HP - Ielts Listening - Self Study

FOR SELF-STUDYING
LISTENING
by HP ACADEMY
IELTS AND MORE

Listening Note Book HP Academy
Table of Contents
Lesson 1: .......................................................................................................................................................................2
Lesson 2: ......................................................................................................................................................................3
Lesson 3........................................................................................................................................................................5
Lesson 4........................................................................................................................................................................7
Lesson 5 ........................................................................................................................................................................9
Lesson 6......................................................................................................................................................................11
Lesson 7 ......................................................................................................................................................................13
Lesson 8 .....................................................................................................................................................................15
Lesson 9......................................................................................................................................................................18
Lesson 10 .....................................................................................................................................................................20
Lesson 11 ....................................................................................................................................................................22
Lesson 12 ....................................................................................................................................................................25
Lesson 13 ....................................................................................................................................................................27
Lesson 14 ....................................................................................................................................................................29
Lesson 15 ....................................................................................................................................................................31
Lesson 16 ....................................................................................................................................................................33
Lesson 17 ....................................................................................................................................................................35
Lesson 18 ....................................................................................................................................................................37
Lesson 19 ....................................................................................................................................................................39
Lesson 20 ...................................................................................................................................................................41
Lesson 21 .....................................................................................................................................................................43
Lesson 22 ...................................................................................................................................................................46
Lesson 23 ...................................................................................................................................................................49
Lesson 24 ...................................................................................................................................................................52
Lesson 25 ...................................................................................................................................................................55
Lesson 26 ...................................................................................................................................................................58
Lesson 27....................................................................................................................................................................61
Lesson 28 ...................................................................................................................................................................64
Lesson 29 ...................................................................................................................................................................67
Key ..............................................................................................................................................................................70
1
Lesson 1: Why Alcohol Is Not a Stress Reliever
Hey, I'm Keri Glassman here with some quick and simple tips to help you
feel just a little bit better.
1. A cocktail or a glass of wine is a fine indulgence for most of us – in fact,

there are ____(1)____ that suggest it‘s downright good for you to have
a drink now and then.
2. But when it comes to stress or feeling ___(2)_____, the time when you
probably feel like you need a drink the most, I say keep the liquor
cabinet____(3)_____.
3. You may feel a little bit better if you‘re down in the dumps and you have
a drink, but alcohol is actually a depressant, it adds ___(4)_____ to
your diet, and it‘s not going to solve the problem that‘s plaguing you.
4. That little bit of relief you get from drinking is only___(5)____ and
your problems may feel worse when that buzz wears off. Research shows
that even _____(6)____ drinking may increase the odds of depression,
which is exactly what you don‘t need when you‘re already feeling down.
5. Instead of alcohol, try some hot tea, ___(7)_____ with friends, go for a
walk in the park, or hit up the gym. Find something healthier and
positive to take your mind off your problems – or to focus on your
____(8)_____, and write them down so you have them top of mind
when a moment hits you.
6. So remember: Have a drink to celebrate, have a drink
to_____(9)______, but don‘t have a drink to save your mood.
7. ____(10)____ the booze can help you feel just a little bit better.
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2
Lesson 2: This is What’s Trending Today…
YouTube says it has___(1)_____an American blogger over a video that

appeared to show the body of a suicide victim.
The blogger, Logan Paul, took the video in the Aokigahara forest, near
Japan‘s Mount Fuji. The area is known as a place where a number of people
have taken their lives in recent years.
In the video, Paul and his friends see a man‘s hanging body from a tree.
They react with shock, but also make jokes.
Suicide ___(2)____ in Japan are among the highest in the world. About
21,000 people there ___(3)____suicide each year, according to Japanese
government estimates.
YouTube said in a ___(4)____ that it has removed Logan

Paul‘s channels from Google Preferred, which presents top YouTube
videos. The company offers those videos to advertisers.
YouTube also said it will not include Paul in the new season of a web-based
series called ―Foursome.‖ And it said his new videos are no longer
being___(5)___.
Paul‘s YouTube channel has more than 15 million subscribers. He has

more than 4 million followers on Twitter. The video___(6)___in the
Japanese forest received over 6 million views before Paul took it down.
YouTube ___(7)____violent content that is shown in a shocking or

disrespectful way, the company says. It issued a ―strike‖ against Paul‘s
channel for ____(8)_____ its community rules after the video was
published.
3
Paul announced earlier this month he was taking a break from making
YouTube videos ―to ____(9)____.” He has also published several apology
videos and posts on social media.
But Paul continues to face strong criticism for the ____(10)____ suicide
victim video as well as other video blogs he published during his visit to
Japan.
I'm Bryan Lynn.
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4
Lesson 3 Massimo Bottura
Massimo Bottura is an Italian chef, with plans to open two new restaurants
in Paris and Naples next year.
But ___(1)___diners will not be welcome. The food will be free, made from
marketplace ___(2)____and served only to the poor.
Bottura‘s Refettorio Ambrosiano restaurant in Milan already feeds the poor

and homeless. The restaurant is in an old theater in the __(3)____ of the
city. Chefs at Refettorio cook free meals with leftovers from local shops.
They use recipes___(4)____ by Bottura and other famous cooks.
Bottura told the Reuters news agency that he never thought leftover foods
were a waste.
―Bread crumbs, some overripe tomatoes, brown bananas…they are just

____(5)______ for us…to show what we can do with our creativity.‖
Bottura started the project to__(6)____leftovers from the eateries of

Milan‘s international Expo in 2015. The project receives support from the
church _____(7)_____Caritas Ambrosiana.
Unlike traditional _____(8)____, the guests do not have to wait in a line

to receive food. Everyone gets ___(9)___ at tables. This limits the number
of daily guests to 96. But Bottura says the experience can help his guests
___(10)____ confidence and take back control of their lives.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says about

___(11)____ of the food produced worldwide each year is wasted or lost.
5
I‘m Jonathan Evans.
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6
Lesson 4
 You meet a new_____(1)_________, and as you go to shake hands

after introducing yourself, you suddenly realize "Wait...I already
forgot their name". WHY does this ALWAYS HAPPEN and what does
it say about your brain?
 Chances are you can remember somebody's face over their name. Our
brains are _____(2)_____ to recognize facial details. Brain scans
even show that _____(3)________ brain cells are fired in response
to any given face, but when it comes to forgetting names, it may have
to do with something called the "Baker Effect."
 If I tell you I'm a baker, I'm providing information about what I do,
and how I spend my time, but if I say my name is Baker, it has no
____(4)____ links and is vulnerable to forgetting.
 After all, names are completely arbitrary and hold no ____(5)_____
information in them, and if your brain can't make connections
between _____(6)______pieces of information, particularly things
you already know or feel familiar with, then you're more likely to
forget that information.
 Of course, it doesn't help that you're often focusing on introducing
yourself. This is known as the "next-in-line effect." Instead of
watching and listening to the other person, your brain starts focusing
on its own routine (What you'll say, how you'll move, etc).
 And we simply aren't very good at both disseminating information at
the same time we try to _____(7)____ and store new information.
Our brains have both short-term and ____(8)______ memory; but
the short-term memory or sometimes called working memory can
only hold so much information, and if you don't focus on it, it fades
away quickly.
 Finally, other research suggests that *drumroll*...you may just not
care. Honestly, you may be at a party in which you'll never see this
person again, or just generally ____(9)_____ in forming a new
relationship. Simply put, the more interest you have in something,
the more likely your brain is to make new connections.
 As a result, people who enjoy making new relationships are tuned
in and focused, and barely feel as if their memory is being
___(10)___ or tested. So how can you improve your ability to
remember names?
7
 We break down 7 clever tips to avoid forgetting names in our newest

AsapTHOUGHT video, which you can check by clicking on the screen,
or using the link in the description below.
 These tips have been so useful to us! And subscribe for more weekly
science videos!
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8
Lesson 5
 Confusingly, we speak of love as one thing, rather than discerning the

2 very different _____(1)______ that lie beneath the single word.
Being loved, and loving.
 We can only make a relationship work when we're ready to do
the____(2)____ and are aware of our unnatural, immature fixation
on the former.
 We start knowing only about being loved. It comes to seem, very
wrongly, like the norm. To the child it feels as if the parent is simply
_____(3)_______ on hand: to comfort, guide, entertain, feed, clear
up, and will remain almost always warm and cheerful.
 Parents don't ____(4)____ how often they've bitten their tongue,
fought back the tears, and been too tired to take off their clothes after
a day of child care. The relationship is almost always entirely non-
reciprocal, the parent loves but they don't expect the favor to be
____(5)______ in any significant way: the parent doesn't get upset
when the child doesn't notice the new haircut, asks carefully
calibrated questions about how the meeting at work went, or suggests
that they go upstairs and take a nap.
 Parent and child may both love, but each party is on a very different
end of the axis, unbeknownst to the child. This is why adulthood,
when we first say we "long for love", what we _____(6)______
mean is that we want to be loved as we are once loved by a parent.
 We want a recreation in adulthood of what it felt like to be
administered to and indulged. In a secret part of our minds, we
picture someone who will understand our needs, bring us what we
want, and be _____(7)______patient and sympathetic to us, act
selflessly, and make it all better.
 This is, naturally, a disaster; for any relationship to work we need to
move firmly out of the child and into the _____(8)_____ position.
We need to become someone who can sometimes subordinate their
own _____(9)_____ to the needs of another.
 To be adults in love, we have to learn, perhaps for the very first time,
to do something truly remarkable, for a time at least, to put someone
else ahead of us.
 That's what true, mature love actually is, much to everyone's
____(10)____ surprise.
9
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Lesson 6
In Kenya, some 90 percent of students who took the 2017 secondary
education exams failed.
Opposition lawmakers are calling on the government to investigate why so

many students did not pass. The minister of education, however,
expressed ______(1)______ with the results.
Caleb Amisi is an opposition lawmaker. He told reporters that parliament

must understand what led to only 10 percent of students scoring high
enough to enter university.
"Kenya National Examination Council must be ordered to prepare and

present a ______(2)_______ report over this perceived mass failure,‖
Amisi said. He added that some of Kenya's most _____(3)______
companies should help with an independent investigation.
The exam results created concern among parents, teachers and others.
They worry about the fate of the students and the quality of Kenya's
education system.
One of the key questions is what caused the high failure rate among the
some 600,000 students who took the test. Are students, teachers, or
the ____(4)______ to blame? Or was the problem a quick grading
process that saw ____(5)_____ go through the exams in just three weeks?
Mark Nyamita, an opposition lawmaker, says the problem needs to be

