3 . One evening, 13-year-old Briar agreed to look after his four younger sisters while his parents were out. The parents were _______ that big brother Briar was reliable in their _______. During that brief time, the home suddenly caught fire.

The first thought coming to Briar’s mind was to rescue his little sisters. The family had _______ discussed emergency plans, so he was _______ to act. In minutes, flames (火焰) were climbing the ceiling. Smoke was filling up the hallways. The terrifying fire quickly _______ throughout the home.

Briar remained calm and focused on the _______ task of saving his four younger sisters: Peyton, 12, Jocelyn, 3, Willow, 1, and 6-month-old baby Sawyer. He first _______ the two younger sisters and rushed the older sisters out the door to _______. After making sure his sisters were far away from the _______ and breathing in fresh air, he ran back into the home to save it, __________ the flames around him. He quickly grabbed the fire extinguisher (灭火器) from the kitchen and __________ tried to put out the fire. But it was uncontrollable at this __________, and despite his best efforts, the flames kept growing __________. The home was filled with thick smoke.

Firefighters arrived on the __________, but the fire was too violent for the home to be saved. Although they lost their home and all their belongings, the family felt incredibly __________ that they all survived the fire unharmed.

5 . Nicole Salgado and and her family woke up on New Year’s Day to panic knocking at the front door of their home in Avodale, Arizona. Her house was on fire, but she didn’t know it. “We were all ________,” Salgado said. “Then all of a sudden around 7:30 in the morning, we heard banging on our door and our doorbell was ________. And we kind of got ________.”

Salgado, a mother of four, ran to ________ the kids while her husband hurried to the front door. There, they found their next-door neighbour, Carolyn Palisch, urging the family to leave the house. He opened the door and their neighbour Carolyn said their house was on fire and told them to leave. Salgado ________ grabbed her kids and ________ from the burning home. No one was wearing socks or shoes ________ her oldest child.

Making sure that everyone was out, they realized the full extent of it. They were just in ________ as they watched their home burn. According to Salgado, minutes after they escaped, the ________ collapsed and smoke filled the inside of their home. ________ said if the family had still been sleeping when the roof fell down, they would have breathed the smoke and immediately ________.

“We are so grateful to just be ________,” Salgado wrote in a post to social media. The doorbell camera caught the moment when Palisch saved their lives. Salgado said the family decided to post the video to share with the world what Palisch did for them. The video has now been ________ almost 7 million times on Tiktok.

In the footage (一段镜头), Palisch is seen yelling outside the Salgado family’s door, surrounded by smoke and ________. She ________ to knock at the door loudly and repeatedly until she is able to help the family escape. “If it weren’t for her, it would be a totally different story,” said Salgado. “We feel so thankful to her. She saved all of us.”

7 . One of the most important battles in any home is for the TV remote. Whoever gets it has the________over what is watched. But after reading this article, your interest in winning the________for the remote may fall, as a study has shown that the remote is pretty________.

The toilet is always a good surface for________. During the study, researchers ________that a toilet had 12.4 colony-forming units (菌落形成单位) per cm² ________the TV remote had 290 colony-forming units per cm. The TV remote was the ________item tested by far. It makes________. How often have you seen someone clean the TV remote and how often are dirty hands________ it?

Many people are now able to________their TV from their smartphone or smartwatch. This may________the dynamics of the fight for the remote but it won’ t ________ it. If the battle does move to smart________, the bacteria (细菌) issue doesn’t disappear. While both smartphones and smartwatches appeared to be cleaner than the remote, they are________far from clean.

If you want to ensure that your home is ________of high amounts of bacteria, throwing out the remote is not the ________ . You need to have a________that ensures the house is clean but that the things you________most are also clean. Hopefully, this latest study can________ some action in your home and cause people to________ the importance of washing their hands regularly and cleaning common surfaces.

8 . Algorithms in the Criminal Justice System

Some of the best or at least sharpest, minds on the planet are devoted to guessing what we might buy next, and showing us advertisements for it. Often the results are unbelievably inaccurate; sometimes they are amazingly precise. Would we _________the same kind of technology to predict what crimes we might next commit? That is the question raised by the latest report by campaigners at Liberty on the _________of the police’s use of big data and machine learning.

