2 . False medical news can lead to patients’ experiencing greater side effects through the “nocebo effect (反安慰剂效果)”. Sometimes patients benefit from an intervention simply because they believe they will- -that’s the placebo effect. The nocebo effect is the opposite: Patients can experience negative effects just because they expect them. This is very true of statins. In blinded trials, patients who get statins are no more likely to report feeling muscle aches than patients who get a placebo. Yet, in clinical practice, according to one study, almost a fifth of patients taking statins report side effects, leading many to discontinue the drugs.

What else is on the fake news hit list? As always, vaccines. False concerns that the vaccine for the virus called human papilloma virus causes seizures (癫痫) and other side effects reduced coverage rates in Japan from 10 percent to less than 1 percent in recent years.

Cancer is another big target for pushers of medical misinformation — many of whom are making money off alternative therapies. “Though most people think cancer tumors are bad, they’re actually the way your body attempts to contain the harmful cells,” one fake news story reads. It suggests that surgery increases the risk of spreading harmful cells.

Silicon Valley needs to own this problem. When human health is at risk, perhaps search engines, social media platforms and websites should be held responsible for promoting or hosting fake information. The scientific community needs to do its part to educate the public about key concepts in research, such as the difference between observational studies and higher quality randomized trials.

Finally, journalists can do a better job of spreading accurate information. News sites are more likely to cover catchy observational studies than randomized controlled trials, perhaps because the latter are less likely to produce surprising results. Such coverage can overstate benefits, claiming for example, that statins could cure cancer; it can unduly emphasize potential risks, such as suggesting a misleading connection with dementia, a serious mental disorder.

The Future of Publishing: E-publish or die?

The iPad and its kind are both good and bad for book publishers.

Like many other parts of the media industry, publishing is being     1     reshaped by the growth of the Internet. For years, e-books have     2     to cut sales of the old-fashioned kind. In response, publishers are trying to support their traditional business while preparing for a future in which e-books will represent a much bigger chunk of sales.

For some time, publishers have operated a “wholesale” pricing model with Amazon. This has enabled Amazon to set the price of many new e-books at $9.99. Amazon has     3     prices low in order to boost demand for its Kindle.

However, publishers are     4     that this may make consumers expect lower prices for all kinds of books. And they worry the downward trend will further cut their thin margins and make     5     bricks-and-mortar booksellers(实体书商)suffer more. Some in the industry even     6     that publishers will suffer a similar fate to that of music companies, whose fortunes disappeared when songs can be cheaply sold online. This is particularly     7     for publishers because digital margins are almost as thin as print ones.

Some publishers try delaying the     8     of electronic versions of new books for months after the print launch to increase print sales. Some are starting to build their own online target reader groups. Sourcebooks, a medium-sized publisher that has developed an online group     9     on poetry, found that book sales rose by 50% after poems had featured on the site.

The publishing firms that survive the tough transition will be those who use flexible     10     and learn quickly to think. Not all of them can turn that particular page successfully.

5 . The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. “Yet when we think of health, we tend to ________ physical well-being at the expense of mental health. Instead, we should tackle mental health the same way we tackle physical health-with an eye towards preventing disease by addressing the foundational forces that cause us to be sick or well.

About 15 percent of the world’s diseases are mental illnesses. Depression is one of the most common mental illnesses, ________ an estimated 300 million people around the world. Depression is so widespread that the WHO has ________ that, by 2030, it will be the leading cause of the global disease burden.

Mental illness may be even more common than we think. Many mental health challenges are likely ________ . There are a number of reasons for this. They include differences of opinion within the mental health field about the characteristics of these disorders, as well as changes to how we study them across populations and cultures. We also have a long way to go before we create a culture where stigma no longer ________ people with mental illness from getting assistance. Thirty-eight percent of Americans have said they are “definitely or probably”________ to have a person with mental illness move next door to them. Their attitudes make it more likely that many people with mental illness will remain under the radar, making it ________ to accurately assess their true numbers.

