2 . Liu Xiaoyu, the Chinese-Canadian ever won first place in the 18th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. And he was the second pianist of Chinese origin to ________ the honor.

It was his first ________ in China when he played at the 51st Hong Kong Arts Festival in February. However, it was his third trip to the special region. He had ________ here twice before when he was three and nine. He ________ remembered visiting some attractions in Hong Kong at nine years old. When he would play the ________ once again, he was very ________ and looked forward to bringing Chopin’s music to the audience in Hong Kong as soon as possible.

At the ________ in February at the Hong Kong City Hall, Liu played Chopin’s two pieces of music, both of which he had played in the Warsaw competition. In the second half of the public performance of music, he played French composer Maurice Ravel’s music. The applause and ________ from the audience made him return to the stage three times to take a ________ as a sign of politeness.

Some say Liu’s musical style is ________, with less romance but more ________. The young pianist just ________ to express his inner emotions clearly and directly. He ________ that if we still play the same music played 200 years ago, the way of playing will be undoubtedly different. To confirm it, he points out, “Austrian. composer Mozart ________ Serenata Notturna (《月下小夜曲》) in a, time of candles, but in the 21st century, we have electric lights—our way of living is ________ the way we play.”

3 . Sanyé Mylo’s eyes twinkle with excitement when he stands in the sound booth of The Record Co. in Boston, eager to bring his creation to life. With the press of a button, his latest rap track fills the room. “I didn’t know spaces like this existed,” says Mylo, who grew up in the low-income neighborhood of Dorchester. He is one of the young musicians who, thanks to The Record Co. , has turned his music into a full-time occupation.

Founded in 2010 by Matt McArthur, The Record Co. aims to give musicians more affordable access to the creative workspace and introduce the world of music to those who may have never considered their place in it.

McArthur understands this challenge firsthand. As a music technology student at Berklee College of Music, he was frustrated by the high costs of renting time in production studios. On average, a recording studio in Boston costs more than $100 per hour to rent.

He saw a recording studio not as a private office for a man of means but as a community center available to all. So he took out loans, collected donations and opened a studio in a tiny basement in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Slowly but steadily, McArthur expanded it and eventually rented a new property to include spaces for practice and production.

Today, The Record Co., with a full-time staff of more than 20 people, is a state-of-the art, 12,000-foot facility that can be rented for as little as $10 per hour. Each month, it receives about 1,000 reservations, and around 3,500 musicians pass through its doors. At The Record Co., the principle is clear: Music should be affordable for everyone, and so should the space for creating it. The building has been shaped not only with an ear to acoustics(音响效果)but also with an eye to ensure it is as welcoming to a musician in a wheelchair as to one who walks in with a guitar over the shoulder.

Liu Wenwen is the first suona player to study for a doctor’s degree in China. On social media platforms, Liu’s name is often followed by a video of her    1    (perform) at a concert in Sydney. The audience    2    (impress) by the unfamiliar instrument and the music.

Both of Liu’s parents’ families     3    (play) suona for generations. But it takes time and hard work    4    (become) a musician. “To avoid disturbing the neighbors, my parents would take me to a park to practice at 4 a.m. everyday.” Her primary school classmates laughed at her,    5    (say) her whole family was engaged only in “weddings and funerals”. These are the two major     6    (occasion) where the instrument is played in China.

She found suona music beautiful    7    the first time in 2008, when entering Shanghai Conservatory of Music to learn the instrument systematically from Professor Liu Ying,    8    top player. “The music played by Professor Liu was amazing,    9    was quite different from what I’d heard before,” she said.

Speaking of the popular video, Liu said, “I felt my hard work paid off. I trained for over 20 years,    10    (probable) just to win cheers for traditional Chinese music on the international stage.”

6 . Do our musical preferences say something about our personality or how we view relation- ships with others? According to new research, they just may.

In the study, 469 participants listed their favorite songs about falling in love, breaking up, parental love or anything else related to relationships. Then, they filled out questionnaires to define their attachment (依恋) style in relationships — whether they feel confident,   anxious and avoidant.

Researchers matched words of these songs with the questionnaires. According to the analysis, participants who see themselves as worthy of love preferred songs with sweet themes, while those who tend to worry liked songs expressing more sad themes, and those who often drop out of social relationships chose songs with avoidant themes.

According to the lead author, Ravin Alaei from the University of Toronto, this is the first study that examines how song words play a role in music preferences. “One reason why people turn to music is that it can embody what they think, feel, and do in relationships and song words especially matter for that,” he said. “People enjoy having their feelings and thoughts spoken back to them.”

To extend their findings, the researchers pulled together 823 most popular songs from 1946 to 2015. After rating how much these songs’ words showed different attachment themes, they compared songs from 1946 to 1965 with those from 1990 to 2015. They found more recent popular songs were more likely to have avoidant attachment words or themes than older popular songs. Alaei believes this can show a trend (趋势) toward more avoidance in relation-ships — Perhaps because people are less connected than they used to be. “We’ve become more individualistic, and we feel lonelier than people used to several decades ago,” he said.

What does this mean? It may mean that we can reflect (沉思) on our interpersonal relationships with people around us when we want to listen to a kind of music over and over again.

More than 27 million Chinese people watched the first online concert of the Irish pop band Westlife on Friday night. The concert held in London was live streamed on WeChat Channels,     1    (impact) the Chinese audience with hit songs such as Seasons in the Sun and My love, as well as one of the most popular Chinese song     2    stirred the emotion for Chinese fans.

In addition     3     their good Mandarin pronunciation in the Chinese song, the band shared their experiences of visiting China     4    (react) to the excited audience through their interactions.

For the first time, the band performed the Chinese song, The Road to Ordinary. Up to now the video of this song    5    (play) on the band's official WeChat Channels account over 72 million times , with the figure       6    (gradual) rising.

The choice of The Road to Ordinary was a joint decision     7    (make) by Westlife and the WeChat team, taking into consideration     8    series of factors including the song's popularity, the band's temperament(气质) and the context of cultural exchange in the grand global    9     (perform).

“Music is all about feelings, and we pass this feelings to others and make people happy.” Westlife extended thanks to Chinese fans after the    10    (fascinate) online concert and posted on its official Sina Weibo account.