If you are like most young people, you’ll have been online     1     used a phone at some point today. A bit of screen time is fine-especially if you are studying, socializing or simply relaxing. Yet too much screen time can be bad for your brain.

A recent study of more than 4,000 children found that those who       2     (play) on a screen anywhere did not do     3     (well) in thinking tests than those who seldom used mobile phones.     4     (look) at things online can also mean that you are missing out on the real world. Every hour looking at a screen     5     (be) an hour you can spend being with your friends or learning a new exciting hobby.

If you are worried that you are spending too many hours scrolling (滚动) through social media, glued to the television or     6     (lose)in games, you might want to think about cutting down a bit, or even “going cold turkey”,     7     means giving up completely, instead of       8     (cut) back.

See if you can go     9     (total) screen-free for a week, a month or whatever you feel you can manage. If that’s too hard, just cur out one thing, such as games. You might even feel differently about your favorite device when       10     challenge is over.

3 . Have you ever paid attention to your school guards? Would you say “good morning” to the cleaners? For high school student Ding Jiacheng, it is a_________ that many students haven’t realized the importance of jobs done by this non-teaching staff. He wanted to solve it and make a_________.

The boy from Hangzhou Entel Foreign Language School, together with several other students, _________ a project called “The Invisible (隐形的) Are Important”. They hoped more students would respect the “invisible” staff in the school. The project won a prize at China Thinks Big, a competition held by Harvard and Tsinghua University to_________ teenagers to study social matters.

“My team members and I sent questionnaires to 158 students, said Ding.“In one question, 56% of students said they would greet those non-teaching workers, _________ only 17% strongly believe that every student should do so.”

The team also did research on the interaction (互动) between students and workers. “Most students follow the rules of their teachers. However, one-third of students go_________ the rules of the dormitory(宿舍) workers,” said Ding. “It shows that students treat non-teaching staff_________ from teaching staff.”

The main reason, according to Ding, is that students know_________ about the work done by non-teaching staff. They also have few chances to communicate with them. So Ding’s team made videos to show the staff working in the school. They also held a basketball match between students and non-teaching staff to increase_________ interaction.

“The activity helped me understand that we can all have a__________ influence through our creative ideas,” Ding said.

4 . ① What is your earliest childhood memory? Adults seldom call back events much earlier than the year before entering school, just as children younger than three or four seldom remember any specific, personal experiences.

② An explanation is suggested by psychologists (心理学家) for this “childhood amnesia” (童年失忆). Now Annette Simms, a psychologist of Riverdale University, offers a new explanation for it. According to Dr. Simms, children need to learn to use someone else’s spoken description in order to turn their short-term, fast forgotten impressions (印象) into long-term memories. In other words, children have to talk about their experiences and hear others talk about them.

③ So why should personal memories depend so heavily on hearing them described?

④ Dr. Simms says that the human mind organizes memories in that way. Children whose mothers talk with them about the day’s activities before bedtime can remember more of the day’s special event than those whose mothers don’t. Talking about an event in this way helps a child to remember it.

⑤ “The key to creating this mental life story is language,” says Dr. Simms. “Children learn to talk about the past,” she says. “Talking to others about their short-term memories of the past leads to the establishment (建立) of long-term memories.” The child learns that this “word-description” of an experience can then be stored in the memory and called back at any time. But a child’s language skills are usually not ready for this until the age of three or four, so they have no way to remember the earliest of their experiences.

5 . Children’s lives have changed greatly over the last 50 years. But do they have a happier childhood than you or I did?

It’s difficult to look back on one’s own childhood without feeling nostalgic(怀旧的). I have four brothers and sisters, and my memories are all about being with them, playing board games on the living room floor, or spending days in the street with the other neighbourhood children, or racing up and down on our bikes. My parents hardly appear in these memories, except as providers of meals.

These days, in the UK at least, the nature of childhood has changed greatly. Firstly, families are smaller, and there are far more only children. It is common for both parents to work outside the home and there is the feeling that there just isn’t time to bring up a large family, or that no one could possibly afford to have more than one child. As a result, today’s boys and girls spend much of their time alone. Another major change is that youngsters today prefer to spend most of their free time at home, inside. More than anything this is because of the fact that parents worry far more than they used to about real or imagined dangers, so they wouldn’t dream of letting their children play outside by themselves.

Finally, the kind of toys children have and the way they play is totally different. Computer and video games have replaced(取代) the board games and more active pastimes of my childhood. The irony(讽刺) is that so many of these games are called “interactive(互动的)”. The fact that you can play computer games on your own further increases the sense of loneliness felt by many young people today.

Do these changes mean that children today have a less pleasant childhood than I had? I personally believe that they do, but perhaps every generation(一代人) feels exactly the same.

10 . “Snowplow (扫雪机) parenting” is the newest parenting style that can include parents booking their adult children haircuts, calling their college kids to wake them up so that they don’t sleep through a test, and even calling their kids’ employers.

“‘Helicopter (直升机) parenting’ means monitoring their kids’ every activity, which is out of date.” Claire Cain Miller and Jonah Engel Bromwich wrote in The New York Times. “Some rich mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: clearing any problems in their children’s path to success so that they don’t have to meet failure or lose opportunities.”

There is a mother who started a charity (慈善机构) in her son’s name to try to raise his chances of being accepted to the college. Another parents spent years helping their daughter avoid foods with sauce, which she didn’t like. Once she got to college, she had problems with the food in her school because it was all covered in sauce.

A survey says that three-quarters of parents of children between the ages of 18 and 28 ask for doctor visits or haircuts for their children, and 11% say they would call their kids’ bosses whether their children are having an issue at work.

As reported, wealthy parents try to get their children into top colleges by giving a large amount of money to a school, such as paying for a building. This parenting has become the most popular way to raise children, whatever the income, education, or race is.

Julie, a teacher at Stanford, told the Times that “snowplow parenting” is not a reasonable approach. “The parents should prepare the kid for the road, instead of preparing the road for the kid,” she said.