When Will Life Return to Normal?

If 2020 felt hellish, be warned that we aren’t out of the fire yet, even if we are moving in   the right direction. Welcome to 2021, aka purgatory.

There is little doubt that vaccines hold the key to ending the pandemic. A recent modeling study predicted that vaccinating just 40 per cent of US adults over the course of 2021 would reduce the coronavirus     1     rate by around 75 per cent and cut hospitalizations and deaths from covid-19 by more than 80 per cent.

But all this is still some way off. In the meantime, we will have to    2     to a middle ground where some people are protected but not others. As Adam Kleczkowski, a mathematical biologist at the University of Strathclyde UK,     3     out, supplies of the various vaccines are limited, distributing them is    4    , immunity takes a few weeks to develop and the protection they offer isn’t 100 percent.

In the northern hemisphere, he says, the most likely scenario is a third wave of covid-19 in the new year, requiring further lockdowns and    5     for up to five months. “ Realistically we’re in for a longer ride than we hope for.” he says.

Tim Spector at King’s College London, who leads the Covid-9 Symptom Study in the UK,   also predicts a third wave. But if lots of healthcare workers and    6     people have been vaccinated, the mortality rate will be lower and the pressure on the healthcare system    7     , he said at a recent Royal Society of Medicine seminar.

The upsides of ever-widening vaccination will kick in around April. He said, “I’m    8     that if we can just get our mental state together until Easter, we can hang on in there.”

There are still many things we don’t understand about this virus, however, and we may well be in for some surprises in the coming year that throw that trajectory（轨）off course. As this magazine went to press, for example, there was widespread speculation about the     9     of a new variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus circulating in the UK that may be more highly     10    .

In Australia, the goal will be to keep the virus from resurging as the summer fades into autumn, says epidemiologist Catherine Bennett at Deakin University in Melbourne. A recent outbreak in Sydney has led to new restrictions.

3 . Trying to make a big decision while you’re also preparing for a scary presentation? You might want to ______ doing that. Most people prefer to have sufficient time to analyze a situation and consider the ______. Feeling stressed changes how people ______ risk and reward. A new article published in Current Directions in Psychological Science reviews how, under stress, people pay more attention to the ______ of a possible outcome. Pressure can result in ______ attention and the use of unconscious reasoning. It can force a decision-maker to sort the relevant factors from the irrelevant, and can ______ clear thinking with specific priorities. 

It’s a bit ______ that stress makes people focus on the way things could go right, says Mara Mather of the University of Southern California. “This is sort of not what people would think,” Mather says, “Stress is usually associated with disagreeable experiences, so you’d think that maybe I’m going to be more focused on the ______ outcomes.” But researchers have found that when people are under stress — by being told to hold their hand in ice water for a few minutes, for example, or give a speech — they start paying more attention to positive information and ______ negative information. “Stress seems to worsen their learning from negative feedback,” Mather says. This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they’re considering and less to the downsides. So someone who’s deciding whether to take a new job and is feeling stressed by the ______ might weigh the increase in salary more heavily than the worse commute (通勤)。

The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in ______, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges. “The compulsion to get the reward comes stronger and they’re less able to ______ it,” Mather says. So a person who’s under stress might think only about the good feelings they’ll get from negative things like a drug, while the ______ shrink to the distance.

Stress also ______ the differences in how men and women think about risk. When men are under stress, they become even more ______ to take risks; when women are stressed, they get more conservative. Mather links this to another research that finds, at difficult times, men tend to face the situation, while women are likely to be more conservative.

4 . The MacArthur Foundation late last month announced its latest crop of “genius grants”, and once again you thought maybe, just maybe, this was your year.

And why not? These days, we’re all geniuses. We might be “marketing geniuses” or “cooking geniuses” or “TV geniuses”. We have so weakened “genius” that it’s fast joining the company of “natural” and “mindful” (留心), words left inactive through overuse and misuse.

Admittedly, the word is tough to nail down. Sometimes we assume genius equivalent to raw intelligence. But many of humanity’s greatest breakthroughs were achieved by those with only modest IQs.

Sometimes we think of the genius as someone extremely knowledgeable, but that definition also falls short. During Albert Einstein’s time, other scientists knew more physics than Einstein did, but history doesn’t remember them. That’s because they didn’t make use of that knowledge the way Einstein did. They weren’t able to, as he put it, “regard old questions from a new angle”.

The genius is not a know-it-all but a see-it-all, someone who, working with the material available to all of us, is able to make surprising and useful connections. True genius involves not merely an extra advance, but a conceptual leap. As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it: Talent hits the target no one else can hit; genius hits the target no one else can see.

We’ve lost sight of this truth, and too often grant the title of genius on talented people hitting visible targets. A good example is the much-boasted announcement earlier this year that scientists had, for the first time, recorded the sound of two black holes bumping, a billion light-years away. It was a remarkable discovery, no doubt, but it did not represent a dramatic shift in how we understand the universe. It merely confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

As Plato observed, “What is honored in a country is cultivated there.” What do we honor? Digital technology, and the convenience it represents, so naturally we get a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg as our “geniuses”, which, in point of fact, they aren’t.

The iPhone and Facebook are wonderful inventions. In many ways, they make our lives a bit easier, a bit more convenient. If anything, though, a true genius makes our lives more difficult, more unsettled. William Shakespeare’s words provide more anxiety than relief, and the world felt a bit more secure before Charles Darwin came along. Zuckerberg and Jobs may have changed our world, but they haven’t yet changed our worldview.