__(6)___. If not, millions of young Kenyans will be barred from higher
education.
"If this goes on in this government over the next five years, we are going to
have a whopping 2.5 million-plus people with their future
____(7)_____," he said.
11
Some Kenyan officials say the ___(8)_____ failure resulted from efforts to
reduce cheating. In an interview with Citizen Television, Education
Minister Fred Matiangi hinted that explanation might be true. He
suggested the results show the true state of Kenyan education.
"I am very ____(9)____ with the results we have had in the last two years,
2016 and 2017, because we have lived a lie for such a long time," Matiangi
said. "Time is here for us now to deal with the truth."
Calls are growing for a national conference to resolve the __(10)____ and
decide what to do about the students who failed the exams. Lawmakers will
likely discuss the issue in the National Assembly in February.
I'm John Russell.
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Lesson 7
 Bitcoin, the cryptic currency which was_____(1)______ to disrupt

the banking system, is facing an existential crisis. Everyone told you
that Bitcion was an ______(2)__________ payment system, but it
may be flawed.
 It was designed to be limited to 21 million coins, and so that no single
institution could control the bitcoin network. But now, if it's to save
itself, it may need some decisive _____(3)______.
 As it stands, Bitcion operates through ____(4)_____ public ledger,
called the blockchain. Think of this as a type of library, but one held
in every computer in the network. Within that library, every book
represents a day's block, limited in size, usually full of transactions.
 Importantly, only those who solve a specific mathematical puzzle, one
____(5)____ from all the books already in the library, have
permission to add a new book onto the shelves. These puzzle-solvers
are called miners, and they get a reward every time they add a new
entry.
 Until now, this has been that primary source of revenue. Problem is,
there are now more transactions than space in these blocks, or
"books." If Bitcoin gets more popular, this could ____(6)_____ a
speed limit on how quickly transactions can be processed, and means
miners will have to charge more for priority access.
 To ____(7)____ effectively, even new third parties would have to be
introduced to process transactions outside the Blockchain, or the
limits will have to be removed, allowing for ever bigger blocks.
 Over the next few months, miners will vote on which software update
to ____(8)_____. Option A, Bitcoin Core. Or option B, Bitcoin
Unlimited.
 If it's ever going to be business-friendly, then this political flaw needs
to be ______(9)_______. What happens next is anyone's guess.
 All we know is that billions of dollars of Bitcoin value could be at
___(10)____, in the event there is no decisive agreement.
13
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Lesson 8
War can be deadly for wildlife, too. A new study reports that war is the
biggest threat to Africa's elephants, rhinoceroses, and other animals.
Researchers examined how years of ___(1)_____ in Africa have affected
populations of large animals. More than 70 percent of Africa's protected
wildlife areas have been within a war zone at some point in the last 70
years.
The more _____(2)_____ the fighting, the greater the drop in animal
populations, said Josh Daskin, an ecologist at Yale University. He was the
lead author of the study, which was published Wednesday in the
journal Nature.
―It takes very little conflict, as much as one conflict in about 20 years, for
the average wildlife population to be _____(3)______,‖ Daskin said.
___(4)____ with frequent fighting — but not necessarily the bloodiest

fighting— lose 35 percent of their large animal populations during each
year of war, he said.
Some animals get killed by weapons of war. Yet, many also die because of
changes in social and economic conditions in an area as a result of war, said
Rob Pringle. He is an ecologist at Princeton University and the study‘s co-
author.
People in and around war zones are poor and hungrier. So they may begin
to ____(5)_____ hunt animals for valuable tusks or hunt protected
animals to eat, Pringle said. And during wartime, animal conservation
programs do not have as much money or power to protect wildlife.
Most of the time, wildlife populations do survive. Researchers have found

only six examples of entire animal populations being destroyed by war. A
large group of giraffes in a Uganda park, for example, died out between
1983 and 1995 during two _____(6)____ wars.
15
The new study examined the entire African continent over 65 years. The
researchers looked at 10 different factors that could change population
numbers. They included war, drought, animal size, protected areas and
human population _____(7)______.
The number of wars had the biggest effect on wildlife population. The
intensity of the wars — measured in the number of human deaths — had
the least effect on animals.
Greg Carr is head of a nonprofit group that works in and around Gorongosa
National Park in Mozambique. He said the study‘s _____(8)____ are not
surprising. He said Gorongosa‘s wildlife populations fell during the
country‘s civil war. However, that was caused more by poverty than war,
Carr said.
"With or without war, ____(9)_____ is the threat to wildlife in Africa

going forward," he said in an email to the Associated Press. Gorongosa is an
example of how bad war is for wildlife. But it is also an example of how
quickly wildlife populations can recover, researchers say.
Mozambique‘s civil war ended in 1992. The war hurt its animal populations.
Rebel and government soldiers hunted much of the wildlife in Gorongosa,
Daskin said. ____(10)_____ came close to disappearing. But today,
Daskin said, wildlife is back to 80 percent of pre-war levels.
"The effect of war on wildlife is bad," Pringle said. "But it's

not apocalyptic."
I‘m Susan Shand.
16
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Lesson 9
 Most machines of any degree of _______(1)______ that we opt to

live around are offered to us with an instruction manual. A guide to
how the unfamiliar machine works.
 What we can except from it! How to get the best out of it, and how to
interpret its signals.
 The _____(2)_______ being that it would be so much easier and
less enraging to deal with this machine, when we have taken some
time systematically and patiently to learn, how it operates.
 And yet one area, when we tend not to have manuals to read is when
it comes to other people and their functioning. This causes us
immense troubles. We going to relationship without any real sense of
where the others peculiarities will lie and vice versa.
 We are wittingly proceed as if operating another person might be an
intuitive skill will just pick up along the way. It can take a painful
decade or more to work out the very ____(3)____.
 Mostly, human machines work in extremely ___(4)___ ways. And
yet tend not to explain, the origins of their madness. For example:
They don't calmly lay out that certain incidents in childhood have
given them a disposition to shout at airport, to be suspicious of
authority or to be shifty in owning up to debts.
 We must work backwards, from ____(5)_____ behavior, to possible
causes, without any help, from the machines themselves. Sometimes,
the signals are just completely confusing. "Fuck off, I really don't
want to see you."
 Turns out to mean: I am so worried you don't want me and I am
getting in early with my revenge. Please tidy away your clothes and
put away the dishes.
 Might mean: I am trying to control you procedurally because I fell so
out of touch with you ______(6)_____. We would save so much
time if we knew how to give one another manuals, early on.
 If we could explain: when I am hurt I go cold or I am especially prone
to be subservient, but then, resentful or I get ___(7)____ when I am
at most vulnerable or I feel a need to talk about other possible lovers
because I feel so unattractive to you deep down.
 Instead, the weaknesses of machines are usually discovered in a heat
of conflicts. In context where they would have wounded the other
18
person. And therefore will be denied to the good will that might have
____(8)_____ that could be forgiven.
 Many of the difficult patterns of behavior of human machines have
very ____(9)______ points of origin. But, once they have caused
the partner humiliation they are unlikely ever to be looked upon
charitably. We don't need people to be perfect, we only need them to
be able to see their faults, to teach us about them, when we are
unthreatened and to apologize for the difficulties they causes in good
time.
 In other words, the greatest, most loving and luxurious gift any
partner could ever give another is an instruction manual. To their
own rather _____(10)_____, odd but ultimately, always really
rather lovable soul.
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Lesson 10
The Japanese public broadcaster NHK ___(1)____ sent out a message

Tuesday warning of a likely North Korean missile launch.
The __(2)____ alarm for a missile attack was the second in the Pacific area
since the U.S. state of Hawaii gave a mistaken warning on Saturday.
NHK sent the message out on its website and through its mobile telephone
app at 9:55 UTC.
The message said, ―North Korea likely to have launched a missile.‖ The
warning ___(3)___ people to take shelter in buildings or underground.
About 10 minutes later, NHK sent out another message calling the alert a
mistake. NHK blamed human error for the alert.
There were no immediate ___(4)___ of widespread panic as a result of the

false warning.
However, in the U.S. Pacific island state, the Hawaii State Emergency
Management Agency released the alert. It warned of a ―BALLISTIC
MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII.‖ The alert urged people to
immediately ___(5)__ shelter saying the message was not a test.
Hotel workers sent guests into basements and people fled and struggled to
find places to take shelter as a result of the wrong message.
The mistaken alert was discovered within 20 minutes. But it took about 38
minutes for officials to send a ____(6)____.
The state‘s governor David Ige said the false alarm was sent out during an
employee ___(7)____ change. He added that there was no automated
process to let people know that the warning was false. The governor
apologized and said officials were taking ___(8)___ to ensure that such a
false alarm does not happen again.
Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard criticized officials for the long

delay in correcting the mistake. She said the delay ―is something that has to
be fixed, corrected with people held ___(9)_____.‖
20
In November, North Korea tested a ballistic missile that, officials say, could
reach all of the U.S. mainland. It was the latest in a series of long distance
missile launches by the North.
Hawaii is home to the U.S. Navy‘s Pacific Command and its Pacific Fleet. In
December, the state restarted its monthly tests of a warning siren system to
warn ____(10)____ of any coming nuclear attack.
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Lesson 11
 Sometimes you can catch important things about human nature in

