2 . My phone was an extension of myself. I couldn’t go anywhere _________ it. I scrolled through my friends’ _________ into late night and turned my phone on before my eyes were fully open. I enjoyed having it until that day when I realized that what had started as a useful tool had turned into a(n) _________. So, I made a _________ decision to turn off that smartphone and _________ my old dumb phone out of hiding.

When I was watching TV shows or movies and there was a boring part, I _________ picking up the phone and checking out “what everyone else was doing.” Now I had to pay attention or find a way to _________ myself with my thoughts instead. When I visited New York City, I had to write out _________ and ask people where an intersection (十字路口) was _________ pulling out my phone.

I have welcomed silence into my life with open arms and am enjoying the increased __________ from not constantly having to fight with the __________ to check my phone while I’m trying to get something done. I am allowing my thoughts to speak to me instead of my phone. I am connecting with others in a __________ way that isn’t all about me. Instead of always posting about what’s going on in my __________ perfect life, I am connecting with my friends one-on-one, talking about the reality of our lives and being there for them from a place of __________.

As much as having a smartphone was __________, not having one is freeing on a much bigger level.

3 . Like many young Chinese, Zuo had been raised from a young age to be “a good student”. As long as she followed the rules and worked hard, money and success would naturally followed. Zuo had followed the instructions to the_________. She aced exam after exam, winning a place at a prestigious college inBeijing. However, when Zuo sent out a sea of job applications , She didn’t just fail to_________her preferred role; she didn’t receive a single_________.

For Zuo, the failure came as a crushing_________. Being a high flier, she was emotionally unprepared for such a setback. She struggled with anxiety for months: unable to sleep,_________ by guilt, and feeling compelled to repeatedly apologize to her parents and teachers.

But the ordeal (磨难) has left a profound impression on Zuo. The former teacher’s pet has transformed into a passionate_________of what she calls the ”good student mentality.“ In January, Zuo set up a group on Douban named “Victims of the Good Student Mentality,” and it has quickly attracted a passionate following.

“Good students” like Zuo tend to be_________vulnerable (脆弱的) to mental health issues. Successive studies have found that high achievers are more likely to_________ anxiety, depression than the general population. This is because high achievers like Zuo often excessively rely on _________ validation (认可) to support their self-esteem, leaving them unable to cope with setbacks. Over time, students __________ the externa world’s evaluation criteria as their own standard for self-assessment.

It’s clear that a diverse range of young people can__________victim to the “good student mentality.” Luckily, in Chinese education system, there is growing __________that student anxiety is a serious problem. A teacher in Shanghai, surnamed Dong, tells that “the good student mentality” is becoming ever more prevalent, with well behaved, introverted children__________seeking praise and awards as a way to __________their self esteem. If they fail to meet the school’s incredibly high standards, there’s a risk that it will trigger an emotional __________.Hence, Zuo recently wrote a welcome message offering new members some advice: “Be kind to yourself; challenge the norms; treat yourself well.“ And, most importantly:” You can be a “bad” kid.

4 . I’m pretty good at sticking with things even when they get hard. Bad relationships, unpleasant workplaces, ______ sports — I’ve hung on for months and even years longer than I should have, convinced the situation would ______ if I refused to give up.

After all, isn’t every success story littered with ______? Didn’t Beyoncé lose Star Search, and didn’t Oprah get fired from her first TV job? Quitting is a sign that you lack patience and strong will, or so I was raised to believe.

______, if I look back on all the things I eventually quit, my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. I’ve wasted immeasurable time and energy dragging my heels, determined that I could ______ everyone if I just kept going.

