2 . Mind-reading AI turns thoughts into words using a brain implant

An artificial intelligence can accurately translate thoughts into sentences, at least for a limited vocabulary of 250 words. The system may bring us a step closer to _________ speech to people who have lost the ability because of paralysis.

Joseph Makin at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues used deep learning algorithms to study the brain _________ of four women as they spoke. The women, who all have epilepsy, already had electrodes attached to their brains to _________ seizures. Each woman was asked to read aloud from a set of sentences as the team measured brain activity. The largest group of sentences _________ 250 unique words.

The team fed this brain activity to a neural network algorithm, training it to identify regularly _________ patterns that could be linked to repeated aspects of speech, such as vowels or consonants. These patterns were then fed to a second neural network, which tried to turn them into words to _________ a sentence.

Each woman repeated the sentences at least twice, and the final repetition didn’t form part of the training data, _________ the researchers to test the system. Each time a person speaks the same sentence, the brain activity associated will be similar but not identical. “Memorising the brain activity of the these sentences wouldn’t help, so the network instead has to learn what’s similar about them so that it can generalise to this final example,” says Makin. Across the four women, the AI’s best _________ was an average translation error rate of 3 percent.

Makin says that using a small number of sentences made it easier for the AI to learn which words tend to follow others. For example, the AI was able to decode that the word “Turner” was always likely to follow the word “Tina” in this set of sentences, from brain _________ alone.

The team tried decoding the brain signal data into __________ words at time, rather than whole sentences, but this increased the error rate to 38 per cent even for the best performance. “So the network clearly is learning facts about which words go together, and not just which neural activity __________ to which words,” says Makin. This will make it hard to __________ the system to a larger vocabulary because each new word increases the number of possible sentences, reducing __________.

Making says 250 words could still be useful for people who can’t talk. “We want to deploy this in a patient with an actual speech disability,” he says, although it is possible their brain activity may be different from that of the women in this study, making this more __________.

Sophie Scott at University College London says we are a long way from being able to translate brain signal data comprehensively. “You probably know around 250, 000 words, so it’s still an incredibly __________ set of speech that they’re using,” she says.

5 . Everyone knows that taxation is necessary in a modern state: without it , it would not be possible to pay the soldiers and policemen who protect us; _____ the workers in government offices who   _____ our health, our food, our water, and all the other things that we cannot do for ourselves. _____ taxation, we pay for things that we need just as much as we need somewhere to live and something to eat.

_______ everyone knows that taxation is necessary, different people have different ideas about ________ taxation should be arranged.

In most countries, a direct tax on _____, which is called income tax, exists. It is arranged in such a ______ that the poorest people pay nothing, and the percentage of tax grows ______ as the taxpayer’s income grows. In some countries, for example, the tax on the richest people goes up as high as ninety-five per cent!

And countries with taxation nearly ____ have indirect taxation too. Many things imported into the country have to pay taxes or “duties” Of course, it is the men and women who buy these imported things in the shops _____. really have to pay the duties, in the ______ of higher prices. In some countries, ______, there is a tax on things sold in the shops. If the most necessary things are taxed, a lot of money is ______ but the poor people suffer most. If unnecessary things ______ jewels and fur coats are taxed, less money is obtained but the tax is _______ as the rich pay it.

Probably this last kind of indirect tax, together with a direct tax on incomes which is low for the poor and high for the rich, is the best arrangement.

6 . The modern Olympic Games, founded in 1896, began as contests between individuals, rather than among nations, with the hope of promoting world peace through sportsmanship. In the beginning, the games were open only to _______. An amateur is a person whose involvement in an activity - from sports to science or the arts - is purely for ________. Amateurs, whatever their contributions to a field, expect to receive no form of compensation; professionals, ________, perform their work in order to earn a living.

From the perspective of many athletes, ________, the Olympic playing field has been far from fair. Restricting the Olympics to amateurs has excluded the participation of many who could not afford to be _______. Countries have always desired to send their best athletes, not their ________ ones, to the Olympic Games.

