2 . If you examine the birth certificate of every soccer play in the last World Cup tournament, you will most likely find the excellent players were born in the earlier months of the year. If you then examine the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup, you will find this phenomenon even more ________.

What might account for this strange phenomenon? Some guess a certain astrological sign (星座) ________ superior soccer skills; others maintain that winter-born babies have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina (耐力). But Anderson Ericsson, a 58-year-old professor who is called the expert on experts, believes in neither. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved ________: training a person to hear and repeat a random series of numbers. "With the first subject, after 20 hours of training, his digital span rose to 20", Ericsson recalls, "and after about 200 hours of training he could repeat up to 80 numbers."

This success, coupled with later research showing memory itself is not ________ determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is a cognitive exercise, which means whatever inborn differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are ________ by how well each person encodes the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as ________ practice. It involves more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, ________, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. ________, it involves stepping outside your comfort zone, setting specific and well-defined goals, focusing on ________ areas of expertise, obtaining immediate feedback from professionals and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying high achievers in a wide range of ________, including soccer, golf, chess, piano playing and darts. They gather all the data they can and make a rather shocking statement: the trait we commonly call talent is highly ________. And yes, expert performers are nearly always made.

Ericsson's formula seems appealing to many tiger parents: "practice makes perfect" is naturally ________ to genetic determination. By ________ innate ability as insignificant, many are confident they can make a concert-level pianist or an Olympic figure skater of their kids as long as they push them hard enough. Ericsson, ________, believes what parents should learn from the science of expertise is not the effect of logging thousands of hours, but how to get kids to ________ the importance and challenge of effective practice.

3 . People on a college campus were more likely to give money to the March of Dimes if they were asked for a donation by a disabled woman in a wheelchair than if asked by a non-disabled woman. In another _________, subway riders in New York saw a man carrying a stick stumble and fall to the floor. Sometimes the victim had a large red birthmark on his _________; sometimes he did not. In this situation, the victim was more likely to _________ aid if his face was spotless than if he had an unattractive birthmark. In_________ these and other research findings, two themes are _________: we are more willing to help people we like for some reason and people we think_________assistance.

In some situations, those who are physically attractive are more likely to receive aid. _________ in a field study researchers placed a completed application to graduate school in a telephone box at the airport. The application was ready to be_________ , but had apparently been “lost”. The photo stuck to the application was sometimes that of a very _________ person and sometimes that of a less attractive person. The measure of helping was whether the individual who found the envelope actually mailed it or not. Results showed that people were more likely to ____________the application if the person in the photo was physically attractive.

The degree of____________between the potential helper and the person in need is also important.

For example, people are more likely to help a stranger who is from the same country rather than a foreigner. In one study, shoppers on a busy street in Scotland were more likely to help a person wearing a(n) ____________T-shirt than a person wearing a T-shirt printed with offensive words.

Whether a person receives help depends in part on the “worth” of the case. For example, shoppers in a supermarket were more likely to give someone ____________ to buy milk rather than to buy cookies, probably because milk is thought more essential for ____________ than cookies. Passengers on a New York subway were more likely to help a man who fell to the ground if he appeared to be ____________ rather than drunk.

4 . Is Climate Change Consuming Your Favorite Foods?

As the increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, heat stress, longer droughts(干旱), and more intense rainfalls linked to global warming continue to upset our daily weather, we often forget they also impact the quantity, quality, and growing _________ of our food. Many foods have already _________ top spots on the world's "endangered foods" list, indicating their possibility to become _________ within the next 30 years.

To start with what is _________ in many people's lives we are disappointed to find that coffee plantations in South America, Africa, Asia, and Hawaii are all being threatened by rising air temperatures and irregular rainfall patterns, which invite disease to _________ the coffee plant and beans. The result? Significant _________ in coffee output.

And coffee's culinary (烹饪的) cousin, cacao (aka chocolate),is also suffering stress from global warming's rising temperatures. But for chocolate, it isn't the warmer climate alone that's the problem. Cacao trees actually _________ warmer climates as long as that warmth is paired with high humidity and sufficient rain. _________, the problem is that the higher temperatures projected for the world's leading chocolate-producing countries are not expected to be _________ by an increase in rainfall. Therefore as higher temperatures take more moisture from soil and plants, it's __________ that rainfall will increase enough to make up for this loss.

Another notably nutritious plant, peanut grows best when it gets five months of continuous warm weather and 20 to 40 inches of rain. Anything __________ and plants won't survive. That isn't good news when most climate models agree that the climate of the future will be one of the __________, including droughts. The world has already caught a glimpse of peanut's future fate when last year a serious drought across the peanut-growing Southeastern U.S led many plants to die. According to a financial report, the __________ spells (时期) caused peanut prices to rise by as much as 40 percent!

