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   ______.

3 . 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).

5 . 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.

8 . Teachers have always had to deal with cheating students. In today’s high-tech world, new   ________ are making it much easier for students to _________. Recent studies have shown that most _________ in the United States now have access to smartphones. Experts say much of the cheating is done with the help of smartphones.

Nile Nickel is a technology and social media expert. He says many students put _________ into their smartphones to cheat and then hide their cheating by _________ other devices to view the information. Earlier this year, officials _________ several Thai students cheating this way during exams.

Denise Pope, an expert at Stanford University, once said, “Some kids are doing well in school, and they are _________ cheating because they need to _________ their grades. They feel the _________ of keeping a really high grade point average.” According to Pope, improving the learning and testing process can help cut down on cheating. “What I mean by that is to create tasks where it’s almost ___________ to cheat,” she said.

Pope adds that changing the __________ tests are structured can prevent cheating. She says the best tests __________ students to write their answers instead of choosing from a list of choices.

But Pope points out that one of the most important ways to help __________ cheating is to get teachers, students and parents to talk __________ about it. She says this can help students better ___________ the reasons for holding themselves to a high standard of honesty.

9 . Environmental problems have been recognized as one of the main challenges that we have to overcome in the 21st century. The fact that the environment is getting worse and worse is believed to have become a _________ to our survival. To solve this problem, all the countries in the world should join together _________ working individually for their own interests. 

People support international cooperation for the reason that the _________ of environmental problems is normally on a global scale. It is common sense that we_________ the same biosphere (生物圈), whose components are linked. For example, a stream in one country can be polluted by the dirty water poured by the _________ country. It should be noted that some countries do not have _________ resources to reduce pollution, even though these countries have realized the importance of environmental protection. 

These countries can _________ with the developed countries and obtain technology and experience so as to carry out environmentally friendly policies continuously. 

_________ the importance of international cooperation, countries should take measures to make some changes. It’s fair to say that countries are_________ with different environmental problems. For example, greenhouse gases in China are __________ created by the power generation industry__________ those in the United States are primarily due to the increase in car__________. 

The technologies and methods that are__________ in most countries may not be effective in some countries. In addition, countries should enforce some environmental laws and raise citizens’ __________ of protecting the environment. 

__________, countries should make a joint effort to solve the global environmental problems.

10 . For me, it’s the moment I know that New Year has truly begun. I prepare a glass of wine and sit down to ______ New Year cards.

I love sending cards to the mixture of people who’ve adorned (装扮) my life, even if I now ______ see them. I enjoy pushing stamped envelopes into the postbox and decorating my place with the cards I’ve ______.

A report says that 80% of people would prefer a(n) ______ card over an e-card. However, we send around 100 million fewer cards every year, thanks to social media.

I ______ it. When you’re used to your WhatsApp pinging non-stop, the idea of uncapping a pen seems out of date. But it’s because we have to put more ______ into choosing, writing and sending cards that the ritual becomes so ______.

What saddens me is that while many people ______ social lives online, there are some, ______ the elderly, who aren’t good at online communication and for whom a card is badly needed comfort that they haven’t been ______. One friend, who has just moved to a different city where he ______ no one, ended up decorating his house with cards sent to the previous (以前的) owners, just to fight off his ______.

So this New Year, let’s put down our phones, ______ those dusty address books and send cards to our cousins and friends. The ______ they will feel when one gets cards instead of the usual electricity bills will make it worth the ______.