On a sunny afternoon, Anthony Perry stepped off the train at Chicago’s 69th Street station. The 20-year-old, who worked nights in a grocery store, was on his way to see his ________.

On the platform, something unthinkable happened: a man fell over the edge and onto the electrified train tracks! As Perry and other horrified passengers watched, he shook uncontrollably as the ________ moved through his body.

“Help him!” someone cried. “Please, someone!”

Perry couldn’t just stand there and ________. He sat at the edge of the platform and eased himself down. ________ all rails between the man and him were electrified, he quickly leaped towards the victim, using a high-knee technique from his high school football days.

Perry soon reached down and grasped the victim’s wrist. ________, he felt a powerful electric shock shoot through his body. Perry jumped back. He reached down a second time, and was shocked again. But the third time he seized the man’s wrist and forearm, and managed to move the guy’s body away from the ________.

“Give him chest compressions!” yelled an old lady on the platform.

Perry was no expert, but for a few moments he worked on the man’s heart until the victim regained ________. Then, first-aiders arrived. Perry let the professionals ________. Heart still racing from the electric shocks, he climbed back up onto the platform, grabbed his things and continued on to his grandfather’s.

The evening news reported the incident, ________ an unnamed hero with saving the victim’s life. To many, Perry’s ________ deeds demonstrated the power of choosing compassion over personal safety.

Kenneth Shinozuka was 10 when his grandfather,     1     has Alzheimer’s disease, began to wander. He wanted to invent something to help. That turned out to be a pressure sensor in a sock. The sensor will send an alarm to a caregiver’s smartphone as soon as a patient     2     (step) out of bed. Today Kenneth continues to improve his invention     3     (help) caregivers get an alarm from any distance. His biggest dream is to one day find cures for all Alzheimer’s.

Fishing is my favorite sport. I often fish for hours without catching anything. But this does not worry me. Some fishermen are unlucky. Instead of catching fish, they catch old boots and rubbish. I am even     1    (lucky). I never catch anything — not even old boots.     2    (spend) whole mornings on the river, I always go home with an empty bag. Very often I     3    (advice) to give up fishing because my friends believe it’s a waste of time for me. But they     4    (not realize) one important thing. I’m not really interested in fishing. I am only interested in sitting in a boat and doing nothing at all!

A study shows 176 bird species have been found to build nests with human litter, such as plastic bags and fishing nets.     1     worries the scientists is that such materials can harm chicks and even adult birds. The study     2     (review) research covering almost 35,000 nests and finds that birds use human-made materials in nests on all continents except Antarctica. While such behaviour     3     (observe) as early as in the 1830s, in recent years it has undoubtedly increased.

Hem an Bekele is not your typical high school student．Rather than spending his free time playing video games or staring at his phone, this 14 year-old from Fairfax, Virginia was calling professors and conducting experiments, all to create a soap that could treat skin cancer, and to make it affordable for everyone who needs it．His work won him the grand prize in this year’s 3M Young Scientist’s Challenge, a competition that encourages kids to think of unique ways to solve everyday problems.

Growing up in Ethiopia, Bekele found in pity that people working outside were likely to end up getting skin cancer．Skin cancer did have cures and was treatable in most cases．However, the average price of skin cancer treatment globally was almost $40,000．Those shocking statistics really inspired him to create a more accessible solution．He started doing experiments and working on different things, and that turned into his bar of soap as a project.

A lot of his research and development started in his family’s kitchen and in his basement．But as he reached the final of the competition, he realized that he did need to do a little bit more outside of just his house．So he reached out to people at University of Virginia and people at Georgetown, and he got a lot of assistance．The number one person would be Deborah Isabelle, who helped him organize and structure his ideas during the finalist competition．Bekele said that he definitely couldn’t have done that all by himself.

Bekele’s award-winning soap is a compound based bar of soap and it’s charged with different cancer fighting chemicals．The color of the soap is a bit of a dark type of white and it has a rough surface, which could be a good exfoliant（去角质剂）．It does have a strong medicine smell and feel a bit stickier．The whole point of it is that even once you wash off the soaps, the medicinal parts will stay on your skin．It can activate the body’s immune cells to defend cancer.

Bekele won 25,000 prize money and he was going to use it to continue research．He said, “I still need a lot of resources to be able to conduct this research, so this money will definitely help me achieve it.”

