1 . There are countless unanswered questions about why Jared Loughner went on a shooting rampage (横冲直撞), but of this we are _________: across America there are thousands of parents of older adolescents and young adults who are _________ that their child’s strange behavior will lead to violence.

That most of these parents have no idea what to do is frightening enough. It’s a national scandal that, even if they succeed in getting their child mental-health care before _________ strikes, the system is set up to frustrate them at every turn.

“The mental-health-care ‘system’ in America is a _________ system,” says Michael Fitzpatrick, “The system was already in crisis, and has become even less _________ over the last three years as state budgets for mental health have been cut by $2 billion.”

The nightmare begins when an adult child _________ to acknowledge that he or she may be suffering from a mental illness. Yet often the signs are clear.

There are _________ in behavior: the child no longer has friends or engages in any activities, becomes _________ isolated, dresses inappropriately, stops working or going to school. In Loughner’s _________, fellow students and faculty at Pima Community College were terrified of his shouts and incoherence(语无伦次), with one woman making sure she always sat by the door in the classroom they shared so she could make a quick __________.

A second sign of mental illness is that __________ change: the child becomes more irritable, angry, or depressed, or simply loses his or her spark(生气，活力).

Finally, thoughts change, turning to the __________, such as Loughner’s belief that former friends were chasing him at 2 a.m., as The New York Times reported.

So don’t make the mistake of thinking that a child is too young to suffer from mental illness: half of all cases first appear by age 14, and three quarters by age 24. The most effective __________ to a child who shows signs of mental illness is to sit down and have a calm conversation about what you’ve __________, according to experts, clearly __________ that you want to help, and assure him you will always be there for him.

2 .

"A woman's life isn't complete until she has________ ."says Lao Bai as he toasts his friends at the dinner table. The line is produced at the dinner party，a________ scene from the latest romantic comedy B for Busy（爱情神话），which is starred by attractive actresses such as Ma Yili, Ni Hongjie and Wu Yue.

With the audience merrily immersed in the carefully designed plots and lines of the film, the ________ of feminist consciousness is distinctly perceived. Indeed, the film featuring the local culture of Shanghai took only a few days to become the highest-rated Chinese movie of 2021 on Douban because the film, as opposed to a wealth of other conventional films, ________ the traditional male gaze, pushing the boundaries of female empowerment even further. As the line at the beginning implies, more and more Chinese women are going all out to ________ themselves from the traditional restrictions set by men and to erase huge sexist bias with great achievements.

Have those women pioneers achieved a huge success in the male's world? Not nearly.

With the opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, a grieving ________ unkindly unfolded online before all the Chinese people. One is Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old skier winning two gold medals for China; the other is a chained mother of eight locked in a doorless hut.

The huge gap between them serves as a ________ reminder that the poverty gap remains hard to bridge in China. The extent of a person's ________ determines how cozy his/her life turns out to be. A simple but underlying principle is that the wealthier you are, the wider access you will have to novelties, which will further your ________ on the world. Accordingly, in relatively wealthy areas, the prominent Eileen Gu stands a chance to pursue her dream and secure perfect skiing abilities, thus greeting herself with spiritual gratification in self-fulfillment. ________ in comparatively destitute areas, women are denied the access to self-refinement, subjected to men's incurable obsession with having ________ and thus they reluctantly perform the mission of carrying on the family line-for husbands. The fundamental cause of it comes down to poverty, resulting in the poor's limited horizons, which invariably contribute to ________ misconduct.

On a whole scale, China still has a long way to go because it has just ________ the relief of absolute poverty, not relative poverty. Even if relative poverty is tackled, a lag period awaits before the ________ of deep-rooted concept resulting from it, requiring women's continuous fight.

Thereby, as we take a close look at our country, attention should not be ________ paid to those glorious sportswomen; spotlight also needs to be cast upon those unfortunate women trapped in deep darkness. Be it Eileen Gu or the chained woman in Xuzhou, each one of them, as Lao Bai introduces himself in B for Busy, represents a different and real part of China.

3 . When Storms Hit Cities, Poor Areas Suffer Most

Severe storms fall on the rich and poor alike, but low-income neighbourhoods suffer more damage from urban flooding, according to a new study.

The report notes that the gaps include an underestimation of the historic damage caused by urban floods and the inability of governments to_________where damage will occur. It stresses a need for stronger_________among local, state and federal agencies.

The scientists conducted interviews in four cities and found that the poor, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and the disabled were "disproportionally_________" by floods.

"Low levels of citizen engagement"_________to the problem, it says. The report notes that urban flooding damaged not only homes, but also schools and medical centers used by low-income families._________, in nearby neighbourhoods, "residents of valuable properties" received additional federal flood insurance to restore their homes.

