights before and knew “the poetry clap”. She made a polite tapping of fingers. But when she made her debut (首次演出) as a performer at the age of 62 at the legendary Bang Said the Gun night in south London, she said, “It was so wild — like nothing I had ever seen before.” The audience stamped their feet and shook shakers. “It felt transformative. I thought, ‘I’ve got to have more of this,’ ” Dickins said. Becoming a performance poet has given her a place on a stage of her own making.

All her life she has written, mostly without being seen or heard. Her mother died when she was nine, and, after she went into a care home at 13, Dickins’ writing stayed in notebooks. Really, she says, a lot of her adult life has been about getting over childhood shyness. At university — she studied education — she met her husband of 40 years, but in three years of seminars she did not say a word. Some of this results from her years at the children’s home. She says, “It gave me a sense of what it’s like to be excluded. I never fitted in anywhere.”

After she graduated, she discovered that she loved working with people with learning disabilities. She became an expert in inclusive education. “That was my niche (称心的职业),” she says. She published books and returned to the University of North London as a senior lecturer in early childhood studies.

Dickins now sees that in adulthood she has been giving herself permission to be silly. “The sillier I allow myself to be, the better the writing is,” she says. Her observations are humorous.

“Putting things into words and giving shape to your emotions is an important part of coming to terms with the things that happen in life,” she says.

Does she still feel like an outsider?

“I think I’ve made it into a virtue. I celebrate the fact that I don’t fit into a box. Finally! You have to wait till you’re 62 to feel confident!” she says. “But I have a sense of who I am and I'm proud of it. I wouldn’t be anyone else now — and it took me a long time to say that.”

10 . Typing.com is an online typing tutor for students of all ages. Typing.com’s proven curriculum helps students from beginners to advanced learners, focusing on technique, accuracy, and speed. The following are some frequently asked questions about typing on our website.

An average student without learning differences will learn to touch type within eight to ten hours. They may be touch typing at a very slow speed (8-15 words per minute).

Yes. Not only does it prevent you from practicing your fingering, but it also slows you down and makes you type less accurately. It's far more difficult to notice mistakes when you're not looking at the screen.

The most important technique to learn to type faster is touch typing. This is a technique based on developing muscle memory for your fingers.

Focus on accuracy rather than speed. Use the entire keyboard correctly. Learn some keyboard shortcuts. Practice every day.

Arrange your fingers properly. The most important step in improving your typing speed is ensuring that you place your fingers correctly on the keyboard. Rest the index finger (食指) of your left hand on the “F” key and the index finger of your right hand on the “J” key.

Typing.com is a free online typing tutor and digital literacy (读写能力) platform used by millions of students and education professionals around the world. We aim to provide valuable learning tools to as many school teachers and students as possible.