1 . The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003.

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia (“哥伦比亚”号航天飞机)______ into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the shattered shuttle flew toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate ______ of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam (绝缘泡沫胶) that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also   ______ out a less direct, more surprising cause. Engineers had known about - and inappropriately______ - the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were ______ in a series of overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials.

By the start of 2003, the phrase “death by PowerPoint” had well and truly entered the ______ vocabulary. Edward Tufte was the first to have taken it literally: That spring, the Yale statistician published a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, whose core argument was that the medium of communication influences the substance of communication. While PowerPoint, as a medium, did not ______ create unclear, lazy presentations, it certainly ______ and sometimes even masked them — with potentially deadly consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides.

Wired ran an excerpt (节选) from Tufte’s booklet in September 2003 under the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included his assessment — summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” — in its ______ of the year’s most important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of confusion,” the entry read.

Despite the backlash it inspired in the ______, the presentation giant rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, well into the hundreds of millions. During lockdown, people ______ PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil ______ the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. Today’s concerns about social media somehow resemble the PowerPoint critique. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies ______ form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid.

______, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. If the innovation did change the way we think, we are measuring its effects with an altered mind. Either the critical remarks were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the   ______.

3 . During the initial stages of instructed L2 (the second language) acquisition students learn a couple thousand, mainly high frequency words. Functional language proficiency, however, _______mastery of a considerably large number of words. It is therefore _______ at the intermediate and advanced stages of language acquisition to learn a large vocabulary in a short period of time. There is not enough time to _______the natural (largely incidental) L1 (the first language) word acquisition process. Incidental acquisition of the words is only possible up to a point, _______, on account of their low frequency, they do not _______often enough in the L2 learning material.

Acquisition of new words from authentic L2 reading texts by means of strategies such as contextual deduction (演绎) is also not a _______for a number of reasons. There appears to be no _______to intentional learning of a great many new words in a relatively short period of time. The words to be learned may be _______in isolation or in context. Presentation in bilingual (双语的) word lists seems an _______shortcut because it takes less time than contextual presentation and yields excellent short term results. Long term memory, ________, is often disappointing so contextual presentation seems advisable.

Any suggestions on how to use this in educational contexts should be based on a systematic ________ of the two most important aspects of the L2 word learning problem, this is to say,   selecting the relevant vocabulary (which and how many words) and creating the best conditions for the acquisition process. This article sets out to ________a computer assisted word acquisition programme (CAVOCA) which tries to do exactly this: the programme operationalises current theoretical thinking about word acquisition, and its ________ are based on a systematic list of the vocabulary relevant for the target group. To ________its frequency, the programme was ________ in a number of experimental settings with a paired associated method of learning new words. The experimental results suggest that an approach combining the two methods is most advisable.

4 . Transition. It’s a pleasant word and a calming concept. It means going surely and sweetly from somewhere present to somewhere future. Unless, that is, it is newspapers’ ‘transition’ to the _______ world, an uncertain and highly uncomfortable process.

Just look at the latest print circulation figures. The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian and many of the rest are down overall between 8% and 10% year-on-year, but their websites go ever higher.

All of that may well be true, depending on timing, geography and more. _______, everyone— from web academics to print analysis—says so. Yet pause for a while and count a few little things that don’t _______.

One is the magazine world, both in the UK and in the US. It ought to be _______, wrecked by the move to the tablets which fit existing magazine page sizes so perfectly. But, in fact, the rate of decline in magazine purchasing is relatively small, with subscriptions holding up strongly and advertising remarkable _______.

As for news and current affairs magazines — which you’d expect to find in the eye of the digital storm — they had a 8.4% increase to report. In short, on both sides of the Atlantic, although some magazine areas went down, many showed rapid growth.

You can discover a _______ phenomenon when it comes to books, Kindle and similar e-readers are booming, with sales up massively this year. The apparent first step of transition couldn’t be _______. Yet, when booksellers examined the value of the physical books they sold over the last six months, they found it just 0.4% down. Screen or paper, then? It wasn’t one or the other: it was _______.