apparent incidentals. It's well-observed that between the ages of
around 1 and 12, many children manifest a deep _____(1)_____ to a
stuffed, soft object normally shaped into a bear, a rabbit, or less often,
a penguin.
 The depth of the relationship can be extraordinary. The child sleeps
with it, talks to it, cries in front of it and tells it things it would never
tell anyone else.
 What's truly remarkable is that the animal looks after its owner,
addressing him in a tone of unusual ___(2)____ and kindness. It
might, in a crisis, urge the child not to worry so much, and to look
forward to better times in the future.
 But naturally, the animal's character is entirely made up. The animal
is simply something invented or brought alive by one part of the child
in order to look after the other.
 The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott was the first person to
write seriously and with ____(3)____ about the business of Teddy
bears.
 In a paper from the early 1960s, Winnicott described a boy of six,
whose parents had been deeply ____(4)____ to him, becoming very
connected to a small animal his grandmother had given him.
 Every night he would have a dialogue with the animal, would hug him
close to his chest and shed a few tears into his stained and graying
soft fur.
 It was his most precious ____(5)_____, for which he would have
given up everything else. As the boy summarized the situation to
Winnicott, "no one else can understand me like bunny can."
 What ____(6)_____ Winnicott here was that it was of course the
boy who had invented the rabbit, given him his identity, his voice, and
his way of addressing him.
 The boy was speaking to himself via the bunny, in a voice filled with
an otherwise all too rarely present compassion and sympathy. Though
it sounds a little odd, speaking to ourselves is common practice
throughout our lives.
 Often, when we do so, the tone is harsh and punitive. We operate
ourselves for being losers, time wasters or ___(7)____. But, as
22
Winnicott knew, mental well-being depends on having to hand a

repertoire of more gentle, forgiving and hopeful inner voices.
 To keep going, there are moments when one side of the mind needs to
say to the other that the criticism is enough, that it understands that
this could happen to anyone that one couldn't have known.
 It's this kind of ____(8)_____, benevolent voice that the child first
starts to rehearse and exercise with the help of a stuffed animal. In
adolescence, animals tend to get put away. They become
embarrassing, evoking a vulnerability we're keen to escape from.
 But, to follow Winnicott, if our development has gone well, what was
trialed in the presence of a stuffed animal should continue all of our
lives. Because, by definition, we will frequently be let down by the
people around us who won't be able to understand us, won't listen to
our griefs, and won't be kind to us in the manner we crave and
require.
 Every healthy adult should therefore possess a capacity for self-
_____(9)____, that is, for retreating to a safe, secluded space, and
speaking in a tone that's gentle, encouraging and infinitely forgiving.
 That we don't formally label the understanding self "white rabbit" or
"yellow bear" shouldn't obscure the debt that the nurturing adult self
owes to its earlier embodiment in a furry toy.
 A good adult life requires us to see the links between our strengths
and our regressive, childlike ____(10)____. Being properly mature
demands a gracious accommodation with what could seem
embarrassing or humiliatingly vulnerable.
 We should honor stuffed animals for what they really are - tools to
help us on our first steps in the vital business of knowing how to look
after ourselves.
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Lesson 12
 Today, a hidden but ____(1)____ crisis exists in America. One in

every five children in the United States is at the risk of hunger. But
children don't suffer from hunger because we lack food. As a nation,
we have plenty.
 The problem is ___(2)____ that keep many children from accessing
these food. This is Lily and her mom. Lily's mom works overtime to
provide for Lily's needs.
 But by the end of the month, she can't provide Lily with ___(3)____
meals. This makes it harder for Lily to focus in school and succeed in
the classroom. But this is not just Lily's crisis.
 It's yours, too. That's right. With more than 17 million families facing
hunger in the U.S, there are millions of children struggling in schools.
Children who don't receive proper nutrition are more susceptible to
____(4)____ and disease.
 It turns out hunger is a national health issue as well. These factors
snowball and have an enormous impact on our economy. Billions of
dollars are lost every year, paying for ill effects of hunger.
 Hunger is also an economic issue. We call this a hunger triad,
affecting our most vulnerable citizens, our children. And with the
resources needed to solve it right in front of us, it seems so simple.
 Yet, we found no one group was connecting the ___(5)___. Though
community programs were in place, they weren't reaching all the
people who needed it.
 Community leaders and organizations didn't know funding was
available to reach more children, and the people who needed the food
didn't know how to access it.
 So Share Our Strength developed a ___(6)____breaking strategy to
make sure food reaches children where they live, learn, and play.
Here's how the No Kid Hungry strategy works.
 We rally government leaders, private companies, and local nonprofits
and together we craft ____(7)____ plans to connect at risk kids with
the food they need.
 So, how does this strategy affect a girl like Lily? Now, Lily receives
breakfast at school, helping her focus in class. Lily‘s mom receives
food assistant funds made more accessible by Share Our Strength,
____(8)_____ Lily‘s mom to feed her all mouth.
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 Through Share Our Strength‘s Cooking Matters Program, Lily‘s mom

learns how to buy and cook nutritious food on a budget. And when
summer comes and school‘s out, a Summer Meals Program is
available for Lily and her friends.
 And the hunger triad disappears. And our nation grows healthier. We
can ____(9)____ childhood hunger in America. No kid hungry. But
we need your help to get there.
 Let‘s solve this crisis together as a nation and eradicate childhood
hunger. Take the No Kid Hungry pledge and join us.
 When you do, you will join a community of No Kid Hungry
____(10)____ and begin receiving actions big and small that you
can take to help us achieve our goal of ending childhood hunger.
 Let‘s end childhood hunger together. Take the pledge.
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Lesson 13
 A fundamental belief of the modern world, which explains a lot of our

___(1)____ around failure, is that we are what we earn. When we
say this, we mean something very particular:
 Not just that it‘s nice to have a lot of money but that our income is the
source of information, ____(2)____, decisive information, about
our character, our intelligence, our moral fibre: in short, money is the
key indicator of our worth in human and not just financial terms.
 The more money we make, the more we deserve to exist. By
extension, it feels impossible to imagine ourselves as good,
___(3)____ – and still poor. But can this really be true? Must we
hate and deem ourselves despicable beings because our salary is not
elevated?
 For an answer, we must look to ____(4)____ and in particular, to
the typical way that salary is determined. Here we find something
striking: wages are not decided by the extent of someone‘s human
worth or social contribution per se.
 Wages are simply the result of the intensity with which certain people
want a job done ____(5)____ to the number of people who happen
to be able to do it. If many people can complete a task, however
humanly important it might be (holding a hand on a cancer ward),
little money will be offered for it.
 And if there are very few people able to do it, however ___(6)____ it
might be (kicking a ball 60 metres into a goal), if there‘s intense
demand, salaries will be elevated. Money is in fact no accurate
measure of the human worth of the work in question; the
determinant of wages is just the strength of demand in relation to
supply.
 We may not be able easily to change how much people earn, but we
can change how we judge ____(7)_____. This isn‘t an issue of
politics; it‘s an issue of appreciation. We can change how we assess
what a modest wage means.
 We can use our imaginations to remember and hold in mind all that
is not ___(8)____ in a salary – in our lives and in those of others; all
the degrees of intelligence, care, dedication, empathy and creativity
that may be present, _____(9)_____ by the blunt aggregated
marker of a wage.
 However tempting it might be to settle the question of the value of
humans in stark financial terms, the truth remains beautifully and
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redemptively more complicated – as we must realise as soon as we‘ve

spent some time around a person at work and got to know what sides
of their character their ___(10)____ will call on through an average
day.
 We‘ll then have no option but to reach a dauntingly complex
conclusion: we are not what we earn.
 We publish new, thought provoking, films every week. Be sure to
subscribe to our channel and take a look at more of what we have to
offer at the link on your screen now.
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Lesson 14
 Humans have long ____(1)_____ the Fountain of Youth and with

the wide-ranging benefits of reducing disease and enabling a longer,
healthier life, reversing the causes of aging is a major focus of much
medical research.
 Normally, the process of aging in the human body starts at middle age
around 45. The process and its effects depend on both, the
____(2)____ as well as environmental factors.
 Aging causes some amount of reduction in the rate of human cell
_______(3)_______ and also causes some of the cells to function
inappropriately.
 Ageing is considered a one-way street, but researchers at Harvard
University have shown that some aspects can be reversed.
Researchers say that they've been able to reverse the aging process in
mice, using a chemical that in one week made two-year-old mice
tissue _____(4)____ tissue of six-month-old mice.
 In human years, that's as if a 60-year-old's cells became more like the
cells of a 20-year-old. The researchers have managed to reverse the
effects of aging in mice using an approach that restores
communication between a cell's mitochondria and nucleus.
 Mitochondria are the power supply within the cell, _____(5)____
the chemical energy required for key biological functions. When
communication breaks down between mitochondria and the nucleus,
which is the cell's control center, the effects of aging accelerate.
 The study found that by restoring this molecular communication,
aging could not only be _____(6)____, but could be reversed.
Responsible for this communication breakdown is a decline of the
chemical NAD.
 This chemical reduces in the body as we age. By increasing amounts
of a compound used by the cell to produce NAD, the researchers
found that they could quickly repair mitochondrial function, and that
led to the radical ____(7)_____ in the ageing of the mice.
 They had more energy, their ____(8)_____ were as though they'd
be exercising and it was able to mimic the benefits of diet and exercise
just within a week. Researchers say that the diseases they have come
to expect of old age have been drastically reversed in mice.
 Even the younger mice showed benefits from the compound, making
them "supercharged" above normal. The researchers say a "magic
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pill" that reverses ageing is several years away, ___(9)____ due to

