This International Women’s Day, 8 March 2024, join the United Nations in celebrating under the theme “Invest in women: Accelerate progress”.

The world is facing many crises,     1     (range) from geopolitical conflicts to increasing poverty levels and the severe impacts of climate change. These challenges can only     2     (address) by solutions that empower women. By investing in women, we can spark change and speed the transition towards a     3     (health), safer, and more equal world for all.

If current trends continue, more than 342 million women will     4     (live) in extreme poverty by 2030．     5     (ensure) women’s needs and     6     (priority) are considered, governments must prioritize gender-responsive financing and increase public spending on essential services and social protection.

Policymakers must also value, recognize, and account for the vital contribution women make     7     economies worldwide through paid and unpaid care work. Women spend around three times more time on unpaid care work than men     8     if these activities were assigned a monetary value they would account for more than 40 per cent of GDP.

Investing in women and championing gender equality boosts a future     9     everyone in society can thrive, creating     10     world of boundless opportunity and empowerment for all.

2 . More than 200 people were killed and 900 others injured in a major accident Friday evening involving three trains in the eastern Indian state of Odisha, officials said on Saturday.

At least 233 people ____ and about 900 were injured in the ____, and the number of death is ____ to increase further.

According to officials, the Coromandel Express, which runs from Kolkata to Chennai, hit the Yashwantpur-Howrah Express, which derailed (脱轨). A cargo train was also said to be ____ in the accident.

Officials said the ____ of the collision was so ____ that carriages of the two trains climbed atop each other, ____ deaths and injuries to passengers. A large number of passengers were ____ inside the derailed coaches.

____ after the accident, rescue teams, health officials, police, and fire services rushed to the ____. A large crowd of locals ____ reached the spot to help the injured.

All the health facilities nearby were ____ alert. Meanwhile, the injured were ____ to the hospital throughout the night.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has ____ grief over the ____ of lives in the accident and condolences (吊唁) are pouring in from various quarters.

3 . Initial conversations can have a huge impact on how relationships develop over time. People are often stuck in the impressions they think they might have made the minute they finish speaking with someone for the first time: “Did they like me or were they just being polite?” “Were they deep in thought or deeply bored?”

To find out whether these worries are necessary, we have conducted nearly 10 years of research. In our studies, participants in the UK talked with someone they had never met before. Afterward, they were asked how much they liked their conversation partner and how much they believed that their conversation partner liked them. This allowed us to compare how much people believed they were liked to how much they were actually liked.

Time and time again, we found that people left their conversations with negative feelings about the impression they made. That is, people systematically underestimate how much their conversation partners like them and enjoy their company — a false belief we call the “liking gap”.

This bias (偏见) may seem like something that would occur only in initial interactions, but its effects extend far beyond a first impression. Surprisingly, the liking gap can constantly affect a variety of relationships, including interactions with coworkers, long after the initial conversations have taken place. Having a larger liking gap is associated with being less willing to ask workmates for help, less willing to provide workmates with open and honest feedback, and less willing to work on another project together.

There are numerous strategies to minimize your biased feelings. One place to start is shifting your focus of attention. Try to direct your attention to your conversation partner, be genuinely curious about them, ask them more questions, and really listen to their answers. The more you’re zeroed in on the other person, and the less you’re focused on yourself, the better your conversation will be and the less your mind will turn to all the things you think you didn’t do well.

4 . The clock rules our lives. The more we try to save time, the less time we seem to have. In every area of our lives we are doing things faster. And many of us live in towns and cities which are getting noisier and more stressful as each day passes. But now a worldwide movement, whose aim is to slow life down, has started. Its supporters are people who believe that a happier and healthier way of life is possible.

The Slow Food movement was founded the day that an Italian journalist, Carlo Petrini, saw that McDonald’s had opened a restaurant in a beautiful square in Rome. He thought it was sad that many people today live too quickly to sit down for a proper meal and only eat much fast food. He decided that he had to try to do something about it and so he started the Slow Food movement. Slow Food has become a global organization ever since and now has more than 80,000 members in 100 countries.

Slow Food also encourages people to eat local and regional food, to use local shops and markets, to eat out in small family restaurants, and to cook with traditional recipes.

The idea of Slow Cities was inspired by the Slow Food movement. The aim of Slow Cities is to improve people’s quality of life. Towns which want to become a Slow City have to reduce traffic and noise, increase the number of green areas, plant trees, build pedestrian zones, and promote local businesses and traditions. Now it has spread to other countries all over the world, from the UK to Japan and Australia. There are now 135 Slow Cities in 24 countries across the world that have been named since founding of the organization in 1999. Gao Chun County, in east China’s Jiangsu Province, is expected to be named the first “Slow City” in China next year.

