In many urban Chinese offices, a trend (趋势) is gaining popularity among young professionals. The trend     1     (know) as “office farming” involves growing fruit-bearing plants such as bananas and pineapples right at their desks.     2     (particular), these fruits, which often come with half-ripened (半熟的) fruits, are easy to care for, as they require just regular water changes and nutrient additions.

This trend is not just about     3     (decorate); it is also about functionality. These beautiful plants can produce fruits,     4     adds an interesting element to the usual office environment. As     5     result, these desk gardens quickly become office attractions, offering a unique way to help     6     (they) break the ice and foster social interactions (互动) between colleagues (同事).

The appeal of these fruit-bearing plants is evident on social media platforms, where thousands of these plants     7     (sell). This trend connects China’s farming traditions     8     modern city life. It also reflects broader social trends. Office workers seek to relieve the stresses of long working hours and     9     (difficulty) environments by taking part in more calming and nature-oriented activities. As the practice grows, more workers are considering expanding their indoor gardens and adding more variety to their collection of plants     10     (bring) a sense of happiness to their office surroundings.

2 . Whenever we see a button, we are eager to press it because we know something will happen. This is true in most cases, for example on a doorbell and on the “on / off” on the TV. But some buttons are actually fake, like the “close” button on a lift.

Many people are in the habit of pressing the “close” button because they don’t have the patience to wait for the lift doors to shut. But lifts’ “close” buttons are a complete scam, at least in the US — the doors will not close any faster no matter how hard you press.

It started in the 1990s when the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in the US, making sure that all lifts stayed open long enough so that people with disabilities could enter. Only US firefighters and repairmen can use the buttons to speed up the door-closing process if they have a code or special keys.

But to normal lift riders, the buttons aren’t completely useless. According to psychologists, fake buttons can actually make you feel better by offering you a sense of control.

“Perceived (能够感知的) control is very important. It reduces stress and increase well-being,” Ellen J. Langer, a psychology professor, said, “Having a lack of control is associated with depression.”

Experts have revealed that a lot of buttons that don’t do anything exist in our lives for this same purpose. For example, many offices in the US have fake thermostats (温度调节器) because people tend to feel better when they think they can control the temperature in their workspace.

But psychologists found it interesting that even when people are aware of these little “white lies”, they still continue to push fake buttons because as long as the doors eventually close, it is considered to be worth the effort.

“That habit is here to stay,” John Kounios, a psychology professor, said, “Even though I have real doubts about the traffic light buttons, I always press them. After all, I’ve got nothing else to do while waiting. So why not press the button in the hope that this one will work.”

5 . Digital reading (数字阅读) appears to be destroying habits of “deep reading”. Astonishing numbers of people with years of schooling are in fact illiterate (文盲). This month’s Ljubljana Manifesto (宣言) explains: “The digital field may promote more reading than ever in history, but it also offers many attractions to read in a casual and scattered (零散的) manner— or even not to read at all. This increasingly endangers higher-level reading.”

That’s frightening, because “higher-level reading” has been necessary to civilization. It made the understanding and an international increase in empathy (共鸣). Without it, we would suffer a lot. As the Ljubljana Manifesto notes, “as much as one-third of Europeans struggle even with lower-level reading skills.” More than one-fifth of adults in the US “fall into the illiterate/functionally illiterate category”. Separately, post-pandemic (后疫情时期) reading scores for American13-year-olds are the lowest in decades. And the Washington-based Center for Global Development recently estimated that literacy (读写能力) in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa among those with five years of schooling has decreased by 10% this past half century.

Experts in the Ljubljana Manifesto record the demerits of digital reading: “Recent studies of various kinds indicate a decline of thoughtful reading, slow reading and long-form reading.” When you read a book on paper, you can be entirely inside the experience, absorb hundreds of pages of details thoroughly and begin to catch the world’s complexity. Online, says Maryanne Wolf of UCLA, we are “skimming, scanning and scrolling”. The medium is the message: doing deep reading on your phone is as hard as playing tennis with your phone. Recently, a bright 11-year-old boy told me I was wasting time on books: he absorbed more information faster from websites. He had a point. But digital readers also absorb more misinformation and seldom absorb fine opinions.

In short, as professors from Northwestern University predicted in 2005, we are returning to the days when only an elite (精英) “reading class” reads long texts, which is worrying.

6 . Technology seems to discourage slow, careful reading. Reading on a screen tires your eyes and makes it harder for you to keep your place. Online writing tends to be more skimmable (易略读的) and list-like than print. The neuroscientist Mary Walt argued recently that this new standard of skim reading is producing“an invisible, game-changing transformation”in how readers process words. The neuronal circuit (神经回路) that maintains and supports the brain’s ability to read now prefers the rapid absorption of information.

We shouldn’t overplay this danger. All readers skim. From about the age of nine, our eyes start to skim quickly across the page, reading only about a quarter of the words properly, and filling in the gap s by inference. Nor is there anything new in these fears about declining attention spans (持续时间). So far, the anxieties have proved to be false alarms. “Quite a few critics have been worried about attention spans lately and see very short stories as signs of cultural decline,” the American author Selvin Brown wrote. “No one ever said that poems were evidence of short attention spans.”

And yet the Internet has certainly changed the way we read. For a start, it means that there is more to read, because more people than ever are writing. And digital writing is meant for rapid release and response. This mode of writing and reading can be interactive and fun. But often it treats other people’s words as something to be quickly taken as materials to say something else. Everyone talks over the top of everyone else, eager to be heard.

Perhaps we should slow down. Reading is constantly promoted as a source of personal achievement. But this argument often emphasizes “enthusiastic” “passionate” or “eager” reading, non e of which words suggest slow, quiet absorption. To a slow reader, a piece of writing can only be fully understood by immersing oneself in the words and their slow understanding of a line of thought.

The human need for this kind of deep reading is too tenacious for any new technology to destroy. We often assume that technological change can’t be stopped and happens in one direction, so that older media like “dead-tree” books are kicked out by newer, more virtual forms. In practice, older technologies can coexist with new ones. The Kindle has not killed off the printed book any more than the car killed off the bicycle. We still want to enjoy slowly-formed ideas and carefully-chosen words. Even in a fast-moving age, there is time for slow reading.

8 . As a general rule, all forms of activity lead to boredom when they are performed on a routine basis. As a matter of fact, we can see this principle at work in people of all _________. For example, on Christmas morning, children are excited about _________ with their new toys. But their _________ soon wears off and by January those same toys can be found put away in the basement. The world is full of _________ stamp albums and unfinished models, each standing as a monument to someone’s _________ interest. When parents bring home a pet, their child _________ bathes it and brushes its fur. Within a short time, however, the _________ of caring for the animal is handed over to the parents. Adolescents enter high school with great excitement but are soon looking forward to _________. The same is true of the young adults going to college. And then, how many _________, who now complain about the long drives to work, __________ drove for hours at a time when they first __________ their driver’s license (执照)? Before people retire, they usually __________ to do a lot of great things, which they never had time to do while working. But __________ after retirement, the golfing, the fishing, the reading and all of the other pastimes become as boring as the jobs they __________. And, like the child in January, they go searching for new __________.