1 . Cloud computing is set to change how people communicate,work and learn.But do you know it may also affect how you are hired for a job in the future?

It was once more common for people to find jobs advertised in the newspaper and then physically send applications to organizations. Now we primarily look online using job sites and apply for those jobs using cloud recruitment (招聘) services.

However, many new technologies, with the help of artificial intelligence(AI),are changing recruitment and the way we communicate with those holding the key to our dream jobs.

AI recruitment technology, such as ENGAGE Talent, is making it easier for recruiters to find potential employees by analyzing networking sites, like LinkedIn, for appropriate candidates. Primarily based on keywords, circumstance changes or current company performance, it can find candidates that haven’t clearly expressed an interest in changing jobs. Helen Poitevin, research director of IT research firm Gartner, stated, “This method of finding a passive candidate is the subject of a lot of investment and innovation today.”

Another innovation designed to help recruiters is AI assistants, similar to Apple’s Siri. CNN reported that graduates in the future might have to be overseen by a virtual assistant before getting a real interview for highly competitive graduate programs.

Companies such as Hire Vue have already developed software that plays prerecorded questions for candidates and analyzes their responses for different factors, including grammar, facial expressions and tones. It can then produce a result that defines the candidate’s qualities and recommends whether they should be considered.

The US graduate Sarah Ali has been through eight Hire Vue interviews. She told CNN, “Once I understood the AI interview process, I started thinking of it as a game and how I could optimize (优化) myself.”

This interview process has yet become the mainstream outside the US, but with the power of cloud computing, how long will it be before this tech is used worldwide?

Nowadays, it is common that more and more high school students open their own microblogs on the Internet. For one thing, it can provide a colourful platform to show their talent. For     1    , it is a useful way to release their     2     (press). And all these make it more and more popular with high school students.     3     many parents and teachers hold a different view. They think that managing a microblog will take a lot of time and energy,     4     should be used to study.

I am     5     (great) in favour of this activity. Today the Internet     6     (play) an important role in our life. Therefore, as high school students of the Information Age, we need to learn to make use of this     7     (meaning) tool to communicate and display ourselves.

What’s more, opening and organising microblogs need various abilities such as writing, designing, being good     8     computer skills and so on. Only if we master those abilities can we make a successful microblog. As a result, we improve ourselves while     9     (organise) our microblogs.

In fact, the microblog itself is of little harm. It is your attitude towards it that     10     (matter). We should take advantage of it and avoid some bad effects.

4 . Every festival has its own meaning. Labor Day, for example, celebrates the value of hard work. Thanksgiving is about showing thanks to people around you. And Valentines’ Day is a time when you express love to your loved ones. But somehow it now seems that all festivals we just care about one thing — shopping. And that can be a big problem.

“In a way, over-consumption (过度消费) is the mother of all our environmental problems,” Kalle Lasn once told CNN. Lasn is the organizer of Buy Nothing Day, a day set up in Canada in 1992 to fight against unhealthy spending habits, and has now become an international event. It’s held on the day, which is known as Black Friday — a famous shopping day in the US and Canada.

You can see the irony (讽刺) here.

Even though the idea of Buy Nothing Day was brought up 26 years ago, we seem to need it now more than ever. It’s just as Lasn said, all the different kinds of pollution in our lives today — bad air quality, the reduction of forest area, endangered animal species, and plastic bags found in the ocean — seem to be the same cause: over-consumption.

The latest example is the Singles’ Day shopping craze of Nov 11, which saw a new sales record. But as Nie Li, a campaigner at Greenpeace, told Reuters, “Record-setting over-consumption means record-setting waste.” And it was reported that last year the Singles’ Day packages left more than 160,000 tons of waste, including plastic and cardboard. The Collins Dictionary has also just named “single-use” its Word of the Year, pointing out the problem that there’re too many things we tow out after only using them once.

So, Buy Nothing Day might only be here for one day a year, but it’s not just to remind us to the a break from shopping on that day, but to change our lifestyle completely, focusing on fun “with people we care about” rather than wasting money on useless things.

6 . “Farm to table” is the name of a movement that encourages people to eat locally grown food. The farm­to­table idea has become more popular in recent years. But there is also a movement that brings “table to farm”. Its purpose is to connect people to the land and to honor local farmers by creating a sort of restaurant without walls.

Its founder, Jim Denevan, got the idea for this kind of “culinary adventure (美食探险)”, as he called it, ten years ago. He recently prepared tables for more than a hundred people at Briars Farm in Virginia. He and his eight­member team arrived the night before. Chefs (厨师) from a local restaurant prepared the dinner.

Jim Denevan’s brother is a farmer and he himself is a chef. He thought that the idea of a meal served right on the farm made sense, though not everyone agreed.

“But I wanted to make the idea work, so I decided to cross the country,” said Denevan. “I went all the way across the United States and set the table on farms, ranches (大牧场) and beaches, and all the places where food came from.”

“This kind of event connects us with a lot of enthusiastic people, people that we can form relationships with,” said Matt Szechenyi, who operates Briars Farm.

The tour of the farm ends at the dinner table. The meats in the meal come from Matt Szechenyi’s farm. The vegetables come from nearby farms. Guests and local farmers sit together.

Annoica Ingram came with a friend. “The food is wonderful. I appreciate their hard work. I see everything they have to do to take care of the animals and make sure they are well­cared­for. Without them, I think, we’ll have big problems,” she said.

