1 . There is growing interest in East Japan Railway Co. ltd, one of the six companies, created out of the privatized national railway system. In an industry lacking exciting growth ________, its plan to use real-estate assets in and around train stations ________ is drawing interest.

In a plan called “Station Renaissance” that it ________ in November, JR East said that it would ________ using its commercial spaces for shops and restaurants, extending them to ________ more suitable for the information age. It wants train stations as pick-up ________ for such goods as books, flowers and groceries ________ over the Inter. In a country where city ________ depend heavily on trains ________ commuting, about 16 million people a day go to its train stations anyway, the company ________. So, picking up commodities at train stations ________ consumers extra travel and missed home deliveries. JR East already has been using its station ________ stores for this purpose, but it plans to create ________ spaces for the delivery of Inter goods.

The company also plans to introduce ________ cards—known in Japan as IC cards because they use integrated circuit for ________ information ________ train tickets and muter passes ________ the magic ones used today, integrating them into a/an ________ pass. This will save the company money, because ________ for IC cards are much less expensive than magic systems. Increased use of IC cards should also ________ the space needed for ticket vending.

2 . Today’s youth will drive tomorrow’s growth. Young people have always confused their elders. Today’s youngsters are no different. They have thin wallets but ________ tastes. They long for authenticity while being constantly immersed in an artificial digital world. They ________ convenience and abundance. As they start spending in earnest, brands are trying to understand what these walking paradoxes (悖论) ________ and how they shop. The answers will define the next era of consumerism.

A good place to start analyzing the psyche of young consumer is to consider the ________ that has shaped them. At one end of the scale, today’s 30-somethings came of age in the midst of the global financial crisis of 2007-2009. Their younger peers were slightly ________, beginning their careers in years when tightening labour markets had pushed up wages until the covid-19 pandemic turned many of their lives upside down.

These two big ________ have contributed to pessimism among the young people who experienced them. A study found a widespread ________ among Gen Zs that they would be able to afford to retire. Less than half believed they would ever own a home.

In many ways youngsters’ shopping habits, like their lives, are defined by the “________ economy”. The popularity of social media means there are many new ways of attracting consumers’ eyeballs. Most young shoppers never knew a world without smartphones. More than two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-old Americans spend four hours or more on their devices each day.

These “always-on purchasers” often avoid a weekly shop so that they can have quicker ________ of everything from fashion to furniture. They like subscriptions, often favoring shared access to products over outright ownership, which has ________ online-rental sites and streaming services.

The internet has also changed how the young discover brands. Print, billboard or TV advertising has ________ social media. Instagram and TikTok are where the young look for inspiration, particularly for goods where ________ matter, such as beauty, fashion, and sportswear. ________ physical shops are not entirely out of favor. They can be successful as long as the experience feels personal and, ideally, integrates virtual and physical worlds.

How the young shop is clearly shifting. What they buy, too, is changing. What older generations consider optional, such as wellness and luxury, has become ________ for the young.

More broadly, young consumers claim to be more ________ than previous generations. Some of these values are centered around identity (race, gender and so on). Others stem from things the young care about, such as climate change.

3 . Please stop ruining children’s summer camp

Teslie Conrad is the director of Clemson Outdoor Lab in South Carolina, which runs several different youth summer camps. Clemson _______ cell phones and other electronic devices in summer camps. And according to the American Camp Association, most sleep-away camps in the United States _______ access to cell phones.

This makes sense. We traditionally think of summer camps as a place where we get to swim in a lake, camp under the stars and make new _______ over campfires and outdoor adventures, not one where we text and play video games.

Researchers say that campers develop invaluable social skills, while facing risks and working their way through their feelings of homesickness — all _______. “It’s kind of like letting go of everything and coming to a different world,” says Alexa Sherman, an 11-year-old camper. Many of the campers there say they _______ YouTube and Snapchat, but they quickly come to appreciate the hands-on activities and in-person friendships.

The people who have the _______ time letting go, camp directors say, aren’t necessarily the campers themselves, but instead their parents.