the cost of the compound, which would be about $50,000 a day for a
human.
 Reversing aging isn't just to make people live until they are 200 or
300, the goal is to keep people healthier for longer and keep them
from getting ____(10)____ of aging.
 Thanks for watching. Subscribe for more videos and make sure you're
following us on Facebook and google+.
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Lesson 15
 What's the point of travel? It's to help make us into better people. It's
a sort of ____(1)_____. Without anything mystical being meant by
this, all of us are, in one way or another, on what could be termed "an
inner journey."
 That is, we're trying to develop in particular ways. In a nutshell, the
point of travel is to go to places that can help us in our inner
evolution. The outer journey should assist us with the inner one.
 Every location in the world contains qualities that can support some
kind of beneficial change inside a person. Take these 200 million year
old stones in America's Utah Desert.
 It's a place, but looked at psychologically. It's also an inner
destination, a place with _____(2)______, free of preoccupation
with the petty and the small-minded.
 Somewhere imbued with calm and _____(3)____. Religions used to
take travel much more seriously than we do now. For them, it was a
therapeutic activity.
 In the Middle Ages, when there was something wrong with you, you
were meant to head out for a pilgrimage to ___(4)_____ with relics
of a saint or a member of the holy family.
 If you had toothache, you'd go to Rome, to the Basilica of San Lorenzo
and touch the arm ___(5)___ of Saint Apollonia, the patron saint of
teeth.
 If you were unhappily married, you might go to Umbria to touch the
shrine of Saint Rita of Cascia, patron saint of ____(6)___ problems.
 Or, if you were worried about lightning, you were sent to Bad
Münstereifel in Germany to touch the skull of Saint Donatus, believed
to offer help against fires and explosions.
 We no longer believe in the divine power of journeys but certain parts
of the world still have a power to change and mend the wounded
parts of us. In an ideal world, travel agencies would be ___(7)_____
by a new kind of psychotherapist.
 They'd take care not just of the flights and the hotels, they'd start by
finding out what was wrong with us and how we might want to
change.
 The anxious might be sent to see the majestic, immemorial waves
crashing into the cliffs on the west coast of Ireland. People a bit too
31
concerned with being admired and famous might be sent to

_____(8)____ the ruins of Detroit.
 Someone out of touch with their body might be recommended a trip
to Porto Seguro in Bahia in Brazil. Nowadays, too often, we head off
without fully knowing what's wrong with us or precisely
understanding how our chosen destination is meant to help us.
 We should become more ____(9)_____ traveler on a well-
articulated search for qualities that places possess, like calm or
perspective, sensuality or rigor.
 We should follow old-fashioned pilgrims in striving to evolve our
characters according to the suggestions offered up by the places we've
been to. We need to relearn how to be ambitious about travel, seeing
it as a way of helping us to grow into better ____(10)_____ of
ourselves.
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Lesson 16
 The International Olympic Committee, or IOC, has banned Russia

from the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Some
Russian ___(1)_____, however, can participate in the games as an
"Olympic Athlete from Russia‖, or OAR.
 The IOC found ―systemic _____(2)_____ of the anti-doping rules
and system in Russia." Doping refers to the illegal use of a drug (such
as a steroid) to improve an athlete's performance.
 Russian officials have denied any state ____(3)_____ in the doping
of athletes. This is the first time in Olympic history that the IOC has
____(4)_____ a country for doping.
 The IOC had banned countries from the Olympics before, including
Germany, South Africa, India, and Kuwait. Previous suspensions were
for acts of war, state-sponsored ______(5)_______, or failure to
meet Olympic charter requirements.
 The IOC has also stripped eleven medals, out of 33, won by Russian
athletes in the Sochi Olympics. Russian athletes can still compete in
the _____(6)_____ February Olympics – if they meet certain
conditions. A panel must approve the athlete's invitation to the
Olympics. The athlete must have a clean record and meet strict
testing requirements.
 Once ____(7)_____ for participation, the athletes will compete in
a uniform that carries the OAR name. The Olympic anthem, instead
of the Russian national anthem, will be played during
_____(8)______.
 Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously called such
conditions "a ____(9)______" to Russia. He has suggested that his
country's athletes would not agree to compete in Pyeongchang under
such circumstances.
 However, at the International Association of Athletics Federations
world championships in London in August, 19 Russian track-and-
field athletes did compete under similar circumstances.
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 On December 4, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said

that Russia was not considering a ____(10)____ of the Winter
Olympics. Whether the Russian government's position will change
following today's announcement remains to be seen.
 I'm John Russell.
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Lesson 17
 Sand, whether you use it for building sand castles, telling time with
an hourglass, or hydraulic fracturing, is pretty much the same just
about anywhere you go -- an uncountable number of tiny grains
____(1)______ together to form the same dunes and beaches.
 But why does sand almost always look the same? And how does so
much of it end up at the beach? Well, much of the world's sand is
made out of the same stuff-- tiny crystals of the ____(2)_____
quartz, which is made out of silicon and oxygen, the two most
common elements in Earth's crust.
 And as you'll know if you've ever bitten through the crust -- of a
sandwich -- that had sand in it -- quartz grains are small, and really
tough. Here's why: Quartz crystals form within a cooling blob of
molten granite rock, or magma, deep under Earth's surface. As the
magma cools, different minerals _____(3)______ into solid rock at
different temperatures, and quartz is one of the last minerals to form.
 It's _____(4)_____ to crystallize in the tiny spaces left in the now
cooling rock, pretty much ensuring that it ends up in a specific size
range. But being last has lasting advantages. Minerals that do form in
the earlier, hotter conditions have weaker chemical structures and
weather away more easily than quartz, kind of like how a relationship
forged in the heat of passion might not be as stable as a deep
___(5)____ developed over time.
 So as the weak, flash-in-the-pan minerals wear away, the unfaltering
quartz grains are left to pop out of the rock as sand! And then it's only
a matter of time--sometimes a very long time-- before the quartz sand
gets whisked away by ____(6)_____ and rivers and carried to the
sea. There, at the mouth of a river, the fast-flowing water slows
____(7)_____, and the well-rounded sand drops out.
 Larger rocks and pebbles were already left behind upstream, while
smaller sediments like silt and clay continue to be swept along by the
____(8)_____ current and are deposited further from shore. Over
thousands and thousands of years, the paths of rivers sweep up and
down the coast, dropping off ____(9)_____ of sand to be spread by
waves and currents into smooth sandy beaches.
 Of course, not all beaches are purely quartz sand, and not all quartz
sand ends up on beaches - but the fact that so many beaches and so
many sands are the same is a testament to the chemistry of the most
common components of earth's crust as they cool and crystallize, and
35
to the physics of sediments slowly shifting and surging towards the

sea. They are, quite ___(10)_____, the real sands of time.
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Lesson 18
 This is What‘s Trending today…
 The United States is now alone in the world in its ____(1)_____ of
the Paris climate agreement.
 Syria announced it would sign that agreement Tuesday in Bonn,

Germany at the United Nations yearly climate change
_____(2)______. The treaty calls for individual limits on
greenhouse gas releases among participating countries. It is not
binding nor does it provide any _______(3)_____ mechanism.
 Barack Obama signed the treaty in his second term as U.S. president.
 However, in June, President Donald Trump _____(4)_____ the

nation from the agreement. He said the agreement hurts the U.S.
economy and American workers. At that time, Syria and Nicaragua
were the only other countries that had not signed.
 Nicaragua signed the agreement last month. Environmental

organizations around the world _____(5)______ Syria‘s decision.
But comments on social media were directed more at the United
States and Donald Trump.
 Senator Michael Bennett is a Democrat from the state of Colorado.

He tweeted, ―Even Syria will join #ParisAgreement. This doesn't
make America great. It makes us the only country denying the
_____(6)______ of #climatechange.‖
 A user with the name Curious Doubter replied to Bennett, ―It‘s 30

degrees, ____(7)______ are never going to heat our houses, and the
seas have been rising and the climate warming since the last Ice Age.‖
 On Facebook, user Brian McNoldy noted that Syria

_______(8)________ even though it is currently involved in a civil
war. He described the U.S. as ―left in the dust behind industrial
37
giants, ____(9)_____-world developing countries, and everyone in

between.‖
 Twitter user Achille disagrees however. Achille tweeted, ―All of
you pseudo intellectuals that haven't read the #ParisAgreement yet
are nevertheless ______(10)______should probably move to a
country in it!‖
 And that‘s What‘s Trending Today.
 I‘m Caty Weaver.
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Lesson 19
 One of the odder _____(1)_______ of relationships is the

immediate certainty that whenever things go wrong in our lives. It is
first and foremost and quite obviously, our partner's fault.
 We get furious with our partners because we assign them such a deep
role in our lives. We have faith that a person who understands
obscure parts of us, whose _____(2)_____ solves so many of our
problems couldn't realistically also be someone who wouldn't be able
to fix our whole lives
 We _____(3)_______ our partners' powers - an exaggeration that's
an echo heard in adult life down the decades of a child's or their
parents'. The partner inherits a little of that beautiful romantic
dangerous unfair trust that we as children once had in our parents.
 At one level the lover has learnt how to reassure the anxious child in
us, that's why we love them. But that source of strength also brings
with it some very serious problems for the ______(4)______ part
of us insists on trusting them a little too much believing that they
actually control far more of existence than they possibly could.
 It's also to do with a permission that the partner's love gives us to
moan in a way we cannot otherwise. The world is constantly mean to
us. It rejects our creative endeavors. It _____(5)_______ us in
promotions, it rewards idiots.
 But usually we can't complain. We can't get angry with the people
who are really to blame for hurting us. So we get angry with those
whom we can be sure will tolerate us for blaming them.
 We get angry with the very nicest, most sympathetic, most loyal
people in our vicinity. The ones least likely to have _____(6)____ us
but most likely to stick around while we blame them furiously for
having done so.
 The mean words and mad _____(7)______ we mutter to our lovers
undoubtedly often sound horrible, but let's at least remember that
they are a curious proof of intimacy, a symptom of love itself.
 And in their own way, oddly romantic, a detail indirectly
acknowledged by their frequently sexual conclusions. We can tell any
stranger something reasonable and polite, but only in the presence of
someone we really trust can we dare to be properly
______(8)______ and truly unkind.
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 If we think of love as being in perfect agreement all the time, we will

