1 . A four-year-old dog named Kob became a hero in its neighborhood by discovering a possibly life-threatening gas leak (泄漏) in its owner’s front yard.

This dog’s actions not only _______ its surroundings, but also stressed the importance of the behavior of our furry friends.

The story began when Kob, _______ by 28-year-old Chanell Bell, started digging a large hole in the yard. At first, Bell thought this was typical dog _______, but as the hole grew larger, she became _______. Recognizing that Kob’s actions were unusual, she trusted the dog’s judgment, considering its normally well-behaved nature.

After _______ a recent gas leak in her home, Chanel _______ a gas detecting (探测) tool. She followed her sense and chose to use the tool to _______ the newly dug hole by Kob.

Finding gas coming out of the hole, Bell _______ contacted the authorities about the issue.

“If it wasn’t found, the _______ would have continued to escape into our homes,” Bell said. “We were told it could have caused ________ health effects like breathing issues, brain damage, and even ________. They told me that something as simple as ________ a light could have caused a burst!”

During the repairs, workers ________three main gas leaks in Bell’s neighborhood caused by aging ________. It took the workers over three days to repair the leaks and replace the old equipment.

Throughout the repairs, the workers________ Kob for saving the neighborhood.

2 . I was watching a TV program when I came across a sorrowful sight: homeless people lying near the wall of a busy Manhattan train station. Dan Rather, a reporter, was covering the event. He ________ numerous people: the homeless, those who ________ the homeless, and those who didn’t.

One woman took the ________ every day. During the winter months, the number of homeless living in the station increased, because it was cold and this woman ________ disliked it. She complained to Dan Rather that most of the homeless people were able-bodied and could have ________ a job, but they chose not to. She also said that most of the homeless could have gone to ________ but they would rather live at the station. She just didn’t ________ that nobody could acquire a job without a home address and that many shelters across the country are being closed as a result of a shortage of funds.

________, a mother and son did a lot to help the homeless. The household ________ the homeless by giving them a hot breakfast in the morning and giving them money to eat a lunch and dinner.

Dan Rather then went along with a homeless person to the welfare office. It took the man three days to just fill out the proper applications. The complete ________ took six days. He met with a welfare lawyer who could give him a(n) ________. Dan Rather spoke with the lawyer and he said that it took time because the nation didn’t have enough money to provide welfare to everyone who ________.

After watching this program, I gave ________ consideration of becoming a welfare lawyer for the homeless, who are part of our ________. We must do something — anything — to ________ the situation now. Only when we solve this problem can the nation have a bright future.

3 . The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies. Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Another event listing site, Meetup, reported a 14% increase in the number of RSVPs to book clubs between January 2023 and January 2024, compared with a 4% increase in RSVPs for all UK-based events.

Victoria Okafor, who co-runs the book club Between2Books, said the heightened interest in reading may be partly the result of a general “shift in hobbies”, as GenZ (the generation around 00s) turned to other ways to spend their free time. Besides, during the global health crisis period, many people were forced to slow down and pick up or reignite hobbies, and online book clubs provided a platform to connect with others.

Social media may be helping with the visibility of book clubs, too, said Okafor. “People may come across your page accidentally, but from there people have the knowledge to attend should they wish. I think this makes a big difference compared to just hearing things from word of mouth.”

Many of the book clubs listed on Eventbrite carry specific themes — Sheffield Feminist Book Club, Bring Your Baby Book Club, and Modern Chinese Literature Online Book Club.

Okafor’s club, Between2Books, focuses on books by writers traditionally excluded (排除) from the classics. She thought she began seeking out such stories “embarrassingly late”. “Reading authors of color brought back a joy to my reading that came from not only seeing elements of myself and culture reflected in novels but also reading stories that could be funny or empowering as opposed to the accounts of struggle that can often surround stories of people of color,” she said. “The variety of books makes reading and discussion so rich and I think that’s what attenders are drawn to.”

4 . Earlier this month, an opinion study said about 75 percent of the French public want to ban bullfighting (斗牛). But a small group of supporters say it is a tradition that should continue.

Baptiste is a 16-year-old boy training to be a bullfighter who lives in Arles, a town in southern France. He says opponents do not understand bullfighting. “Bullfighting is a tradition, an art, a dance with the bull,” Baptiste said. He is one of 12 students in Arles learning how to fight bulls.

Opponents wonder how it can be called “an art” when an innocent animal is killed in the end. During a recent protest march, one sign read: “Bullfighting is not a fight; it’s the killing of a tortured (折磨) innocent.”

Aymeric Caron is a French lawmaker who sent a bill to Parliament that would ban bullfighting. It is currently being debated. He said some parts of France permit bullfighting as long as fewer than 1,000 bulls are killed each year. Just because it is a tradition, he said, does not “morally justify a practice”.

Other lawmakers in Caron’s party are not supporting his bill, so it is unlikely to pass. But the news of the anti-bullfighting proposal started a discussion throughout France.

Frederic Pastor oversees the bullfights in the city of Nimes. He said the bull is “glorified (给予荣耀)” during the fight although it is killed. Nimes is home to 14 bullfighting shows each year. They bring in over $60 million to the city.

Tiphanie Senmartin Laurent is one of the protesters. She said most people are against bullfighting. “Torture is not a show,” she said.

Spain is considered the place where bullfighting began. People there are also questioning the practice. Bullfighting was banned in the Spanish province of Catalonia in 2010 but later brought back. A major court in Spain called the practice a “cultural asset”. That means it is considered a tradition that has value. A new proposal on animal safety in Spain does not discuss bulls.