From my perspective, when big data are used to determine the course of the criminal justice system, they could _______. Because machine learning can only detect patterns in the data that it is given, any bias in the original sample will only be _________. So if past practice has been to prejudice against women or minorities, any algorithm fed on previous experience will _________this pattern, but this time with the apparent authority of science behind it. And because modern machine learning techniques are hard to understand, even to their programmers, a computer cannot easily be made to _________its own reasoning in the way that police officers can.

The civil liberties group says it found at least 14 police forces in England and Wales are using or have used software to predict crimes in particular areas; three are attempting to use the same technology on individuals in order to predict their likelihood of _________. It makes obvious sense to concentrate police resources where they are most needed, and this is especially true after the staff cuts are imposed. _________, it is easy to see that the use of such software can bring about unjust discrimination. Because crimes are detected more often where there are police to keep an eye on them, the areas in which police are concentrated will _________suggests that they need more police sent to them, and so on.

Society does have a vital interest in being able to predict who is most likely to remake a crime, and to help them away from __________. But the idea that algorithms could substitute for probation officers or the traditional human intelligence of police officers is __________. Of course, such human judgments are sometimes unreliable. But training an algorithm on the results of previous mistakes merely means they can be made without human intervention in the future. The strongest single __________of whether a young man will end up in jail is whether his father did so. People live down to society’s expectation, and we all lose as a result.

The more data is collected and shared through the state’s various systems — not just the police, but schools, the welfare system and even, increasingly, the NHS — the __________it will be for anyone to escape such stereotyping. The risk is a loss of liberty with no corresponding gain in efficiency. The damage this has done cannot be repaired by technology alone. Machines can make human __________very much worse. They cannot be trusted to __________human responsibility.

9 . Climate experts have warned about the many ways a warming planet can negatively affect human health. ________ global temperatures are predicted to increase by 1.5℃ by the 2030s, that risk is becoming increasingly real.

One long-held prediction that appears to be coming true — according to the results of a study recently published in Nature Scientific Reports — is how climate change might enhance ________ of bacteria that thrive and spread through warm sea waters and cause an infection with a particularly high ________ rate.

Vibrio vulnificus (创伤弧菌) flourishes in salty or brackish waters above 68℉. Infections are currently rare in the U.S., but that’s likely to change. Using 30 years of data on infections, scientists at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. found that Vibrio vulnificusis ________ from its historic Gulf Coast range, with more Northern states reporting infections as waters become warmer.

“We’re seeing the core ________ of infections extending to areas that traditionally have very few and very rare cases,” says Elizabeth Archer, a Ph.D. researcher and ________ author of the study. “But these areas are now coming into the main area of infections.”

Based on the latest data on how much the world’s water and air temperatures will rise, the scientists predict that by 2081, Vibrio vulnificus infections could reach every state along the U.S. East Coast. Currently, only about 80 cases are reported in the U.S. each year; by 2081, that could go up to over three-fold, the authors say.

Such a proliferation could have serious health consequences. Vibrio vulnificus kills approximately 20% of the healthy people it infects, and 50% of those with weakened immune systems. There is little evidence that antibiotics can ________ the infection, but doctors may prescribe them in some cases. People can get infected either by eating raw shellfish like oysters or by exposing small ________ to waters where the bacteria live, which can lead to serious skin infections.

Warming sea temperatures aren’t the only reasons behind the rise of Vibrio vulnificus. Hotter air also draws more people to the coasts and bays, bringing them into closer contact with the bacteria.

“The bacteria are part of the natural marine environment, so I don’t think we can ________ it from the environment,” says Archer. “It’s more about mitigating infections by increasing ________ of the risk.”

To alert people to the growing threat, ________ systems are needed to track when concentrations of bacteria start to rise, similar to currently available pollen and pollution alarm.

Vbrio vulnificus is so ________ to temperature changes that concentrations could bloom after even a day of warmer water, so consistent monitoring and alerts are critical, says Iain Lake, professor of environmental epidemiology at University of East Anglia and senior author of the paper.

Lake says the expansion of Vibrio vulnificus is concerning for public health since the bacteria are now invading waters closer to heavily ________ areas, such as New York and Philadelphia. “Everyone can get a Vibrio vulnificus infection,” he says. “But the more ________ there is between warmer waters and people, the more the bacteria can move into populations ________ the elderly and those with other health conditions, who are more vulnerable to infections.”