The world of live action role-playing

For many people, the days of playing make-believe (假扮) ended in childhood. But for some, the game of make-believe lives on in Live Action Role-Playing, or LARP. This is a game where people act out characters in a(n)     1     plot. A gamemaster creates the plot and then puts together an event where people     2     the story. Those who find a particular plot interesting sign up for the event. Then the gamemaster, or the players themselves, make up their characters for the story. At the event, each person comes in costume and behaves as their character.

Although pretty much anything goes in LARP, nearly every event involves players completing a(n)     3     together. A gamemaster writes a goal into the plot and usually prepares challenges for the players. For example, a character may hold up the mission, making it hard to     4     the goal. LARP events can be as long as the gamemasters want them to be. They can last anywhere from a few hours to several days.

The genius of LARP is that each event can be any kind of story. The most     5     ones come from fantasy, historical, horror or science fiction genres (体裁). With such a variety of story types, LARP attracts all kinds of people. Some players enjoy LARP as a(n)     6     to practice creating or costume-making. Other players enjoy the challenge of going into different worlds and using their brains to solve puzzles. There are also those who simply want to have fun and make friends.

One     7     LARP players have is coming out of their LARP experiences and returning to the real world. This is especially common after a long event. Most players experience a “bleed,” which describes parts of their LARP experience     8     into their everyday life. Since all the senses — seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting — are at work,     9     becomes difficult. However, researchers agree that the overall effects of LARP are     10    . People of different backgrounds come together to grow their skills, play and express creativity.

Too much expenditure on fashion

Recently, an increasing number of students are pursuing fashion in our class.

3 . The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003.

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia (“哥伦比亚”号航天飞机)______ into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the shattered shuttle flew toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate ______ of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam (绝缘泡沫胶) that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also   ______ out a less direct, more surprising cause. Engineers had known about - and inappropriately______ - the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were ______ in a series of overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials.

By the start of 2003, the phrase “death by PowerPoint” had well and truly entered the ______ vocabulary. Edward Tufte was the first to have taken it literally: That spring, the Yale statistician published a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, whose core argument was that the medium of communication influences the substance of communication. While PowerPoint, as a medium, did not ______ create unclear, lazy presentations, it certainly ______ and sometimes even masked them — with potentially deadly consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides.

Wired ran an excerpt (节选) from Tufte’s booklet in September 2003 under the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included his assessment — summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” — in its ______ of the year’s most important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of confusion,” the entry read.

Despite the backlash it inspired in the ______, the presentation giant rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, well into the hundreds of millions. During lockdown, people ______ PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil ______ the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. Today’s concerns about social media somehow resemble the PowerPoint critique. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies ______ form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid.

______, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. If the innovation did change the way we think, we are measuring its effects with an altered mind. Either the critical remarks were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the   ______.

4 . Mental Health Crisis Among Teens Demands a New Approach

Since the CDC released its survey results last month showing alarmingly high rates of sadness and depressive thoughts among teens, fingers have been pointed from two sides at the causes of this crisis.     1    . Others say that today’s more secular(世俗的)culture has confused our most vulnerable young people. But neither side seems to grasp the true urgency of the issue.

According to the CDC’s findings, more than one in five of the 17,000 high school students surveyed reported mental breakdown. Their rates of sadness and hopelessness are the highest in a decade, reflecting an increasing trend exacerbated by society’s isolation(隔离)and stress.     2    .

Parents as well as teachers and others who have direct contact with children must accept this preventive approach. It is crucial that they not be afraid to ask direct questions about depressive thoughts.     3    . It is also especially important that parents understand what help is available to their children.

    4    . For example, we can demand equity equality, which means insurance coverage(保险范围)for behavioral illnesses health issues that is for physical , thus reducing the financial burden. We can also urge our congressmen to fund health programs and expand mental health professions.     5    . Put the politics aside. There are lives in the balance.

5 . In the 19th century, three pioneering women struggled to find their place in a male-controlled field. Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake—among the first female doctors—are the heroines of Olivia Campbell’s new book. The story is lively and interesting, and the main characters are full of personality and individualism. Jex-Blake is described as “big and confident, a determined educational reformer with large eyes and an even lager personality”. Garrett Anderson, referred to as “Lizzie” throughout, was equally determined but also educated, and polite. The result is a great read for anyone looking for an introduction to the history of medical women.

The biographies of the three women are woven into a bigger, grander story about medicine in the 19th century and it is slow and unwilling acceptance of female physicians (医师). Though British, Blackwell attended medical school in the US. “Lizzie” was admitted to the medical school only via a loophole (漏洞) in the admissions policy. And Jex-Blake’s attempt to sit a medical exam in Edinburgh was met with a storm of protest.

Unsurprisingly, the three heroines faced many difficulties, but their efforts finally proved successful. Women in White Coats is, therefore, a successful tale of social progress. The final concluding chapter paints a sunny picture of present-day equality within the medical profession. However, in its efforts to tell an inspiring story, the book glosses over continuing problems within the profession today. Though more women than men now graduate from medical school, they face struggles with career progression and sexism.

