2 . Now that we have briefly explored the history of the short story and heard from a few of its creators, let us consider the role of the reader. Readers are not empty vessels that wait, _______ raised, to receive a teacher’s or a critic’s interpretation. They bring their unique life experiences to the story. With these_______ , the best readers also bring their attention, their reading skills, and most importantly, their_______ to a reading of a story.

My students always_______ me to discuss, analyze, interpret, and evaluate the stories we read without destroying the excitement of being beamed up into another world. For years I _______with one response after the other to this challenge. Then one day I read an article by a botanist who had explored the beauty of flowers by x-raying them. His illustrations showed the rose and the lily in their_______ beauty, and his x-rays_______the wonders of their construction. I brought the article to class, where we discussed the benefits of examining the internal structure of flowers, relationships, current events, and short stories.

A short story, _______ , is not a fossil to admire. Readers must ask questions, guess at the answers,_______what will happen next, then read to discover. They and the author form a partnership that brings the story to life. Awareness of this partnership keeps the original excitement alive through discussion, analysis, interpretation, and ________. Literary explorations allow the reader to admire the authors’________ as well as their artistry. In fact, original appreciation may be enhanced by this x-ray vision. The final step is to appreciate once again the story________— to put the pieces back together.

Now it is your turn. Form a partnership with your author. During your________in reading, enter into a dialogue with the published scholars featured in Short Stories for Students. Through this________with experts you will revise, enrich, or________your original observations and interpretations.

During this adventure, I hope you will feel the same as the listeners that surround the neck of my Pueblo storyteller.

3 . Thanks to in-depth reporting by the Wall Street Journal, we now know that Facebook has long been aware its product Instagram has harmful effects on the mental health of many adolescent users. Young girls, in particular, struggle with their body image thanks to a constant stream of photos and videos showing beautiful bodies that users don’t think they can attain.

While the information the Journal covered is essential and instructive, it does not tell the whole story. Deep down, this is not an Instagram problem; it’s a people problem. Understanding that distinction can make the difference between a failed attempt to contain a teen’s interest in an addictive app and successfully addressing the underlying problem leading to mental distress induced (诱发) by Instagram.

Critics were quick to shame Facebook for sitting on the data and not releasing it to researchers or academics who asked for it. Others criticize the social media giant for not using the research to create a safer experience for its teen users. The anger, while understandable, is misplaced.

While I’m reluctant to defend Facebook, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to blame the company for withholding data that would hurt its business. Have you ever binge-watched (狂看) a Netflix series? I assure you it wasn’t a healthy endeavor. You were in active, likely did nothing productive, mindlessly snacked and didn’t go outside for fresh air. It is an objectively harmful use of time to stare at a TV or laptop for a full weekend. Should we respond by shaming Netflix for not alerting us to how damaging an addictive product can be?

While it’s reasonable to say Instagram makes esteem issues worse, it strains credulity (夸张到难以置信) to believe it causes them in the first place. You create your own experiences on social media. For the most part, you choose which accounts to follow and engage. If you’re already vulnerable to insecurities and self-sabotage (自损) — as many teens are — you will find accounts to obsess over. And this isn’t a new phenomenon.

Before social media, there were similar issues fueling self-esteem issues. Whether the target be magazines, movies or television shows depicting difficult-to-attain bodies, there has been a relatively steady chorus (异口同声) of experts nothing the damage new media could cause young viewers.

Self-esteem issues have an underlying cause — one that’s independent of social media use. Instagram merely enhances those feelings because it provides infinitely more access to triggers than older forms of media. It’s more worthwhile to address those underlying factors rather than to attack Facebook.

5 . One of the curious things about social networks is the way that some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely register at all.

Before you go deep into the puzzle, consider this: If you measure the height of your male friends, for example, the average is about 170 centimeters. You are 172 and your friends are all about the same height as you are. Indeed, the mathematical concept of “average” is a good way to capture the nature of this data set.

But imagine that one of your friends was much taller than you. This person would dramatically skew the average, which would make your friends taller than you, on average. In this case, the “average” is a poor way to capture this data set.

Exactly this situation occurs on social networks. On average, your coauthors will be cited more often than you, and the people you follow will post more frequently than you, and so on.

Now Lerman from University of Southern California has discovered a related paradox, which they call the majority illusion. They illustrate this illusion with an example. They take 14 nodes linked up to form a small network. They then color three of these nodes and count how many of the remaining nodes link to them in a single step.

In one situation, the uncolored nodes see more than half of their neighbors as colored. This is the majority illusion — the local impression that a specific feature is common when the global truth is entirely different.

So how popular is it in the real world? It’s found out that the majority illusion occurs in almost all network scenarios. “The effect is largest in the political blogs network, where 60% of nodes will have majority active neighbours, even when only 20% of the nodes are truly active,” says Lerman.

It immediately explains many interesting phenomena. For a start, it shows how some content can spread globally while other similar content does not — the key is to start with a small number of well-connected early adopters fooling the rest of the network into thinking it is common. The affected nodes then find it natural to follow the trend. A real spread finally comes into being.

But it is not yet a marketer’s charter. For that, marketers must first identify the popular nodes that can create the majority illusion for the target audience. These influencers must then be persuaded to adopt the desired behavior or product, which is essential to the prospect of the marketing plan.

Even Very Young Children Can Be Depressed

If you doubted it, I would introduce you to Susan, who came to my office and talked constantly about her “bad feeling”. Susan     1     (lose) interest in her favorite activities, stopped playing with her friends, and told her parents that she wanted to be dead. She’d spent more time in the school nurse’s office than in her classroom.