Finally, in the world of sea, as air temperatures rise, oceans and waterways absorb some of the heat and undergo warming of their own. The result is the __________ in fish population. Warmer waters also encourage vicious marine bacteria, like Vibrio, to grow and cause illness in humans. And that satisfying “crack” you get when eating crab could be __________ as shellfish struggle to build their calcium carbonate (碳酸钙) shells, a result of ocean acidification.

6 . Communications technologies are an inevitable part in our life. But they are far from________when it comes to conveying the truth. The first study to compare________across a range of communications media has found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails.

The fact that emails are automatically ________ and can come back to cause you problems-appears to be key to the finding.

Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asked 30 students to keep a Communications________for a week. In it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and________how many lies they told.

Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each ________. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and 37 per cent of phone calls.

His results, to be presented at the conference on human-computer interaction in Vienna, Austria, in April have________ psychologists. Some expected emailers to be the biggest liars, reasoning that because________makes people uncomfortable, the detachment (分离）of emailing would make it easier to lie.

Others expected people to lie more in face-to-face exchanges because we are most________at that form of communication. But Hancock says it is also ________ whether a conversation is being recorded and could be reread, and whether it occurs in real time.

People appear to be________to lie when they know the communication could later be used to hold them to account, he says. This is why fewer lies appear in email than on the phone.

People are also more likely to lie in ________-in an instant message or phone call, say-than if they have time to think of a response, says Hancock. He found many lies are________responses to an unexpected demand, such as :“Do you like my dress?”

Hancock hopes his research will help companies work out the best ways for their employees to communicate. ________, the phone might be the best medium for sales where employees are encouraged to stretch the truth.

But given his results, work evaluations, where honesty is a priority, might be best done using________.

7 . Warning: Don't make big decisions from high elevations

You definitely don't want to have your head in the clouds when making a crucial financial decision. But who could have thought our decisions are literally influenced by altitude?

It seems that what floor you happen to be on matters when pondering something over. If it's a high elevation, like the top floor of an office tower, chances are you'll embrace________a little more than you would on the ground floor, according to researchers from Miami University. The study, published this month in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, suggests you may want a(n) ________ advisor to work from a ground-floor office rather than the penthouse（顶楼）. And it gives new, literal________to the idea that you should stay grounded when making big decisions. "When you increase elevation there is a(n) ________effect on the sense of power," lead author SinaEsteky, PhD, noted in a release. "This heighted feeling of power________more risk-seeking behaviour."

For the study, Esteky's team interviewed people as they were ascending and descending in the glass elevator of a tall building. They found the________of the elevator strongly influenced the level of risk-aversion（风险预防）among participants. They were more likely, ________, to take more gambles on the way to the 75th floor -- but their decision became far more grounded as they neared, well, the ground.

Another experiment________on people who were either on the ground floor or the third floor     of a university building. Each group was asked to make 10 decisions of________risk levels. Guess which group made the most risky decisions? What was it about higher elevations that emboldened（赋予勇气）the participants? Researchers theorized it could have something to do with perception that elevation gives people a(n) ________of power and bravery.

Risk   seems   a   lot   smaller   when   seen   from   above----literally.   That   idea   seemed   to   hold________in further experiments. What participants were told their   decisions   were   being influenced by elevation, the effect________disappeared. Likewise, "elevation effect" wasn't a factor at all for people confined to cubicles who couldn't see how high up they were.

"The important lesson is that when people become aware of the________impact of elevation, it doesn't happen anymore," Esteky says. "The brain is very   sensitive   to subtle________factors,   but   also really good at correcting for such effects, so________can help us be more rational in our   decisions."

9 . Music is nice, people seem to say, but not important. When students and parents are asked to rate subjects according to their importance, the music arts are________ at the bottom of the list. Too often, music is viewed as mere entertainment, but certainly not an education which should be first emphasized. This view is________. In fact, music education is beneficial and important for all students.

Music tells us who we are. Because music is an expression of the beings who create it, it ________ their thinking and values, as well as the social________ it came from. Rock music________ a lifestyle just as surely as does a Schubert song. The jazz influence that George Gershwin and other musicians introduced into their music is obviously American________ it came from American musical traditions. Music expresses our character and values. It gives us identity（身份，同一性）as a society.

Music provides a kind of feeling cannot be________ any other way________ can explain how the sun rises and sets. The arts explore the emotional meaning of the same phenomenon（现象）. We need every possible way to discover and________ to our world for one simple but powerful reason: No one way can get it all.

The arts are forms of thought as powerful in what they communicate as mathematical and scientific symbols. They are ways we human being "talk" to each other. They are the________ of civilization（ 文 明 ）through which we express our fears, our curiosities, our hungers, our discoveries, our hopes. The arts are ways we give form to our ideas and imagination so that they can be________ others. When we do not give children________ to an important way of expressing themselves such as music, we________ from them the meanings that music expresses.

Science and technology do not tell us what it means to be human. The________ do. Music is an important way we express the meaning and value of peace and love.

So music education is far more________ than people seems to realize.