Barry Garst studies youth development at Clemson University. He said that whether you call them “helicopter”, “snowmobile” or “lawnmower” parents, over-involved parenting is having a negative overall effect and is _______ the types of positive interpersonal experiences these camps are meant to provide for youth. Not weather, not water safety, not dangerous bears. It’s parents who call every day demanding _______ on their kids and who expect to hear from the camp director about every skinned knee.

Meg Barthel, the lead girls’ counselor at camp Echo, carries a device with access to Wi-Fi around camp. “I have to _______ the mothers who are used to having constant communication with their daughters,” she says. How many ________ a day? “Up to 100.”

Some camps address parents’ ________ for updates by posting pictures and videos online. But sometimes this can have the ________ effect. In response, they’ll often receive the following phone call: “Hello, camp director, I was on your ________ and I don’t see them. Are they OK? Were they sent to the hospital?”

Research on over-parenting, says Garst, shows that when parents behave this way, the development of a child’s sense of ________ can be slowed or can become altogether halted. The parents are sending the message that they don’t think their kids can get through tough moments on their own, and the kids pick up on this attitude. “Children are not really learning how to ________ for themselves.”

4 . Jealousy is a motive of immense power. Although you are often ________ aware of being jealous or envious of someone, sometimes the actual reasons for the envy are buried in your unconsciousness and hidden by rationalizations. ________, what you really value in life is more often revealed by asking yourself who you are jealous of rather than asking yourself directly “what do I value.” The ________ often takes into account what society expects you to value and you are aware only of what you should want ________ what you really want. Envy and jealousy, on the other hand, kick in as a gut reaction (直觉反应) in your emotional system long ________ you become conscious of it.

Introspection (反省) which can help one achieve a deeper understanding of emotions is unfashionable in contemporary psychology largely due to the lasting effects of behaviorism. ________ this view, we will argue that introspection can be a valuable source of insights into the internal logic and evolutionary underlying principle of certain complex emotions like envy. Of course, ________ can be rightfully raised against the purely subjective exercise of introspection, which is why it is essential to eventually test these assumptions by using a rigorous scientific approach. But ________ one can have fun speculating (沉思) on possibilities of finding why.

What ________ jealousy, beyond the obvious of someone who is better off? And can the functional logic of the causes be explained in evolutionary terms; i.e., what might be their _______ value? Through introspecting on ________ and through informally surveying friends, students, colleagues, etc., we are trying to come up with a reasonable evolutionary scenario (设想).

Let’s think about envy, too. The whole purpose of envy is to ________ you to act either by independently trying harder (envy) or by coveting (贪求) and stealing what the other has (jealousy). This is why jealousy has a (n) ________ component, but envy is more positive sometimes even being associated with admiration.

In this book, we can show that there is often an evolutionary hidden ________ that drives this human psychological tendency, and makes it comprehensible. Evolution has ________ into you an emotion (jealousy) that is caused by certain very specific “releasers” or social cues, which is largely insensitive to what the other person’s final state of happiness is.

5 . Foreign aid and NGOs can make things worse when disaster strikes

Nearly all of us are collective donors in some sense - when governments send relief to disaster areas, the money they use comes from taxpayers. Many of us are also ______ donors, sending funds directly from our own wallets to charitable organizations. But in the past 10 to 15 years, accusations of ______ relief efforts and unused donations have generated concern among donors. These concerns are not ______; large-scale international disaster relief can have drawbacks that range from wasting resources to seriously undermining (削弱) local governments.

One of the biggest challenges to disaster relief is coordination (协调). After disaster strikes, immediate necessities are important, but what is the best way to ______ them? Unfortunately, pouring donated items into a disaster area can ______ relief efforts. Their arrival in large numbers can cause “the second disaster”, ______ relief workers with extra responsibilities and taking up precious space.

Then there are the consequent effects of ______ for donations for sudden big emergencies. A heartfelt expression of feeling can harm other charitable efforts by redirecting funds. The 2007 economic decline, ______, hit US charitable giving which didn’t recover until 2014. In such a time of donation ______, increasing donations to a disaster area can take funds away from other efforts that might be able to use it better.