5 . The number of universities has grown very fast in recent decades. Higher-education institutions across the world now employ 15 million researchers, up from 4 million in 1980. Governments are also happy to spend on higher education because it is supposed to produce scientific breakthroughs that can be available to all. In theory, therefore, universities should be an excellent source of productivity growth.

In practice, however, the productivity has slowed down during the last decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, workers’ output per hour across the rich world rose by 4% a year. But in the last decade, 1% a year was the norm. Even with the wave of innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), productivity growth remains weak — less than 1% a year, which is bad news for economic growth.

A new paper by Ashish Arora and his team suggests that universities’ rapid growth and the rich world’s slowdown productivity could be two sides of the same coin. The paper suggests that scientific breakthroughs from public institutions “caused little or no response from businesses” over a number of years. A scientist in a university lab might publish brilliant paper after brilliant paper. Often, however, this has no impact on corporations’ own patents, with life sciences being the exception. And this, in turn, points to a small impact on the overall productivity.

Why do companies struggle to use ideas produced by universities?

The paper says that, free from the demands of the market, researchers in university labs focus more on satisfying their curiosity than finding breakthroughs that will change the world or make money. “To some degree, such kind of research is not a bad thing; some breakthrough technologies, such as penicillin, were discovered almost by accident,” it writes, “But if everyone is doing that, the economy suffers.”

Perhaps, with time, universities and the business world will work together more tightly. Tougher competition could force businesses to beef up their internal research. In fact, researchers in companies’ labs, rather than universities, are driving the current AI innovations. At some point, governments will need to ask themselves hard questions. In a world of weak economic growth, huge spending on universities may come to seem an unjustifiable luxury.

6 . Keith Payne realized he was poor for the first time when he was in the fourth grade. The awareness came to him when a new lunch lady in the cafeteria asked him to pay for his lunch.

“Previously, the lunch lady had just waved me on because I’d always been on free lunch,” he says. “But this new lady didn’t know how things worked, and it was the first time that I had been asked to pay for my lunch.”

It was an agonizing moment and all of a sudden, he realized why he got free lunch while many of his classmates were paying for their meals every day.

“It’s not like I was poorer the day after that than I was before. Nothing objective had changed. But because of that subjective awareness, I began constantly comparing myself with my classmates and felt really unhappy,” he says.

Keith Payne is now a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina and shares how the awareness of inequality affects the way that both our minds and our bodies respond.

“As we walk through the world, it is very natural for us to compare our lives with those of others. We think about ourselves in terms of being on a certain ladder (梯子) with some people above us and it can cause serious psychological consequences,” he says.

One is that it makes us more willing to seek out risks and engage in high-risk, high-reward sort of behaviors. It affects us in ways that are similar to physical threats.

“But I think there are wiser and less wise ways to make those social comparisons,” he says. “Upward social comparisons feel terrible, but they can be motivating. Downward social comparisons feel great, and yet they can be demotivating. So one of the things I recommend is that we can be more strategic in making upward and download social comparisons, Neither one is good in itself. It just depends on what your goal is.”

7 . If you frequent any kind of public transportation, then you’re well aware of certain types of passengers and passenger habits that are annoying. But it’s not just other passengers that get angry, there are certain things that drive the train attendant crazy.     1    . Maybe next time you’ll be able to spot the people doing some of these on the train.

We’ve all been there in that moment when someone boards a train trying to take several huge items with them to wherever they’re trying to go. They wind up taking up way too much space and blocking seats.    2    . Train attendants are the ones who bear the brunt of it (首当其冲) because they have to figure out how to deal with this person’s stuff without upsetting all the other passengers. It adds unnecessary conflict and makes the attendant’s job much harder.

    3    . It’s a totally different thing to be eating a big meal consisting of last night’s dinner leftovers. Not only is it typically unsettling for other passengers who then have to smell leftover chicken and whatever else you’re eating, but it’s bound to make a mess that attendants will then have to clean up after they depart the train.

For some reason, people have a bad habit of talking very loudly to one another to a point where you can hear them from opposite sides of the train cart (车厢). This goes for playing music as well. Some people like to play music through their phone. This really bothers fellow passengers on the train.     5    ? The train attendant.

8 . In recent years, much of my life as a consumer has shifted to what I like to call background. As I’ve subscribed to more apps and streaming platforms, significant sums of my money tend to slip away each month without my ever thinking about it.

Think of it as an automated trade. Spending without the trouble of spending. Acquaint ion without action. Or thought.

But while this flood of subscriptions was sold to me on the condition that it would make my life more trouble-free, there was a certain shock I felt upon discovering how much I was spending without realizing each month ($179.45).

You see, the thing about background spending is that it tends to happen, well, in the background without your full attention. And there lies the point.

“Hand over your credit card details and let us take care of the rest,” these companies promote. But by again sing their name, we’ve become lazy, positive consumers. And this laziness breeds (导致) more laziness because most of us can’t be bothered with conducting regular reviews of our subscription spending. We’re too lazy to even notice or cancel it!

I know it’s not just me who is suddenly living life as a smart-braised subscriber. The average consumer spends $273 per month on subscriptions, according to a 2021 study of 2,500 by digital services firm West Morose. Not a single person surveyed knew what his actually monthly spending was.

It’s understandable why this model is so attractive to businesses. As companies questioned traditional advertising models, subscription offered the promise of “selling once and earning forever.” And while subscription services have been around for decades (think Wine of the Month Club), more customers have been willing to sign up thanks to the widespread availability of smartphones and the increasing ease of home delivery.

While these subscription promise ease and happiness, not all of us are satisfied. Last year, the Kameny Institute found 40 percent of consumer believe they have too many subscriptions. Almost half of us also think we pay too much for streaming video-on-demand subscriptions.