The scientists visited a frequently flooded neighbourhood where middle-income African-American residents_________they were given a lower priority on major flood relief projects than wealthier neighbourhoods.

Among the basic problems faced by all four cities: Historical records of flooding contained gaps that_________previous flooding damage. The records don't include the costs of more frequent small floods and uninsured damage, including resulting health problems and unemployment in areas where businesses are_________.

Factors related to climate change, such as record rainfall, also make it more_________to predict both the extent and locations of future flood damage. The report notes that before Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, the worst storm__________flooded about 73,000 homes. Harvey damaged 208,353 homes, 59 percent were outside the areas where record flooding was estimated to occur once in 500 years.

The report__________ "a new generation of flood maps and visualizations" that better integrate storm damage predictions with local landscape characteristics and shortcomings in the__________of storm sewer（下水道）systems.

Over 280 million Americans live in__________areas. "In order to better understand and manage urban flooding," said a civil engineering professor who__________the committee behind the report, "each city must take into account its__________and natural environment, the impacts on people, information available to understand or communicate flood events, and the mix of local, state and federal policies in force."

4 . No business would welcome being compared to Big Tobacco or gambling. Yet that is what is happening to makers of video games. For years parents have casually complained that their offspring are “addicted” to their smartphones. Today, ________, ever more doctors have using the term literally.

On January 1^st “gaming disorder” — in which games are played ________, despite causing harm — gains recognition from the Worth Health Organization. A few months ago China, the world's biggest gaming market, announced new rules limiting children to just a single hour of play a day. Western politicians worry publicly about some games' similarity to gambling. Clinics are sprouting around the world, promising to cure patients of their habit.

Are games really addictive? Psychologists are ________. The case for the defence is that this is just another moral panic. Killjoys in the past issued ________ serious warnings about television, rock 'n' roll, jazz, comic books, and even novels. As the newest form of mass media, gaming is merely enduring its own time in the stocks before it eventually ceases to be controversial. Furthermore, defenders argue, the criteria used to diagnose gaming addiction are too ________. Obsessive gaming, they suggest, is as likely to be a symptom (of depression, say) as a disorder in its own right.

The prosecution refutes that, unlike rock bands or novelists, games developers have both the motive and the means to engineer their products to make them ________. The motive arises from a business-model shift. Many use a "free-mium" model, in which the game is free and money is made from purchases of in-game goods. That ________ playtime directly to profits. The means is a combination of psychological theory and data that helps games-makers ________ that playtime. Psychologists already know quite a lot about the sorts of things that animals, including humans, find rewarding. Smartphones use their permanent internet connections to send gameplay data back to developers. That allows products to be constantly fine-tuned to ________ spending.

While psychologists argue about the finer points of what exactly counts as addiction, the industry should recognize that, in the real world, it has a problem. Clinics are already reporting booming business, as lock-downs have given gamers more time to spend with their hobby. The regulatory climate for tech is getting ________. And being associated in the public mind, fairly or not, with gambling and tobacco will not do the industry any favours.

It would be wise to get ahead of the discussion. A good place to start would be with hard data. Many of the studies supporting the opinion that games are addictive in a ________ sense are not clear: they rely on self-reported symptoms, contested diagnostic criteria, and so on. Even basic questions about the amount of time and money spent by users are hard to answer. The industry has an abundance of ________ that could help. But gaming firms mostly keep details of how gamers behave ________, citing commercial sensitivity.

In the long run, that will prove unwise. Gaming firms should make more of their data available to researchers. If — as seems likely — worries about addictiveness are ________, it is hard to think of a clearer way of showing it. And if not, it is better for firms to recognize the problem now and do something about it ________. The alternative is that regulators will force them to act. And once a government is seized by a fit of moral panic, it can lash out.

5 . Word on the street is that gossip is the worst. An Ann Landers（安·兰德斯, 知名专栏作家）advice column once characterized it as "the faceless demon that breaks ________and ruins careers" The Talmud（describes it as "three-pronged tongue" that kills three people: the teller, the ________, and the person being gossiped about. And Blaise Pascal observed, not unreasonably, that if "people really knew what others said about them, there would not be four friends left in the world."________as these indictments（控告）seem, however, a significant body of research suggests that gossip may in fact be healthy.

It's a good thing, too, since gossip is pretty common. Children tend to be seasoned gossips by the age of 5, and gossip as most researchers understand it--talk between at least two people about ________ others-accounts for about two-thirds of conversation.

Despite dodgy（躲闪）reputation, surprisingly ________share of it--as little as 3 to 4percent-is actually malicious（蓄意的）. And even that portion can bring people together. Researchers at the University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma found that if two people share negative feelings about a third person, they are likely to feel closer to each other than they would if they both felt ________about him or her.

