2 . My real research started at the New York Botanical Garden. I met a person who is a paleobotanist (古植物学家), which means that he ________ prehistoric plants. My novel centers on Merwin and Louise, two little Sycamore ________ who began life during the Cretaceous Period.

Sycamore trees are called fossil species, which means they have been ________ since the time of the dinosaurs. They are ________ to modern trees we see in forests today. The Sycamore tree also makes those kind of seed balls, a little bit like a nursery (托儿所), like all these ________ in there together. In most of my stories. I write about children who get ________ from their parents and find their way in the world. That’s kind of what Sycamore seeds and other seeds do. They must ________ the plant that made them and go find a place to ________.

It was fun trying to ________ all the different places these two little seeds could go. I wanted them to go underwater. Drawing pictures underwater is so hard. ________ the whole scene with King Seaweed was really fun.

What surprised me the most was the idea that ________ are really communities. Trees communicate with each other with a mycelial (菌丝) system under the ground that ________ everything. It felt like there were interesting parallels (相似之处) with us, because we also live in ________, and we try to help each other. However, there are sometimes ________ from outside, and we have to find out ways to ________. Plants are doing the same thing

4 . Most of us would like to be more creative, but we assume there is little we can do about it. Psychology professor K. Anders Ericsson claims that with enough practice, any of us can become experts. However, he is quick to add that this requires a specific kind of practice that Ericsson calls ‘deliberate practice’: that is, pushing beyond one’s comfort zone and setting goals that are above one’s current level of performance. He says he has yet to find the limits on being successful and he doesn’t believe them to be real.

Ericsson has looked primarily at artistic and athletic skills, but can these findings apply to creativity? Most experts agree that even if most people cannot hope to become creative geniuses, they can learn to become more creative through practice. Psychologists claim that there are actually two levels of creativity, which they refer to as’Big C’ and ‘small c’. Big C creativity applies to breakthrough ideas, ones that may change the course of a field or even history. Small c creativity refers to everyday creative problem solving, like creating a new recipe or improving a process, which psychologists subdivide further into similar and different thinking. Similar thinking involves examining all the facts and arriving at a single solution. In contrast, different thinking involves coming up with many possible solutions. What most people think of as creativity generally involves different thinking and can be taught, practised and learnt.

Even with practice, different thinking alone cannot make one creative, however. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive psychologist, says that most creative people share one personality quality: openness to new experience. Since this quality and these processes have been identified, less creative people can try to emulate them. Normally, we tend to reproduce what we already know because creative ideas move us into unfamiliar territory involving risks and following the usual behaviors is comfortable.

Moving outside of our comfort zone, engaging indeliberate practice and tolerating contradictory ideas, risk and failure are all things we can learn to do better. It is unlikely that doing so will transform any of us into creative geniuses, but it does have the potential to increase our level of creativity.

Most polar bears could die out by the end of the century due to global warming,     1     (scientist) say. According to a study, most polar bear populations will be dropping markedly by 2080. The cause is melting (融化) sea ice. Polar bears feed     2     (main) on seals on the ice. Without ice, the bears have to walk to faraway places and spend more and more time away from     3     (they) main food source. That means the animals could die.

Lack of food leads to another problem: Mother bears may not be fat enough to produce milk for their babies. Some bears could stop     4     (have) babies, which results     5     a rapid decline (减少) in numbers.

Arctic sea ice usually melts in spring and summer, and then grows in winter. But now, the ice is taking     6     (long) to grow back. Weather statistics say the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Ice in the region     7     (drop) by 13% every 10 years since the 1970s.

But the study also notes that it is still possible     8     (slow) Arctic melting. The world can cut the burning of coal, oil, etc. and lower the greenhouse gas emissions (排放)     9     bring about climate change. It would have to be a big drop to make     10     difference.

It is a special cross-country race. The competitors’ vehicles are made     1     fruits and vegetables like carrots, eggplants, grapefruits, pumpkins and oranges. They are the creations of pupils from the Shanghai World Foreign Language Primary School.

According to Chen You, the science class teacher,     2     (base) knowledge had been taught within 6 classes to students before they drew sketches and     3     (choose) vegetables to make a food car.

Although students were encouraged     4     (design) their cars together with parents, all the cars should be made in the class. After     5     (bring) piles of ingredients as well as tools the children began their innovation. Some cut the carrot slices to make them round, and some others assembled (组装) their car components together.

In addition to the     6     (compete), students are required to reflect on the     7     (difficulty) they encountered making their vehicles,     8     things they have learned from the activity and the improvements they think the course can make.

    9     touched the teachers most was the unity and friendship among the children. For example, although the contest was fierce (激烈的), students felt     10     (excite) for the champion car as if they themselves had stood out, and when a girl’s car fell apart their friends comforted her and helped reassemble the car.

7 . For Kurt Gray, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, conducting experiments comes with certain problems. Before starting any study, his lab must get ethical(伦理的)approval from an institutional review board, which can take weeks or months. Then his team has to hire online participants—easier than bringing people into the lab, but Gray says the online subjects are often lazy. Then the researchers spend hours cleaning the data. But earlier this year, Gray accidentally saw an alternative way to do things.