feel that getting into fights must mean that a relationship is
_____(9)_____ down or starting to fall apart. But crazy blame
games are at heart just a symptom of an intensity of investment in
another person.
 We aren't simply nice with our partners because we're so close to
them. They draw us into very private ___(10)_____ of turbulence
and distress from which absolutely everyone else is excluded. That's
one of the stranger, more unfortunate and yet from a calm angle
almost flattering gifts of love.
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Lesson 20
 We hear about calories all the time. How many calories are in this
cookie? How many are burned by 100 jumping jacks, or long distance
running, or fidgeting? But what is a calorie, really, and how many of
them do we actually need?
 Calories are a way of ____(1)______ track of the body's energy
budget. A healthy balance occurs when we put in about as much
energy as we lose. If we ____(2)______ put more energy into our
bodies than we burn, the excess will gradually be stored as fat in our
cells, and we'll gain weight.
 If we burn off more energy than we replenish, we'll lose weight. So we
have to be able to measure the energy we consume and use, and we do
so with a unit called the calorie.
 One calorie, the kind we measure in food, also called a large calorie, is
____(3)____ as the amount of energy it would take to raise the
temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius.
 Everything we consume has a calorie count, a measure of how much
energy the item stores in its chemical bonds. The average pizza slice
has ___(4)____ calories, there are about 78 in a piece of bread, and
an apple has about 52.
 That energy is released during _____(5)______, and stored in other
molecules that can be broken down to provide energy when the body
needs it. It's used in three ways: about 10% enables digestion, about
20% fuels physical activity, and the biggest chunk, around 70%,
supports the basic functions of our ____(6)____ and tissues.
 That third usage ______(7)_______ to your basal metabolic rate, a
number of calories you would need to survive if you weren't eating or
moving around. Add in some physical activity and digestion, and you
arrive at the official guidelines for how many calories the average
person requires each day: 2000 for women and ___(8)____ for
men.
 Those estimates are based on factors like average weight, physical
activity and muscle mass. So does that mean everyone should
____(9)____ for around 2000 calories? Not necessarily.
 If you're doing an energy guzzling activity, like cycling the Tour de
France, your body could use up to 9000 calories per day.
_____(10)_____ requires slightly more calories than usual, and
elderly people typically have a slower metabolic rate, energy is burned
more gradually, so less is _____(11)_____.
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 Here's something else you should know before you start counting
calories: The calorie counts on nutrition ____(12)____ measure how
much energy the food contains, not how much energy you can
actually get out of it.
 Fibrous foods like celery and whole wheat take more energy to digest,
so you'd actually ___(13)____ up with less energy from a 100 calorie
serving of celery than a 100 calorie serving of potato chips.
 Not to mention the fact that some foods offer nutrients like protein
and vitamins, while others provide far less nutritional value. Eating
too many of those foods could leave you overweight and
malnourished.
 And even with the exact same food, different people might not get the
same number of calories. _____(14)______ in things like enzyme
levels, gut bacteria, and even intestine length, means that every
individual's ability to ____(15)_____ energy from food is a little
different.
 So a calorie is a useful energy measure, but to work out exactly how
many of them each of us requires, we need to factor in things like
exercise, food type, and our body's ability to process energy. Good
luck finding all of that on a nutrition label.
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Lesson 21
 We're continually being bombarded with suggestions about what we

might do: go jet skiing, study in Colorado, visit the Maldives, or set up
a tech company out ___(1)____. The modern world makes sure we
know at all times just how much is going on out there.
 It's a culture in which intense and painful doses of FOMO, or fear of
missing out, are going to be _____(2)_____. There are two ways of
looking at this: romantic or classical.
 To the romantic temperament, missing out causes immense agony.
Somewhere else ____(3)____, and interesting, and attractive people
are living exactly the life that should be yours.
 You'd be so happy if only you could be over there at that party with
those people working in that agency off Washington Square, or
holidaying in that shack in Jutland. Sometimes it just makes you want
to burst into ___(4)____.
 The romantic believes in the idea of a defined center, where the most
exciting things are happening. At one time it was New York, for a few
years it was Berlin, then London, now it's ___(5)______ San
Francisco and in five years it may be Auckland or perhaps Rio.
 For the romantic, humanity is divided into a large group of the
mediocre, and a tribe of the elect: artists, _____(6)________, the
edgy part to the fashion world, and the people doing creative things
with tech.
 As a romantic it's exhausting inside your soul. Your mother
sometimes drives you nuts; her life is utterly ___(7)____. How can
she accept it? Why isn't she itching to move to the Bay Area?
 She's always suggesting you take a job in Birmingham or inviting you
on a walking holiday in the Lake District. Sometimes you're quite
rude to her.
 You avoid certain people like the plague: that shy friend from school
who struggles with their weight, the flat mate who's a telecoms
engineer, who wants to go into local politics.
 Being around individuals who are so unglamorous and lacking in
ambition can feel pretty fatal. For their part, classically
____(8)____ people acknowledge that there are, of course, some
genuinely marvelous things going on in the world but they doubt that
the obvious signs of glamour are a good guide to finding them.
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 The best novel in the world, they like to think is probably not
currently winning ____(9)_____ or storming up the best seller lists.
It may be being written at this moment by an arthritic woman living
in, the otherwise, unremarkable Latvian town of Liepāja.
 Classical people are intensely aware that good qualities
____(10)_____ with some extremely ordinary ones. Everything is
rather jumbled up: lamentable taste in jumpers is compatible with
extraordinary insight.
 Academic qualifications can give no _____(11)_____ of true
intelligence. Famous people can be dull. Obscure ones can be
remarkable. At a perfect ____(12)______ party drinking
sandalwood cocktails at the coolest bar in the world you could be
feeling sad and anxious.
 You might have the ____(13)______ conversations of your life with
your aunt, even though she likes watching snooker on television and
has stopped dying her hair.
 The classical temperament also fears missing out, but it has a rather
different list of things that they're afraid of not enjoying: getting to
truly know one's parents, learning to cope well with being alone,
_____(14)______ the consoling power of trees and clouds,
discovering what their favorite pieces music really mean to them,
chatting to a 7 year old child.
 As these wise souls know: one can indeed miss out on such extremely
important things if one's always rushing out a little too intently to
find excitement elsewhere, heading off in haste to that stylish bar
with a see-through elevator ____(15)______ with some of the city's
top creatives.
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Lesson 22
 You're in line at the grocery store when, uh oh, someone sneezes on

you. The cold virus is ____(1)___ inside your lungs and lands on a
cell on your airway lining. Every living thing on Earth is made of
___(2)____, from the smallest one-celled bacteria to the giant blue
whale to you.
 Each cell in your body is surrounded by a cell membrane, a thick
flexible ____(3)_____ made of fats and proteins that surrounds and
protects the inner components. It's semipermeable, meaning that it
lets something pass in and out but blocks others.
 The cell membrane is covered with tiny _____(4)_____. They all
have functions, like helping cells adhere to their neighbors or
____(5)______ to nutrients the cell will need. Animal and plant
cells have cell membranes.
 Only plant cells have a cell wall, which is made of rigid cellulose that
gives the plant structure. The virus cell that was sneezed into your
lungs is _____(6)_____. Pretending to be a friend, it attaches to a
projection on the cell membrane, and the cell brings it through the
cell membrane and inside.
 When the virus gets through, the cell recognizes its mistake. An
enemy is inside! Special enzymes arrive at the scene and chop the
virus to pieces. They then send one of the pieces back through the cell
membrane, where the cell displays it to warn neighboring cells about
the ____(7)____.
 A nearby cell sees the warning and immediately goes into action. It
needs to make antibodies, proteins that will attack and kill the
invading virus. This process starts in the nucleus. The nucleus
contains our DNA, the blueprint that tells our cells how to make
everything our bodies need to ____(8)_____.
 A certain section of our DNA contains instructions that tell our cells
how to make antibodies. Enzymes in the nucleus find the right section
of DNA then create a copy of these instructions, called messenger
RNA.
 The messenger RNA leaves the nucleus to carry out its ____(9)____.
The messenger RNA travels to a ribosome. There can be as many as
10 million ribosomes in a human cell, all studded along a ribbon-like
structure called the endoplasmic reticulum.
 This ribosome reads the instructions from the nucleus. It takes amino
acids and links them together one by one ______(10)______ an
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antibody protein that will go fight the virus. But before it can do that,
the antibody needs to leave the cell.
 The antibody heads to the golgi apparatus. Here, it's packed up for
delivery outside the cell. _____(11)______ in a bubble made of the
same material as the cell membrane, the golgi apparatus also gives
the antibody directions, telling it how to get to the edge of the cell.
 When it gets there, the bubble surrounding the antibody fuses to the
cell membrane. The cell ejects the antibody, and it heads out to track
down the virus. The leftover bubble will be broken down by the cell's
lysosomes and its pieces _____(12)_____ over and over again.
 Where did the cell get the energy to do all this? That's the roll of the
mitochondria. To make energy, the mitochondria takes
___(13)____, this is the only reason we breathe it, and adds
electrons from the food we eat to make water molecules.
 That process also creates a high energy molecule, called ATP which
the cell uses to power all of its ____(14)____. Plant cells make
energy a different way. They have chloroplasts that combine carbon
dioxide and water with light energy from the sun to create oxygen and
sugar, a form of chemical energy.
 All the parts of a cell have to work together to keep things running
smoothly, and all the cells of your body have to work together to keep
you running smoothly.
 That's a whole lot of cells. Scientists think there are about
____(15)____ trillion of them.
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Lesson 23
 Very many of us suffer from a peculiar-sounding problem: an