Health — both physical and mental — is a ________ of the social, economic, and environmental conditions in which we live. Our minds, just like our bodies, are shaped by complex factors. including where we live, our genetics, our childhood experiences, and our ________ to material resources. Income, ________, is one of the most significant influences on health and is linked to a number of common mood — anxiety disorders. From 2009 to 2013, 8. 7 percent of people with annual incomes below the federals poverty line were reported to experience “serious psychological distress,” compared with the lower levels of psychological distress reported by individuals with higher annual incomes.

If we ________ an arm or develop an infectious disease, it will be difficult for anyone to consider us healthy. If, however, we struggle with mental illness — such as depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — it is possible that our disease will ________ few outward symptoms. At the same time, the stigma that is still too often ________ to mental illness can make those who develop a disorder less likely to seek the help they need. Given these challenges, and the reasons I have listed, it is ________ that we address mental health with as much energy and insight as we apply to physical concerns. Our health deserves ________ less.

We Could Be Heroes

Altruism has long been an evolutionary mystery. Why would anyone choose to help somebody not related to them, with no promise of     1    ? The usual answer is that such behaviour is an adaptation: for example, groups in which it     2     would have been more united, and hence more successful. But what about acts of extreme altruism? Can we ever understand why some people risk — and sometimes lose — their lives for a stranger?

To try to answer this question, Samuel Oliner, a sociologist, and his wife Pearl set up the Altruistic Personality and Prosocial Behavior Institute at Humboldt State University in 1982. In one of their first studies, still the largest of its kind, they interviewed and psychologically     3     406 people who had risked their lives to rescue Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe, along with 72 people who had lived in occupied areas but had done nothing out of the     4    . A number of things became clear. The rescuers were much more sympathetic than the non-rescuers, and they also supported values of fairness, compassion and personal     5     towards strangers that they said they had learned from their parents.

What’s more, they were unusually tolerant: the people they     6     as their “in group” consisted of the whole of humanity, not just their own kind. As Kristen Monroe at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the psychology of Holocaust rescuers, puts it: “Where the rest of us see a stranger, an altruist sees a fellow human being.”

Samuel Oliner says his finding has held up in all their follow-up studies. It has also been     7    by psychologists Eva Fogelman, whose father, too, owed his wartime survival to the generosity of Polish farmers. Fogelman has spent much of her career studying the psychological effects of the Holocaust on     8     and their families. In her book Conscience and Courage, she recalls her conversations with about 300 rescuers of Jews: I began after a while to wait for the recital of one or more of those well-known passages: a loving home; an altruistic parent or beloved caretaker who served as a role model for altruistic behavior, a tolerance for people who were different.”

8 . If you ask something of ChatGPT, an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool that is going viral, the responses you get back are almost instantaneous, utterly certain and often wrong. It is a bit like talking to an economist. The questions raised by technologies like ChatGPT yield much more indecisive answers. But they are ones that managers ought to start asking.

One issue is how to deal with employees’ concerns about job security. Worries are natural. An AI that makes it easier to process your expenses is one thing; an AI that people would prefer to sit next to at a dinner party quite another. Being clear about how workers would redirect time and energy that is freed up by an AI helps foster acceptance. So does creating a sense of agency: research conducted by a team in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that an ability to override (凌驾于) an AI makes employees more likely to use it.

Employees at Tapestry, a set of luxury brands, were given access to a forecasting model that told them how to assign stock to stores. Some used a model whose logic could be interpreted; others used a model that was more of a black box. Workers turned out to be likelier to overturn models they could understand because they were, mistakenly, sure of their own intuitions (直觉). Workers were willing to accept the decisions of a model they could not explain, however, because of their confidence in the expertise of people who had built it. The qualifications of those behind an AI matter.

The different ways that customers respond to humans and to algorithms (算法) is a booming area of research. In a recent paper Gizem Yalcin of the University of Texas at Austin and her coauthors looked at whether customers responded differently to decisions — to approve someone for a loan, for example, or a country club membership — when they were made by a machine or a person. They found that people reacted the same when they were being rejected. But they felt less positive about an organisation when they were approved by an algorithm rather than a human. The reason? People are good at explaining away unfavourable decisions, whoever makes them. However, it is harder for them to attribute a successful application to their own charming, delightful selves when assessed by a machine. People want to feel special, not reduced to a data point.