Susan was six years old and     2     (suffer) from depression. Proper treatment helped Susan recover. Without it, she might still be an unhappy child, alone and in pain.

The risk for depression does tend to increase as we grow older. Depression in young children is rare but real. Rene Spitz, a     3     (note) psychological researcher, found that infants who were in an institutional orphanage after World War II refused to eat and eventually died     4     they weren’t held by their caretakers. Children have an innate need     5     (hold) and comforted. If those needs aren’t met, then even very young children can fail to thrive and may become sick and die.

Approximately 1% of preschoolers experience depression; they often have great difficulty expressing their feelings, because not all of their language skills     6     (develop) sufficiently. Instead of expressing their feelings in language, the depressed preschool children are likely to show emotions by exhibiting significantly aggressive, fearful, or crying behavior.     7     most preschool children may get angry if they’re hungry, sleepy, afraid     8     their parents go away, or fail to get Daddy to buy them the latest toys, these behaviors are often carried to extremes of intensity and frequency in depressed children.

Although a diagnosis of clinical depression is rare in preschool children, there are times when it is appropriate. In most cases, the child who     9     (experience) significant frustrations resulting from the death or absence of a parent, has witnessed or been victims of violence, or has had a significant health problem     10     has interrupted normal emotional or physical development. I find preschool children to be more resilient (适应力强的) than older children in dealing with these events, as long as they have a supportive parent and receive timely treatment.

For parents who send their kids off to college saying, “These will be the best years of your life,” it would be very appropriate to add, “     1     you can handle the stress of college life.”

Freshmen are showing up already stressed out, according to the latest research study     2     reported students’ emotional health levels at their lowest since the survey started in 1985. While in school, more students are working part-time and near-full-time jobs. At graduation, only 29 percent of seniors     3     (offer) jobs.

Pressure to excel often creates stress, and many students are not learning how to effectively handle this stress. Let me show five facts that I believe every college student     4     know about stress.

First, stress can make smart people do stupid things. Stress causes     5     brain researchers call “cortical inhibition (皮层抑制).” In simple terms, stress prevents a part of the brain responsible for decision-making and reaction time and can negatively affect other mental abilities as well.

Second, the human body doesn’t discriminate between a big stressful event and a little one. Any stressful experience will create about 1,400 biochemical events in your body. If any amount of stress is left     6     (uncheck), many things can occur within the body, including premature aging and energy drain.

Third, stress can become your new pattern. When you regularly experience negative feelings and high amounts of stress, your brain recognizes this     7     your normal state. This then becomes the new norm (常态) for your emotional state.

Fourth, stress can be controlled. Countless studies demonstrate that people can restructure their emotional state using emotion refocusing techniques. One technique     8     (involve) slowing your thoughts, breathing slowly, and focusing on the positive feeling that you receive.

Finally,     9     (draw) to what you study can lessen stress. Barbara Frederickson, a leading international authority on the importance of positive emotions, says humans are genetically programmed     10     (seek) positive emotions such as love and joy. It’s suggested that you should choose a major or career path you love and enjoy. Otherwise, you could end up fighting against your own biology.

The fairest woman in the world was Helen.     1     was the fame of her beauty that there was not a single young prince in all of Greece that didn’t wish to marry her. When her suitors assembled in her home to make a formal proposal for her hand there were so many from such powerful families that her reputed father King Tyndareus, was afraid to select one from amongst them, fearing that the others would unite against him. He therefore demanded first a solemn path from all     2     they would stand up for the cause of Helen’s husband, whoever he might be, if any wrong was done to him through his marriage. Then Tyndareus chose Menelaus, the brother of Agamemnon, and made him King of Sparta as well.

So matters stood when Paris gave the golden apple to Aphrodite. The Goddess of Love and Beauty knew very well where the most beautiful woman on earth was     3     (find). She led the young shepherd straight to Sparta, where Menelaus and Helen received him graciously as their guest. The ties between guest and host were strong. But Paris broke that sacred bond. Menelaus, trusting completely to it, left Paris in his home and went off to Crete.

Menelaus returned to find Helen gone, and he called upon all of Greece to help recover her. The chieftains responded     4     they were obliged to do. They eagerly arrived for the great expedition,    5     (cross) the sea and lay mighty Troy in ashes. Two of the first rank, however, were missing: Odysseus. King of the Island of Ithaca, and Achilles, the son of Peleus and the sea nymph Thetis. Odysseus, who was one of     6     (shrewd) men in Greece, did not want to leave his house and family to embark on a romantic adventure overseas for the sake of a faithless woman. He pretended, therefore, that he had gone mad, and when a messenger from the Greek

Army had arrived, the King was plowing a field and sowing it with salt     7     seed. But the messenger seized Odysseus’ little son and put him directly in the way of the plow. Instantly the father turned the plow aside, thus     8     (prove) that he had all his wits about him. However reluctant, he had to join the Army.

Achilles was kept back by his mother. She sent him to the court of Lycomedes and made him wear women’s clothing, hiding him among the maidens. Odysseus was dispatched by the chieftains to bring him out. Disguised as a peddler he went to the court     9     Achilles was said to be, with gay ornaments in his pack such as women love, and also some fine weapons. While the girls flocked around the trinkets, Achilles fingered each of the swords and daggers. Odysseus knew him then, and he had no trouble at all in making him disregard what his mother had said and     10     (go) to the Greek camp with him.

So the great fleet made ready.