All of us are constantly making tricky choices between going further into familiar territory and ______ to expand our horizons. This is known as the exploration-exploitation trade-off. When we are younger, it’s advantageous to go far on the side of exploration, trying lots of new things because we have plenty of time to ______ later. But as we age, it’s often smarter to double down.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t quit something just because you’ve put a lot of time into it. Economists call this the sunk cost fallacy (谬误): People are more likely to ______ something if they’ve invested a lot of money or effort into it, even when it’s clear that they should ______ their losses and jump ship. This practice is normal and ______, but it’s also unreasonable. If an activity or relationship is making you miserable, that’s important information you shouldn’t ignore.

If you don’t get energy out of doing something, it can be a(n) ______ that this is not for you or that there’s something better you could be doing. Or it could be a sign that you should ______ your goals. Maybe your yogurt startup might not win over investors, but you could still make and sell yogurt at the farmers’ market on weekends.

In fact, dogged persistence in the face of energy-sucking disappointment can ______ depression, and then make you suffer from diseases in the long run.

But the good news is that people can learn to pay better attention to these moments when they’re happening and make ______. The art of quitting isn’t about just letting go whenever there’s an obstacle. It’s about being able to let go when there’s no ______ to success anymore.

5 . Man the Hunter, a key idea in human sciences, proposes that hunting was a major driver of human evolution and that men conducted this activity, leaving women out. It holds that human ancestors had a division of ______, rooted in biological differences between males and females, in which males evolved to hunt and provide, and females tended to children and domestic duties. It assumes that males are ______ superior to females and that pregnancy (怀孕) and child-caring reduce or eliminate (根除) a female’s ability to hunt.

Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century and spread through popular ______. It is represented in museum displays and textbook figures, Saturday morning cartoons and feature films. The thing is, it’s ______.

Researchers look at the damage on our ancestors’ remains for clues to their ______. Neandertal females and males do not vary in ______ patterns or exhibit sex differences in diseases from repetitive actions. Their skeletons show the same modes of wear and tear. This discovery implies that they were engaging in ______ activities, from hunting large game animals to processing fur for leather.

Observations of recent and contemporary societies provide direct evidence of women ______hunting. Agta people of the Philippines, ______, hunt while pregnant and breastfeeding, and they have the same hunting success as Agta men.

A recent study of cross-cultural observational data lasting the past 100 years—much of which was ______ by Man the Hunter contributors—found that women from a wide range of cultures hunt animals for food. 79 percent of the 63 societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies reportedly feature women ______. The women are involved in hunting regardless of their childbearing status.

Much about female exercise science and the ______ of prehistoric women remains to be discovered. But the idea that in the past men were hunters and women were not is absolutely ______ even by the limited evidence we have. Now when you think of “cave people”, we hope, you will imagine a(n) ______ group of hunters surrounding a deer or hitting stone tools together rather than a heavy-browed man with a heavy stick over one shoulder. Hunting may have been remade as a ______ activity in recent times, but for most of human history, it belonged to everyone.

8 . 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   ______.

9 . The sharing economy is an economic model known as a peer-to-peer(P2P)based activity of getting, providing, or sharing goods and services that is often promoted by on-line platforms (平台) It allows persons and groups to make money from the assets (资产) which is not _______ .In a sharing economy, underused assets such as parked cars and spare bedrooms can be _______ when they are not used. In this way, physical assets are shared as _______ .

Concerns about the sharing economy often includes the uncertainty about _______ .While businesses offering rent services are often _______ by local governments, people who don’t have official permission to _______ rent services may not be following these rules or paying the costs. This could mean putting them in a better position that makes it possible for them to ask _______   prices to get a bigger market share.

Another _______ is that lack of watching over businesses will lead to _______ uses of both buyers and sellers in the sharing economy. There have been many cases ________ known to the public like hidden cameras in rented rooms, lawsuits (诉讼)over ________ treatment of ridesharing drivers by the platforms ________ employ them, and even murders of customers by real or ________ ridesharing providers.

There is also a fear that lots of information shared on online platforms can create racial or sex bias (偏见) among users. This can happen when users are allowed to ________ who they will share their homes or cars with, or because of the database of users with poor credit history or bad behaviour ________ .