1 . By day, Robert Titterton is a lawyer. In his spare  time though he goes on stage beside pianist Maria Raspopova — not as a musician but as her page turner. “I’m not a trained musician, but I’ve learnt to read music so I can help Maria in her performance.”

Mr Titterton is chairman of the Omega Ensemble but has been the group’s official page turner for the past four years. His job is to sit beside   the pianist and turn the pages of the score so the musician doesn’t have to break the flow of sound by doing it themselves. He said he became just as nervous as those playing instruments on stage.

“A lot of skills are needed for the job. You have to make sure you don’t turn two pages at once and make sure you find the repeats in the music   when you have to go back to the right spot.” Mr Titterton explained.

Being a page turner requires plenty of practice. Some pieces of music can go for 40 minutes and require up to 50 page turns, including back turns for repeat passages. Silent onstage communication is key, and each pianist has their own style of “nodding” to indicate a page turn which they need to practise with their page turner.

But like all performances, there are moments when things go wrong. “I was turning the page to get ready for the next page, but the draft wind from the turn caused the spare pages to fall off the stand,” Mr Titterton said, “Luckily I was able to catch them and put them back.”

Most page turners are piano students or up-and-coming concert pianists, although Ms Raspopova has once asked her husband to   help her out on stage.

“My husband is the worst page turner,” she laughed. “He’s interested in the music, feeling every note, and I have to say: ‘Turn, turn!’ Robert is the best page turner I’ve had in my entire life.”

2 . Many people believe that working to the maximum is the secret to success, but research has found that moderation(适度) also gets results on the job.

In a study led by Ellen Langer of Harvard University, researchers asked people to translate sentences into a new made-up language. Subjects who practiced the language moderately beforehand made fewer errors than those who practiced extensively or not at all. High levels of knowledge can make people too attached to traditional ways of viewing problems across fields the arts, sciences, and politics. High conscientiousness is related to lower job performance, especially in simple jobs where it doesn’t pay to be a perfectionist.

How long we stay on the clock and how we spend that time are under careful examination in many workplaces. The young banker who eats lunch at his desk is probably seen as a go-getter, while his colleagues who chat over a relaxed conference-room meal get dirty looks from the corner office. “People from cultures that value relationships more than ours does are shocked by the thought of eating alone in front of a computer”, says Art Markman, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin. Social interaction has been shown to lift mood(情绪) and get people thinking in new directions and in ways that could help improve any post-lunch effort.

Markman also promotes off-task time. “Part of being a good thinker is experiencing things that are seemingly unrelated to what you are working on at the moment but give you fresh ideas about your work,” he says. “Also, there is a lot of research showing that a positive mood leads to higher levels of productivity and creativity. So, when people do things to increase their life satisfaction, they also make themselves more effective at work.”

5 . “Thank you for letting me observe your classes. It was an unusual experience,” the email began, which got my heart racing.

I am an industry scientist, and in my spare time I was teaching a course for computer science students at a local university. By that point in the semester, I hadn't asked the students to solve any technical problems or even open their computers. Instead, I taught them teamwork and communication and skills they’d need in industry. My approach caught the attention of the university, so a teaching expert appeared in my class. This made me wonder whether university officials would agree with the unique view I brought from industry—or remove me from the classroom.

I thought of these lessons when I started to develop the university class. The part-time role was appealing because I was eager to share my expertise and get back to working with students. But I didn’t want to use my old teaching style, which focused on lectures and whiteboard exercises. I wanted to develop the same qualities I was looking for in job candidates at my company.

I decided to use games and challenges to encourage teamwork and creativity. In one, students had to work together to decide how to survive a tough desert environment. In another, they built the tallest structure they could out of spaghetti and candies. The teaching expert sat in on one such class.

I worried they might have been taken aback(吓到). But after that unsettling opening, their email was positive: “I understand the important message you're conveying,” they wrote. “Today's industry is about people, not just computers. Keep up the good work.” Hearing that my teaching had a positive impact on their career paths was truly rewarding.

In the end, education is not just about sharing knowledge. It's also about helping students develop soft skills that will help them succeed wherever they plan to go, be it academia or industry.

Instead of starting a career in big cities, more and more university     1    (graduate) choose to return to their hometown. Li Dan is one of them. The girl,     2    (bear) in a small village in Southwest China, decided to stay with her family and friends after getting her degree at university.

In the strong support from national policies that aim to eliminate poverty, she started her own fruit growing business. Taking advantage     3     new technology and the Internet, she     4    (expand) her business to include agritourism over the last several years, creating more than 50 new jobs for the people in her village.     5     (live) in the hometown offers is a strong support network. More     6    (important), this network is also     7     good one for getting new agribusinesses up and running quite quickly. Thus, it is no surprise that more and more young people are now attracted to life in the country,     8     they can fulfill personal goals and contribute to     9    (they) local communities rather than just being white-collar professionals in big cities. “It is the hard work and your devotion     10     make a decent life, ” said Li Dan in an interview.

10 . For many young Canadians, planting trees is more than just a job. It’s a way of ______   and it could be catching on, thanks to a popular ______ by Leslie. While working for a logging company, the 29-year-old filmed herself using the ______ method that allowed her to plant 4,545 trees in a single day. She said that the work is incredibly ______.

Planting trees is not easy work, according to Leslie. Not only is it ______ tiring, but it also exposes laborers to the bad weather. “It could start the day off ______ and then minutes later, it will just be raining or snowing. You never know what to ______,” she described. “There were some days that we were planting through a heat ______, so we had like 37 to 40 degree weather for several days straight and that was really ______.”

So far, Leslie has planted a total of 372,290 trees in the past few years. ______, she’s still nowhere near beating the Guinness World record. That honor ______ Kenny Chaplin, who once planted 15,170 trees in 19 hours. After 35 years on the job, he says he’d ______ it to anyone.

“I think every parent in Canada should ______ their kid out tree planting because it will turn them into a worker,” he ______ . “They’ll learn how to work, they’ll have ______ and they’ll have money in their pockets.”