Globalisation has profoundly transformed the world. Changes in the sphere of economics, politics, and society have a great impact on our daily lives. Besides the numerous opportunities that globalisation     1     (bring) us, such as increased interconnectedness resulting from advanced communication technology and the expansion of the world market, it     2     (create) a number of significant challenges. Many jobs have become insecure, people work on the basis of short-term contracts, or they     3     (require) to work long hours for low wages. However, the transformations brought on by globalisation is alive with other facets of our lives     4    . There is a growing uncertainty that is significantly reshaping family and community life,     5     (include) the way it influences young people’s decisions on partnership and family formation.

This round table will feature experts from different regions of the world,     6     will offer their insights into this complex phenomenon, and propose policy-oriented solutions for challenges     7     families and communities increasingly deal with in a globalised world.

In particular, the round table will analyse the changes in the structure and functions of the family     8     (result) from globalisation. The question of how families and communities can benefit best from modernity and globalisation,     9     at the same time build resilience against the negative aspects, will receive special attention. The exchange of best practices and lessons     10     (learn) from different countries and regions will serve as the basis for future-oriented solutions.

4 . COLUMBIA, Mo. – Jilly Santos set three successive alarms on her phone, skipped breakfast, and hastily packed everything while her father drove. But last year she rarely made it to the doors of Rock Bridge High School by the first bell, at 7:50 a.m.

Then she heard that the school board was about to make the day start even earlier, at 7:20 a.m.

“I think if that happens,” recalled Jilly, 17. “I will have to drop out of school. And I will complain to the end!”

The nearly 20-year movement to start high schools later has recently gained momentum as hundreds of schools in dozens of districts across the country have adopted later school starting time.

These schools have referred to the accumulating research results on the adolescent body clock. Evidence suggests that later high school starts have widespread benefits. Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that the later a school’s start time, the better off the students were on many measures, including mental health, car crash rates, attendance and, in some schools, grades and standardized test scores.

“The research was not a randomized controlled trial. Its methods were practical and findings were promising. Even schools with limited resources can make this one policy change with what appears to be benefits for their students,” Dr. Elizabeth Miller said.

Researchers have found that during adolescence, as hormones(荷尔蒙) rise and the brain develops, teenagers who regularly sleep eight to nine hours a night are less likely to be tardy, get in fights or sustain athletic injuries. Sleeping well can also help to stop their tendency toward uncontrolled or risky decision-making.

During adolescence, teenagers have a later release of the “sleep” hormone melatonin(褪黑素), which means they tend not to feel sleepy until around 11 p.m. This explains mainly for their late bed time and naturally leads to late rising time. Other minor factors include the presence of electronic devices, which excites the brain and slows the onset of sleep. The Minnesota study noted that 88 percent of the students kept a cellphone in their bedroom.

But many parents object to shifting the start of the day later. They say doing so makes sports practices end late, jeopardizes student jobs and bites into time for homework.

At heart, though, experts say, the resistance is driven by mistrust about the primacy of sleep. “It’s still a badge of honor to get five hours of sleep,” said Dr. Judith Owens. “It supposedly means you’re working harder, and that’s a good thing. So there has to be a cultural shift around sleep.”

5 . The Power of the Press

In modern countries any efforts to restrict the freedom of the press are rightly condemned. However, this freedom can easily be abused.     1     Though we may enjoy reading about the lives of others, it is extremely doubtful whether we would equally enjoy reading about ourselves. Acting on the contention that facts are sacred, reporters can cause untold suffering to individuals by publishing details about their private lives. Newspapers exert such tremendous influence that they can not only bring about major changes to the lives of ordinary people but can even overthrow a government.

The story of a poor family that acquired fame and fortune overnight, dramatically illustrates the power of the press. The family lived in Aberdeen, a small town of 23, 000 inhabitants in South Dakota.       2     They were expecting their sixth child and were faced with even more pressing economic problems. If they had only had one more child, the fact would have passed unnoticed. They would have continued to struggle against economic odds and would have lived in obscurity. But they suddenly became the parents of quintuplets, four girls and a boy, an event which radically changed their lives. The day after the birth of the five children, an aeroplane arrived in Aberdeen bringing sixty reporters and photographers.

The rise to fame was swift.     3     Newspapers and magazines offered the family huge sums for the exclusive rights to publish stories and photographs. Gifts poured in not only from unknown people, but from baby food and soap manufactures who wished to advertise their products. The old farmhouse the family lived in was to be replaced by a new $ 500, 000 home. Reporters kept pressing for interviews so lawyers had to be employed to act as spokesmen for the family at press conferences. While the five babies were still quietly sleeping in oxygen tents in a hospital nursery, their parents were paying the price for fame.     4     They had become the victims of commercialization, for their names had acquired a market value. Instead of being five new family members, these children had immediately become a commodity.

6 . As Christmas approached, the price of turkey went wild. It didn’t rocket, as some might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started waving. We live in the age of the variable prices. In the eyes of sellers, the right price—the one that will draw the most profit from consumers’ wallets—has become the focus of huge experiments. These sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price.

