2 . My phone was an extension of myself. I couldn’t go anywhere _________ it. I scrolled through my friends’ _________ into late night and turned my phone on before my eyes were fully open. I enjoyed having it until that day when I realized that what had started as a useful tool had turned into a(n) _________. So, I made a _________ decision to turn off that smartphone and _________ my old dumb phone out of hiding.

When I was watching TV shows or movies and there was a boring part, I _________ picking up the phone and checking out “what everyone else was doing.” Now I had to pay attention or find a way to _________ myself with my thoughts instead. When I visited New York City, I had to write out _________ and ask people where an intersection (十字路口) was _________ pulling out my phone.

I have welcomed silence into my life with open arms and am enjoying the increased __________ from not constantly having to fight with the __________ to check my phone while I’m trying to get something done. I am allowing my thoughts to speak to me instead of my phone. I am connecting with others in a __________ way that isn’t all about me. Instead of always posting about what’s going on in my __________ perfect life, I am connecting with my friends one-on-one, talking about the reality of our lives and being there for them from a place of __________.

As much as having a smartphone was __________, not having one is freeing on a much bigger level.

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 . Pope (罗马教皇) Francis wearing a massive, loose and white puffer coat. Elon Musk walking hand-in-hand with rival GM CEO Mary Barra. None of these things actually happened, but such AI-generated _______ did go viral online over the past week.

The situation demonstrates a new online reality: the _______ of a new crop of artificial intelligence tools has made it cheaper and easier than ever to create realistic images, as well as audio and videos. And these images are likely to pop up with increasing frequency on social media.

While these AI tools may enable new means of expressing creativity, the spread of computer-generated media also threatens to further _______ the information ecosystem. That risks _______ the challenges for users, news organizations and social media platforms to tell what’s real. There are also concerns that Al-generated images could be misused.

Images, compared to the Al-generated text, can be _______ powerful in provoking emotions when people view them, said Claire Leibowicz, head of AI and media integrity at the Partnership on AI. That can make it harder for people to slow down and _______ whether what they’re looking at is real or fake. _______, bad guys could eventually attempt to create fake content in quantity in order to confuse Internet users and provoke certain behaviors.

Computer-generated image technology has improved rapidly in recent years, from the photoshopped image of a shark swimming through a flooded highway to the websites that four years ago began mass producing mostly _______ photos of people. But in most cases, the creators of the recent hot images don’t appear to have been ill-intended.

There are _______ by platforms, AI technology companies and industry groups to improve the transparency when a piece of content is generated by a computer. Platforms including Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and YouTube have policies restricting or even ________ the sharing of media that could mislead users. But as use of AI-generated technologies grows, even such policies could threaten to ________ user trust. If, for example, a fake image accidentally slipped through a platform’s detection system, it could give people false confidence. Although there’s a detection system that says it’s real, it’s actually not.

Work is also underway on technical solutions that would, ________, watermark an AI-generated image or include a transparent label in an image’s metadata, so anyone viewing it across the Internet would know it was created by a computer. “All these institutions are ________ disclosure and transparency,” Leibowicz said.

A group of tech leaders, including Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, this week wrote an open letter ________ artificial intelligence labs to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.” ________, it’s not clear whether any labs will take such a step. And as the technology rapidly improves and becomes accessible beyond a relatively small group of corporations doing responsible practices, lawmakers may need to get involved.

6 . High school biology teacher Kelly Chavis knew smartphones were a problem in her class. For one class period, students used a whiteboard to count every Snapchat, Instagram, text, call or other notifications that appeared on their phones.   Chavis   told   students   not   to _________ these notifications.

Teachers around the country have done similar experiments, usually _________ dozens of markings on the whiteboard. Chavis, who teaches honours-level classes, was _________ by the results of her experiment.

Chavis is among a growing number of teachers, parents and health experts who believe that smartphones are now partly to blame for increasing the levels of student _________. The use of electronic devices is so _________ that the National Education Association newsletter said it was a “mental health tsunami (海啸)”.

Tests, after-school activities and problems at home can increase _________ for students. But research now _________ that smartphones and social media are some of the main reasons for the rising levels of uneasiness.

Last year, an editorial in the journal Paediatrics proposed that doctors ask young patients about their social media use as part of routine exams. Three researchers wrote that too much social media use might _________ the development of mental health disturbance in at-risk teenagers, such as feelings of _________, depression and anxiety.

Researchers are still not sure whether phones cause student depression or depression causes phone use. __________ 70 percent of teens see anxiety and depression as major problems among their peers, according to a Pew Research report. Nearly 60 percent of parents said they were __________ about the influence of social media on their children’s physical and mental health.

Schools are starting to take steps to deal with the problem. Many public schools pay outside companies to watch students’ social media activity for signs of __________. Others invite in yoga teachers and comfort dogs to help __________ students. Some schools have organized unplugged events — days in which people do not use their electronic devices. Less than 20 percent of students and school employees took part, __________ the control that technology has over their daily lives.

Some parents are not letting their children get smartphones until they grow up. Deirdre Birmingham of New Jersey __________ a campaign called “Wait Until Eighteenth” because she didn’t think her video game-loving 10-year-old son was ready for a smartphone. The campaign involves groups of parents who have children in the same class. These parents agree not to let their children get phones until they are teenagers.

9 . Ambition is a necessary quality in life. It is the ________which drives us on to use whatever talent we have got. If we haven’t got some degree of ambition, these talents will not be used for our own and others’ ________.

Ambition,________ , can have several faults. First of all, it can be________. We may not be able to see the limits of our own abilities, so we do ambitious things that are completely beyond us. Our career masters can see our good qualities and our limitations________. They may tell us that we haven’t the ability to deal with people and would not make good businessmen. We refuse to take their ________. We keep on trying. Many years and many ________ later we are forced to accept their judgement. But what a waste of time our ill-founded ambition has caused us!

Secondly, our ambition can be too concentrated. Our attention is devoted to one   ________aim, such as getting distinctions in a science subject. Everything that may draw us away from this aim is cut out of our lives. In the end we get our distinctions. But what   ________we have caused ourselves in the process! We are isolated beings only caring about a particular examination. And we probably won’t make good scientists. We________the breadth of vision necessary for success at a higher level.

Thirdly, our ambition can be limited to lifeless objectives. We want to gain money, or power, or membership of some circles. Persons who feel inferior try to________by seeking the respect of others through possession of these artificial signs of worth.

Fourthly, our ambition may be ________. Instead of directing some of our ambitions towards community improvement, we may exploit members of the community in the interests of self-advancements. In later life we may be ambitious for the success of our children but we regard this success as only a further ________of our own success.

Ambition is necessary in the lives of individuals—necessary for their own improvement and for the improvement of the community in which they live. But, like all blind forces, it must be ________ if it is not to cause disaster. It must be tightly controlled by the head and the heart. Otherwise ambition may demand too high a price ________human qualities.