1 . No Guts, No Glory? The Fear and Attraction of Risky Winter Sports

Once I went flying off the side of a mountain on skis. Certainly, I didn’t mean to. Before I _________ the ground, there was a surprising amount of time for reflection—and more on the long painful journey down to the ambulance.

The Winter Olympics are here, and I’ll be astonished with my heart in my mouth, watching ski-jumping and people hurtling downhill at _________ speed one way and another. But why are we so attracted to doing, watching and glamorizing dangerous activity? Is it really the thrill (兴奋) of the adrenaline (肾上腺素) rush? I hate that part when I take a big risk of any kind.

It _________ out I’m not the only one. The popular “thrill-seeker” explanation put forward by Marvin Zuckerman and others that sensation seeking is a basic personality trait has been strongly _________. Thrill-seeking is common in the young, especially young males. Many pay a high _________ for it. But our relationship with fear, courage and risk-taking is _________.

Eric Brymer and Robert Schweitzer asked people who had been doing an extreme sport for many years, to reflect   _________ on the experience. For these people, it wasn’t that they didn’t feel fear, or that they were attracted to the feeling of fear. They saw fear as an important tool to _________ danger—and working through it was a transformative experience. Part of the reward was the sense of one-ness with nature that lay beyond the _________.

For me, reading what the research participants said was __________ and there was a lot that was easy to relate to. __________, it seemed as though they believed they were only taking on risks over which they could prevail (战胜). Presumably, many of the people who are severely injured thought so too. I wonder if many who draw the short __________ regret it?

I have an almost total lack of mastery of winter sports. The contrast between my enthusiasm and lack of skill   __________ the somewhat spectacular accident at the start of this post. But just what kind of risks are we talking about with winter sports more commonly? For example, Brian Chaze and Patrick McDonald gathered published data on head injuries in winter sports. They advocated __________ use for sledding and skating as well. Children who hurt their heads sledding need hospitalization twice as much as for head injuries in other sports. Helmets aren’t used much, though.

Perhaps the best __________ from watching the winter Olympians is not the glamour of their risk-taking, but the way they rock those helmets.

2 . The news that Derby has approved what promises to be Britain’s largest urban rewilding project so far is very welcome. The 320-hectare Allestree Park will, subject to detailed consultation, be given over to a range of habitats and perhaps even see the reintroduction of species such as dormice and red kites.

Urban rewilding - which is not the same as urban green space, however extensive - can take many forms. They _________ from aiming to slow down the rate of species loss by _________ swift (雨燕) and sparrow boxes to new apartment constructions (there are now 247m fewer house sparrows than there were in 1980) to designating areas the size of Allestree Park.

But in fact, some of the most successful projects have been _________. Canvey Wick, a disused area of the Thames estuary, returned to a “self-wilded rainforest” that is now home to nearly 2,000 invertebrate (无脊椎的) species, including at least three _________ thought to be extinct. Rivers _________ natural wildlife corridors, working their way through cities, then linking them to countryside. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot gives the example of the River Wandle, which in the 19th century supported up to 90 factories, and was described as “the hardest worked river for its size in the world.” Now it teems with (充满着) wildlife, and the local authorities have considered _________ beavers (海狸).

Urban rewilding, _________, won’t make a massive difference to global heating, with only 6% or so of Britain is actually built on it. But giving nature freer rein (控制) in parts of towns and cities could help to mitigate (缓解) flooding, and to slow species loss. Importantly, about 83% of us live on the portion of the UK’s land that is classed as urbanised, and access to nature has also been shown to improve psychological well-being. One recent Canadian study found that adding just 10 trees to a city block had a big effect on people’s _________ of their health; research is beginning to find that increasing biodiversity can heighten that impact. And on a more general scale, those who _________ wildness are more likely to fight for it.

The pressure for development means that there will always be tension with __________ interests: the Swans-combe Peninsula in Kent, another self-wilded area that is home to 1,992 species of invertebrates, including 250 of conservation concern, is now __________ for the London Resort, including a theme park expected to destroy 76 hectares of priority habitat which forms a vital part of the ecological network. This loss would be __________ losing 140 football pitches (球场) __________ of nationally important habitat.

In these mid-pandemic, post-Brexit, austerity-bitten (财政紧缩的) times, the financial arguments can be hardest to __________ for councils short of cash, but the evidence that “we need nature as much as it needs us”, in the words of Jo Smith of the Derbyshire Wildlife Trust, is surely __________. With a bit of imagination, flexibility and commitment, many more urban areas could follow Derby’s example.

3 . 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.

4 . With advances in electronics and neuroscience, researchers have been able to achieve remarkable things with brain implant devices. In addition to restoring physical senses, scientists are also seeking innovative ways to ____ communication for those who have lost the ability to speak. A new “decoder” receiving data from an electronic device implanted inside the skull, for example, might help paralyzed patients speak using only their minds. Researchers from the University of California developed a two-stage method to turn brain ____ into computer-synthesized speech.

