1 . Is there a friend of yours who always sings out of tune (曲调) but never realizes it? Don’t be so hard on them — they may have amusia — the inability to tell the difference in tunes.

Apart from singing out of tune, people with amusia may also find it hard to recognize music they’ve heard before without the help of song lyrics. Besides, people who suffer from Amusia can have difficulty in recognizing melodies and a total inability to tell between different musical sounds, according to Live Science. However, people with amusia can recognize common environmental sounds as well as the high and lows sounds in human voices, meaning that this inability can be specially related to music.

In many cases, people who have amusia are born with it, as 46 percent of these individuals’ family members were found to have similar conditions, according to a 2017 study. Brain imaging shows that their brains receive and respond to music pitch (音高) information, but it is not reaching conscious awareness, meaning that the mind can’t understand the information.

Scientists at the University of Otago in New Zealand also think that amusia is related to people’s special processing skills. They invited people with amusia, musicians and students from non-musical backgrounds to perform a task related to spacial imagination. They were asked to decide whether pairs of images are the same object moving around or mirror images.

The result showed that the amusia group made more mistakes than the other two groups. Amusia might be related to the way brain stores information about the high and low sounds in songs, according to the study.

Although those who aren’t confident about their singing skills often say they’re “tune-deaf”, people with amusia only make up about 1.5 percent of the population, as shown in the 2017 study. “Like dyslexics (诵读困难者) can learn how to read, those with amusia should be able to better their ability to recognize tunes if they start early enough,” Isabelle Peretz, a professor of psychology from the University of Montreal in Canada, told Live Science.

2 . Whenever we are planning to buy something online, most of us prefer to look at the reviews first. We imagine that they have been left by shoppers like us who want to share their knowledge with others, so the reviews would be of great value to us.     1     Some of them are writing positive review s in return for a payment or gifts from the maker. How do we know this?

A careful study of thousands of reviews on a popular shopping website showed that a surprisingly large number of reviewers gave either four-or five-star ratings to the product. Two-or three-star ratings both accounted for less than ten percent of the total, which looked suspicious (可疑的).     2     Not everything being sold on the shopping website could be first class! We all know that some false information is provided. Some products that you buy on shopping website can be terrible. You would expect therefore to see a variety of scores.     3    

It seems that anyone who writes a large number of good review s is given a special treat by the shopping website.     4     How should a shopper reply to all these “wonderful” reviews? The best thing to do is to have access to a website run by some organizations such as Which in the UK. The Which product evaluation is based on strict tests carried out by experts and then on reviews by trusted shoppers who are Which members. They are not allowed to take free gifts from makers.

    5     So, a good and responsible organization seems to be the best answer.

6 . “I was captivated by weightlifting during the London 2012 Olympic Games,” says Fiona Clements, a software developer working in London. “I think it’s partly because the effort is so obvious—you can see every flash of doubt, pain and happiness of success on the athletes’ faces.”

Clements was 48 at the time. She thought she’d left it far too late to even consider trying it, but then she kept thinking about it. “It took until September 2022, but I finally went for it.” Clements signed up for a beginner’s class with Sally Moss, a strength coach who is an expert in Olympic lifting, and loved it from her first class. Now 58, Clements can lift 50kg and push 21kg overhead. She says she has never felt stronger.

Resistance training, to use the term for any type of exercise where you’re working against weight, whether it’s using dumbbells(哑铃), exercise bands or just your own body weight, is extremely beneficial.

“I just thought that it would be impossible to make a difference to my body as an older woman,” says Joann a Blacker, a small business owner, who took up strength training at 53. “I’d gained weight and felt awful. I certainly didn’t think that weightlifting would be the way I would change my body.”

Blacker can now lift 40kg for 10 repetitions and feels more than ready to deal with training alone. Clements, at the same time, has already signed up with her local gym, for the days she’s not training with Moss. “I can feel these bands of hard muscle when I move my arms and legs that I’m pretty sure weren’t there before,” she says. “But the best part is that I’m actually able to understand the sport I love. It still feels like magic when that bar goes overhead.”

Have you ever eaten a “painting”? Here it is, the     1     (tradition) Chinese folk art—sugar painting. Spoon as pen, liquid sugar as ink, everything in the world can be drawn quickly.