A slender and imprecise line separates what we call “financial support” from “earning money.” Do athletes “earn money” if they are reimbursed for travel expenses? What if they are paid for time lost at work or if they accept free clothing from a manufacturer or if they teach sports for a living? The runner Eric Liddell was the son of poor missionaries; in 1924 the British Olympic Committee ________ his trip to the Olympics, where he won a gold and a bronze medal. College scholarships and support from the United States Olympic Committee made it possible for American track stars Jesse Owens and Wilma Rudolph and speed skater Dan Jansen to train and compete. When the Soviet Union and its allies joined the games in 1952, the ________ of amateur became still less clear. Their athletes did not have to ________ work and training because as citizens in communist regimes, their government financial support was not considered payment for jobs.

In 1971 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ________ the word amateur from the rules, making it easier for athletes to find the ________ necessary to train and compete. In 1986, the IOC allowed professional athletes into the games.

There are those who ________ the disappearance of amateurism from the Olympic Games. For them the games ________ something special when they became just another way for athletes to earn money. Others say that the designation(命名) of amateurism was always ________; they argue that all competitors receive so much financial support as to make them paid professionals. Most agree, however, that the ________ over what constitutes(组成) an amateur will continue for a long time.

7 . In 1965, 17-year-old high school student Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours to see how he’d cope without sleep. On the second day, his eyes stopped focusing. Next, he lost the ability to ________ objects by touch. By day three, Gardner was moody and uncoordinated. At the end of the experiment, he was ________ to concentrate, had trouble with short-term memory and started hallucinating(出现幻觉). Although Gardner recovered without long-term psychological or physical ________, for others, sleeplessness can result in hormone(激素) imbalance, illness, and even death.

Sleep is ________. Adults need 7 to 8 hours of sleep at night, and adolescents need about 10. In the United States, it's estimated that 30% of adults and 66% of adolescents are ________ sleep deprived. When we lose sleep, learning, memory, mood, and reaction time are affected. Sleeplessness may also cause inflammation, hallucinations, high blood pressure, and it's even been ________ to diabetes and obesity.

How can sleep ________ cause such enormous suffering? Scientists think the answer lies with the ________ of waste products in the brain. During our waking hours, our cells are busy using up our day's energy sources with get broken down into various by-products, including adenosine(腺苷酸). As adenosine builds up, it increases the ________ to sleep, also known as sleep pressure. In fact, caffeine works by ________ adenosine's receptor pathways. Other waste products also build up in the brain, and if they're not cleared away, they collectively ________ the brain and are thought to lead to the many negative symptoms of sleep deprivation.

So, what's happening in our brain when we sleep, to prevent this? Scientists found something called the Lymphatic System, a clean-up mechanism(机能) that removes this build up and is much more ________ when we're asleep. It works by using cerebrospinal fluid(脑脊髓液) to flush away toxic by-products that accumulate between cells. Lymphatic vessels, which ________ pathways for immune cells have recently been discovered in the brain, and they may also play a role in ________ the brain's daily waste products. While scientists continue exploring the restorative mechanisms behind sleep, we can be sure that sleeping is a(n) ________ if we want to maintain our health and our sanity.

8 . A true reality of retirement planning is that your future is riding on the quality of your assumptions. Humble ______ can be dangerous.

For example, eight years into this bull market, expecting stocks to deliver as strong returns over the next decade is an uncertain proposition many are nonetheless ______.

Another potential ______ assumption is that you will be able to keep working past 65. Yet the recently released 2017 Retirement Confidence Survey by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute finds that more than half of workers say they expect to still be on the clock past age 65. ______, less than 15 percent of today's retirees kept working that long.

"If you plan on working longer as a way to get by in retirement, you are going to be in trouble," says Craig Copeland, senior research associate at EBRI. "It should be a ______ to a solid savings and spending plan, not the foundation."