We need more books that don’t offer a “great white men” approach to history. However, they have to deal with the incomplete and uneven nature of progress. Inspiring as it is to read stories of heroines trying hard and succeeding against the odds, that isn’t the whole picture. Medicine might be better for women now than in the past, but the problems of the Victorian era continue to exist and we still have far to go.

7 . Preamble of《China: Democracy that works》

Published by the State Council on December 4, 2021

Democracy is a common value of humanity and an ideal that has always been cherished by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese people.

This year marks the centenary of the CPC. Since its founding in 1921, the Party has taken wellbeing for the Chinese people and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation as its abiding goals, and has made continuous efforts to ensure the people’s status as masters of the country. China is a country with a feudal (封建的) history dating back several thousand years that descended into a semi-feudal and semi-colonial society after the Opium War of 1840. Over the past hundred years, the Party has led the people in realizing people’s democracy in China. The Chinese people now truly hold in their hands their own future and that of society and the country.

The people’s status as masters of the country is the essence of people’s democracy. Since the 18th CPC National Congress in 2012, with a deeper understanding of China’s path to democracy and the political system, the Party has developed whole-process people’s democracy as a key concept and striven to translate it and relevant democratic values into effective institutions and concrete actions.

Whole-process people’s democracy integrates process-oriented democracy with results-oriented democracy, procedural democracy with substantive (本质上的) democracy, direct democracy with indirect democracy, and people’s democracy with the will of the state. It is a model of socialist democracy that covers all aspects of the democratic process and all sectors of society. It is a true democracy that works.

Democracy is a concrete phenomenon that is constantly evolving. Rooted in history, culture and tradition, it takes diverse forms and develops along the paths chosen by different peoples based on their exploration and innovation.

The best way to evaluate whether a country’s political system is democratic and efficient is to observe whether the succession of its leaders is orderly and in line with the law, whether all the people can manage state and social affairs and economic and cultural undertakings in conformity with legal provisions, whether the public can express their requirements without hindrance, whether all sectors can efficiently participate in the country’s political affairs, whether national decision-making can be conducted in a rational and democratic way, whether people of high caliber in all fields can be part of the national leadership and administrative systems through fair competition, whether the governing party is in charge of state affairs in accordance with the Constitution and the law, and whether the exercise of power can be kept under effective restraint and supervision.

Democracy is not a decorative ornament, but an instrument for addressing the issues that concern the people. Whether a country is democratic depends on whether its people are truly the masters of the country; whether the people have the right to vote, and more importantly, the right to participate extensively; whether they have been given verbal promises in elections, and more importantly, how many of these promises are fulfilled after elections; whether there are set political procedures and rules in state systems and laws, and more importantly, whether these systems and laws are truly enforced; whether the rules and procedures for the exercise of power are democratic, and more importantly, whether the exercise of power is genuinely subject to public scrutiny and checks.

Democracy is the right of the people in every country, rather than the prerogative of a few nations. Whether a country is democratic should be judged by its people, not dictated by a handful of outsiders. Whether a country is democratic should be acknowledged by the international community, not arbitrarily decided by a few self-appointed judges. There is no fixed model of democracy; it manifests itself in many forms. Assessing the myriad political systems in the world against a single yardstick and examining diverse political structures in monochrome are in themselves undemocratic.

In the richly diverse world, democracy comes in many forms. China’s democracy is thriving alongside those of other countries in the garden of civilizations. China stands ready to contribute its experience and strength to global political progress through cooperation and mutual learning.

8 . Artificial intelligence (AI) has amazing potential to change the world, and we’ve only just begun to scratch the surface. As AI matures and people move further away from distinct programming and monitoring of systems, unidentified bias (偏见) might make decisions continue for a long time that cause _______ harm for individuals and society. This bias might _______ input data or even the algorithms (算法) themselves.

All too often, data sets are incomplete and the sample represented in the data set does not _______ the population that the AI model is making predictions about — this is known as coverage bias. Some other types of bias related to input data include sampling bias, where data is not collected randomly from the target group, and participation bias, where users from certain groups _______ surveys at different rates than users from other groups. Still, another more challenging bias to identify is confirmation bias that occurs when a decision maker or analyst has a strong _______ belief or experience that affects their ability to consider alternatives. This could lead one to more strongly _______ data that confirms a preexisting belief.

Bias resulting from AI algorithms themselves, or algorithmic bias, is equally _______. One example of algorithmic bias is implicit bias or unconscious bias, where data scientists _______ make associations or assumptions based on their mental models and memories that affect data modeling decisions. Implicit bias can _______ how data is collected and classified, or how systems are designed and developed. As machines learn, their conclusions and decisions affect people. Ethical (道德的) AI must understand these impacts and create governance and testing methods to ________ mistakes and inaccuracies.

To create ethical AI, companies need to put the ________ of the individual at the center of data innovation. This means thinking about ________ rights as human rights and developing a comprehensive approach to data, including how we use AI.

Having ________ data practices for AI means having good AI governance. This governance not only focuses on data and analytics but also understands the impacts of any given analysis and makes sure it’s ________ and accurate. Good AI governance includes data responsibility as well as a commitment to transparency (透明性).

None of this will be easy, but true innovation never is. By coming together and working on the problem of bias now, before it becomes a(n) ________ force, businesses can help bring out the best AI has to offer the world.