2 . In modern cities, it is now time as much as space that separates urban functions, as people’s lives are lived not only to different timetables, but also at wildly different rates. The mass timetable of the industrial city, with 9-5 office hours and silent Sundays, has gone. In its ______ is flexi-time, part-time working, Sunday shopping and the 24-hour city.

European cities are ______ these changes perhaps faster than British cities. In at least half a dozen cities in Italy, ______, you will find the Uffici Tempi--the Offices of Time. What they do is try to reorganise time more flexibly in the city, in order to meet new needs. This is particularly relevant for Italian women, an increasing number of whom have to ______ two timetables: work and home. Usually located in the Mayor’s office, the Uffici Tempi bring together transport providers, shop-owners, employers, trade unions, the police and other services to see how their efforts might be better ______. The main aim in all this is to increase the efficiency and productivity of the city. This can mean delaying the starting tunes in schools, offices and factories to avoid rush hours, or having shops opening later in the day but closing later too. One further ______ is that there can be more police about in the evening, patrolling the streets when people most need them.

In a number of German cities, people have been ______ whether the timetable of the future city should be 6x6 or 4x9--working hours, that is. Apparently male workers favour a four-day week, while women workers, on the other hand, favour ______ shorter working days. This would give employees more time in the afternoon to be with children or to get the shopping.

The ______ for public services to adapt to our changing lifestyles has been quite difficult for some of the staff involved. ______, who likes working evenings or Sundays? Nevertheless, many city centres are now open for shopping seven days a week, and a number of them now promote themselves as ‘24-hour cities’, where those with money can drink, eat, dance and even shop the whole ______.

Time is flexible, but buildings aren’t. The ______ between the structure of the city and its uses, over time, is a serious architectural and planning problem. ______ has become the key skill. We are slowly ______ the terms of dormitory suburbs and industrial districts, in favour of mixed- use areas, out-of-town retailing and working from home. There is no doubt that planning theory is being ______ by the changing nature of time in the modern city.

3 . 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   ______.

5 . I don’t usually watch TV at night. Last Thursday night, I finished my homework early and _________to watch TV for half an hour. To my surprise, there was a wonderful _________.

The program was about food waste (食品浪费). It asked cooks (厨师) to make meals from food that people threw away (扔掉). The cooks went to _________to find food. They found lots of bread. The bread was three days old but was _________very good. At some street markets they found bananas and strawberries. The _________was a little brown, but it was OK to eat!

From the program, I learned how much food people throw away every week. It is _________. We waste so much food because we _________so much and we can’t eat it all! The program also showed that some farmers throw away a lot of their vegetables because they aren’t the right _________for the shops!

People don’t want carrots when they are very big or very small, _________ the farmers throw them away or give them to pigs!

The program showed people that food waste is a big problem. We must __________food waste together. From now on, I will eat everything in the fridge (冰箱).

7 . In one elementary school, a class of four-and five-year-olds sit in rows, fascinated by their teacher. As part of the daily routine at the state primary school in Acton, West London, Ms Beshirian holds up cards printed with _____ sounds—“qu”, “k”, “w”—and the children chant them back to her in unison. Later they practise reading sentences made up of sounds they have _____ rehearsed. That is a lot of fish, runs an example.

This is phonics, a way of learning to read in which children are taught to decode words. Teachers have long _____ whether this approach is better than the previously favoured one, in which children learned to recognize _____ words, typically while someone read to them. To critics there is something Gradgrindian (功利的) about phonics, which they argue fails to transmit the joy of reading. _____ , over the past decade or so schools in England have adopted the method. When Nick Gibb, a minister, declared the “debate is over” earlier this year, _____ was silenced.

The shift arises from persuasive evidence. In 2005 a study in Scotland found that children who were taught using phonics were, by the end of the programme, seven months ahead of their _____ reading and spelling ability. Other work has supported the results. Rebecca Allen of the University of Oxford notes that few _____ are backed by such strong evidence.

The _____ is becoming apparent. England’s performance improved in the latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, a cross-country comparison. Sandra McNally, one of the authors, notes that, whereas the boost faded with time for better-off children, who would have ______ learned to read well anyway, it persisted for poor readers and those without English as a first language. “Other approaches rely on existing child vocabulary and life experiences,” says Lydia Cuddy Gibbs, head of early years at Ark, a charity which runs 38 state schools. “Phonics helps to put children on a(n) ______ playing field.”

Nor must phonics kill ______ . In Acton the children often play teacher, and phonics is their favourite class to re-enact. Some applaud their friends with teacherly ______ , says Sarah Charlton, who works at the school. “They’ll walk in and say, ‘Maria did amazing reading today,’” she laughs.

Arguments continue over the best way to teach phonics, and questions such as when whole words should be introduced. But ______ , phonics seems firmly embedded in English schools. “It’s very rare that you get a piece of education practice that you stick with and push over a number of years,” says Sir Kevan Collins of the Education Endowment Foundation. “That’s to be ______ . That’s unusual.”

8 . The world would be a better place if we all had children’s eyes. This is not because children’s eyes are too sharp to allow any blot (污点, 瑕疵) to pass without being ______, but because adults have too many conflicting concerns to keep their eyes open to all wrongdoings.

Not long before, an examination, intended to ______ some police officers to higher positions, was held in Gansu province. Someone ______with a good idea that 18 primary pupils could be invited to act as invigilators (监考人). At that age, students would do as they are told and act fearlessly. ______, they caught 25 officers cheating on the spot, which has caused a stir (轰动, 搅动) and ______the question of whether adult invigilators would _______their duties as well.

The implication of this event goes ______its impact on the work style of local police officers and the examinations. Most people said what these children have done points to the sad fact of ______being less trustworthy. If adults acted as invigilators, they would quite ______turn a blind eye to cheating.

We Chinese have been holding the ______that human nature was good at birth: as ______of blot as a sheet of blank paper, which can be ______with content (good or bad) in the process of growing up. Everything should be done on the basis of certain principles (原则). ______, nowadays the repeated reports of cheating in examinations, selling ranks and ______and embezzling (挪用) public funds paint a ______picture of common social morals. Adults have become too concerned with their own personal gains to ______basic sense of principles. When no one ______ any principle and the only concern is personal interest, everyone will ______not only those who first break the rules.

Besides, cheats are unfair to honest examinees, and when the success of cheats _______more people to cheat, the consequences will be disastrous.

In a word, we adults need to have our eyes as ______as children’s on matters of principle.