Something different?

Looking for an unforgettable way to celebrate that special occasion? Well, the range of options open to today’s youngster or even ‘oldest, for that matter,     1    (be) a far cry from the traditional party or restaurant visit. No longer is it considered sufficient to invite your friends round, buy some food and get a baker     2     (produce) a cake. No, today's birthday boy or girl is looking for something out of the ordinary, ranging from the extremely expensive to the downright dangerous. Anything goes,     3    it is unusual and impressive.

    4    is considered top of this year’s popular extravagances are as follows: taking some friends rally driving, helicopter lessons, plane trip and parachuting and hot air balloon. Then, there is always group bungee jumping or taking your friends on a white water rafting ride down rapids.

The desire for adventurous celebration     5     (not restrict) to the young. I recently met an old man     6     celebrated reaching the milestone of eighty by having a flying lesson.

Of course, if you have the money the world is your oyster. A well-heeled relation of     7     flew fifty of his friends to a Caribbean island to mark the passing of his half century.

Unfortunately, I was only a distant relation.

Undoubtedly, the more traditional forms of celebration do continue to satisfy the less extravagant or less adventurous     8    us. However, with my own half century     9     (appear) on the horizon I would not say no to a weekend in Paris and a meal at the Eiffel Tower. I can but     10     (dream). Perhaps by the time I’m eighty I’ll be able to afford it.

Publicity at any Price

Have you ever wondered how far some people will go to get    11     or to make their point? There are hundreds of examples of publicity stunts（广告行为）but here are just several that really caught the public’s attention.

In September 2003, Mark McGowan created massive media interest when he took two weeks to push a peanut across London, using only his nose. The protest against his student debt started at Goldsmiths College and ended at 10 Downing Street, where Mr McGowan    12     the nut to former Prime Minister Tony Blair. He asked Mr Blair to accept the nut as     13     for his debt.

In 2007, Sydney, Australia saw the launch of this campaign to raise awareness of climate change. 2.2 million homes and businesses turned off their non-essential lights for one hour. Since then, this event has captured the public's     14    with up to 50 million people across the world taking part. Global    15    like the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Rome’s Colosseum and the Coca-Cola billboard in Time’s Square have all stood in darkness.

The release of Michael Jackson’s CD History was     16     by his record company, Sony, by floating a huge statue of the artist down the River Thames in June 1995. This was part of a massive     17    campaign costing $30 million. There were a total of nine statues used in countries throughout Europe as part of the campaign. Each one was 10 metres tall, 2100 kilos in weight and was made from steel and fiberglass.

To promote the change of     18    colour from red and white to blue, the soft drink company, Pepsi, launched a series of ambitious publicity stunts. In April 2006 it paid the British newspaper. The Mirror, to print on blue paper. It also     19     for Concorde airplanes to be painted blue and got the astronauts on the Mir space station to be filmed with a(n)     20    Pepsi can. In total the campaign cost the company £300 million.

The other night I had dinner with my friend Kim, who in midlife is trying to change her career. She has spent decades as a successful photographer, but she knows it’s time to do something different. What, _______ , is she qualified to do, besides photography? “I’m good at parties, ” she told me with a shrug. “And parallel parking.” We refilled our wineglasses and laughed really hard as we dreamed up the various careers in which that particular _______ might be useful.

Here's a(n) _______ exercise: Ask yourself what you’re good at, aside from the skills you use at work. After my conversation with Kim, I put this question to a handful of friends and got_______ ranging from “finding restaurants for people” to “spotting terrific old chairs.” The more I think about my own answer to this question, the more confused I seem to get.

A year ago this month I _______ a job, and a career, which brought me great satisfaction for more than two decades. Can serendipity be a strategy? It certainly worked for me. I happened to find a field in which my ______ and the requirements of the job overlapped. Like most of my friends, I spent my 20s and 30s marching ______ along my given path, working hard, with purpose, and by the time I reached my 40s, I was able to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Isn’t that the way the American Dream goes?

Here’s what you learn when you ______ that dream: pride is the unpleasant by-product of success. If you are really good at your job for a long enough time, you begin to _______ that you can be good at any job and therefore can easily jump from one thing to another, switching horses in midstream. Examples of this thinking are everywhere, from the harmlessly frivolous(轻率的） to the_______ serious. As it turns out, humility is its own kind of skill; _______it hurts, but falling on your face hurts more.

Over the years a number of 20-somethings have come to me for advice, which I have_______ given: Work hard, meet lots of people, say yes to many things. Don't complain, put a smile on your face, remind yourself that studying philosophy for four years in college might not prove to be particularly _______in the working world.

So, folks, an assignment: Ask yourself what you’re good at. As for me, aside from what I most recently did for a living—writing, editing, managing people and showing up to meetings on time—my greatest strengths seem to be making vacation packing lists and remembering which houses in my town are on the market. So I have entered this next phase of my life with _______ (for what I’ve accomplished), humility (about all that I don’t know) and fear (see_______ greatest strengths).

