2 . Taking A Vacation Could Help You Live Longer

Thinking about skipping vacation days? Don’t. One of the longest follow-up studies in the world finds vacations can actually prolong your life.

And if you think your spin classes (动感单车课程) and clean eating will make up for _________ your dream cruise trip and save you from your jam-packed, hard driving life, think again. An improved, healthier lifestyle doesn’t _________ working too hard and not taking your holidays, University of Helsinki professor Timo Strandberg said Tuesday at the annual European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress. “_________ can be a good way to relieve stress.”

The new findings are a part of the Helsinki Businessmen Study, research that for decades has_________1,222 male executives born between 1919 and 1934. Each had at least one risk factor for heart disease, for example, smoking, _________, or had high blood pressure. The research, which began in the 1960s, _________ into a longitudinal (纵向的) study and was extended through 2014, focusing in part on how mid-life risk factors can impact the _________in old age.

For the study, the men were split into two groups. In one control group, men lived their lives as they _________ did and did not meet with the study’s investigators. Men in the other group, a(n) _________group, were given advice on how to improve their health. These men were asked to exercise, improve their diets, reach a healthy weight or stop smoking.

At the study’s 15-year check-in, Strandberg found that if their vacations __________, the men who improved their lifestyles had a 37 percent higher chance of death rate. What is to __________? Working too hard, not sleeping enough and not taking enough vacation.

While __________, this new research won’t likely impact most Americans’ vacation habits. Most American workers don’t get that many paid days to begin with. Even if they do have the time, many workers feel they can’t __________ it. Americans have put off vacation because they feel they have too much work to do and too many family __________.

Given that experts find that vacation can help you be more productive when you return to work, maybe it’s time to put forward the request for a few days __________.

3 . Deepfake Are Deeply Troubling

A recent video on the internet has Coco Lee, who died last year, talking to her fans and saying, “From the moment I left this world, I can always feel your endless love and support.” The video looked _________, but it was a “deepfake” created by AI.

AI has _________ to the point where it has become difficult to distinguish what is real from what isn’t. These types of deepfakes are now all over the internet where we see people, usually celebrities and politicians, saying things which they didn’t really say. One “deepfake” has Taylor Swift _________ a brand of cookware. Some “creative” person used AI to manipulate (操控) her image and _________ to make it appear that she were speaking for the product.

But there is a more _________ trend in deepfakes that has become more prevalent (普遍的). As with the Coco Lee deepfake, there are people using AI to “resurrect (复活)” their lost loved ones and _________ them. In one recent high-profile case you’re probably aware of, the famous musician Bao Xiaobo used AI to “resurrect” his daughter, who died at the age of twenty-two. With the technology, he is able to talk to her and ask her questions. Though he knew it was fake, he didn’t _________because he missed her very much.

The _________ consequences of not “letting go” of a loved one can be serious. It may cause a person to live in a fantasy world instead of accepting the healthy and necessary process of grieving and _________ with his or her life.

__________, there is a legal aspect to AI deepfakes which has yet to be thoroughly considered. Can a dead person’s image be manipulated to say things which they didn’t say and wouldn’t have said if they were __________? Can a person’s image be copyrighted to prevent this from happening? These are some of the questions that __________ will have to consider, and courts will have to decide.

In 1931, the British author Aldous Huxley wrote a novel called Brave New World, which was about a future __________ by technology. In many ways we are living in this “Brave New World” and are __________ our “humanity” with all its faults, virtues and limitations. I’m sorry that Coco Lee is gone, and I’m sorry that Tino Bao’s daughter is gone, but grieving is a part of life, and grief, as they say, is the __________for love.

5 . “It’s almost a moral duty that museums should be free,” said Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 2002, when a ticket to MOMA cost $12. In October MOMA started charging $30, the latest in a series of price _______ involving the Metropolitan Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and so on.

Higher energy and labour costs have pushed up ticket prices in Europe, too. Prices have remained _______ only in Asia and the Middle East, where museums are younger and state funding is especially generous.

Ticket fees may seem high, particularly in destination cities where tourists are _______ to be discouraged by spending a few more dollars. But whatever museums _______ , it is not covering their operating costs. The Association of Art Museum Directors reported in 2018 that ticket sales accounted on average for just 7% of total _______ at American art museums. Memberships contributed another 7%. The _______ of budgets usually come from charitable donations, grants and retail operations.

European museums are less _______ admissions fees, because they are often heavily subsidized (补助) by governments. All national institutions in Britain offer free admission, as do most state-run museums in China while in America some 30% are free. Some observers have repeated Mr Lowry’s call for museum to stop charging for _______ entirely.

_______ price s go against museums’goal of sharing art with a more diverse public. They could also speed up the already steep decline in the share of Americans attending museums and galleries.

Declining public interest is a challenge for institutions that rely heavily on public support. Those who choose not to visit a museum today may be the people who ________ government subsidies or refuse to write personal cheques as sponsors in a few years. Those who spend time inside museums’galleries are more likely to grasp their richness and want to ________ their own riches in them.