It's simply too ______ to assume you will indeed be able to work longer. A survey by the Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies found that nearly two-thirds of retirees left the workforce earlier than expected because they were laid off, reorganized out of a position, or due to general unhappiness with a job. Only 16 percent of retirees who ______ the work force earlier than they expected did so because they felt they could ______ afford to.

______, a new report from Prudential puts a dollar value on why your current employer may not be inclined (倾向于) to do back flips to keep an older you happy and engaged. The estimated one-year cost to a firm when an employee ______ retirement: $50,000.

Prudential estimates that on a company-wide level, delayed retirement can ______   overall workforce costs by 1 percent to 1.5 percent. That's not nothing. And it goes a long way in explaining why employers may be more inclined to focus on "financial wellness" strategies to get workers ready to retire ______ than programs to help workers delay retirement.

Fewer than one-third of employees surveyed by TCRS report their employer has some sort of "transition" program such as flexible work schedules, reduced hours or ______ to a different role.

"Workers' vision of retirement is changing faster than employers' business ______," said Catherine Collinson, president of TCRS. That makes it ever more crucial for pre-retirees to take the steps today that will increase the ______ they can continue to work longer, if that's part of the plan.

9 . Last year I went on holiday to Spain. But _____, after two days in Madrid, I started to get severe __pain. I was in such suffering that I went to the local hospital for a(n) __.

No sooner had I arrived than I was __to a small room, and I had not been waiting too long __a surgeon came to examine me. He didn’t speak English and I only spoke a few words of Spanish. He ___that   I   had to   remove   my   clothes   and he   gave   me   one of   those funny hospital gowns( 罩衣)which hardly __anything.

He then asked me in Spanish if I was embarrassed. “Si, unpoco (Yes, a little)”, I replied   with my face turning red. You see, not only did I feel embarrassed at __my clothes in front of a stranger but also this   __stranger was an extremely handsome man. He looked at me as though I   was out of my ___and then he quickly ___down the passage.

I was beginning to ___what had happened to him when he suddenly reappeared, this time with a group of ___students, and again asked the same question in Spanish. Now I was feeling ___, and shouted in English, “Yes, I’m extremely embarrassed. I think you would ___too if you had to talk to a crowd of strangers with almost no clothes on.” Then a female doctor in the group held my arm gently and ___in perfect English, “I think I see the problem. My ___wants to take a photograph of your back—an X-ray—so he wants to know if you are ___a baby. You see, embarazada means pregnant in Spanish.”

No sooner had she told me this than I realized the ___of the misunderstanding. We all had a __, although I must admit that I felt rather stupid as well.

10 . When we saw a programme on TV about a Christmas trip to Lapland, we knew our four children would love it. ____ them on any holiday is costly, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime ____ for our family.

In October, we got the children to write Christmas ____ to Santa. They thought it was a bit soon but were ____ just how many letters Santa receives, so getting in early would make sure that he would read them.

Our departure day arrived in mid-December. There was an explosion of excitement as we parked and ____ our suitcases onto a trolley (手推车) and the children realized we were _going on a plane. The excitement built as we ____.

It was all worth it. The look on their faces as we ____ in Rovaniemi, Finland, was ____. Four days of total magic followed. We took sleigh rides, ____ snow mobiles (雪地摩托) and patted reindeer. On our fourth day we finally ‘found’ Santa, who had a genuine, thick white ____. His home was ____ from floor to ceiling with Christmas parcels, which was every child’s dream.

If that wasn’t ____, he held four hand-written letters that our children immediately ____. Santa said, “So, you must be Thomas, Lucy, Alice and Philip and you’ve come all the way from England just to see me!” He turned to one of the towers of wrapped presents, ____ up and carefully withdrew four parcels. Each of them received a personally addressed ____ signed ‘With love from Father Christmas’ and inside was ____ what they’d asked for in their letters.

Those four days in Lapland will ____ forever the most memorable of our lives. Our four children, now aged between 32 and 38, still talk about that ____ as the most wonderful Christmas ever where childhood magic came to ____.