“Slow Cities are about having a community life in the town,” said a local resident. “It is not ‘slow’ as in ‘stupid’. It is ‘slow’ as in the opposite of ‘worried’ and ‘stressful’.”

But not everybody is happy. For teenagers, who have to go 25km to Norwich, the nearest city, to buy CDs, living in a Slow City is not very attractive. “It’s all right here for adults,” says Lewis Cook, 16. “But if you want excitement, you have to go to Norwich. We need more things here for young people.”

Recently, there    1     (be) a notable surge in the sales of pre-packaged meals, with “braised pork with preserved mustard greens (梅菜)” emerging as a top favorite. Fuyang city in Anhui province has become a major production hub(中心) for this dish.

During the    2     (influence) annual 315 Gala held by China Central Television to mark World Consumer Rights Day on March 15, it    3     (report) that workers at a pork wholesale market in Fuyang had been using meat from pig neck— an area    4     (contain) glands (腺体), lipoma (脂肪瘤), and thyroid (甲状腺) — to make a traditional Chinese dish consisting of pork belly and preserved mustard greens, all in    5     effort to expand profit margins.

The report stated that the wholesale price for pork belly is about 24 yuan ($3.34) per kilogram,     6    is four times that of meat from pig neck.

CCTV added that the use of meat from a pig’s neck violates Chinese    7     (regulation), yet it is being discovered in Fuyang’s extensive semi-prepared food industry.

Footage    8     (display) at the gala showed that workers at a local food business stacked frozen pork in open air, some without packaging. Inside the workshop, workers put sliced pork    9    preserved mustard greens into cans to be sealed and shipped to market.

A person     10    charge said their business has flourished due to growing appetite for semi-marinated food, which is ready for consumption after simple cooking.

7 . Don’t Be A Bystander

None of us like to think we’d walk on by when someone needed our help.     1    

One of the most famous examples of this is the tragic case of Kitty Genovese who was fatally stabbed in Kew Gardens, New York, in 1964. Subsequent investigations concluded that several people saw or heard what was happening, but did nothing to intervene.     2    The more people there are, the less likely they are to help.

There are various factors contributing to this effect — people think that others will get involved or intervene (called “diffusion of responsibility”).     3    It is also partly down to “pluralistic ignorance” — since everyone is not reacting to the emergency, they don’t need to either; it’s not serious because no one else is doing anything. After a serious incident where people have been affected by the bystander effect, they are often horrified that they didn’t do anything.     4    

The important thing to understand though is that other studies have shown that once people are aware of the bystander effect, they are less likely to be affected by it. Self-awareness is the best antidote to it.     5    Ignore everyone else and how they are behaving and go with your gut—if you’d call an ambulance, do it. If you’d run for help, do it. If that’s how you would have behaved when you were on your own, then that’s probably the right course of action The worst that can happen is you’ll look a little foolish at having overreacted. You might also save someone’s life.

9 . When Lenore Skenazy let her 9-year-old son take the New York subway home by himself 10 years ago, you would have thought that she’d carried out a crime. Now Skenazy started the movement Free Range (放养的) Kids to bring up safe and independent children. Just this month, Utah became a free range state, changing its law to protect parents from being charged with neglect (疏忽)for letting their kids walk alone, or wait in a car for an adult.

Skenazy argues that the risks of giving children some freedom are exaggerated (夸大). Skenazy’s mother used to send her outside at 5 to walk to school. That was just normal back then. And suddenly we hear stories about parents getting punished for letting their 10-year-old son play outside.

We get so used to not knowing our neighbors, not letting our kids walk to school, or play outside, that nowadays, the kids are either in a car or in the backyard, and they don’t get to know the neighborhood. In fact, the world has become safer. We have the technologies to keep track of almost everything our kids do. And so you think you must control them, and you think your child is something that has to be tracked like a package.

The famous case for many parents was the Etan Patz case in New York in 1979. Patz’s parents gave him permission for the first time to walk to the bus stop nearby. He was killed. The story is so terrible that we remember it two generations later. And we don’t allow our kids to walk alone because of one terrible thing that happened 39 years ago. But we don’t say, “I want to drive you to the dentist, but what if we get in a car accident? Think of those people who died in a car accident 39 years ago. I don’t want to be like them. No, we’re not going.” And we recognize that it would be funny to think that way.