How would you feel if moving to a new town meant     1    (lose) track of your friends?

What if the only way of getting news from faraway friends was writing letters that     2     (take) ages to be delivered? Thanks to advances in technology, how we make friends and communicate with them has changed     3    (significant).

The digital age     4    (enable) us to find people who share our interests. Whatever our hobbies, the Internet can connect us with people     5     also enjoy doing them, even if they live on     6     other side of the world.

On social media sites, people tend     7    (post) only positive updates that make them appear happy and     8    (friend). But smiling photos can hide real problems. Remember the saying: on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. A young person could be old; a woman could be a man; we could even be sharing our information     9     criminals.

Although technology has changed the way we acquire friends, the     10    (mean) of friendship and our longing for friends remains the same.

Nowadays, before we upload a photo of ourselves to social media, chances are that we'll use     1         app to smooth our skin, make our eyes     2     (big), eyelashes longer and lips fuller.

With a couple of taps on our mobile phones, we're able to get a quick fix and present our own best version to the world. However, the problem is, when we     3     (simple) edit our imperfections away, we're also changing the way we look at     4    (we).

Last month,     5     (research) from the Boston University     6     (publish) an article which analyzed photo     7     (edit) apps' bad impacts on people's self-esteem and their potential to cause appearance anxieties. They warned that such apps are blurring (难区分)the lines     8    reality and fantasy. These apps allow one to change his or her appearance in minutes and follow a(n)     9     (realistic) standard of beauty.

Now we've got this daily comparison of the real self with this intentional or unintentional self that we present on social media. This is     10     many young people suffer an identity crisis when it comes to how they look.