2 . Fatima has been the only woman working as a tour guide in Afghanistan. The 22-year-old grew up leading _______ through the countryside, and now she leads tourists through the streets of Herat, the third largest city in Afghanistan.

She grew up in rural Gohr Province, where there was no schooling   _______ to girls, but she convinced her family to let her take _______ if she brought in enough of an income from sheep herding. She practiced her English by listening to BBC radio, which she could _______   when high enough in the hills.

“I thought a lot during these years,” Fatima says. “My brothers and sisters were _______to get married. I decided that I would not continue in the _______. That was how I decided to work.”

She signed up for Facebook and began joining groups for people interested in history._______ that people only knew Afghanistan as a place of war and conflict, she started writing regular posts about places in her country that foreigners might not know about.

After she began writing her _______, everything changed. Fatima started getting comments and responses from her new online friends. In 2020, one of them — a man known as “Big Tom” — _______ out to her saying he was going to be traveling in Afghanistan and if she would be interested in ________ him around in Herat? She said yes.

Tom recommended her to someone else, and Fatima continued to get work by word of mouth. Eventually she came to the ________ of Untamed Borders, a boutique (精品的) travel agency that specializes in trips to more inaccessible areas. The company hired her in late 2020, and the young self-taught woman became her country’s first female professional tour guide.

Of course, being a pioneer is never ________. Fatima says many people in her life, including some of her family members, have told her that it’s too dangerous for a woman to work,________ if it means interacting with men one-on-one. Sometimes children throw stones at her while she’s guiding tourists through the local market. Other people have shouted profanities (污言秽语) at her.

Fatima says that the________of her employers and the people she has met through giving tours is what keeps her motivated. “Challenges are always a part of my life. If I give up, then other women will never________,” she said.

3 . An interview is a discussion with someone in which you try to get information from them.     1     There are three basic sub-types of interview: structured interviews, unstructured interviews and semi-structured interviews.     2     Incidentally, “respondent” and “informant” are words that are sometimes used instead of “interviewee”.

A great deal is provided by this personal contact: you are another human being, and interviewees will respond to you, in bodily presence, in an entirely different way from the way that they would have reacted to questionnaires that came through their letterboxes or to emails.     3     Most people want to help and give their opinions, and they will usually be energized to help by your physical presence.

If you take the trouble to schedule a visit, you can be more or less guaranteed of a response. Most importantly, though, you will be able to relate to interviewees while you are talking to them.     4     You will be able to watch their behaviour which will give you important clues about how they feel about a topic. Because of the primacy of the personal contact, your appearance and tone are important—how do you want to be seen? As “one of us”? As a person in authority? As an observer? …Or what?     5     However you decide to present yourself, it is good practice of course to try to put the interviewee at ease before the interview begins — to talk about the weather, about your journey, about anything that will break the ice.

4 . My husband jokes with me that my midlife crisis was having my now 11-year-old daughter in my 40s.

I started my career as Associate Editor at Woman’s World magazine in the late 1990s. Then I was a magazine editor-in-chief for five national consumer publications and also contributed to magazines like Longevity and New Woman.

Four years after getting married in 2005, I eventually gave birth to my daughter, Crystal. As I wrote on Parenting.com: “As the doctor checked her vital organs and my husband counted her 10 perfect fingers and toes, I realized that my body had produced a wonder.”

While my peers were dealing with the stresses of kids in school, I focused my creative energy on carving out my new identity. I was excited when I was offered a “Mom’s Talk” column where I wrote about toys, breastfeeding, and my ongoing(追求) for “baby-free” time.

When Crystal was 3 years old, I wrote an essay about watching her dance at a toddler(学步的小孩) reading group at the library, instead of sitting down with the other children. I expected her performance to annoy people, but her joyful dancing attracted them and made me consider my own possibilities.

“Had I ever been that way, I wondered. If so, could I be like that again? Could I become as free as a child with her whole life ahead of her, ready and willing to be the star of her own production?”

As my daughter transformed from a toddler into a young girl, she continued to be my inspiration. I wrote about the new rules for babysitting and shared research showing that fathers who participated in housework had a positive impact on their daughter’s future success on The Washington Post.

I focused on providing Crystal with resilience-building(韧性) when she neared her teens. I wrote about powerful phrases for The Week, like “no one is the judge of your self-worth”.