Gossip may even make us better people. A team of Dutch researchers reported that hearing gossip about others made research subjects more ________positive gossip inspired self-improvement efforts, and negative gossip made people prouder of themselves. In another study, the worse participants felt upon hearing a piece of negative gossip, the more likely they were to say they had learnt a ________from it. Negative gossip can also have a prosocial（亲社会的）effect on those who are gossip about. Researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley found that once people were ostracized（排斥）from a ground due to reputed selfishness, they reformed their ways in an attempt to regain the ________ of the people they had alienated.

By far the most positive assessment of gossip, though, comes from the anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. Once upon a time, in Dunbar's account, our primate ancestors ________ through grooming（梳毛）, their mutual back-scratching ensuring mutual self-defense in the event of attack by predators. But as hominids（原始人类）grew more intelligent and more social, their groups became too ________ to unite by grooming alone. That's where ________and gossip, broadly defined-stepped in. Dubar argues that idle chatter with and about others gave early humans sense of shared identity and helped them grow ________ of their environment, thus cultivating the complex higher functioning that would ________ yield such glories of civilization as the Talmud, Pascal, and Ann Landers.

So next time you're tempted to gossip, fear not-you may actually be promoting cooperation, boosting others self-esteem, and ________ essential task of the human family. That`s what I heard, anyway.

7 . The first daigou, meaning someone who makes purchases on another’s behalf, were Chinese students studying abroad, who carried ____ products home on behalf of family and friends. Adding a commission (佣金) helped them pay their tuition fees. The ____ of social-networking apps such as WeChat, China’s most popular, brought the business online. Daigou could then offer their services to friends of friends, and ____ items they thought might appeal to their network. But while daigou in America and Europe purchase mainly luxury goods for their customers, in Australia they buy mainly vitamins, food and beauty products. And while luxury brands see daigou as a threat, undercutting sale in China, Australian firms have come to ____ them.

There are perhaps 50,000 daigou, ____ the aisles (过道) of Australian shops and periodically stripping them bare. Ordinary daiguo can post 60,000 parcels to China every day. The biggest have grown into ____ export businesses which deliver goods through China’s free0trade zones. Express delivery services to China have ____ and some 1,500 stores in Australia mainly take are of the needs of daigou. One such chain, AuMake, recently listed on the Australian Securities Exchange. Its ____ sales staff can arrange for a purchase to be posted to China as soon as it has been rung up (收款记账).

The ____ for the customers is simple: the products daigou post are guaranteed to be genuine. Ever since Chinese firms were found to have been selling contaminated (污染过的) milk power in 2008, many anxious Chinese parents have turned to foreign brands. But websites selling foreign goods are riddled with ____, while Chinese shops charge a fortune for the real thing.

The odd sales channel works for companies, too. Daigou allow young Australian firms to build their brands in China much more cheaply and easily than if they tried to ____ their products directly, argues Keong Chan, the chairman of AuMake. A firm called the a2 Milk Company doubled its profit in the year to June thanks to soaring Chinese ____. Daigou ____ more of those sales than Chinese retailers or e-commerce sites, according to Peter Nathan, who heads its Asia-Pacific unit. ____, many business fall over themselves to win the favour of the most influential daigou. “It’s like having 50,000 ____,” says Andrew Cohen, chief executive of Bellamy’s, a listed manufacturer of infant formula.

8 . Most of us have no difficulty recognizing luck when it’s on apparent display, as when someone wins the lottery. But _________ often plays out in delicate ways and it’s easy to construct narratives that portray success as out of everything but luck. These misleading stories have surprising implications for human mindset, downplaying the power of chances.

Consider the history of the Mona Lisa. After having staved in the _________ for most of its early existence, the painting was pushed into the spotlight in 1911 when it was stolen from Louvre. The famous theft remained _________ for two years until a maintenance worker was arrested after trying to sell the painting. His arrest caused a second wave of _________, with the painting on everyone’s lips. As in the art world, it is so too in the world of work. Almost every career path consists of a sequence of steps, each of which depends on former ones. Inevitably, some of those _________ steps can be influenced by chance factors, which, as a result, are sure to affect the following process. So it is reasonable to conclude that _________ all successful careers involve at least a certain degree of luck.

One’s date of birth _________, for example. According to a study, most children born in the summer tend to be among the youngest members of their class, which explains why they are less likely to hold _________ positions during high school and thus, less likely to land good jobs later in life.

To acknowledge the power of chance events is not to suggest that success is independent of _________. Charlie Munger has said. “The safest way to get what you want is to __________ what you want.”

Of course, luck counts too. Being born in a good education system is a kind of luck we can control— that is, at least we can decide how lucky our children will be. But in America, we’ve been doing a bad job as the budget for education has __________. The human tendency to __________ luck’s role has caused this troubling state by unwillingness to invest in education, the strong system of which can produce __________ for the next generation.