For years, scientists have been trying to control and use neutral inputs to give a voice back to people whose neurological damage prevents them from talking. Until now, many of these brain-computer interfaces have ____ a letter-by-letter approach, in which patients move their eyes or facial ____ to spell out their thoughts. But these types of interfaces are very slow - most max out producing 10 words per minute, a fraction of human’s average speaking speed of 150 words per minute.

The brain is undamaged in these patients, but the neurons - the pathways that ____ your arms, or your mouth, or your legs are broken down. These people have high cognitive functioning and abilities, but they cannot accomplish ____ tasks like moving about or saying anything, “says a co-lead author of the new study and an associate research specializing in neurological surgery at UCSF.” We are essentially by passing the pathway that’s broken down.“

The researchers started with high-resolution brain activity data collected from five volunteers over several years. These participants - all of whom had normal speech function - were already undergoing a ____ process for epilepsy(癫痫)treatment that involved implanting electrodes(电极)directly into their brains. The research team used these electrodes to ____ activity in speech-related areas of the brain as the patients read off hundreds of sentences.

From there, the UCSF team worked out a two-stage process to recreate the spoken sentences. First, they created a decoder to ____ the recorded activity patterns as instructions for moving parts of a virtual vocal tract(声道). They then developed a synthesizer that used the ____ movements to produce language.

Other research has tried to decode words and sounds directly from neural signals, ____ the middle step of decoding movement. However, a study the UCSF researchers published last year suggests that your brain’s speech center focuses on how to move the vocal tract to produce sounds, ____ what the resulting sounds will be.

Using this method, the researchers successfully reverse-engineered words and sentences from brain activity that ____ matched the audio recordings of participants’ speech. When they asked volunteers on an online crowd-sourcing platform to attempt to ____ the words and sentences using a word bank, many of them could understand the simulated(模拟的)speech, though their ____ was far from perfect. Out of 101 synthesized sentences, about 80 percent were perfectly transcribed(记录)by at least one listener using a 25-word bank.

5 . A Mountain But not a Volcano

On September 20th the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the central banks' central bank, released data showing that corporate borrowing around the world remains at an all time high. A notable ______ is in China, where there is even more business borrowing as a share of GDP than in Japan at the peak of its bubble-related borrowing fever in the 1990s. But it is high everywhere. Corporate ______ in the rich world stood at 102% of GDP at the end of March, compared with 92% before the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. Could high levels of debt ______ the recovery in advanced economies?

Many regulators were sounding the ______ about elevated company debt even before the covid19 pandemic. Since then, the hit to firm's incomes has led to a wave of rating downgrades: between March 2020 and March 2021, Fitch, a ratings agency, ______ 460 firms, or almost 20% of its corporate portfolio. While defanlts (违约) have eased this year as economies have recovered, many firms will be ______ by higher levels of debt for years to come. Even if interest rates remain ______, this "debt overhand" could affect their willingness to invest or to hire new staff.

Intriguingly, however, aftereffects from corporate debt booms rarely cause significant economic damage, even if ______ themselves suffer when firms default. A recent paper by Moritz Schularick, of the University of Bonn, and several co-authors, examines data on business cycles for 17 advanced countries over more than a century, and compares corporate debt bursts with those associated with ______ borrowing (like the 200809 financial crisis).

The authors argue that lenders often have a/an ______ to restructure old corporate loans, reducing the risk of "zombie" companies persisting, and freeing up finance to support the next recovery. For household debt, however, restructuring thousands of ______ loans is often impossible, and lenders may be more inclined to keep the loans on their books in the hope that house prices eventually ______. The risks to the economy are higher after commercial property bursts than for corporate debt where lenders mainly have their eyes on firm's cash flows. This is one reason why the property-related debt depression in China are potentially disturbing.

In much of the rich world, there are reasons to be ______ optimistic. The largest lenders are in much better health than in 2008. All of the major ______ authorities, carried out stress tests during 2020, using macroeconomic scenarios much more severe than have actually came out, but their banking systems were able to absorb large corporate losses and carry on lending. And the parts of the economy that have had the toughest time during the pandemic only account for a relatively small share of corporate debt. For example, the BIS projects that ______ will increase in the hospitality industry (酒店餐饮业) over the coming years, but they note that the sector only accounts for between 1.5% and 8% of corporate credit in the nine major economies they model.

There will be a mountain of corporate debt in many countries for some time. But that dos not mean the recovery will necessarily falter (衰退).

6 . When I first began to learn photography, a photographer offered me a simple ______ for taking a good picture.

Don’t just “point and ______ ”, as one camera used to advertise. After ______ your intended subject through the lens(镜头), pause and think about how you ______ in the moment. Then after deciding the specific part of your subject that ______ that emotion, simply cut away everything else and press the button. ______ : focus on what matters most.