Yet significantly reducing costs may not actually do much to ________   new audiences either. If tickets were free, “people who typically come anyway might come more often. ________ that, you’re not really changing your demographic (观众结构), says an economist who studies pricing in the arts. He ________ museums to the best American university: Harvard could afford to make tuition free for all, but many wealthy students who do not need the gift would be among the biggest beneficiaries(受益者). As museums throughout the West debate what price is right, most are unlikely to conclude the answer is ________, “moral duty” or not.

6 . Methane (甲烷) is a greenhouse gas. Over 20 years it has over 80 times the planet-cooking power of carbon dioxide, and is _________ for nearly 45%of warming today. Because methane is the main _________ of natural gas, much of man-made emissions comes from the energy industry. Yet because it is short-lived, controlling methane offers the world its best possible chance for _________ progress against climate change.

As COP28, the UN’s climate summit, gets _________ in Dubai, it is greatly encouraging, therefore, that the chances of such a deal on methane are good. Negotiators must _________ at a rare opportunity to strike one.

The reason a deal looks possible is that the politics are promising in all the biggest markets. China has recently announced that it will start including methane in its national climate plans. America will soon finalize regulations to _________ methane emissions from its huge oil and gas sector, including measures that cover leaky pipelines and storage. And the European Union has also agreed on tough methane standards, covering both domestic sources and _________ fossil fuels.

_________ are helping, too. A range of new technologies for monitoring methane will help _________ large sources of emissions from the energy industry. Because oil and gas firms can often sell methane (rather than wastefully burning or releasing it), many investment s to avoid __________ will pay for themselves. Most firms do not invest because of the trouble, higher returns on other projects, or wells’ distance from consumers. Whatever the reason, they suffer no __________ for adding needlessly to global warming.

Since green-washing, the process of conveying a false impression about how some products or measures are environmentally sound, is quite common, if a global methane deal is to be more than that, __________, it will need rigour (缜密). Methane-control seemed to __________ at the UN climate summit in Glasgow two years ago, when negotiators __________ came up with a proposal to cut emissions by 30% by 2030．Yet the deal was voluntary, and had no enforcement mechanisms (机制); emissions have since __________. An agreement this time round must link promises to national climate plans and, crucially, to domestic enforcement mechanisms.

7 . Perhaps no issue attracts more senior leadership attention than growth does, and for good reason._______in gains and profits is the standard by which we tend to measure the competitive fitness and health of companies. Analysts, investors, and boards are especially concerned about growth_______to get insight into stock prices. _______are attracted to faster-growing companies because they offer better opportunities for advancement and higher pay. Suppliers prefer faster-growing customers because working with them improves their own growth prospects.

While sustained profitable growth is a nearly universal goal, it is a(n) _______one for many companies. Many researches conducted on the long-term patterms of growth in U.S.corporations suggest that when inflation is_______, most companies barely grow. _______in an analysis of 10,897 publicly held U.S.companies from 1976 to 2019, researchers found that firms in the top quartile grew at an inflation-adjusted average of 11.8% per year, but those in the lower three quartiles experienced little or no growth (0.3%, 0.03%, and 0.5%, respectively). And the majority of firms in the top quartile were unable to _______ superior growth performance for more than a few years.

Over the past two decades, I have tried to understand why some companies are effective at sustaining growth. I have found that while the usual explanations, such as market forces and technological changes do play a role, many companies’ growth problems are done by themselves. _______, firms approach growth in a highly reactive, opportunistic manner. When market demand is booming, they throw resources at developing new capacity, and build out organizational infrastructure without thinking through the _______— for example, whether their operating systems and processes can scale, how rapid growth might affect corporate culture and what would happen if demand slows. In the process of chasing growth, companies can easily destroy the things that made them __________in the first place, such as their capacity for innovation, their great customer service, or their unique cultures.

9 . History has not yet _______ what we will definitively call the postmillennial cohort (2000年后出生的人) that now _______ more than 60 million people in the U.S. These kids and _______ with no concept of life _______ the Internet have so far been called the App Generation and Generation Z. They’ve been referred to as Homelanders, having grown up under the ghost of terorism. They’ve also been _______ the Plurals, for their historic diversity, as well as the Founders, at least by MTV.

Whatever we _______ naming them, marketers and academies are turning their attention to this group, which has billions in _______ and is already shaping the culture. This generation is growing up “totally and utterly connected,” says California State University psychologist Larry Rosen. Experts like Rosen have concerns about these kids’ Google-inspired expectations that everything be _______. They worry about their inability to _______ even five seconds of boredom. And they worry about the demands that come with ________ several identities online, from Facebook to Twitter to Snapchat. “There’s so much pressure on young people, who are still ________ their identities, to present this crystallized, idealized identity online,” says the University of Washington’s Katie Davis.

Historian Neil Howe sees ________ with the Silent Generation, the spoilt, risk-avoiding, “nice” generation of kids who grew up during the Great Depression and World War II, although some marked differences are found. Today’s youths are also coming of age among geopolitical trouble and fears about the economy, he says, ________ schools emphasize an intense far-reaching sensitivity to other kids. He suspects this ________ will be known for being well behaved and perhaps boring the culture by playing it safe. “There are typical examples that occur repeatedly,” Howe says, “even if they go by different ________.”

10 . 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.