“Oh my God, buy it!” I believe that you are very familiar with Li Jiaqi’s phrase. Livestreaming marketing is a method of selling products on live video streaming platforms, which are now mainly Taobao, Kuaishou and Douyin. On April 1st, 2020, Luo Yonghao finished his first livestreaming marketing on Douyin. Data showed that the total amount of payments reached 110 million yuan in 3 hours, which set the record of livestreaming marketing on Douyin.

One of the most popular functions of livestreaming is the “real-time connection”. Although traditional television shopping channels also allow viewers to instantly buy recommended items, they don’t allow hosts to respond to real-time comments, nor can television sales data be readily collected to analyze customers’ purchasing behaviors or performance indicators. With this feature, potential customers can get answers to pressing questions and gain a more comprehensive impression of the products, making promotional activities more convincing and effective.

Under the influence of the current epidemic, online shopping reduces direct contact between folks, having a certain guarantee for the health of residents. At the same time, many industries are hit by the epidemic. In this situation, many businessmen walked into the studio with the aim of recovering some of the damage for the business as much as possible.

Meanwhile, the expanding of 5G has created a favorable environment for livestreaming marketing. Supported by the technology of 5G, the image quality of the live stream is clearer, so more details can be showed to customers, which helps to provide them an entirely different experience. “With the arrival of the 5G era, livestreaming will be faster, allowing users to zoom in and out of videos to see more details of products,” said the general manager for e-commerce content at Taobao.

Many families in the United States have a     1     (large) income now than ever before, but people are finding it difficult     2     (make) ends meet anyway. 

Why isn’t a dollar worth as much as it used to be? Economists say that the cost of living is the money that a family must pay     3     the necessities of life. For many years now, the cost of living has increased    4     (great), so the value of the dollar has decreased. 

No one fully understands why the cost of living keeps    5     (increase), but economists believe that workers and producers can make prices go up. As workers earn money, they have more money to spend,    6     they demand more goods. If there is     7     demand for certain goods, the prices of these goods go up. At the same time, if there’s a    8     (short) of goods, the prices also increase. 

Families need to know     9     happens to their money. They need to make their income meet the cost of living, so many people plan a family budget. Budgeting    10     (help) you spend your money wisely as the cost of living increases.

9 . In the past decade, the use of social media has grown in a way that no one could have guessed. It has turned some teenagers into celebrities (名人) and turned the famous into the infamous, overnight.

A key feature of social media, however, is its volatility. Trends come and go, disappearing almost as quickly as they appeared. So, what were the key social media trends of 2019?

Short video apps such as TikTok and its Chinese equivalent Douyin, took the world by storm. The Telegraph reported that TikTok was ranked 8th on Apple’s App Store in April. And Douyin had more than 300 million domestic monthly active users in June, CNBC said.

Why are these short videos — which are rarely longer than a few minutes — so popular? Jiang Yige, Singapore-based analyst at FengHe Fund Management, has a theory. Short videos are “just right to fill in the little gaps in our busy schedules”, he told CNBC.

These videos — apart from being very convenient — are important to teenagers because they allow them to express themselves, according to Teen Vogue.

The sense of community that users of short video apps get is another appealing feature. Liza Koshy, a user of the US app Musically who has over 2 million followers, said that she was thrilled when anyone said that her video had “inspired” him. “It’s really cool...because I think that as short video creators that’s what we all expect,” she added.

Live streaming is another feature of our social media life that now seems as natural as sunrise. It’s a pretty neat idea: You can watch anyone, anywhere, live.

However, China has taken live streaming to a whole new level. In China, more than 100 million viewers monthly watch a live streaming video. Forbes thought that a number of factors had led to the popularity of live streams. Among them is viewers’ ability to interact while remaining anonymous.

However, the boom in social media may be having side effects too. Fake news is one serious problem it arguably causes. Material shared on these platforms is often not checked for accuracy. The most basic content can be false and can sway users one way or another. We use social media all the time; that doesn’t mean that we understand the influence it is having on us. We should be mindful of both the time we spend on it and its impact on our minds.

10 . Who’s in control of your life? Who’s pulling your strings? For the majority of us, it’s other people — society, colleagues, friends, family or our community. We learned this way of operating when we were very young, of course. We were brainwashed. We discovered that feeling important and feeling accepted was a nice experience and so we learned to do everything we could to make other people like us. As Oscar Wilde put it,“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

So when people tell us how wonderful we are,it makes us feel good. We long for this good feeling like a drug — we are addicted to it and seek it out wherever we can. Therefore, we are so eager for the approval of others that we live unhappy and limited lives, failing to do the things we really want to. Just as drug addicts and alcoholics live worsening lives to keep getting their fix, we worsen our own existence to get our own constant fix of approval.

But,just as with any drug,there is a price to pay. The price of the approval drug is freedom — the freedom to be ourselves. The truth is that we cannot control what other people think. People have their own agenda, and they come with their own baggage and, in the end, they’re more interested in themselves than in you. Furthermore, if we try to live by the opinions of others, we will build our life on sinking sand. Everyone has a different way of thinking, and people change their opinions all the time. The person who tries to please everyone will only end up getting tired and probably pleasing no one in the process.

So how can we take back control? I think there’s only one way — make a conscious decision to stop caring what other people think. We should guide ourselves by means of a set of values — not values imposed from the outside by others, but innate values which come from within. If we are driven by these values and not by the changing opinions and value systems of others, we will live a more authentic, effective, purposeful and happy life.