The picture that emerges from such research is messy. It is also dynamic: just as technologies evolve, so will attitudes. But it is crystal clear on one thing. The impact of ChatGPT and other AIs will depend not just on what they can do, but also on how they make people feel.

With so much fake news online, it can sometimes be hard to figure out the truth. Concern about the phenomenon led some tech companies to     1     that they’ll crack down on fake news sites.

Fake news is a(n) common occurrence — you see it on your social media feeds, and even on forwarded messages on your phone’s group chat. There’s always one person in your group who likes to send     2     news from what can only be described as doubtful origins.

It was even named 2017’s word of the year by dictionary     3     , Collins, which describes fake news as “false, often sensational, information spread under the guise of news reporting”.

Here’s our advice on how to     4     a fake.

First, check the website and quality of the articles. Look at the     5     of the story and read other articles on the site — are they well written with proper citations or are they full of grammatical errors? You should also make sure that you’re on a legal news site. Some fake sites use     6     and even logos that are similar to those of real news organizations. For example, abcnews.go.com is real, while abenews.com. co is not.

Second, is it the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Sometimes a fake news story can have a sliver of truth to it, but most of the facts and figures are plotted from imagination. To make sure, search for the same story on several     7     websites to ensure nothing has been misrepresented.

Third, make sure it’s not satire (讽刺). If the story is on a satirical website, you should be aware that the     8     is humour and satire, and not misled

Being able to detect fake news is a crucial part of digital     9     and is an important aspect of life in the digital age. However, not all of the misinformation being passed along online is completely fictional, though some of it is. Snopes. com has been exposing false viral     10     since the mid-1990s, whether that’s fabricated (编造的) messages, distortions containing bits of truth and everything in between. Founder David Mikkelson warned in a Nov. 17 article not to sort everything into the “fake news” category. In one word, stay alert and objective.

10 . Tattoos are enjoying a great popularity among college students in America. They _________ students’ shoulders, backs, arms, legs, feet, and even toes. A Harris online survey reported that 26 percent of college students in America had at least one tattoo. In the area of _________ nearly equal percentages of males (16%) and females (15%) have tattoos.

In fact, the tattoos are popular among all _________ groups, as documented by a 2011 Pew Research Center survey. The Pew research shows that in America, 36 percent of those aged 18 to 25, and 40 percent of those aged 26 to 40 have at least one tattoo. In July 2009, “tattoos” reached its highest ranking ever, coming in as the number two most _________ search term on the Internet.

Tattoos can be a sign of beauty or they can be used as a statement, to become empowered, to _________ something or someone, and to feel included. According to an article by Cate Lineberry in Smithsonian.com, humans have been tattooed for thousands of years. “These permanent designs — sometimes plain and simple, sometimes complicated, but always _________ — have served as amulets (护身符), status symbols, declarations of love, signs of religious beliefs, decorations and even forms of punishment,” she said.

Josh Schuhz, a student from University of Maryland, who has had 22 hours of tattoo work done, says he feels _________ by his tattoos. “Getting my tattoo was almost like _________ an important ceremony,” he said, “I’ve gotten work done almost everywhere I’ve traveled: Texas, New York, San Diego, Afghanistan and New Zealand. “Sehuhz’s tattoos are _________ by the work of spiritual and visual specialist artist Alex Grey.” I really love art, and Alex Grey’s work represents a(n) __________ energy, an energy not seen by the eye,” Schuhz explained.

Exercise Science major Shelly Stemper from Yale said she got her tattoo as a way to __________ with her older brother. “He’s nine years older than me, and we are fond of each other.” she said. “We decided to get tattoos together and had been looking for a tattoo that would be __________ for both of us. Once, on a family trip to Denali National Park in Alaska, we saw wolves and I chose a wolf paw while my brother a wolf head as our tattoos because we love this animal and they reminds us of our __________.”

More college students in America began to accept and even __________ the art of tattooing. Tattoos are certain to be part of our culture for years to come, and due to the human desire to __________ oneself, tattoos promise to grow in diversity.