People have relied on the forests of the Yucatan Peninsula for thousands of years. The ancient Maya who built the great cities of Tikal，Palenque and Calakmul used the region’s trees for building material and fuel wood. But populations on the peninsula grew so large that by around A.D. 900，the Maya had deforested large areas, leading to frequent natural disasters. Eventually they were forced to abandon most of their cities entirely. Today, Yucatan forests are home to around 500 kinds of trees.

But only a few of those---including the mahogany Swietenia macrophylla, with its beautiful, workable and rot-resistant wood---are real moneymakers. One large trunk can net $1,000 or more. And because it grows in isolated groups, it’s an easy species to harvest selectively. “Mahogany is king, ” says Ellis.

Noh-Bec is not ancient; it was founded in the 1930s by chicleros —people who made their living mainly by harvesting natural chewing gum from chicle found in trees rich in the Yucatan. They began to see mahogany’s value in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when communities regained the power to manage their own forests under the existing ejido system. In ejidos, elected councils run parcels of land, though government regulations still limit what they can do. Noh-Bec community members capitalized on their autonomy by building a sawmill and, later, charcoal furnaces to process and market furniture and other wood products.

In 1993, the community also became the first forest certified as sustainably harvested by the Forest Stewardship Council, earning it a profit in international markets. Noh-Bec’s profits now come mainly from cutting and selling mahogany to developed world customers who want to know that their purchases don’t contribute to deforestation.

As an archaeologist at Florida State University, Jessi Halligan and her team made a discovery, reported this past spring, in the Florida section of the Aucilla River.

Deep in a sinkhole, buried in a pile of sand and mastodon dung was a small, ancient knife used for hunting and cutting meat from the bone. The dung dates back roughly 14,500 years—some 1,500 years before the Clovis people, who were long thought to have been America’s first human residents.

Discover caught up with Halligan to learn more about the find and the world of underwater archaeology.

Q: First off，what’s the impact of the Aucilla River knife discovery?

A: A lot of us thought the Americas were populated by folks who came from Siberia across the Bering Land Bridge into Alaska and Canada. However，Canada wasn’t walkable 14,500 years ago—it was covered by ice. So if people were in Florida 14,500 years ago and there was no land route through Canada, then the first people who came to the Americas probably came by boat. Therefore, we really need to start re-examining when and where people came from and what we thought we knew. We don't have all the answers we thought we did.

Q: Why did you decide to get into archaeology?

A: To me, if s that combination of things: using your body as a tool to help you understand things, as well as using your brain to think about what those things meant and applying that to the big picture about people.

Q: How many underwater archaeologists are there?

A: For every 100 archaeologists, maybe one to five of them are underwater archaeologists, and most of them are shipwreck archaeologists. I’m one of only a few dozen maybe in the whole world who focus on landscapes that got covered by sea level rise or prehistoric settlements that were land but ended up underwater.

Q: _______________

A: The water’s really dark，so you can’t see very far, and you can’t have as many people working at the same time. Also, you can’t talk underwater, so you have to communicate through hand signals, which can slow things down.

For something so essential, water management is all too often lacking in advancement. Ifs about playing a waiting game—waiting for the rains to return in time and the reservoirs (水库） and groundwater reserves to refill.

Often the rains do come. But in long-term cases waiting is highly dangerous. Witness the Cape Town water crisis. When “day zero” strikes—the day engineers turn off taps, in about 10 weeks----many will suffer, causing, potentially, social unrest and instability.

The reservoirs that supply water to the city of Cape Town are nearly empty due in part to below-average rainfall for many years, but also, and maybe more importantly, because of increased “abstraction”---the city has grown (by almost 80% since 1995) and needs more water. But this is hardly a unique situation, with climate change projected to result in more frequent extreme droughts (干旱)and rises in urban population putting ever more pressure on limited water resources. In short, the climate is changing and cities are growing.

Cape Town might just be the right moment to make a shift. Public awareness is high, hence there is political willingness to come up with solutions. Often these are of the engineering variety. In Cape Town desalination plants are rapidly being built. But such a solution is expensive and often unsustainable. It has serious environmental impact and can increase water demand, leading to problems for future generations. The truth is that engineering options are seen as easier and less politically sensitive than actually managing water demand.

More importantly, we have to change our ways. Look at Melbourne, for example. The city was severely hit by the millennium drought between 2001 and 2010, but it managed to reduce per-person water consumption by nearly 50% over this period. Some of the temporary water use restrictions were made permanent, transforming the city. The use of recycled water, reducing leaks, increasing efficiency and, most importantly, long-term planning all played a part. Public awareness and political will need to be in harmony. So, yes, householders should conserve water but policymakers can’t be afraid to take action，even when it includes (initially) unpopular measures.

There’s no need for fatalism—we can prevent future water crises, instead of waiting for the rains to come or providing expensive, short-term engineering solutions. Or, even worse, going back to business as usual when the drought is over.