If coordination is good and immediate relief goes well, damaged communities move into the ______ phase. For individuals, this includes returning to work, and recollecting personal networks, all of which require ______ to basic public services. The charitable supply of these services can have ______ consequences. Most philanthropic (慈善的) organizations want to ______ their rebuilding efforts with local workers. This practice is beneficial to a post-disaster economy as it provides a(n) ______ source of wages. But if salaries and work standards of these visiting organizations are higher than those offered in the recovery area, these visitors end up causing an intemal ______. Top employees are no longer available or willing to work in the public sector.

7 . If you survey American parents about what they want for their kids, more than 90 percent say one of their top priorities is that their children be caring. This makes sense: Kindness and concern for others are held as _________ in nearly every society. But when you ask children what their parents _________ for them, 81 percent say their parents value achievement and happiness over caring.

Kids learn what’s important to adults not by listening to what we say, but by _________ what gets our attention. And in many developed societies, parents now pay more attention to individual achievement and happiness than anything else. However much we _________ kindness and caring, we’re not actually showing our kids that we value these traits (特点).

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that kindness appears to be _________. An analysis of annual surveys of American college students showed a substantial drop from 1979 to 2009 in imagining the _________ of others.

It’s not just that people care less; they seem to be _________ less, too. In one experiment, a sociologist left behind thousands of what appeared to be lost letters in dozens of American cities in 2001, and again in 2011. From the first round to the second one, the proportion of letters that was _________ by helpful passersby and put in a mailbox declined by 10 percent. Psychologists find that kids born after 1995 are just as likely as their parents to _________ that other people experiencing difficulty should be helped — but they feel less personal responsibility to take action themselves. __________, they are less likely to donate to charity, or even to express an interest in doing so.

If we truly care less about one another, some of the blame lies with the values parents have __________. In our own lives, we’ve observed many fellow parents becoming so focused on achievement that they fail to cultivate kindness. They seem to regard their children’s successes as a personal badge (徽章) of honor and their children’s failures as a(n) __________ reflection on their own parenting.

Other parents unconsciously __________ kindness, seeing it as a source of weakness in a fiercely competitive world. But there’s no reason parents can’t teach their kids to care about others and themselves — to be both __________ and self-respecting. If you encourage children to consider the needs and feelings of others, sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t. But they’ll soon learn that if you don’t __________ others considerately, they may not be considerate toward you. And those around you will be less likely to be considerate of one another, too.

8 . How Coronavirus Is Changing the Dating Game for the Better

If you are single and dating, you are no doubt facing special challenges during this pandemic. But as a biological anthropologist (人类学家) who has spent some 40 years studying romantic love around the world and the brain activity of this ancient and universal human passion, I have come to recognize that in some ways, coronavirus has given you a _________.

Foremost, coronavirus has _________ things down. This pandemic has forced singles to return to a more traditional _________: getting to know someone before falling in love. I am hopeful that the _________ mode of dating will give singles additional time to select a truly appropriate mate as well as enable romance to develop slowly — even flourish long term.

Let’s look at some of the ways in which coronavirus has changed the dating game, and how those changes might provide some lasting benefits.

Video Chats Are In

During the second weekend of April, dating site Match.com asked members several questions about how they have changed their courtship habits since the world shut down. An astonishing 6,004 men and women _________. And they are doing something new: video chatting. Before COVID-19, only six percent of these singles were using video chatting to court. Now, 69 percent are _________ to video chatting with a potential partner.

And there are some real advantages to seeing these potential partners on FaceTime, Zoom, or some other internet _________. We are walking billboards of who we are. Your haircut (or lack of haircut during these pandemic times), your preppy shirt, your revealing blouse ... All these and many more visible traits (特质) signal your _________, education, and interests. _________, specific brain regions respond almost __________ to assess two things about a likely mate: their personality and their physical appeal. We do this within seconds of seeing him or her.

Time to Talk

During the coronavirus lockdowns, many of you now have more time. You are not __________ in the morning, commuting to work, or meeting pals after office hours. Many of you have more time to talk. __________, you have something important to talk about. During this pandemic, singles are likely to share far more __________ thoughts of fear and hope - and get to know vital things about a potential partner fast. Psychologists report that this __________ — the process of disclosing one’s innermost feelings, attitudes and experiences - promotes closeness, love and __________. These are the foundation stones of a strong partnership.