_____(1)______ properly to inhabit the stretch of time we call ‗the
present‘. Maybe we‘re on a beautiful beach on a sunny day, the sky is
azure and the palm trees slender and implausibly _____(2)_____,
but most of ‗us‘ isn‘t actually here at all.
 It‘s somewhere at work or in imaginary discussion with a rival or
plotting a new enterprise. Or maybe we‘re at the birthday of a child:
it‘s enormously significant for her and we love her dearly, but we are
elsewhere.
 Our body is ____(3)_____ in the 'now', but our minds are skipping
to points in both the future and the past. What is it that makes the
present, especially the nicer moments of the present, so difficult to
experience properly?
 And why, conversely, can so many ___(4)____ feel easier to enjoy,
appreciate and perceive when they are firmly over? One benefit of the
past is that it is a dramatically foreshortened, edited version of the
present.
 Even the best days of our lives contain a range of dull and
uncomfortable moments. But in memory, like skilled editors of hours
of raw and often uninspired footage, we can lock on to the most
_____(5)______ moments; and therefore construct sequences that
feel a great deal more meaningful and interesting than the settings
that generated them.
 Hours of mediocrity can be reduced to five or six perfect images.
_____(6)_____ is the present enhanced by an editing machine.
Much of what ruins the present is sheer anxiety. The present always
contains an enormous number of possibilities, some hugely
____(7)____, which we are constantly aware of.
 Anything could theoretically happen, an earthquake, an aneurysm, a
rejection –which gives rise to a non-specific anxiety that trails around
us most of the time: the simple dread at the unknownness of what is
to come.
 But then, of course, only a very limited range of awful things do ever
come to pass, and we forget the anxiety at once (or, rather, shift it to
the new present). So when we remember an event, what we leave out
49
of it is how much of that event we actually spent anticipating an

____(8)____ future that never came.
 Our bodies further contribute to our distraction from the present.
They have their own moods and itineraries. They might feel tired and
____(9)____ at just the moment when the landscape around us
would demand grandeur and confidence.
 But these dissonant moods also get edited out of memory. We‘ll
remember the view over the ocean far longer than the slight
queasiness which ___(10)____ us in on ourselves at the time.
 Our minds are cavernous, ___(11)_____ places. So much courses
through them that has little to do with what is right in front of our
eyes. We can end up seeming ungrateful to where we are.
 Someone is telling us an important story, and not from any evil
____(12)____, just from the difficulty of having to manage the
entity called ‗I‘, we digest some regret or other instead.
 We are at a beautiful location, but we can barely take in the vegetation
and the extraordinary views. So fixated are we on an event that will
only occur in six months' time. We need to be prepared for the weird
way in which we _____(13)____ with the world, and not berate
ourselves unduly for our difficulties at doing justice to where our
bodies and minds happen to be.
 We should be ready for this disloyalty in other people, too – at
moments when they look strangely worried at a party we‘ve
____(14)_____ on, or don‘t seem to be listening to a story we're
telling them.
 They, too, may just be experiencing some of the major difficulties of
being in the present. Like us, they‘ll probably enjoy our
______(15)______ with us so much more when the present has
safely given way to memory.
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Lesson 24
 Imagine as a thought experiment that you live in a small village and

depend on the local fish pond for food. You share the pond with three
other villagers. The pond starts off with a dozen fish, and the fish
____(1)_____.
 For every two fish, there will be one baby added each night. So, in
order to _______(2)________ your supply of food, how many fish
should you catch each day? Take a moment to think about it.
 Assume baby fish grow to full size immediately and that the pond
begins at full ______(3)_______, and ignore factors like the sex of
the fish you catch. The answer? One, and it's not just you. The best
way to maximize every villager's food supply is for each fisherman to
take just one fish each day.
 Here's how the math works. If each villager takes one fish, there will
be eight fish left over night. Each pair of fish produces one baby, and
the next day, the pond will be fully ______(4)______ with twelve
fish.
 If anyone takes more than one, the number of reproductive pairs
drops, and the population won't be able to _____(5)_____ back.
Eventually, the fish in the lake will be gone, leaving all four villagers
to starve.
 This fish pond is just one example of a classic problem called the
tragedy of the commons. The _______(6)________ was first
described in a pamphlet by economist William Forster Lloyd in 1833
in a discussion of the overgrazing of cattle on village common areas.
 More than 100 years later, ecologist Garrett Hardin revived the
concept to describe what happens when many ______(7)_______
all share a limited resource, like grazing land, fishing areas, living
space, even clean air.
 Hardin argued that these situations pit short-term self-interest
against the common good, and they end badly for everyone, resulting
in overgrazing, overfishing, overpopulation, pollution, and other
social and environmental problems.
 The key feature of a tragedy of the commons is that it provides an
opportunity for an individual to benefit him or herself while
______(8)______ out any negative effects across the larger
population.
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 To see what that means, let's revisit our fish pond. Each individual
fisherman is motivated to take as many fish as he can for himself.
Meanwhile, any ____(9)______ in fish reproduction is shared by
the entire village.
 Anxious to avoid losing out to his neighbors, a fisherman will
conclude that it's in his best interest to take an extra fish, or two, or
three. Unfortunately, this is the same conclusion ____(10)_____ by
the other fisherman, and that's the tragedy.
 Optimizing for the self in the short term isn't optimal for anyone in
the long term. That's a _______(11)_______ example, but the
tragedy of the commons plays out in the more complex systems of
real life, too.
 The ____(12)_______ of antibiotics has led to short-term gains in
livestock production and in treating common illnesses, but it's also
resulted in the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which
threaten the entire population.
 A coal-fired _______(13)________ produces cheap electricity for
its customers and profits for its owners. These local benefits are
helpful in the short term, but pollution from mining and burning coal
is spread across the entire atmosphere and sticks around for
thousands of years.
 There are other examples, too. _____(14)_______, water shortages,
deforestation, traffic jams, even the purchase of bottled water. But
human civilization has proven it's capable of doing something
remarkable.
 We form social contracts, we make communal agreements, we elect
governments, and we pass laws. All this to save our collective selves
from our own individual impulses.
 It isn't easy, and we certainly don't get it right nearly all of the time.
But humans at our best have shown that we can solve these problems
and we can continue to do so if we remember Hardin's lesson. When
the tragedy of the commons ______(15)_____, what's good for all
of us is good for each of us.
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Lesson 25
 Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting

life-skills anyone can have. Yet few of us know how to do it, not
because we're evil, but because no one has taught us how and – a
____(1)______ point – no one has listened to us.
 So we come to social life greedy to speak rather than listen, hungry to
meet others, but _____(2)_______ to hear them. Friendship
degenerates into a socialized egoism. Like most things, it's about
education.
 Our civilization is full of great books on how to speak – Cicero's
Orator and Aristotle's Rhetoric were two of the greatest in the ancient
world – but sadly no one has ever written a book called ‗The Listener‘.
 There are a range of things that the good listener is doing that makes
it so nice to spend time in their ____(3)_______. Firstly, they egg
us on. It's hard to know our own minds.
 Often, we're in the vicinity of something, but we don't quite close in
on what's really bothering or exciting us. We hugely benefit from
encouragement to ______(4)_______, to go into greater detail, to
push just a little further.
 We need someone who, rather than launch forth on their own, will
simply say those two magic words: Go on… You mention a sibling and
they want to know a bit more. What was the relationship like in
childhood, how‘s it ______(5)_______ over time.
 They're curious where our concerns and excitements come from. They
ask thing like: why did that particularly ______(6)______ you?
Why was that such a big thing for you? They keep our histories in
mind, they might refer back to something we said before and we feel
they're building up a deeper base of engagement.
 Secondly, the good listener urges ________(7)__________. It's
fatally easy to say vague things: we simply mention that something is
lovely or terrible, nice or annoying. But we don't really explore why
we feel this way.
 The friend who listens often has a productive, friendly suspicion of
some of our own first _________(8)___________ and is after the
deeper attitudes that are lurking in the background.
 They take things we say like ‗I'm fed up with my job‘ or ‗My partner
and I are having a lot of rows…‘ and it helps us to focus in what it
really is about the job we don't like or what the rows are really about.
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 They're bringing to listening and an ambition to clarify the

______(9)______ issues. They don't just see conversation as the
swapping of anecdotes. They're reconnecting the chat you're having
over pizza with the philosophical ambitions of Socrates, whose
dialogues are records of his attempts to help fellow Athenians
understand their ideas and values in a better way.
 Thirdly, good listeners don't _____(10)_____. The good listener is
acutely aware of how insane we all are. They know their own minds
well enough not to be surprised or frightened about this.
 They're ______(11)______ at making occasional little positive
sounds: strategic ‗mmms‘ that delicately signal sympathy without
intruding on what we're trying to say. They give the impression that
they recognize and accept our follies; they're reassuring us they're not
going to shred our dignity.
 A big worry in a _____(12)_____ world is that we feel we can't
afford to be honest about how distressed we are. Saying one feels like
a failure could mean being dropped. But the good listener signals
early and clearly that they don't see us in these terms.
 Our vulnerability is something they warm to rather than are appalled
by. Lastly, good listeners separate disagreement from criticism.
There's a huge ______(13)________ to feel that being disagreed
with is an expression of hostility, and obviously sometimes that's
right.
 But a good listener makes it clear that they can really like you and, at
the same time, think you're wrong. They make it plain that their liking
for you isn't dependent on _____(14)______ agreement.
 They are powerfully aware that a really lovely person could end up a
bit muddled and in need of some gentle untangling. When we're in
the company of people who listen well, we experience a very powerful
pleasure, but too often, we don't really realize what it is that this
person is doing that is so nice.
 By paying strategic attention to the pleasure, we can learn to magnify
it and offer it to others, who will notice, hear – and repay the favor in
turn. Listening deserves discovery as one of the ___(15)______ to a
good society.
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Lesson 26
 Are you sleeping restlessly, feeling irritable or moody, forgetting little