He was working with computer scientists at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence to see whether they could develop an AI system that made moral judgments like humans. But first they figured they’d see if a system from the startup Open AI could already do the job. The team asked GPT-3. 5, which produces human-like text, to judge the ethics of 464 scenarios(情境), previously evaluated by human subjects. It turned out that the system’s answers were nearly the same as human responses.

“This is crazy,” Gray says. “If you can just ask GPT to make these judgments, why don’t you just ask GPT instead of asking people?” The results were published this month in Trends in Cognitive Science.

Now, researchers are considering AI’s ability to act as human subjects in fields such as psychology, political science, economics, and market research. No one is yet suggesting that chatbots can completely replace humans in behavioral studies. But they may act as convenient stand-ins(替代者) in pilot studies and for designing experiments, saving time and money. Language models might also help with experiments that would be too impractical, or even dangerous to run with people. “It’s a really interesting time,” says Ayelet Israeli, a marketing professor at Harvard Business School who believes the models’ impact on behavioral research could amount to a “revolution”. “Some of these results are just astonishing.”

8 . Seafloor cables (光缆) carry over 95% of all digital data traffic worldwide, including financial trading information and social media communications. However, how the Earth’s changing climate could impact this vast undersea network has been relatively understudied until now.

In a new study published in Earth-Science Reviews, an international team of researchers led by the UK’s National Oceanography Centre(NOC) worked to illuminate this problem by assessing how and where future climate change is likely to impact subsea cables.

By analyzing published datasets, the researchers identified regional climate change “hotspots” where threats to subsea cables may become more intense. These include areas in the western Pacific where changes to tropical cyclone (热带气旋) intensity and frequency have already increased cable damage.

“In our paper, we conducted the first comprehensive assessment of a range of climate-related threats to seafloor cables across the globe and their landing stations,” says study co-author Thomas Wahl. “Our analysis clearly stresses the need to carefully plan cable routes and landing station locations factoring in a range of local threats and how those are affected by climate change.”

When we look at Florida, there are at least 21 subsea telecommunications cables that connect to the Florida coastline, North and South America and the Caribbean, meaning that there will be a breakdown in communications worldwide if a cable is damaged, the researchers say.

However, the study identifies the importance of assessing changing conditions, particularly where multiple cable systems share a landing point, as they may be affected by combinations of threats that affect the low-lying Florida coastline, such as sea level rise, and changes in storm activity. “Our reliance on cables that are no wider than a garden hose (软管) is a surprise to many, who regard satellites as the main means of communication,” says lead author Mike Clare, a researcher with NOC. “But satellites simply don’t have the bandwidth to support modern digital systems. The ‘cloud’ is not in the sky—it is under the sea.”

In Xixian county, located in Linfen, Shanxi province, a smart pear orchard (果园)     1     (stretch) 33.3 hectares (公顷) has been developed with the     2     (assist) of the Shanxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

In this orchard, every pear is given     3     unique QR code that enables monitoring of the entire growth process. “The QR code serves     4     an ID card, recording the life of a pear,” said Wang Yibo, an agriculture official from the county.

    5     (establish) in 2020, the smart orchard is operated with the help of cutting-edge technologies such as the internet, big data, cloud computing and the internet of things. There are 64 villages in the county     6     rely on pears as their primary industry,     7     (account) for 80 percent of the farmers’ income.

So far, Xixian     8     (build) a smart agriculture integration platform made up of 12 systems, including water-fertilizer     9     (integrate) management, disease and insect monitoring, and the monitoring and evaluation of the quality of the land.

According to Wang, the platform not only helps with production but also promotes sales, as its tracking system can collect first-hand marketing feedback data. Pear farmers can learn about the market demand through the system to     10     (accurate) identify their customers and carry out targeted promotions.

10 . There is a wide gap between China and developed economies such as the US and South Korea in terms of the chip industry. However, the nation has taken big steps in charting its own course, which is evident in its chip industry’s growth. And China can meet 85 percent of its domestic demand if the chip industry fully applies the 14-nanometer transistor (晶体管) technology. In fact, this could become a reality in three to four years. Still, China lags behind in the processing and manufacturing of chips, as well as chip design and packaging.

Yet there is a silver lining for China, because the US’ technology blockade (封锁) helps remove the domestic objections to the development of the chip industry. The story of China’s LCD industry could be repeated in the chip industry this time: China has made joint efforts in the past ten years and now secures more than 60 percent of the LCD market.

Nevertheless, there should not be a mad rush across the country to develop chips. The government should offer encouragements to state-owned as well as privately owned enterprises to produce high-quality chips. The measure of freeing integrated circuit-making enterprises of paying corporate income tax for two years is a good move in this direction.

Also, China has about 1,700 semiconductor enterprises. They should be encouraged to pool their resources and technologies and strengthen their business operations so they can achieve breakthroughs in core technologies.

Besides, China should build a friendlier environment to attract talents from across the world to its chip industry. It’s indeed alarming that China faces a shortage of 300, 000 professionals in the chip industry. As Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of Huawei, said, “We had adopted a money-pumping approach in the past to develop the electronic industry. However, it takes more than money to develop chips. We should try our best to win over mathematicians and physicists.”