1 . The Great PowerPoint Panic of 2003.

Sixteen minutes before touchdown on the morning of February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia (“哥伦比亚”号航天飞机)______ into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard were killed. As the shattered shuttle flew toward Earth in pieces, it looked to its live TV viewers like a swarm of shooting stars.

The immediate ______ of the disaster, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board determined that August, was a piece of insulating foam (绝缘泡沫胶) that had broken loose and damaged the shuttle’s left wing soon after liftoff. But the report also   ______ out a less direct, more surprising cause. Engineers had known about - and inappropriately______ - the wing damage long before Columbia’s attempted reentry, but the flaws in their analysis were ______ in a series of overstuffed computer-presentation slides that were shown to NASA officials.

By the start of 2003, the phrase “death by PowerPoint” had well and truly entered the ______ vocabulary. Edward Tufte was the first to have taken it literally: That spring, the Yale statistician published a booklet entitled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, whose core argument was that the medium of communication influences the substance of communication. While PowerPoint, as a medium, did not ______ create unclear, lazy presentations, it certainly ______ and sometimes even masked them — with potentially deadly consequences. This is exactly what Tufte saw in the Columbia engineers’ slides.

Wired ran an excerpt (节选) from Tufte’s booklet in September 2003 under the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A few months later, The New York Times Magazine included his assessment — summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb” — in its ______ of the year’s most important ideas. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of confusion,” the entry read.

Despite the backlash it inspired in the ______, the presentation giant rolls on. The program has more monthly users than ever before, well into the hundreds of millions. During lockdown, people ______ PowerPoint parties on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint presentations for their parents when they want to get a puppy. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil ______ the world.

On its face at least, the idea that PowerPoint makes us stupid looks like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. Today’s concerns about social media somehow resemble the PowerPoint critique. Both boil down to a worry that new media technologies ______ form over substance, that they are designed to hold our attention rather than to convey truth, and that they make us stupid.

______, concerns about new media rarely seem to make a difference. If the innovation did change the way we think, we are measuring its effects with an altered mind. Either the critical remarks were wrong, or they were so right that we can no longer tell the   ______.

Chip flow interrupted

A stable global supply chain of chips had been maintained before disruptive moves by the US.

Two of the US’ top chipmakers—NVIDIA and AMD-were ordered to stop exports of two high-end chips to China on Aug 31. The ban     1     sophisticated (精密的) chips for graphics processing units (GPUs); which have been widely used in applications including AI and creative production.

This came after US President Joe Biden signed an order to pass the $52.7 billion (about 369.5 billion yuan) semiconductor chip manufacturing subsidy (补贴) and research law on Aug 25.

It aims to     2     efforts to “make the United States more competitive with China’s science and technology efforts”, Reuters noted.

Biden also signed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 into law on Aug 9. According to the act, chip makers that shift their factories to the US can receive subsidies and tax benefits with     3     conditions that restrict US companies from increasing investments in China for 10 years.

“The US and its allies,” Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and a financier for the Bill Clinton, Obama and Biden presidential campaigns, said in March, “should utilize targeted export controls on high-end semiconductor manufacturing equipment... to protect     4     technical advantages and slow the advancement of China’s semiconductor industry”.

In     5     to the US latest act, Woo Jin-hoon, a guest professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University, wrote for China Daily, this is “a move that can be profitable for the US in the short term, but harmful in the long run”.

The design, manufacturing and even raw materials of a complete and complex product like semiconductors (especially chips) are usually     6     across many different countries and regions, forming a huge trade network.

No matter how hard countries or regions try to support their own manufacturing bases and     7     their production, a certain degree of interdependence among countries and regions is unavoidable, China Daily commented.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Sept 1 at a press     8     that the US move is typical “sci-tech hegemony (霸权)”.

“With its technological advantages, the US has abused the concept of national security and its state power to     9     down on the development of     10     economies and developing countries,” said Wang. “The move violates market economy principles, harms international economic and trade orders and disrupts the stability of global industrial and supply chains.”

A new report by the World Health Organization (WHO) reveals that around one in a hundred deaths worldwide is due to passive smoking, which kills an estimated 600,000 people a year.

In the first study to assess the global     1     of second-hand smoke, WHO experts find that children are more     2     exposed to second-hand smoke than any other age-group, and around 165,000 of them a year die because of it.