things, and feeling overwhelmed and ______(1)______? Don't
worry. We've all been there. You're probably just stressed out.
 Stress isn't always a bad thing. It can be _____(2)______ for a
burst of extra energy and focus, like when you're playing a
competitive sport, or have to speak in public.
 But when it‘s continuous, the kind most of us face day in and day out,
it actually begins to change your brain. Chronic stress, like being
______(3)______ or having arguments at home, can affect brain
size, its structure, and how it functions, right down to the level of your
genes.
 Stress begins with something called the hypothalamus pituitary
adrenal axis, a _____(4)______ of interactions between endocrine
glands in the brain and on the kidney, which controls your body's
reaction to stress.
 When your brain _____(5)______ a stressful situation, your HPA
axis is instantly activated and releases a hormone called cortisol,
which primes your body for ____(6)_____ action.
 But high levels of cortisol over long periods of time wreak havoc on
your brain. For example, chronic stress increases the activity level
and number of neural ______(7)______ in the amygdala, your
brain's fear center.
 And as levels of cortisol rise, electric signals in your hippocampus, the
part of the brain associated with learning, memories, and stress
control deteriorate. The hippocampus also inhibits the activity of the
HPA axis, so when it ____(8)______, so does your ability to control
your stress.
 That's not all, though. Cortisol can literally cause your brain to shrink
in size. Too much of it results in the loss of synaptic connections
between neurons and the shrinking of your prefrontal cortex, the part
of your brain ______(9)_______ behaviors like concentration,
decision-making, judgement, and social interaction.
 It also leads to fewer new brain cells being made in the hippocampus.
This means chronic stress might make it harder for you to learn and
remember things, and also set the ____(10)_____ for more serious
mental problems, like depression and eventually Alzheimer's disease.
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 The effects of stress may filter right down to your brain's DNA. An
experiment ____(11)________ that the amount of nurturing a
mother rat provides its newborn baby plays a part in determining
how that baby responds to stress later in life.
 The pups of nurturing moms turned out less sensitive to stress
because their brains developed more cortisol receptors, which stick to
cortisol and dampen the stress response.
 The pups of negligent moms had the opposite outcome, and so
became more sensitive to stress throughout life. These are considered
epigenetic changes, meaning that they affect which genes are
expressed without directly changing the genetic code.
 And these changes can be _______(12)________ if the moms are
swapped. But there's a surprising result. The epigenetic changes
caused by one single mother rat were passed down to many
generations of rats after her.
 In other words, the results of these actions were
________(13)________. It's not all bad news, though. There are
many ways to reverse what cortisol does to your stressed brain.
 The most powerful weapons are exercise and meditation, which
involves breathing deeply and being aware and focused on your
_____(14)______. Both of these activities decrease your stress and
increase the size of the hippocampus, thereby improving your
memory.
 So don't feel ____(15)______ by the pressures of daily life. Get in
control of your stress before it takes control of you.
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Lesson 27
 Given how things are with ourselves and the world, one of the great
questions we face is should we laugh or should we cry? The history of
philosophy has an interesting take on the choice.
 Two of the greatest _____(1)_______ of ancient Greece were
Democritus and Heraclitus. Both men, who lived to a very old age,
had a deep knowledge of people and the world but responded to what
they knew in _______(2)________ different ways.
 Heraclitus couldn't stop weeping. Democritus couldn't stop laughing.
It's obvious why Heraclitus cried. Once we open our eyes fully to the
reality of existence, it's astonishing we can ever carry on.
 There is simply so much to be sad about. The human animal is a
benighted, deluded, uncontrolled monster, perfectly suited to the
error, meanness and suffering.
 The greater question is how and why one would ever laugh. There is
of course always the option of idiotic laugh, the plastic laugh, the
sentimental callous fool. But this wasn't the philosopher Democritus'
way, he laughed richly and generously not because some
_____(3)_______ position led him to naively misunderstand how
bad things could be.
 His good humor wasn't delusional nor was it simply a random quirk
of temperament. Democritus, laughed in a very particular and highly
admirable style because of the way he thought about the world.
 He was a ______(4)_______ realist. He knew everything there is to
know, about the human tendency to greed, murder and lust and of
our constant exposure to random accident and misfortune.
 And ultimately Democritus was so _____(5)_____ of the darkness,
he knew so much about suffering and risk. He no longer felt he had to
register this constantly at the front of his mind in order to do them
justice.
 They seem to him an entirely obvious ______(6)_______ fact
about existence. He could be cheerful, because anything nice, sweet or
charming that came his way, was immediately experienced as a
bonus, a gratifying addition to an originally ____(7)______ starting
point.
 By keeping the dark backdrop of life always in mind, Democritus
_______(8)_________ his appreciation of whatever stood out
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against it. A pleasant thing that happened to him wasn't taken to be a

feeble _____(9)_______ for his larger dashed hopes.
 It was a delightful, slightly improbable, but very noteworthy backing
of an always _____(10)_____ tragic trend. Democritus who's
learned to be enjoying parties wine and drinking.
 "A life without ______(11)_______ is a long road without an inn"
he wrote. He didn't believe that he had to feel constantly sad to prove
that he recognized life to be sad. He danced and drank because of a
rightful confidence that he had already done justice and would in the
future again have to fully do justice to the sadness of things.
 Democritus was aiming at an intelligent kind of cheerfulness one that
admits from the outset that life is fundamentally grim but that uses
this despair as a catalyst for a more vivid engagement with the
beautiful or kind moments that do come ones way.
 Like an English person who is especially adept
to _______(12)________ value from the last day of summer or a
condemned man who perfectly savors the last meal before being led
to the firing squad. Democritus was a master practitioner of that
highly admirable state of mind: Cheerful despair.
 Once we've acquired the skill of cheerful despair life acquires a
distinctive new kind of sweetness in all its pleasant structures. Every
pain-________ day is a blessing.
 We're ____(13)______ and touched when once in a while someone
seems to understand a few things we say or does something
_______(14)_______ kind. We enjoy the distinctive cheerfulness
of those who've done all the crying they can and are determined, for a
while at least, to hold on to the light.
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Summary
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Lesson 28
 What do Charles Darwin, Michael Jordan, and Yoda have in

common? They, like many other historical and fictive individuals, are
bald, in some cases by their own choice.
 For centuries, a shining dome has been a symbol of intelligence, but
despite this, many balding people still wish their hair would return.
Scientists have long _____(1)_______, "Why do some people lose
their hair, and how can we bring it back?"
 The full-headed among us have about 100,000 to 150,000 hairs on
our scalps, and scientists have discovered two things about this dense
thicket. Firstly, the sprouting hair we see is mostly made up of
keratin, the protein leftover from dead cells that are forced
______(2)_________ as new cells grow beneath them.
 Secondly, the structures that drive hair growth are called hair
follicles, a network of complex organs that forms before we're born,
and grows hair in an _______(3)_______ cycle.
 This cycle has three main phases. The first is anagen, the growth
phase, which up to 90% of your hair follicles are experiencing right
now, causing them to push up hair at a rate of one centimeter per
month.
 Anagen can last for two to seven years, depending on your genes.
After this productive period, ______(4)_______ within the skin
instruct some follicles to enter a new phase known as catagen, or the
regressing stage, causing hair follicles to shrink to a fraction of their
original length.
 Catagen lasts for about two to three weeks and cuts blood supply to
the follicle, creating a club hair, meaning it's ready to be shed. Finally,
hairs enter telogen, the resting phase, which lasts for ten to twelve
weeks, and affects about 5-___(5)___% of your scalp follicles.
 During telogen, up to 200 club hairs can be shed in a day, which is
quite normal. Then, the growth cycle begins anew. But not all heads
are hairy, and, in fact, some of them grow increasingly patchy over
time in response to bodily changes.
 95% of baldness in men can be _____(6)________ to male pattern
baldness. Baldness is inherited, and in people with this condition,
follicles become incredibly sensitive to the effects of
dihydrotestosterone, a hormonal product made from testosterone.
64
 DHT causes shrinkage in these _____(7)______ sensitive follicles,

