1 . A Day in My Wheel Chair

Alex Johnson was born with a rare disorder and got his first wheelchair when he was 7 years old. When he was 11, he arranged to get a bunch of borrowed wheelchairs and then invited his teachers and fellow students to spend a day in them.

Dozens of volunteers quickly learned how complicated it was for Alex to get around the school. Balancing a lunch tray while also rolling down the cafeteria line? Super tricky. Those who participated also learned about the aches and pains Alex struggles with daily. There’s also the arduous, if not impossible, task of rolling a manual wheelchair up and down slopes.

Doors are the worst, they said, because they’re heavy and difficult to pull open from a rolling chair. And although the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) specifies that doorways need to be wide enough to allow a wheelchair and the person’s hands to pass through safely, but many doors in older buildings are just too narrow.

But making the world more accessible for wheelchair users is a public policy issue controlled by government officials, so Alex recently challenged the Tennessee House of Representatives to spend a day in wheelchairs. And 10 men and women took him up on it! For a full day, they worked at their desks and attended all their regular meetings in wheelchairs. The lawmakers had the same eye-opening experiences that Alex’s school pals had.

State Representative Clark Boyd said, “I expected it to be difficult, but I had no idea how frustrating it could be to just simply get around.”

Thanks to comparable wheelchair challenges around the world, more lawmakers are getting the opportunity to learn more about what it’s like for the millions of people living with a mobility disability. “My hope is that through my challenge we can make the world more accessible,” Alex said. “Together, we can change the world, one challenge at a time.”

2 . The El Maestrazgo mountain region of Aragon is one of Spain’s most under-populated areas. There, in the tiny village of Aguaviva, Marcelo Martinez and Gilda Mazzeo, 35-year-old transplants from Buenos Aires, have been learning to embrace their adopted home. “It’s not as isolated as it looks,” says Martinez, pointing out that the nearest town is “only” 30 minutes away. Mazzeo less convinced, but even she is filled with emotion as she recalls how kindly her children were treated when the family first arrived. “They gave us food, clothes, bicycles, everything.”

For the past two years, Aguaviva has been the center of a little-known plan to repopulate Spain’s remote villages with families from Latin America. Settlers are attracted with prepaid flights, jobs, and housing — a ticket out of the poverty that has spread much of their continent. Luis Bricio, Aguaviva’s mayor and founder of the Association of Spanish Towns Against Depopulation, describes his venture as an effort to save places that would otherwise “disappear.” Since the 1950s, reducing birthrates and migration to cities have left Spain with more than 2,000 ghost towns. Many more villages are populated only by handfuls of people in their 80s.

Enter Argentina, a country struggling with an unemployment rate of 12%. In opinion polls, one-third of its citizens have said they would leave if they could. Already, experts estimate, as many as 15,000 Argentines have moved to Spain in the past year, nearly doubling the number already there. Just last week, Spain changed its laws to allow mothers — not just fathers — to pass on nationality, doubling the number eligible (有资格的) to become Spanish citizens to more than 720,000. In Teruel province, where Aguaviva lies, the population is now around 40% of what it was in 1900. “There were only two ways to change the situation,” says Bricio. “Either force people to have more babies or bring in young people from outside. We thought Latin Americans would integrate rapidly. They had the language, the common history.” Bricio placed a classified advertisement in an Argentine paper and made an announcement on a Buenos Aires radio station, targeting couples under 40 with at least two children. By the time he arrived to give his presentation, there were already 6,000 people waiting to talk to him. “Argentina, there was very little chance of work.” says Silvia Hernandez, 33, who recently moved to Teruel with her family. “The life our children have here, they could never have had in Argentina.”

Bricio’s association has now placed 106 adults and 142 children in Spanish villages — 112 of them in Aguaviva. Two years ago, the province was so desperate that it staged a protest in Madrid under the slogan “Does Exist”. More recently, a national paper ran a happier headline: “First baby born in Teruel village in 30 years.”

4 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks ‘with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.

On January 10, Uganda reopened schools after the longest closure in the world    1     the coronavirus pandemic. For most students, it was their first time back in the classroom in nearly two years.

When the buildings first shuttered, the Ministry ofEducation broadcast lessons on TV and radio stations, and some schools handed out printed materials. But this did not last for lack of funding. So the     2     (estimate) 15 million children affected by this closure put their studies on hold.        