We need to recover genius, and a good place to start is by putting the brakes on Genius Flooding.

5 . Too much work, too little money and not enough opportunity for promotion, .or growth are stressing us out on the job, according to a new survey from the American Psychological Association.

We all know that stress reduces all of the things that help productivity— mental clarity (清晰), short-term memory, decision-making and moods. One-third of employees experience lasting stress related to work, the survey found. Fifty-four percent of the 1,501 employed adults surveyed say they feel they are paid too little for their contributions, and 61% said their jobs don’t offer adequate opportunities to advance. Only half of the adults surveyed said they feel valued at work.

Besides, women’s stress is rising as families rely more on women’s earnings. An employed wife’s contribution to family earnings has reached, on average, 47% since 2009, so women feel especially stuck and tense. Thirty-two percent of women said their employers don’t provide sufficient opportunities for internal advancement, compared with 30% of men. Women are more likely to feel tense during a typical workday, reporting more often that their employer doesn’t appreciate what they do.

Physically, the body responds to stress by secreting hormones into the bloodstream that stimulate accelerated (加速的) heart rate and breathing and tensing of muscles. People who experience stress as a positive often have increased blood flow to the brain, muscles and limbs, similar to the effects of aerobic exercise. Those who feel frightened or threatened, however, often have an unstable heart rate and constricting wood vessels (血管). Their blood pressure rises and hands and feet may grow cold. They may become agitated, speak more loudly or experience errors in judgment.

Emotional responses to stress often divide along gender lines, with men more likely to have a “fight or flight” reaction while women are more likely to have a tend and befriend” response, seeking comfort in relationships and care of loved ones, according to the research.

Women tend to “internalize”, which contributes to their stress. Many women hesitate to speak up for themselves or challenge behavior they see as unfair. Kay Keaney, interior designer, 40, rose fast at a California medical group, taking on responsibility for interior and facility planning. With her 60-hour workweeks, plus early-morning and late-night meetings and a 1.5-hour commute each way, she seldom had time with her two small children. Whether stuck in traffic on her way to a 6 p.m. pickup at day care, or tom between her children and urgent work emails, “I just wanted to crawl out of my skin,” she says. “I was overwhelmed.” Yet she hesitated to complain. “There was too much work to be done, and playing the Mommy card was bad form.” But the experts suggest that women should give themselves a voice.

7 . We have been putting smart women on the couch for 40 years without making full use of their talent. Today the portion of top jobs that go to women is still _________ low. Why aren’t more women running things in America? It isn’t for lack of ambition or qualifications. The real _________ to getting more women to the top is the difficult issue of time commitment: Today’s top jobs in major organizations _________ 60-plus hours of work a week. Isn’t it too much?

But for businesses and reformers are serious about making their companies _________ for the large number of American talented women, here are three ways to handle it.

Re-think time. We can break away from the _________ that high-level work can be done only by people who work extra time. Maybe working time can be shortened by setting the right amount of work that needs to get done. Senior roles should actually be easier to adapt in this way because highly paid people have the desire to give up some _________ in order to work less.

Availability matters. It’s important to differ between availability and absolute time commitment. Many professional women would _________ agree to check email seven days a week and come to office, if necessary, for an intense project — so long as over the course of a year, the time devoted to work is more _________. Managers need to know that 24/7 availability is not the same thing as a 24/7 _________.

Quality is the goal, not quantity. Leaders need to create a __________ in which talented people are judged not by the quantity of their work, but by the quality of their __________. One who works 20 hours a week and who delivers exceptional results on a pro rata (摊派) basis should be qualified for __________ and viewed as a top performer.

“Devotion” may help talented women who can live with the way that top jobs require today— and if that’s their __________, give more power to them. But only a small percentage of women will choose this route. Until the rest of us get serious about __________ the present way that work gets done in American corporations, we can only complain about the __________ of it all while changing almost nothing.

Do you take part in office gossip? I don’t like to think of myself as a gossip, but I have to admit I often do it. In my turbulent industry, I     1     my behavior perhaps wrongly— by reasoning that gossip helps me get information and figure out what is going on.

Amid a rise in office gossip, researchers are disagreeing over whether it is     2     good or bad. Some defend it as a way of building     3     among people and sharing essential information. But others hold that office gossip can be savage and     4    , as the New York Times reports. At one company, PrintingForLess.com, which has a strict no-gossip policy, gossiping about colleagues can become a/an,     5     offense.

In one case analyzed in a/ an     6     journal, middle school teachers’ gossip about their principal became so poisonous that the principal retaliated, many teachers fled the school and students’ test scores declined. In this case, gossip     7     to “a form of warfare that brought everyone down.”

On the other hand, less malignant gossip that stops short of repeating lies or breaching confidences can serve as a source of understanding. “Gossip helps us     8     the motivations of other people, and enables those low on the food chain, in particular, to understand how power is used in their organizations.” says this New York Times article. It is relaxing, it brings people together, and as a/an     9     it beats gambling, drinking or doing drugs, this reasoning holds.

I have seen gossip help co-workers in some places where I have worked, giving rise to compassion or offers of support when someone is going through hard times. On the other hand, I have .also seen gossip— over an office romance, for example— distract people from their work and even force unwanted     10    .

Whatever side you take, gossip is here to stay. It is a universal human practice and it is too complex to say it is either good or bad, a University of Colorado researcher says.