So if sales in that area have fallen so little, perhaps the _______ mostly affects newspapers? Yet again, though, the messages are oddly ________. The latest survey of trends by the World Association of Newspapers shows that global circulation rose 1.1% last year (to 812 million copies a day). Sales in the West dropped back but Asia more than ________ the difference.

Already 360 US papers—including most of the biggest and best — have built paywalls around their products. However, the best way of attracting a paying readership appears to be a deal that offers the print copy and digital access as some kind of ________ package.

________, print is also a crucial tool in selling internet subscriptions. And its advertising rates raise between nine and ten times more money than online.

Of course this huge difference isn’t ________ news for newspaper companies, as maintaining both an active website and an active print edition is difficult, complex and expensive. But newspaper brands still have much of their high profile in print: a drift on the web, the job of just being ________ becomes far harder.

5 . Expressive arts therapy is a form of therapy that uses dance, drama, music, poetry, and art to enhance one's overall well－being. The arts are used to let go, _____ and to release.

People have been using the arts as tools for _____for many centuries. In the early 1940's expressive arts therapy became formally _____ and has since provided meaningful therapeutic _____ for people of all ages in a variety of treatment settings. There is no right or wrong way in the arts and clients are encouraged to be _____ with self－expression. Expressive arts therapy focuses on the _____ of making art and exploring _____ the piece means to the individual, _____ the final product.

Through the arts, people can _____ ideas and feelings that may be hard to put into words, such as negative memories and stress. It has been _____ that use of the arts can help people develop social skills, _____ anxiety, manage behavior, and increase self－confidence. A free form of expression makes clients _____ of their own work by reducing the need to compare themselves to others, an unfortunate problem seen today.

Expressive arts therapists are professionally _____. Anyone can be an expressive art therapist provided that they get the appropriate training. Knowledge in psychology is _____ to all training, but from there training _____ includes getting a master's degree in counseling with specialized instruction in implementing (实施) the art, music, poetry, and dance/movement therapeutically. Some professionals extend their _____ and obtain a PhD in expressive therapy.

_____ expressive arts therapy is unique, the clinical goal is _____ to other mental health professions. This _____ is to facilitate clients' growth and _____ change.

6 . Group-Centered Societies Have Just as Much Creativity

What does culture have to do with creativity? The answer could be “a lot”. For decades, psychologists trying to understand the roots of creative imaginations have looked at the ways in which two different types of cultures can come to have an effect over its artistic and _________ output. Individualistic cultures encourage people to be unique and to _________ their own interests even if doing so comes at a cost to the group overall. Collectivistic cultures are based on relationships and duties to other people. These types of cultures often _________ the individual’s wants for the needs of those who are close to them or for those in their community.

Individualism has long been thought to have a creative _________. Individualists _________ social convention, the logic goes, and that pushback supports innovation. For instance, around the world, individualistic cultures have more patents than collectivistic cultures do. _________, a new study suggests that these ideas about culture and creativity could be off base. People in collectivistic cultures actually do better with a particular type of creative thinking than those in individualistic cultures. And the findings overall reveal the shortcomings of thinking about innovation too _________.

The new work comes from comparing communities in different parts of China. Though it scores high, as a nation, on measures of cultural _________, China’s 1.4 billion people are more than just a single culture. People from areas north of the Yangtze River tend to be more _________, open to strangers and self-confident, whereas people along the river and farther south are often more inter-dependent, partial to friends over strangers and likely to try harder to __________.

In the new creativity study, researchers investigated innovation with these two groups in mind. The team used a drawing test that had been created by psychologists. They gave kids a sheet of paper with just a few basic elements printed on it: some dots here, squiggles (弯曲的线条) there, and a rectangle that suggested a drawing frame. The children got 15 minutes to use the elements already on the page to draw whatever they wanted. They could get “adaptive creativity” points for doodling in ways that connected the squiggles and lines into an original and __________ image. In addition, a judge checked whether the children chose to incorporate a small shape that could be found just outside the rectangular. This element was easy to __________, so those who included this outside-the-box detail could get points for “boundary-breaking creativity.”