This advice could also be applied to ______ . Focus on what matters most; ______ everything else. When we go about our lives with little ______ or difficulty, we may be tempted to “take it all in” and thus ______ to focus on what matters most and find it ______ to get rid of unnecessary things.

All is too often it is not until our lives are in ______ that we suddenly realize that we’ve ______ our focus. We have ______ paid attention to the important aspects of existence—justice, kindness, and humanity. ______, we actually have a chance to focus again. As we make difficult ______ about what offers meaning and purpose, we may discover that even ______ things have the potential to turn good and ______ . We just need to reframe the ______ before us. Then we can ______ and pay attention to the meaningful things of life.

7 . 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.

8 . Unwrapping your shopping to find you have bought mouldy (发霉的) bread, rotten fruit and sour milk could soon become a thing of the past, thanks to the range of emerging 'active packaging' technologies. While traditional packaging simply _______ a barrier that protects food, active packaging can do a lot more. Some materials _______ with the product to improve it in some way, or provide better information on the state it is in. _______, they may absorb oxygen inside a wrapper to help prevent food spoilage or show whether potentially dangerous foods like red meat and chicken have been stored at unsafe temperatures.

One of the new breed of packaging technologies that have just gone on the market in France is a ‘time temperature indicator’. Stores where the product has already been introduced report that far fewer consumers are returning _______ food. The indicator is basically a label that _______ the temperature a package has been kept at and for how long. The label has a dark ring around a lighter circle. The central ring contains a chemical which polymerises (聚合), changing colour as it does so from _______ to dark. If the package stays cool, the reaction is slow, but increasing the temperature speeds up the polymerization. When the inner circle darkens, it means the product is no longer _______ fresh.

Smart packaging can also control the _______ of the atmosphere inside a container. For instance, the make-up of oxygen (O2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) within packaged vegetables will influence their freshness. This can be hard to control in a sealed package, since vegetables _______ more oxygen and give off more carbon dioxide as the package gets warmer. A firm in California is trying to solve the problem with a wrapper it calls ‘Intelimer’ which changes its permeability (渗透) as the temperature changes in a way that keeps different produces at their best O2/CO2 ________.

Decay can also be ________ by controlling the environment inside a package with an ‘oxygen scavenger’(清除剂). ________, this is achieved by placing a small bag filled with iron powder in the package — any oxygen in the package is consumed by the iron as it oxidises. However, consumers don't ________ finding small bags marked ‘Don't eat in their food’, so a company in New Jersey is making a wrap that itself consumes oxygen. The ________ includes an inner layer of an oxidisable polymer (聚合物) that traps oxygen in the same way as iron.

It is predicted that between 20 and 40 per cent of all food packaging will soon be ________.

9 . Several recent cases of violence against students at U.S. colleges have made global headlines, causing questions about the safety of America’s campuses. Yet statistics from the U.S. government show that the number of crimes reported at colleges and universities actually decreased in recent years. ________, most colleges have stepped up security measures, employing new technology and________ services to increase campus safety.

At New York University, the Safe Ride van service is a routine part of college life. Dana Reszutek used the service at night to travel between campus buildings, which are staffed with security guards for additional________. One night, when a stranger followed Reszutek to her residence hall, he was stopped by the guard. “I wasn’t harmed or touched,” she said. “It’s________ like these that show how high a level of importance safety is to NYU.”

The most recent campus-security trend is probably the introduction of mobile safety apps, which enable students to________ panic buttons, spread their GPS locations or even turn their smartphones into________ devices soothers can see what’s happening. LiveSafe helps students________ information with each other and with law-enforcement officers. Its SafeWalk feature allows students’ friends to________ walk them home by watching their progress on a map. “It’s a great way to increase communication about safety and to break down barriers between students as they________ for one another,” its developer said.

Since most students are never without their smartphones, some feel mobile apps provide better security than the blue-light emergency call boxes dotting most campuses. Yet Thomas Clark, a lieutenant in Western Illinois University’s Public Safety Office, said the boxes—which connect callers to emergency responders—provide an important “________ layer of protection.”

It’s also important for students to take responsibility for their own safety. Becoming familiar with local neighborhoods and campus services are key. In safety tips posted online, many universities and campus police departments emphasize alertness and basic safeguards such as traveling in groups and familiarizing yourself with your________.

Personal-safety expert David Nance says the most important thing students can do is to be________—which means not being distracted by smartphones or other devices. He also recommends learning________ techniques, knowing common distraction tricks used by attackers and keeping a safe distance from strangers.

Students who are thinking about studying in the U.S. can________ campus safety before applying to or deciding on a particular school. Federal law requires American colleges and universities to________ crime statistics every year. This information may be included on a school’s website or can be found online through the U.S. Department of Education’s Campus Safety.