Luckily, there is a solution. Guiding people to __________ their good fortune tends to make them more willing to contribute to the __________, according to a study. So try to engage your successful friends in reviews about their experiences with luck. In the process, the next generation’s odds of success may well increase and meanwhile, all the social members are more likely to enjoy the improved public service.

9 . A Mountain But not a Volcano

On September 20th the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the central banks' central bank, released data showing that corporate borrowing around the world remains at an all time high. A notable ______ is in China, where there is even more business borrowing as a share of GDP than in Japan at the peak of its bubble-related borrowing fever in the 1990s. But it is high everywhere. Corporate ______ in the rich world stood at 102% of GDP at the end of March, compared with 92% before the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic. Could high levels of debt ______ the recovery in advanced economies?

Many regulators were sounding the ______ about elevated company debt even before the covid19 pandemic. Since then, the hit to firm's incomes has led to a wave of rating downgrades: between March 2020 and March 2021, Fitch, a ratings agency, ______ 460 firms, or almost 20% of its corporate portfolio. While defanlts (违约) have eased this year as economies have recovered, many firms will be ______ by higher levels of debt for years to come. Even if interest rates remain ______, this "debt overhand" could affect their willingness to invest or to hire new staff.

Intriguingly, however, aftereffects from corporate debt booms rarely cause significant economic damage, even if ______ themselves suffer when firms default. A recent paper by Moritz Schularick, of the University of Bonn, and several co-authors, examines data on business cycles for 17 advanced countries over more than a century, and compares corporate debt bursts with those associated with ______ borrowing (like the 200809 financial crisis).

The authors argue that lenders often have a/an ______ to restructure old corporate loans, reducing the risk of "zombie" companies persisting, and freeing up finance to support the next recovery. For household debt, however, restructuring thousands of ______ loans is often impossible, and lenders may be more inclined to keep the loans on their books in the hope that house prices eventually ______. The risks to the economy are higher after commercial property bursts than for corporate debt where lenders mainly have their eyes on firm's cash flows. This is one reason why the property-related debt depression in China are potentially disturbing.

In much of the rich world, there are reasons to be ______ optimistic. The largest lenders are in much better health than in 2008. All of the major ______ authorities, carried out stress tests during 2020, using macroeconomic scenarios much more severe than have actually came out, but their banking systems were able to absorb large corporate losses and carry on lending. And the parts of the economy that have had the toughest time during the pandemic only account for a relatively small share of corporate debt. For example, the BIS projects that ______ will increase in the hospitality industry (酒店餐饮业) over the coming years, but they note that the sector only accounts for between 1.5% and 8% of corporate credit in the nine major economies they model.

There will be a mountain of corporate debt in many countries for some time. But that dos not mean the recovery will necessarily falter (衰退).

10 . When it comes to nutrition, people in the United States often make poor choices. Sometimes bad eating habits are not the consequence of a lack of nutritional information or the unavailability of nutritious foods; some people simply choose to eat _______. They prefer to eat only the foods that taste delicious to them. Unfortunately, the decision to eat poorly has lasting _______. As many as half of all Americans are overweight. _______, many Americans suffer from conditions such as heart disease, high blood pressure, and adult-onset diabetes(糖尿病) that can also result from these poor lifestyle choices. If we want to live long, healthy lives, we must make better nutritional decisions. Otherwise, we could be _______ our health and our futures.

Proper nutrition begins with _______. The United States Department of Agriculture(USDA) issues food guidelines to help people to make appropriate nutritional choices. These guidelines are _______ in a USDA chart called the Food Guide Pyramid. The Pyramid is based on research into the specific types of nutrients needed for disease resistance and proper body weight.

According to the Pyramid, Americans should get most of their daily calories intake from bread, cereal, rice, and pasta, eating 6 to 11 servings of these foods per day. Whole-grain products are the best. The larger numbers of servings are only _______ people such as athletes, whose work includes a great deal of physical activity. Following this category are the fruit and vegetable categories, with a total suggested _______ of from 5 to 9 servings per day. This _______ the importance of fiber, vitamins, and minerals in maintaining a healthy lifestyle. The Pyramid’s other ________ include 2 to 3 servings of dairy products and 2 to 3 servings from a group that includes meat, fish, beans, and nuts. The USDA recommends that fats and sweets be eaten sparingly(一点点地).

There are many risk factors that ________ poor health. Among these are such lifestyle choices as improper nutrition and ________ exercise. Current research by the American Heart Association shows that heart disease very often begins when a person is a child. ________ this, many Americans think they can postpone healthy eating and proper exercise until they have health problems. Unfortunately, diseases are not generally ________ until symptoms begin, and by then it may be too late. To live long and productive lives, we must make proper choices now, including healthy ________ choices.