1 . Playing with my 5-year-old child, I sometimes wonder: Why are her made-up games so terribly boring? In Learning to Imagine, psychologist Andrew Shtulman thinks it untrue that kids are uncontrolled wellsprings of imagination. On the contrary, the more we learn, the more imaginative we can become, and learning will not hold back imaginative ideas. Kids, he argues, fail to imagine obvious possibilities.

To gather evidence for this argument, Shtulman explores mechanisms (机制) for expanding imagination. Without support of others or new tools and technologies, people may reject reasonable ideas out of hand, he maintains. Lord Kelvin, for instance, famously denied the possibility of “heavier-than-air flying machines” less than 10 years before the Wright brothers created one. Abstract principles, like those so influential in science and ethics (伦理学), also boost imagination. Finally, imagination grows through exploring alternative models of the world, as in plays, fiction and so on. Across all of these examples, expanding imagination requires building closely on what people already know.

Perhaps counterintuitively (反直觉地), kids relate best to realistic stories. For instance, Walt Disney’s earliest cartoons were disorganized and strange. Only when the cartoons became “reasonably impossible” did they gain mass appeal. Many fictional worlds, from Middle Earth to Hogwarts, rely on reasonable impossibility.

Shtulman cleverly and precisely sails this vast, attractive sea. Learning to Imagine never drags or makes me get stuck on professional words. I wish, however, that there had been more focus on what these findings mean. If education does not hinder imagination, how do we develop it? Shtulman advises us to “engage with, and learn from, the collective knowledge of other people”. AI programs like GPT take that approach, educating themselves on massive data sets.

“Be like GPT” is not the most heartening message. But while humans cannot learn large amounts of data quickly and easily like AI, human imagination is shared and cooperative. That, at least, is something all of us—5-year-olds and their dads alike-have over the chatbots.

China drilled a tunnel through for expressway transport in Beijing on Monday. It is the     1     (long) expressway tunnel in the country created using the shield-tunneling method (盾构隧道法).

With a total length of 7.4 km, the tunnel project     2     (design) to have a two-way six-lane expressway on the middle level, smoke vent (排烟孔) on the upper level     3     evacuation (疏散) and rescue routes on the lower level, according to the Beijing Capital Highway Development Group Co., Ltd., which is carrying out the project.

The tunnel is part of Beijing’s east     4     (six) ring road project. The deepest section of the tunnel,     5     is 75 meters underground, is the deepest underground tunnel in Beijing. In June, the west tunnel of the project was the first     6     (drill) through. The east tunnel was just drilled through on Monday.

With     7     excavation diameter of 16.07 meters and a length of about 145 meters, the shield-tunneling machine adopted in the project is     8     (independent) designed and made by Chinese companies. It weighs 4,500 tonnes.

The tunnel project has helped make way for more space on the ground for     9     (promote) industrial development and planning large parks, contributing     10     the high-quality development of Beijing’s sub-center Tongzhou District and coordinated transport development in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.

8 . That late afternoon I was assigned to accompany an important Chinese businessman to tourist sites in northern Thailand. Silently ________, I stared at my desk. The piles of paper ________ how much work waiting to be done.

We spent the next whole day visiting ________. That evening we went to dinner and a show, one I had attended many times before. While my ________ chatted with other tourists, I exchanged polite ________ in the dark with a man seated in front of me. He was holding his head motionless at an odd angle, as though in prayer. The truth ________ me. He was blind.

“Could I please sit beside you?” he asked. “And I’d love it if you’d ________ a little of what you see.”

“I’d be happy to,” I ________.

As we waited for our drinks, the blind man said, “The music seems out of ________ to our Western ears, but it has charm. Please tell me about the musicians.”

I hadn’t ever noticed the five men ________ at the side of the stage. “They’re seated cross-legged on a rug, ________ in loose white cotton shirts and large black trousers, with fabric around their waists that has been dyed bright red.”

“Yes, yes, I see them!” the blind man said quietly, ________. He patted my shoulder, then pulled me toward him and embraced me ________. “How nice of you to see everything for me,” he whispered. “I can never thank you enough.”

Later I realized that I should have ________ him. I was the one who had been ________, my eyes merely skimming the surface of things.

9 . If your resolution is to learn a new language, you may be wondering: What’s the best way to go about this?     1     There are many different ways to approach it. If you want to start learning a language fast, though, there is plenty of advice we can offer.

Is grammar important?

Yes, grammar is important. But after all, when you’re learning your first language as a baby, your parents don’t have to teach you the clear rules of the language.     2    

Should I focus on speaking or writing?

    3     If you want to travel and communicate with native speakers, then writing might be slightly less helpful. But if you’re learning Latin because you want to read texts in the original language, then you can probably skip the speaking part entirely.

Should I watch shows and listen to music in the language I’m learning?

Absolutely yes. Being exposed to a language will always help you with your learning.

    4     Watching movies to learn a language may have helped somewhat. But it’s important not to trap yourself with a complex language.

How Can I make language learning more fun?

One of the best ways to make learning more fun is to work it in to your other hobbies.     5    

You can’t learn to play the guitar and go jogging at the same time, for example. However, language is always around you and you can practice it while doing something else. While jogging, you could listen to a podcast in another language. While playing the guitar, you could pick songs that are in your target language. Anyway, connecting your interests really matters.

10 . Birds in North America will no longer be named after people, the American Ornithological Society (美国鸟类学会) announced Wednesday. Next year, the organization will begin to rename around 80 species found in the U.S. and Canada.

“There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary (排他的) and harmful today,” the organization’s president, Colleen Handel, said in a statement. “Everyone who loves and cares about birds should be able to enjoy and study them freely.”

Rather than review each bird named after a person individually, all such birds will be renamed, the organization announced. Birds that will be renamed include those currently called Wilson’s warbler and Wilson’s snipe, both named after the 19th-century naturalist Alexander Wilson. Audubon’s shearwater, a seabird named for John James Audubon, also will get a new name. In 2020, the organization renamed a bird once referring to a Confederate Army general, John P. McCown, as the thick-billed longspur.

“I’m really happy and excited about the announcement,” said Emily Williams, an ornithologist at Georgetown University who was not involved in the decision. She said heated discussions over bird names have been happening within birdwatching communities for the past several years. “Naming birds based on habitat or appearance is one of the least problematic approaches,” she said.

Earlier this year, the National Audubon Society (NAS) announced that it would keep its name, even as critics and some voices within the organization have argued that it should dump (抛弃) the association with a man, John James Audubon, whose family treated their employees cruelly.

“The name has come to represent so much more than the work of one person,” Susan Bell, chair of the National Audubon Society’s Board of Directors, told Audubon magazine in March, adding, “We shouldn’t ignore what John James Audubon did to his employees in the past.”