1 . One of the most well-known figures of American history, Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States and the author of the Declaration of Independence. His life was an inspiring one and at the same time a little bit contradictory to his statements and way of living life, and thus he has formed the subject of a lot of authors’ books.

5 . The habit of reading is one of the greatest resources of mankind: we enjoy reading books that belong to us much more than if they are borrowed. Some people regard a borrowed book as a ________ in the house. It must be treated with care and considerate ________. Casual attitudes are forbidden. Because the book is borrowed it tolerates no damage which means it must not suffer while ________. While reading the book, you are not allowed to make any mark or underline the important ________ when a flash of creative idea emerge. This is huge ________ to one’s imagination.

________, your own books belong to you and you can treat them with so much closeness that you are not afraid to mark it up or to place it in a dirty place. Your own books are there for use, not for ________. You don’t need to display them in front of others. Private ownership also encourages ________ marking. A good reason for marking instructive passages in books is that this practice enables you to remember more easily the significant sayings, to ________ them quickly and then review them more frequently in the future.

Given the importance of owned books to a man, everyone should begin collecting a private library, making up his own ________ property. One should have his own bookshelves, which should not be having doors, glass windows, or keys. They should be free and ________ to the hand as well as the eye. Like the jewellery to a woman, the best moral _________ to a man is books. They are more varied in colour and appearance than any wall-paper. Their variety indicates ________ out of brains of different book writers. The knowledge that books are in plain view is also stimulating. Your body and mind are both _________. With books at hand, your mind is free to land any _________ or even strange possibility, which eventually gives birth to new discoveries or inventions.

7 . During my first decade in prison, I busied myself with exercising and hanging out in the big yard. I hardly grew as a person. It wasn’t until I began college in prison in my 30s that I started to realize my full potential.

Through my journey in college, I became a keen reader and writer, striving to escape prison life by expanding my mind beyond the toxic (有毒的) environments I’d been confined to. I started studying feminism and restorative justice. One concept that really hit home for me was toxic masculinity (男子气概). I come from an abusive home and a neighborhood consumed by gangs, drugs and gun violence. I wanted to understand better why I had used violence to solve my problems.

I have found, however, that strangers stand between me and many of the books I want to read.

Books, like everything an imprisoned person receives— personal mail, emails, photos, news and education materials — are evaluated by prison officials and rejected or shared with us. Corrections departments typically claim they ban books that contain sexual content, racial hatred or depictions of violence, criminal activity, anti-authority attitudes or escape. In practice, PEN America wrote in a 2019 report on prison book restriction policies, the restrictions “have been wide-ranging, from perverse to absurd to constitutionally troubling, with bans being applied in ways that are against logic.”

In Texas, books by Alice Walker, Pablo Neruda and even the former senator Bob Dole have been banned. Throughout the country, prison officials have rejected or tried to ban books about biology (too much nakedness in the anatomical drawings), the Holocaust (some of the victims were pictured naked), sketching, dragons and even the moon (it could “present risks of escape,” according to one New York prison). At one point, Colorado prison officials blocked a prisoner from reading two of President Barack Obama’s memoirs because they were “potentially harmful to national security,” although they later reversed that decision.

Claiming such bans are necessary for the safety and security of prisons seems ridiculous. If anything, many banned books could contribute to a safer environment in prisons and in the societies imprisoned individuals are released into. Practically every author I have encountered while in prison, from Don Miguel Ruiz to Angela Y. Davis, has played a role in my efforts to grow and become a better person— someone who can live in society by adding to it, as opposed to taking from it.

Without college and without access to books and materials that expanded my mind beyond the razor wire (钢丝网) and towering concrete walls, I might still be wasting my time on the yard. My worldview would still be dictated by toxic masculinity and the violence and harm that surround it. That’s not who I want to be when I leave this prison. It’s not who I want to see sent back into society.

8 . Background noise—like the chatter in a coffee shop or the drone of passing traffic—might slow our reading speed, but according to a study of Russian readers, it doesn’t _________ how our brain understands written text.

_________, if you’re wondering whether you should be listening to podcasts or music while working, the study has some interesting points to make. In particular, it examined how we might change our reading style to compensate for auditory noise and visual distractions such as typos or poor formatting.

“Overall, previous studies reported a harmful effect of both auditory and visual noise on reading fluency and _________, though their results varied,” write linguistics researcher Nina Zdorova and colleagues. “So far, none of the studies exploring the influence of noise _________ it in the framework of the language processing theories.”

One of the language processing theories examined was the noisy channel model, which proposes that our brain deals with noise by looking at the meaning of _________ words more and at entire sentences less. We then use a bit of smart guesswork to _________ the overall meaning and relationships between words.

The second theory is the good enough model; that’s when our brains aren’t analyzing every single detail of a text but instead only grabbing enough words for a ‘good enough’ understanding. By focusing less on the precise words, our brains can _________ some cognitive resources to deal with noise.

To see how reading was affected by noise _________ these models, the researchers ran two experiments: one on auditory noise (71 participants) and one on visual noise (70 participants). When it came to the auditory noise test, background chatter from overlapping podcasts caused people to spend longer looking at the key section of sentences before completing their reading. This extra time could _________ the noise, meaning sentence comprehension isn’t affected by it. In the visual noise test, comprehension remained the same while reading speed __________. That’s a bit __________ considering previous studies, but the researchers think people just wanted to finish the task, with the visual noise an uncomfortable distraction.

There’s a lot going on in this study, but overall it’s a bigger win for the good-enough language processing theory and an indication that auditory and visual noise doesn’t make us __________ any more or less on any particular comprehension method while we’re reading.

With so many variables to measure in terms of what’s being read and what the __________ noise is, further study is required to learn more. __________ potential distractions may not interrupt your reading as much as you think.