Scientists in Canada are really worried about a serious problem affecting an important animal: the bat. This problem is called white-nose syndrome (症状), and it comes from a harmful fungus (真菌) that attacks the nose, wings, and skin of bats when they sleep together in caves. It started in a cave in Russia in 2006 and has quickly spread to 19 countries, including Canada.

Researchers found that the fungus usually exists in very cold places like the poles. Even though they’re not totally sure exactly how it hurts the bats, one of the most accepted views is that it makes them uncomfortable. This makes the bats stay awake a little bit more and uses up their stored fat, leading to them not having enough food, which causes them to die. More than 5.5 million bats of nine types in Canada have already died from this sickness. If it reaches more bat groups in the Southeast and Midwest provinces, endangered bat s like the Tiger bat and Figgie big-eared bat might disappear forever.

Losing these animals is a big deal for Canadians, even for the whole world, because, in warm months, bats fly at night and eat a lot of insects. They help control the number of bugs that harm forests and spread diseases which can cause a whole bunch of problems. It’s quite an alarming thing, given that the reduction in the number of bats will almost certainly disrupt (扰乱) the harmony in the ecosystem and lead to disasters. The Canadian government is taking this seriously and is thinking about giving money for detailed research on the disease because the possible results could be really bad, like what one lawmaker called “an ecological and economic disaster.” Experts are hired to watch bat colonies (群) more closely, working with other countries and organizations, and making strict rules to limit the movement of things that might have the fungus.

Additionally, public awareness campaigns are being conducted to gain support for bat conservation efforts and promote responsible cave exploration practices to minimize the risk of disease transmission. The Canadian government remains committed to preserving its bat populations and the crucial ecological balance they bring to the environment.

How We Talk about Fear Matters

Lately, there seems to be plenty to fear in the world. How we talk about what we fear might offer clues to how we perceive that emotion socially and culturally.

Get the root of fear.

    1    . In Anglo Saxon times, “fear” primarily referred to sudden danger. The root of the word dates back to “pēr” from Indo-European about 6,000 years ago. This root suggests that fear developed from a sudden (frightening) experience you passed through.

Figure out the emotional meaning of fear.

Whether emotions are viewed positively or negatively varies from culture to culture.    2     . For instance, in English, the word “anxious” can be used to mean “worried” or “eager”. But the word meaning “anxious” just means “regret” in Dargwa. Therefore, many English speakers may not view anxiety as negatively as Dargwa speakers.

Find out a fearful pattern.

In looking at such patterns across the major language families, researchers found that the word “fear” was often associated with anxiety, envy and grief in Indo-European languages. But in Austronesian languages, “fear” more often was associated with surprise.     3     .

    4    

How we talk about fear changes how we react to it. When we talk about what frightens us, it may be useful to disrupt associated meanings. In addition, how our language categorizes an emotion seems to impact whether we perceive those emotions negatively or positively.

In conclusion, fear is something that can be changed by cultural and linguistic experience.    5     . Perhaps Roosevelt was right when he in famously said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

The Grand Canal is a vast waterway system in China, running from Beijing in the north to Zhejiang province in the south. It stretches for nearly 3,200 kilometers and passes through eight of the country’s provinces and municipalities.

Listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, the canal is the longest and oldest artificial river in the world. It has played an important role in ensuring China’s economic prosperity and stability, and is in use today as a major means of transportation.

The Beijing section of the Grand Canal is 82 km long. Along it, cultural relics and sites on both banks are important symbols of culture and are considered a top priority for protection by the local government.

The city government has unveiled two development plans: the first is an implementation plan for the protection, inheritance and utilization of the canal’s cultural values; the second is a construction plan for building a Grand Canal-themed national cultural park.

The plan sets up three implementation milestones in the next five years. In 2020, efforts have been made to lay a firm foundation for the construction of the Grand Canal National Cultural Park, with the Tongzhou section of the canal open to navigation and a management mechanism of the park established. By 2023, significant progress is expected to be made in coordinating the protection and utilization of cultural resources along the canal, with the national cultural park basically set up. By 2025, the park will become a new cultural landmark in Beijing. The Grand Canal, with its cultural resources put under protection and ecological conservation along its banks significantly improved, will embrace improved cultural and tourism development. Cities along the canal by then will welcome further coordinated or integrated development.

The Beijing section of the Grand Canal, a valued asset for the capital, is marked out as a river boasting rich cultural resources, ecological value, social benefits and economic potential. The capital is set to roll out more measures to bring out the best in the canal.

With its protected cultural resources and improved ecological conservation along its banks, the Grand Canal will embrace improved cultural and industrial development.