Uganda’s National Planning Authority in August 2021 projected that 4.5 million of them will likely not return to school. The reasons for the dropouts are manifold. The teen pregnancy rate rose significantly. And many poor children in urban and rural areas    3     (force) to start working to help support their families.，“They turned children into laborers and that was a loss, especially for a family that has relied for almost two years on child labor,” says Munir Safieldin, the UNICEF Uganda representative.

Plus, in an economy pinched by the pandemic, many families cannot currently afford the fees,     4     start at about $135 per term for high school, and other costs (including academic materials and uniforms).

Children who are able to return school have been promoted one grade level, a decision made by the Ministry of Education to guarantee spots for newly     5     (enter) students. But many families and experts are concerned. Mary Goretti Nakabugo, the executive director of Uwezo Uganda, a nonprofit organization working    6     (promote) equitable quality education, argues that even before the closure, many of Uganda’s younger students had not yet acquired basic fundamentals, such as reading and understanding a text. “This is the time for us to rethink our curriculum, our teaching and learning,     7    students who are unprepared for classes will only end up even     8     (far) behind.”

Kusemererwa Jonathan Henry, a teenager living in Kamwokya, one of the largest slums in the capital of Kampala, had just started high school and made new friends     9     the lockdown started. “We were used to the short school breaks but this was too long. At first, all I would do is sit at home and sleep;, he says. Fortunately, his dad’s financial help combined with his personal savings allowed Jonathan to open a fruit and vegetable stall. ”Before the lockdown, I never knew how to fend for     10     , but now I don’t even need to ask for money to   buy clothes.“ Still, Jonathan longed to get back to class. ”The day a date was announced for us to resume school, I washed my uniforms, bags and polished my shoes, that’s how excited I was to get back.”

5 . People using ad-blocking software who visited the New York Times website in March were shown a message. This read: “The best things in life aren’t _______.” It went on to explain that, “Advertising helps us fund our journalism,” and gave the visitor two options to read the newspaper’s online content: _______ their ad-blocking software or pay for a subscription.

Despite many internet users’ opposition, a number of publishers are now banning ad-blocking software. Aidan Joyce, chief executive of Oriel, says, “Most ad-blocking users do not object to a reasonable advertising experience _______ quality free content.” Mark Thompson, the group’s chief executive, said, “Anyone who refuses to contribute to the creation of high-quality journalism has no right to _______ it.”

To satisfy people who hate advertising, the news organization plans to introduce a higher-priced, advertisement-free _______. Ben Barokas, chief executive of Sourcepoint, thinks that media groups should offer consumers a range of different ways to _______ content, including for-free with ads, micropayments and subscriptions.

However, Sean Blanchfield, chief executive of PageFair, argues that publishers need to exercise care in how they ban ad blockers. “Users have justifiable concerns,” he says. “Ads that are served today have serious privacy and security problems.” Mr. Blanchfield says that PageFair aims to help publishers. “_______ the advertising experience in a way that the typical ad-block user wouldn’t find offensive.”

Publishers that ban ad blockers also risk losing their audience to competitors that turn out more _______. In some ways, that matters little. But internet users are not just _______ consumers; Instead, they often help distribute a publisher’s content by sharing links with friends through email, forums, and social media.

More than half of U.K. adults using an ad blocker said that they would switch it off if doing so was the only way to access a website, according to a survey by YouGov. Meanwhile, Sweden’s biggest publishers will ________ block people next month who use ad-blocking software. The idea is that they will be able to turn the ad-blocking tide with a combined effort.

7 . As Christmas approached, the price of turkey went wild. It didn’t rocket, as some might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started waving. We live in the age of the variable prices. In the eyes of sellers, the right price—the one that will draw the most profit from consumers’ wallets—has become the focus of huge experiments. These sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price.

It may come as a surprise that, in buying a pie, you might be participating in a carefully designed social-science experiment. But this is what online comparison shopping has brought. Simply put, the convenience to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that sellers—in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction—are now staring back through the screen. They are trying to “comparison shopping” us.

