Jack London: A Fascinating Character

When one mentions Jack London, the most common contemporary references that pop to mind are The Call of the Wild and White Fang. However, upon a closer look at the author, the true depth of how varied and interesting his life and works were can really be     1    .

London is considered America’s best author by many. Most successful and at ease writing short stories, he was also the first author to become genuinely wealthy during his lifetime from selling his work. However, this did not happen overnight: in fact, London received 600     2     before his first story was published for a spread out payment of $5.

During his 40 years, London seemed to have lived 1000     3    . By the age of 18, he had already worked as a coal miner, worked on sealing ships and can factories, and been in a(n)     4     of beggars. At 17, he went to jail in Buffalo, NY for 30 days due to the latter, an experience which proved to be one that even the productive writer himself called     5    .

When he did return to his formal education, he completed high school and then attended UC Berkley, which had been a major dream for him. However, he stopped after just one semester as he ran out of money and carried on to     6     the Klondike Gold Rush with his brother-in-law. That would later be the       7     for some of his most famous works. It was also in the Yukon that London became very ill and began writing. When he returned home, he     8     to become a commercially successful writer and began to write 1000 words daily. He wrote of adventure, politics, humanity, survival, often     9     from a large number of him personal experiences.

London died at the age of 40, from a drug overdose. It is not known whether it was     10     or not, as he made many references to suicide throughout his works.

You’ll Never Be Truly Alone

In the decades to come, a large number of home robots could make today’s appliances seem interesting. The market for consumer and office robots is expected to develop quickly in the next three years, according to a 2015 report by Business Insider Intelligence, being greater than $1.5 billion and far     1     the growth of robots in manufacturing.

We already have robots that clean the house, like the Roomba, but in the future we’ll also have robot arms that can     2     surfaces and bathe people, says Christopher Atkeson, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon, whose lab has produced such machines. Eventually, robots will fold laundry and cook meals. And if they work well, you won’t even notice them. The key to effective robots is ”being     3    of predicting what people will do,“ says Julie Shah, the head of the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT. ”The idea is either     4     people or staying out of their way.“

That said, some people may want a robot that hangs around. In Japan, a friendly humanoid robot called Pepper that can    5    and respond to human emotion has proved enormously popular since it went on sale two years ago. Pepper might turn out to be the     6    roommate- helpful, kind, and always up for hanging out, but never in the way.

Perhaps the already     7    line between online and offline life will disappear, and human relationships with intelligent machines will represent a new extension of our social    8    . Your in-hour robot could serve as an avatar(化身)for friends and family,     9     from afar so that, with the help of robotic arms and legs, you could dance with or hug a loved one who is halfway around the planet. The real     10    of - or problem with - the house of the future, then, might be that you’ll never have to leave it. However, what the future house will be like still remains to be seen.

The office used to be a place people went because they had to. Meetings happened in conference rooms and in person. Desks took up most of the space. The kingdom of Dilbert and of David Brent is now under threat. The pandemic has     1     the office to competition from remote working, and brought up questions about how it should be designed in the future.

Start with what the office is for. In the past it was a place for employees to get their work done, whatever form that took. Now other conceptions of its role strive for attention. Some think of the office as the new offsite (异地活动) . Its purpose is to get people together in person so they can do the things that remote working makes harder: establishing deeper relationships or     2     in real time on specific projects. Others talk of the office as a destination, a place that has to make the idea of getting out of bed earlier, in order to socialize with people who may have covid-19, seem       3     .

In other words, a layout that is largely devoted to people working at desks alongside the same colleagues each day all feels very 2019. With fewer people coming in and more emphasis on cooperation, fewer desks will be       4     to individuals. Instead, there will be more shared areas, where people in a team can work together flexible. More hot-desking (轮用办公桌) will also necessitate storage space for personal     5     : lockers may soon be back in your life.

To     6     gaps between teams, one strategy is to set aside more of the office to present the work of each department. Another option is to provide everyone with drink. Expect more space to be set aside for     7     and events. Bars in offices are apparently going to be a thing. Robin Avia of Gensler, an architecture firm, says she is seeing lots of       8     for places, like large auditoriums, where a company's clients can have “experiences”.

Designs for the post-covid office must also allow for hybrid work. Meetings have to work for       9     participants as well as for in-person contributors; cameras, screens and microphones will multiply. Gensler's New York offices feature mini-meeting rooms that have a monitor and a half-table sticking out from the wall below it, with seating for 4 or 5 people arranged to face the       10    , not each other.

Sports and fitness play a (n)     1     role in maintaining a healthy and     2     lifestyle. Engaging in sports not only promotes physical     3     but also enhances mental and emotional health. Through sports, we can cultivate teamwork, discipline, and     4    . Participating in sports and fitness activities not only benefits our physical health but also     5     to overall happiness and long life.

Conflict and     1     go hand in hand in our daily lives. When conflicts     2    , it is important to     3     and inquire about the potential issues to find a resolution. It’s natural to find certain behaviors annoying or inconvenient, but it’s our responsibility to     4     the root cause and     5     it appropriately.

“It was a wave of water,” says Oulimata Sambe. She points out the still-sodden(湿透的) armchairs, muddy wardrobe and the water stain a metre and a half up the wall in her small house in Ngor, a fishing village within Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “I had two grandkids on my bed, I had to     1     them out of the window,” she adds. Not faraway, underpasses on Dakar’s scenic corniche(滨海路) became car-    2     lakes. Just weeks earlier another downpour had turned quiet streets in Dakar into raging rivers and collapsed a section of motorway.

    3     events regularly occur across the region. Recent flooding and landslides also killed eight people in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. In June flooding killed 12 people in Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast. Floods in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital,     4     another seven lives. Even when they are not deadly, city floods ruin lives and livelihoods. Storm water recently flooded the biggest textile(纺织业) market in Kano, a city in northern Nigeria, destroying hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of     5    .

Unusually heavy rains have become     6     more common over the past 30 years, leaving huge numbers of people at risk. In places this is partly because of deforestation. A recent study by Christopher Taylor of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, a research institute, and his coauthors found that afternoon     7     in deforested parts of coastal west Africa happen twice as often compared with 30 years ago. Their frequency went up by only about a third in places that kept their forests.

Yet     8     flooding of cities in west Africa is not only caused by heavier rain. Unplanned urbanization is also to blame. As cities have grown, builders have thrown up concrete walls with little     9     about providing drainage, making it harder for water to find a clear path to the sea. As ever larger areas have been paved over, there has been less exposed soil into which water can gently     10     away. And as cites get more packed with new arrivals, their few functioning drains get overwhelmed or clogged.