The researchers gave the test to 683 middle school students from north and south of the Yangtze River. When the scientists got the scores back, they discovered that there were no differences in the children’s overall creativity. When they broke down the results into components, they found that students from collectivistic regions scored __________ in adaptive creativity while those from individualistic areas did better in boundary-breaking creativity.

The findings are also a warning against cultural chauvinism (极端民族主义). Western countries have tended to lead the way in innovation — at least as defined by the metrics (指标) we Westerners have created. Perhaps we have been __________ China’s adaptive creativity. For example, while the country may not have invented the assembly line, it is largely thanks to the __________ its people have made to this system that the country has such a thriving manufacturing sector today.

9 . Two of the most critical lessons learned from the pandemic are the need for effective national leadership and for clear, consistent communication. Countries that fared well had both in abundance; those that didn’t often faltered. The TIMES survey results reflect this, with_________was “leadership and public communication strategies” the only category in which every rated, on average, at least 4 out of 5 for priority. The highest ranking in the category went to “ensuring strong, federally coordinated responses that provincial, state, and local jurisdictions can rely upon for guidance”. The importance of this cannot be overstated. In the U.S., it made no sense to have 50 states _________ their own supplies of masks and tests, and 50 different sets of rules to contain (or not) the disease. As a former local health official, I can tell you that local health departments are chronically under _________ and so rely on federal entities to formulate clear_________ and evidence-based policy guidance, which _______ those closer to the ground to tailor the specifics to their communities. Being able to point to federal guidelines helps serve as political cover-important when the recommendations ask for difficult actions, such as shuttering businesses and _________ stay-at-home orders.

The TIMES survey also identifies global health governance as a top _________ including to “reform the World Health Organization’s regulatory authority”. Unfortunately, the_________of this intervention was rated 2.86. I agree with this low ranking. Any reform at the WHO will be a long and tedious _________. Global health governance needs to occur, but meanwhile, individual governments can take matters into their own ____________. First, they must rigorously evaluate their country’s pandemic response and make necessary ____________ to improve local, regional and national infrastructure and coordination. Second, they should strengthen international scientific____________. Third, willing countries can ____________ multinational agreements for transparency, mutual aid and partnership.

Improvements in global public health must begin locally and be driven by leaders who will learn the hard ____________ from COVID-19. If we can ____________the key factors that need reform, then we must agree on doing what it takes to prevent another tragedy.

10 . If the ________ are just right, some of the electrons inside a(n) ________ will arrange themselves into a tidy honeycomb pattern（蜂巢状结构）— like a solid within a ________. Physicists have now ________ imaged these ‘Wigner crystals’, named after the Hungarian-born ________ Eugene Wigner, who first imagined them almost 90 years ago. Researchers had ________ created Wigner crystals and measured their properties before, but this is the first time that anyone has actually taken a snapshot of the patterns, says study co-author Feng Wang, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “If you say you have an electron crystal, show me the crystal,” he says. The results were published on 29 September in Nature.

To create the Wigner crystals, Wang’s team built a device ________ atom-thin layers of two similar semiconductors: tungsten disulfide（二硫化物）and tungsten diselenide（联硒化物）. The team then used an electric field to tune the density of the electrons that moved freely along the interface between the two layers.

In ordinary materials, electrons zoom around too quickly to be ________ affected by the ________ between their negative charges. But Wigner predicted that if electrons travelled slowly enough, that repulsion would begin to dominate their behaviour. The electrons would then find ________ that minimize their total energy, such as a ________. So Wang and his colleagues slowed the electrons in their device by ________ it to a few degrees above absolute zero.

A mismatch ________ the two layers in the device also helped the electrons to form Wigner crystals. The atoms in each of the two semiconductor layers are slightly different distances apart, so pairing them together creates a honeycomb ‘moiré pattern’（蝶纹结构）, similar to that seen when overlaying two grids. That repeating pattern created regions of slightly lower energy, which helped the electrons ________. The team used scanning tunnelling microscope(STM) to see this Wigner crystal. In an STM, a metal tip hovers above the surface of a sample, and a(n) ________ causes electrons to jump down from the tip, creating an electric current.