They have enough means to do so: the huge data tracks you leave behind whenever you place something in your online shopping cart with top data scientists capable of turning the information into useful price strategies, and what one tech economist calls “the ability to experiment on a scale that’s unimaginable in the history of economics.”

In result, not coincidentally, normal pricing practices—an advertised discount off the “list price,” two for the price of one, or simply “everyday low prices” are giving way to far more crazy strategies.

“In the Internet era, I don’t think anyone could have predicted how complicated these strategies have become,” says Robert Dolan, a professor at Harvard. The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside. The price of the headphones may depend on how budget-conscious your web history shows you to be. The price may even be affected by the price of the mobile phone you use for item search. For shoppers, that means price—not the one offered to you right now, but the one offered to you 20 minutes from now, or the one offered to me, or to your neighbor—may become an increasingly unknowable thing. “There used to be one price for something,” Dolan notes. Now the true price of pumpkin-pie spice is subject to a level of uncertainty.

8 . Catherine Garland, a physics professor, started seeing “the problem” in 2019. She’d laid out the assignment clearly during an engineering course, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.

Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they had saved their project. “Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the Documents folder?” But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Gradually, Garland came to the realization: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations, understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

Garland’s mental model is commonly known as “directory structure”, the hierarchical system (层级体系) of folders used to arrange files. What have caused the mental model to change? It is possible that many students spent their high school years storing documents in the cloud storage like OneDrive and Dropbox rather than in physical spaces. It could also have to do with the other apps they’re accustomed to. “When I want to scroll (滚屏) over to Snapchat, Twitter, they’re not in any particular order, but I know exactly where they are,” says Vogel, who is a devoted iPhone user. Some of it boils down to muscle memory.

It may also be that in an age where every user interface includes a search function, young people have never needed folders or directories. The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search are products of the early 2000s. While many of today’s professors grew up without search functions, today’s students increasingly don’t remember a world without them.

Some may blame the generational incompetence. An international study claimed that only 2 percent of Generation Z (born from 1997 onwards) had achieved the “digital native” level of computer literacy. But the issue is likely not that modern students are learning fewer digital skills, but rather that they’re learning different ones. Garland, for all her knowledge of directory structure, doesn’t understand Instagram nearly as well as her students do. “They use computers one way, and we use computers another way,” Garland emphasizes. “That’s where the problem lies.”

10 . Discover how trade unions have shaped the way people work.

If you are travelling by train this summer you may find this journey is affected by the national rail strike.     1     This year lots of workers are taking strike action and asking for better pay. Teachers, for example, are thinking about whether to go on strike in the autumn. Strikes are usually organized by trade unions. Read on to find out what trade unions are and how they have shaped the way people work.

What is a trade union?

It is an organization that looks after the rights of people who work in the same industry, do a specific job or work at the same company. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) represents 80,000 transport workers, and the National Education Union has more than 460,000 members who work in teaching. Trade unions give their members a strong, group voice and support when dealing with the companies they work for.     2    . There are trade unions for lots of professions including actors, doctors, farmers, journalists, nurses and teachers.

How did trade unions start and grow?

Workers have been organizing themselves into unions for hundreds of years. During the Industrial Revolution (1760 - 1840), when lots of people left the countryside to work in factories in harsh conditions, workers began pressing their employers for better pay and safety rules. In 1871, the Trade Union Act, which made it legal to form trade unions, was passed. Since then, trade unions have made a big difference to the way people work, helping to set a minimum wage, making it illegal for children to work, and making sure workers can have holidays.

How do trade unions achieve their aims?

    3     If they can’t agree, then union members can vote to take action, which could include going on strike. A group of women who made car seat covers in Dagenham, Esses, went on strike in 1968 because they were being paid less than men for doing a similar job. It lasted four weeks and the factory had to stop making cars because no-one else could make the seats. Eventually, the women got more money.

Does everyone agree with strike action?

No. Strikes can seriously disrupt daily life. A rail strike stops people getting to school and work and a teacher strike could close schools. This year’s national rail strike is the biggest in the UK for 30 years, and the next strike day (27 July) is due just before the Commonwealth Games starts in Birmingham, England. The Government says this will harm the event but Mick Lynch of the RMT says the public support the strike.     4     Greta Thunberg’s School Strike for Climate, for example, when she protested every Friday instead of going to school, grew into an international movement.