As is said, Chen Zi’ang, a great poet in the seventh century (Tang Dynasty), liked to eat brown sugar. But he ate it in     2     unique way. He melted the sugar on a clean and smooth table,     3    (make) it into     4     (variety) of shapes of small animals. After cooling down, it could be held in the hand, eaten and enjoyed. Later, Chen went to the capital city,     5     he brought this art. Since then, sugar painting has become a lasting craft. In the 17th century (Qing Dynasty), sugar painting became     6     (increase) popular, and the production skills     7     (be) more advanced. The objects include flowers and birds, fortune symbols and the 12 zodiac signs and other designs. The art of sugar painting combines food, culture and handicraft. The painting is done in one go without any draft.

The sugar painting     8     (create) today shows greater creativity in forms — Cartoon sugar painting, 3D sugar painting, bringing new life     9     conventional ones. The culture of China, and the spirit of sugar painting,     10     (pass) down through the sugar spoons of generations of craftsmen.

8 . Bill Samuel was having a tough Friday. The 71-year-old, who was struggling with kidney (肾) failure, found himself at a medical center 30 miles from home for the second time in 24 hours. Samuel was on the transplant (移植) list, but no _________ had been found yet. Without a _________ bus service for his trip, Samuel took a taxi to and from his _________ to meet his doctor.

Taxi driver Timothy Letts took Samuel as his _________ even though the trip was out of his way, feeling Samuel might need _________. During the 40-minute drive, Samuel shared his positive energy and the struggles of his _________ , saying he was searching for a kidney donor.

As they neared Samuel’s home, Letts _________ him by expressing interest in being a kidney donor. Shocked but excited, Samuel _________ contact information with Letts. After the initial excitement, Samuel started feeling a bit less _________ . He was touched by Lett’s __________ , though he wondered if it has just been a(n) __________ moment. But Letts was true to his __________ . He got in touch with Samuel just a few hours later, and by the next week, Letts had __________ the kidney transplant program. After a months-long screening process, the results were in: Letts and Samuel were a __________ match.

On Dec 7, 2021, they had their operations. It was a __________ . Letts and Samuel still keep in touch to this day.

9 . A team of scientists is studying the sound of the forest in Ecuador to learn how artificial intelligence (AI) could follow animal life in recovering environments.

When scientists want to measure new forest growth, they can study large areas of land with tools like satellites. But understanding how fast and in what number wildlife is returning to an area is more difficult. Sometimes it requires an expert to listen through sound recordings and pick out animal calls.

Jorg Muller, an expert on birds, wondered if there was a different way. So, he turned to bioacoustics (生物声学), which uses sound to learn more about animal life and their living environments. Muller and his team recorded wildlife sounds in Ecuador. They first had experts listen to the recordings and list the sounds of different animals. Then, they examined the sound quality to measure the environment. Finally, they ran two weeks of recordings through an AI computer program trained to understand 75 different bird calls.

The program was able to pick out the calls on which it was trained. However, scientists wondered if the program could correctly identify the number of different kinds of plants and animals in each environment. To see if the program could do that, the team used two different controls. One was from the experts who listened to the recordings, and the second was based on examples from each environment, which can be used to understand biodiversity (生物多样性).

Since the number of sounds that are found to be used to train is limited, the AI program could only identify one-fourth of the bird calls experts could. But it was still able to correctly measure biodiversity levels in each environment, the study said. It also said the results show the AI program is a powerful tool to measure the recovery of animal societies in some forests. The study showed that biodiversity found from recordings can be measured in a cost-effective and complete way and measure environments.

There are still areas for improvement, including the lack of animal sounds on which to train AI models. And the method can only catch animals that use sound to communicate.

Tanghulu, a conventional Chinese snack     1     (basic) made of sugercoated haws (山楂) or other fruit on a stick, has drawn more and more teenagers around the world. According to the data covering social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, tanghulu     2     (be) the most searched term in the frozen and convenient food category in the first half of 2023 in Korea.

The sweet treat arose in China during the Song dynasty,     3     Emperor Guangzong’s favorite concubine (妃) fell ill and a doctor suggested she eat hawthorn berries     4     (fry) in brown sugar every day for a fortnight. When the concubine miraculously (奇迹般的) recovered, the candied fruit gained instant popularity across the country,     5     (late) becoming one of the best-selling street — food snacks in China.

Because of its glassy texture and marble like appearance, it is so visually     6     (appeal) that many like to post     7     (video) featuring the treat being consumed and share the new recipes for it. According to CCTV, unlike the tanghulu made of haws in China, the most popular one in Korea is made of orange slices, whose price amounts     8     22 yuan.

Tanghulu’s recent surge in various countries can be attributed to multiple factors, including the social media     9     (expose) among teenagers and its catering to their affection with pretty food. All in all, who would refuse such     10     awesome flavor?