Children’s exposure to second-hand smoke is most likely to happen at home, and the double blow of infectious diseases and tobacco seems to be a deadly     3     for children in these regions. Commenting on the findings, Heather Wipfli and Jonathan Samet from the University of Southern California, said policymakers try to     4     families to stop smoking in the home.

While deaths due to passive smoking in children were skewed (曲解) toward poor and middle-income countries, deaths in adults were     5     across countries at all income levels.

In Europe’s high-income countries, only 71 child deaths occurred, while 35,388 deaths were in adults. Yet in the countries like Africa, an estimated 43,375 deaths due to passive smoking were in children     6     with 9,514 in adults.

Only 7.4 percent of the world population currently lives in places with     7     smoke-free laws, and those laws are not always     8     enforced (施行). In places where smoke-free rules are     9    , research shows that exposure to second-hand smoke in high-risk places like bars and restaurants can be cut by 90 percent, and in general by 60 percent, the researchers said.

Studies also show such laws help to reduce the number of cigarettes smoked by smokers and lead to higher     10     rates in those trying to quit.

As for what is driving America’s chronic weight problem, there are no definite answers. But a lot of evidence points to the two causes most people already suspect: too much food and too little exercise.

Bigger    1    

The US Department of Agriculture(USDA)reports that the average American ate almost 20% more calories in the year 2000 than they did in 1983, thanks, in part, to a boom in meat     2    . Today, each American puts away an     3    of 195 Ibs of meat every year, compared to just 138 Ibs in the 1950s. Consumption of added fats also shot up by around two-thirds over the same period, and grain consumption     4    by 45% since1970.

Inactivity is the new normal

Lack of exercise is also a major culprit in the obesity epidemic. It’s been decades since most Americans worked in fields and on factory floors. A far greater     5    of us are sitting throughout our working day. This means less exercise each day. According to one study, only 20% of today’s jobs require at least     6    physical activity, as opposed to 50% of jobs in 1960. Other research suggests Americans burn 120 to 140 fewer calories a day than they did 50 years ago. Add this to the higher amount of calories we are packing in, and we get a perfect recipe for weight gain.

But lethargy goes well beyond the workplace. It is also how we get to work and what we do after. Americans walk less than people in any other industrialized country,     7    to sit in cars to get around. And at the end of the day, 80% of Americans don’t get enough exercise, according to the CDC.

In the end, though, we can’t lose sight of the big picture. Over the past years, diet fads have come and gone, with people     8    to blame red meat, dairy, wheat, fat, sugar, etc. for making them fat, but in reality, the problem is much simpler. Genetics and age do strongly     9    metabolism, but as the CDC points out, weight gain and loss is primarily a formula of total calories     10    versus total calories used.

You’ll Often Walk Alone

There has been a quiet pandemic (流行病) developing while most people’s attention has been on Covid-19. The lockdown has worsened a problem that has been     1     in many developed nations for decades: loneliness.

Part of the problem     2     from contemporary employment. Globally, two in five office workers feel lonely at work. This rises to three in five in Britain. Gig-economy (零工经济) jobs can leave people with     3     incomes and without the companionship of colleagues. The pandemic has made it more difficult to make, and maintain, friendships, particularly for new employees. Even before the crisis, the hope that     4     offices would encourage greater camaraderie (友情) proved to be false. Many people find the chatter     5     and withdraw with noise-canceling headphones. They then email colleagues who are sitting only a few desks away.

Perhaps loneliness relates to human history. Mass urbanization is a relatively recent development; if the history of human existence was     6     into a single day, the Industrial Revolution did not occur until almost midnight. For much of that time, humans lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers; cities may just overwhelm the senses. Ms. Hertz points her finger at a recent development: social media. The internet has led too much cyber-bullying (although it has also been a source of companionship during the lockdown). And people     7     to their smart phones spend less time interacting socially.

Some changes in behavior are owing to     8     choice. Before the pandemic no one was stopping people going to church or taking part in sports. They     9     preferred to do other things. Indeed, one reason for the decline in communal activities is that men choose to be with their families rather than     10     to the bar; American fathers spend three times as much time with their children as they did in the 1960s. That is surely a welcome development. So recreating a communal society may be difficult.