It may come as a surprise that, in buying a pie, you might be participating in a carefully designed social-science experiment. But this is what online comparison shopping has brought. Simply put, the convenience to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that sellers—in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction—are now staring back through the screen. They are trying to “comparison shopping” us.

They have enough means to do so: the huge data tracks you leave behind whenever you place something in your online shopping cart with top data scientists capable of turning the information into useful price strategies, and what one tech economist calls “the ability to experiment on a scale that’s unimaginable in the history of economics.”

In result, not coincidentally, normal pricing practices—an advertised discount off the “list price,” two for the price of one, or simply “everyday low prices” are giving way to far more crazy strategies.

“In the Internet era, I don’t think anyone could have predicted how complicated these strategies have become,” says Robert Dolan, a professor at Harvard. The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside. The price of the headphones may depend on how budget-conscious your web history shows you to be. The price may even be affected by the price of the mobile phone you use for item search. For shoppers, that means price—not the one offered to you right now, but the one offered to you 20 minutes from now, or the one offered to me, or to your neighbor—may become an increasingly unknowable thing. “There used to be one price for something,” Dolan notes. Now the true price of pumpkin-pie spice is subject to a level of uncertainty.

8 . The popular college rankings focus primarily on prestige as measured by the SAT scores of incoming students and how many applicants are turned away. An initiative (措施) started last fall by the Obama administration could help families go beyond these limited, and far too easily exploited, indexes to learn quickly and easily how a college is compared with its competitors nationally on important criteria like graduation rates, what a degree actually costs and how much debt a student can expect to run up by graduation day.

If the federal government makes it legally necessary to disclose this information in a clear and consistent (一贯的) way, as it should, families will be better able to make informed college choices. And this will help put pressure on colleges that perform poorly to improve.

Critics may regard this initiative as an example of government overreach. But given that the federal government spends nearly $190 billion a year on higher education aid to students, it has a legitimate interest in making sure that the money flows to the schools that best meet their responsibilities to families and students.

Congress has taken some steps to require greater transparency (透明) from colleges. The 1990 Student Right to Know Act, for example, required colleges and universities that receive federal aid to disclose graduation rates. And the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act required schools to offer a way for consumers to determine actual costs after student aid is taken into account.

But many colleges have done a poor job of obeying federal disclosure rules, and much of the available information is not in one place. The administration’s new efforts would enforce reporting requirements and provide some new tools.

President Obama wants to expand campus-based aid to about $10 billion from the current $2.7 billion. He has proposed moving money away from colleges that fail to control tuition increases or provide good value to others that do a better job. That is a worthy idea in principle, but he will need strong data-based evidence to determine how colleges are doing.

The transparency initiatives are a good place to start and should be embraced by both parties in Congress. If students and families, facing higher tuition and rising debt, are to make sound choices, they need more and better information.

9 . New bike-on-demand services give a new dimension to urban sharing economy. In the 1980s, a bicycle, a radio and a sewing machine were considered as the top three _______ for Chinese couples. At the time, China was the “Kingdom of Bicycles”—bikes were key to people’s daily transportation. Now, the country _______ the world’s largest automobile market. Yet, ambitious entrepreneurs keep attempting to _______ lost glory to bikes. Their strategy, however, is changing.

GPS-enabled and painted in _______ orange, at least 100, 000 Mobikes are in service in Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chengdu. And with its signature yellow bikes, of now connects’ about 227, 000 bicycles in 21 cities. Newcomers like Hello-bike and Ubike are catching up.

Unlike traditional public bikes that have to be borrowed at and returned to a bike stand after a journey, sharing bikes save people from such troubles. Using an intelligent lock with _______ functions to help users locate and borrow bikes, these smart bicycles can be parked in any public area _______ by a local government. Normally, they can be unlocked in seconds by simply scanning the _______ QR code on each bike. Suitable for both enthusiastic cyclists and daily short-distance commuters, the round-the- clock, hourly-charging service is obviously a (an) _______.

But bike-sharing platforms face grave (严峻的) maintenance and management challenges. Damage to and losses of bikes, along with improper parking, are often reported-despite their owner’ _______ calls for proper, considerate use. Regular disappearance and damage reports have not just __________ extra financial burdens of the bike- sharing companies, but also raised the costs of offering such a service __________ decent customers. Parking in unauthorized areas __________ a challenge to urban management, too.

That some 200 sharing bicycles were impounded (扣留) last month by the urban management authorities in Chengdu for “illegally occupying public space”, however, is not a kind of rule needed. Rather, what local government should do is to adapt to the rising trend of bike sharing, and __________ rules keeping the local conditions and people’s convenience in mind.

Bike sharing services should be welcomed by cities aspiring to promote green transport and reduce vehicle emissions and congestion. The GPS system installed on these bikes can help the service apps easily __________ the unruly (不守规矩的)users, who are less likely to repeat their mistakes if given an official warning by the urban management authorities.

The service apps do have other options besides issuing penalties. Keeping a record of customers using shared bikes and adding it to their credit record would be a(an) __________ attempt, so would recruiting volunteers to supervise and report improper use.