9 . High school biology teacher Kelly Chavis knew smartphones were a problem in her class. For one class period, students used a whiteboard to count every Snapchat, Instagram, text, call or other notifications that appeared on their phones.   Chavis   told   students   not   to _________ these notifications.

Teachers around the country have done similar experiments, usually _________ dozens of markings on the whiteboard. Chavis, who teaches honours-level classes, was _________ by the results of her experiment.

Chavis is among a growing number of teachers, parents and health experts who believe that smartphones are now partly to blame for increasing the levels of student _________. The use of electronic devices is so _________ that the National Education Association newsletter said it was a “mental health tsunami (海啸)”.

Tests, after-school activities and problems at home can increase _________ for students. But research now _________ that smartphones and social media are some of the main reasons for the rising levels of uneasiness.

Last year, an editorial in the journal Paediatrics proposed that doctors ask young patients about their social media use as part of routine exams. Three researchers wrote that too much social media use might _________ the development of mental health disturbance in at-risk teenagers, such as feelings of _________, depression and anxiety.

Researchers are still not sure whether phones cause student depression or depression causes phone use. __________ 70 percent of teens see anxiety and depression as major problems among their peers, according to a Pew Research report. Nearly 60 percent of parents said they were __________ about the influence of social media on their children’s physical and mental health.

Schools are starting to take steps to deal with the problem. Many public schools pay outside companies to watch students’ social media activity for signs of __________. Others invite in yoga teachers and comfort dogs to help __________ students. Some schools have organized unplugged events — days in which people do not use their electronic devices. Less than 20 percent of students and school employees took part, __________ the control that technology has over their daily lives.

Some parents are not letting their children get smartphones until they grow up. Deirdre Birmingham of New Jersey __________ a campaign called “Wait Until Eighteenth” because she didn’t think her video game-loving 10-year-old son was ready for a smartphone. The campaign involves groups of parents who have children in the same class. These parents agree not to let their children get phones until they are teenagers.

10 . In December, 43-year-old doctoral researcher Nina Jane Patel put on a headset and entered Meta’s virtual world to see what was happening that day. “Within seconds of being there, there were three avatars (虚拟替身) near me,” she says. “Suddenly they were taking selfies … I couldn’t see at first that they were touching the avatar’s upper body … They were yelling at me, ‘Don’t _______ you don’t like it, this is what you came for.’”

The incident took place in the metaverse (元宇宙) — an immersive virtual world accessed via wearable technology — in which tech groups expect us to spend a far greater proportion of time in the future, both playing and, _______, working.

When it comes to_______, however, it is unclear what rules of engagement apply in a universal digital realm. What counts as harassment (骚扰) in the metaverse? Can an avatar be_______ against, or worse? Will national legislation protect employees or does working in the metaverse require a(n)_______ rule book altogether?

The global workforce has grown far more accustomed to working _______ in the past two years because of the Covid-19 pandemic and companies have already started experimenting with virtual reality in the workplace. Hilton hotel group, for example, uses it to train staff on how to handle guests. And last year Microsoft, in its first step towards _______ the physical and digital worlds of work, began rolling out a plan to enable workers to appear on its Teams collaboration software as avatars.

But the metaverse takes hybrid working a step further, and brings with it a host of tricky employment law issues. These range from practical challenges, such as how are employees paid, to more _______ ones, like whether avatars have a legal identity.

The physical world of work is regulated by _______ legal frameworks. In California, for example, workers can be fired with no notice, while in Holland, employees generally cannot be sacked without ________ from the court or Dutch employment agency. In the metaverse, ________, the national employment law that applies is not immediately obvious.

“In one sense, the metaverse is just another platform. And the fundamental principles of an employment relationship ________ regardless of platform,” says Jonathan Chamberlain, a partner at Gowling WLG. “Arguably, in the era of Teams and Zoom, many of us are already in it. But the employment relationship has until relatively recently been largely geographically ________; employment law is still largely country or state specific. You often cannot ________ your country’s statutory (法定的) employment protection system even if you — or your boss — wanted to.”

So far, no one has decided what legal framework should apply to a decentralised digital workspace, in which workers may be mobile, and geographically ________ from each other and the company they work for.