As my daughter continues to grow during this messy time, there is one certainty: I will continue to tell my stories, through the eyes of my midlife wisdom. I can’t wait to see her next chapter----and for you to read mine.

6 . Hiring processes can be thought of as a battle between integrity and dishonesty. You might imagine this is a simple fight between truth-seeking firms and self-promoting candidates, and to a certain extent it is. But companies themselves tend to bend reality out of shape in ways that are self-defeating.

Start with the obvious wrongdoers: job applicants. When it comes to writing the resume (简历) , they tend to massage reality into the most appealing shape possible. Everyone beyond a certain level of experience is a transformational leader personally responsible for generating millions income; the world economy would be about 15 times bigger than it actually is if all such claims were true. The average British spends four and a half hours a day watching TV and online videos. But each average job candidate is an enthusiast for public welfare, using their spare time only for worthy purposes, like volunteering in soup kitchens.

But the tendency to stretch the truth infects companies as well as applicants. The typical firm will write a job description that invariably describes the work environment as fast-paced and innovative, and then lays out a set of improbable requirements for the “ideal candidate”, someone who almost by definition does not exist. Sometimes, the requirements include an ability to go back and change the course of history.

Too few firms offer an accurate account of what a position actually involves in their job previews, which are supposed to give prospective employees a genuine sense of the negatives and positives of the job, as well as a clear idea of the company’s corporate culture. One effective strategy is to lay out in text or video, what a typical day in the role would look like.

Such honesty can be its own reward. Research has long suggested that realistic job previews lead to lower turnover and higher employee satisfaction. A paper in 2011 by David Eamest of Towson University and his co-authors concluded that favourable perceptions of the organization’s honesty are the best explanation for why. So a process designed to uncover the truth about job applicants would run a lot more smoothly if firms were also honest about themselves.

9 . I moved to a new city and took a job in marketing. I didn't really understand whether it_________me. I enjoyed doing things that I felt had_________—I could see their benefit and feel their impact. As the months passed, I felt it just wasn't for me. I needed to find a way out.

A job advertisement for a(n)_________for a new youth magazine came at exactly the right time. I applied and was_________. My role was to help teams of young people edit their_________and help them with their work. I had assumed the magazine would be a(n)_________of games and dull reviews, so I was_________when one of the first pieces written was about social welfare._________, I found something I was interested in.

I felt a_________in me straight away. I had a purpose again. Days were lost to discussing hot topics and__________the words of their strong and opinionated (坚持己见的) voices.__________in their world, I could see myself making a difference to the team's__________ability. As our website__________increased and the work shifted to reflect what our__________wanted, I developed a greater__________of what young people might want to read.

The biggest change the job brought, __________,was to my well-being. It is rare you find yourself in a job you love, one that you are happy to__________each day. I was thriving (充实）in this__________environment, inspired by the talented young people I was helping to__________their careers. Now, I realize that there are jobs that will keep you happy,__________and inspired.

10 . A few days before New Year 1944, Patricia Krueger received a telegram from the U. S. Army. She hoped it would contain a belated birthday greeting from her husband, an army flight engineer, Charles Krueger, whom she had not heard from for 2 weeks. Instead, the message said he wasn’t coming home: His B-29 had been lost and he was later declared MIA (missing in action). Their son, John Krueger from Middleton, Wisconsin, is still in tears when he recounts this story.

Decades later, the military continues to work to bring back the remains of soldiers like Charles Krueger. The job of finding them falls to DPAA (Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency), created in 2015 after critics charged that the previous MIA search process was slow, and behind on innovations in science and technology. Between 1973 and 2014, the remains of only 1,849 missing service member s were returned to their families; in 2021, the agency accounted for the remains of 141 MIAs; according to DPAA figures.

To accelerate the work, Congress gave DPAA the authority to develop public-private partnerships with scientists and groups outside the government. “Teaming up with academic scientists introduces new ways of thinking,” says military historian Michael Dolski. “Working with partners allows us to tap into their technologies and capabilities in ways that we just can’t maintain.”

For scientists, the work is more than technically satisfying. “It’s the most rewarding aspect of my career,” says Mires, a scientist working with the agency. “In other archaeology sites I’ve worked on, the history is remote,” he says. “Here, you’re doing something not for a thing, but for a person, and all the people they touched.”