making hair shorter and wispier. But loss isn't sudden. It happens
gradually, along a metric known as the Norwood Scale, which
describes the ____(8)______ of hair loss.
 First, hair recedes along the temples, then hair on the crown begins to
thin in a circular pattern. At the ______(9)_______ rating on the
scale, these balding areas meet and expand dramatically, eventually
leaving only a ring of sparse hair around the temples and the back of
the head.
 Genetics isn't all that drives hair loss. Long periods of stress can
release signals that shock follicles and force them into the resting
phase prematurely. Some women experience this after
_______(10)_______.
 Follicles might also lose the ability to go into anagen, the growth
phase. People going through chemotherapy treatment temporarily
experience this. But while balding may look ______(11)________,
scientific investigation has revealed the opposite.
 Below the skin's ______(12)_______, the roots that give rise to our
hair actually remain alive. Using this knowledge, scientists have
developed drugs that _____(13)_____ the resting phase, and force
follicles into anagen.
 Other drugs combat male pattern baldness by blocking the conversion
of testosterone to DHT so that it doesn't affect those sensitive
follicles. Stem cells also play a role in regulating the growth cycle, and
so scientists are investigating whether they can
_______(14)_________ the activity of these cells to encourage
follicles to start producing hair again.
 And in the meantime, while scientists hone their hair-reviving
____(15)_____, anyone going bald, or considering baldness, can
remember that they're in great company.
65
New words
Summary
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………......................……………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
66
Lesson 29
 The first question you tend to get asked when you meet someone at a
party is ―So what do you do?‖ And according to how impressive your
answer is, people are either keen to get to know you better, or swiftly
leave you behind by the nuts.
 We‘re anxious because we live in a world of snobs, people who take a
tiny part of us - our professional ______(1)______ - and use these
to come to a complete verdict about how valuable we are as humans.
 The opposite of a snob is your mother. She doesn‘t care about your
_____(2)______, she cares about your soul. Yet most people aren‘t
our mothers - and that‘s why we worry so much about judgement and
humiliation.
 It‘s said we live in _________(3)________ times. But it‘s more
poignant than that. We live in times where emotional
_____(4)______ have been pegged to the acquisition of material
things.
 What people want when they go after money, big jobs or fancy cars is
rarely these things in themselves, so much as the attention and
respect - if you like ―the love‖ – that are given to those who have
them.
 Next time you see a guy driving by in a Ferrari, don‘t think it‘s
someone unusually greedy; think it‘s someone with a particularly
intense vulnerability and need for love.
 We‘re also anxious because we‘re constantly told we could become
anything. We hear it from our _____(5)______ days. It should be
great that there‘s so much opportunity. But what if we fail in such a
world - what if you don‘t manage to get to the top when there was said
to be every chance?
 The self-help _____(6)_______ of bookstores are filled with two
kinds of books that capture the modern anxious condition. The first
have titles like ‗How to make it big in ___(7)___ minutes‘ and ‗Be an
overnight millionaire.‘
 The second have titles like: ‗How to cope with low
______(8)_______.‘ The two genres are related. A society that tells
people they could have everything, but where in fact only a tiny
minority can, will end up with a lot of dissatisfaction and grief.
 There‘s a related problem: our societies are - to a large extent -
____(9)_______ to be ―fair‖. Back in the olden days, you knew the
67
system was totally rigged. It wasn‘t your fault if you were a peasant
and not to your credit if you were the lord.
 But now we‘re told our societies are meritocracies, places where
rewards go to those who _____(10)_______ them; the
hardworking clever among us. It sounds lovely - but there‘s a nasty
sting in the tail.
 If you really believe in a society where those at the top deserve to get
there, that has to mean those at the bottom deserve to be there too.
Meritocracies make poverty seem not just unpleasant, but also
somehow deserved.
 In Medieval England, people used to call the poor
‗______(11)________‘. Literally, people who had not been blessed
by the Goddess of fortune. Nowadays, especially in the US (where
meritocracy is big), they call them - rather tellingly - ‗losers‘.
 We scarcely believe in ―luck‖ nowadays anymore as something that
explains where we end up. No one will believe you if you say you were
fired because of ―bad luck‖. Your professional position has become
the central verdict on your character.
 No wonder suicide rates rise exponentially the moment a society joins
the so-_____(12)_______ ‗modern world‘. How can we cope? First
off, by refusing to believe that any society really can be meritocratic:
luck or accident continue to determine a ____(13)______ share of
where people end up in the hierarchy.
 Treat no one - not least yourself - as though they entirely deserve to
be where they are. Secondly, make up your own definition of success
instead of uncritically leaning on society‘s.
 There are so many ways to succeed, and many of them have nothing
to do with status as it‘s currently defined within the value system of
_____(14)_______ capitalism. Those who succeed at making
money rarely succeed at empathy or family life.
 Thirdly, and most importantly, we should refuse to let our outer
achievements define our sense of self entirely. There remain so many
vital sides of us that will never appear on our business cards that do
not stand a chance of being ______(15)_______ by that
maddeningly blunt and unimaginative question, ‗So what do you do?‘
68
New words
Summary
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
…………………………………......................……………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
……………………………………………………………………………………………
69
Key
Lesson 1: (1) studies; (2) depressed; (3) closed; (4) calories; (5) temporary; (6) moderate; (7) meet up;
(8) solutions; (9) unwind; (10)Skipping
Lesson 2: (1) punished; (2) rates; (3) commit; (4) statement; (5) published; (6) filmed; (7) bars; (8)
violating; (9) reflect; (10) apparent.
Lesson 3: (1) wealthy; (2) leftovers; (3) outskirts; (4) created; (5) opportunities; (6) reuse; (7)
foundation; (8) soup kitchens; (9) served; (10) again; (11) one-third.
Lesson 4: (1) acquaintance; (2) hardwired; (3) individual; (4) mental; (5) specific; (6) multiple; (7) take
in; (8) long-term; (9) uninterested; (10) used.
Lesson 5: (1) varieties; (2) latter; (3) spontaneously; (4) reveal; (5) returned; (6) predominantly; (7)
immensely; (8) parental; (9) demands; (10)initial.
Lesson 6: (1) satisfaction; (2) comprehensive; (3) trustworthy; (4) curriculum; (5) educators; (6) fixed;
(7) shuttered; (8) mass; (9) satisfied; (10) crisis.
Lesson 7: (1) supposed; (2) indestructible; (3) leadership; (4) shared; (5) derived; (6) impose; (7)
scale(8) implement; (9) resolved; (10) stake.
Lesson 8: (1) conflict; (2) frequent; (3) declining; (4) Areas; (5) illegally; (6) civil; (7) density; (8)
findings; (9) poverty; (10) Species.
70
Lesson 9: (1) complexity; (2) assumption; (3) basics; (4) odd; (5) outward; (6) emotionally; (7) brutal;
(8) ensured; (9) sympathetic; (10) tortured
Lesson 10: (1) mistakenly; (2) false; (3) urged; (4) reports; (5) seek; (6) correction; (7) shift; (8) steps;
(9) accountable; (10) residents.
Lesson 11: (1) attachment; (2) maturity; (3) sensitivity; (4) abusive; (5) possession; (6) fascinated; (7)
perverts; (8) indispensable; (9) nurture; (10) states.
Lesson 12: (1) solvable(2) barriers; (3) nutritious; (4) obesity; (5) dots; (6) ground; (7) innovative; (8)
enabling; (9) eradicate; (10) advocates.
Lesson 13: (1) anxiety (2) crucial; (3) decent; (4) economics; (5) relative; (6) trivial; (7) earnings; (8)
quantified; (9) undetected; (10) labors.
Lesson 14: (1) pursued; (2) genetic; (3) multiplication; (4) resemble; (5) generating; (6) slowed; (7)
reversal; (8) muscles; (9) partially; (10) diseases.
Lesson 15: (1) therapy(2) perspective; (3) resilience; (4) commune; (5) bones; (6) marital; (7) manned;
(8) contemplate; (9) conscious; (10) versions.
Lesson 16: (1) athletes, (2) manipulation, (3) involvement, (4) suspended, (5) discrimination, (6)
upcoming, (7) approved, (8) ceremonies, (9) humiliation, (10) boycott
71
Lesson 17: (1) mixed, (2) mineral, (3) crystallize, (4) forced, (5) bond, (6) streams, (7) abruptly, (8)
weakened, (9) piles, (10) literally.
Lesson 18: (1) rejection, (2) conference, (3) enforcement, (4) withdrew, (5) praised, (6) reality, (7)
windmills, (8) took action, (9) third, (10) outraged
Lesson 19: (1) phenomena, (2) presence(3) exaggerate, (4) primitive, (5) overlooks, (6) harmed, (7)
accusations, (8) irrational, (9) winding, (10) zones
Lesson 20: (1) keeping, (2) consistently, (3) defined, (4) 272, (5) digestion, (6) organs, (7) corresponds,
(8) 2500, (9) shoot, (10) Pregnancy, (11) needed, (12) labels, (13) wind, (14) Variations, (15) extract.
Lesson 21: (1) west, (2) inevitable, (3) noble, (4) tears, (5) probably, (6) entrepreneurs, (7) dull, (8)
minded, (9) prizes, (10) coexist, (11) indication, (12) launch, (13) deepest, (14) appreciating, (15) packed
Lesson 22: (1) sucked, (2) cells, (3) layer, (4) projections, (5) binding, (6) sneaky, (7) invader, (8)
function, (9) orders, (10) creating, (11) Enclosed, (12) recycled, (13) oxygen, (14) parts, (15) 37
Lessn 23: (1) inability, (2) delicate, (3) rooted, (4) events, (5) consequential, (6) Nostalgia, (7) gruesome,
(8) appalling, (9) timid, (10) turned, (11) chaotic, (12) motive, (13) align, (14) laid, (15) encounter.
Lesson 24: (1) reproduce, (2) maximize, (3) capacity, (4) restocked, (5) bounce, (6) phenomenon, (7)
individuals, (8) spreading, (9) decline, (10) reached, (11) simplified, (12) overuse, (13) power plant, (14)
littering, (15) applies.
72
Lesson 25: (1) related(2) reluctant, (3) company, (4) elaborate, (5) changed, (6) bother, (7) clarification,
(8) statements, (9) underlying, (10) moralize, (11) skilled, (12) competitive, (13) tendency, (14) constant,
(15) keys
Lesson 26: (1) isolated, (2) handy, (3) overworked, (4) series, (5) detect, (6) instant, (7) connections, (8)
weakens, (9) regulates, (10) stage, (11) showed, (12) reversed, (13) inheritable, (14) surroundings, (15)
defeated
Lesson 27: (1) thinkers, (2) strikingly, (3) privileged, (4) profound, (5) convinced, (6) baseline, (7) bleak,
(8) sharpened, (9) compensation, (10) expected, (11) festivity, (12) drawing, (13) free,(14) amazed,
(15) unexpectedly
Lesson 28: (1) pondered, (2) upwards, (3) everlasting, (4) signals, (5) 15, (6) attributed, (7) overly, (8)
severity, (9) highest, (10) childbirth, (11) permanent, (12) surface, (13) shorten, (14) manipulate, (15)
methods
Lesson 29: (1) identities(2) status, (3) materialistic, (4) rewards, (5) earliest, (6) shelves, (7) 15, (8) self-
esteem, (9) deemed, (10) merit, (11) unfortunates, (12) called, (13) critical, (14) industrial, (15) captured
73
74

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FOR SELF-STUDYING

IELTS AND MORE

Lesson 1: Why Alcohol Is Not a Stress Reliever

1. A cocktail or a glass of wine is a fine indulgence for most of us – in fact,

Lesson 2: This is What’s Trending Today…

YouTube says it has___(1)_____an American blogger over a video that

YouTube said in a ___(4)____ that it has removed Logan

Paul‘s YouTube channel has more than 15 million subscribers. He has

YouTube ___(7)____violent content that is shown in a shocking or

I'm Bryan Lynn.

Lesson 3 Massimo Bottura

Bottura‘s Refettorio Ambrosiano restaurant in Milan already feeds the poor

―Bread crumbs, some overripe tomatoes, brown bananas…they are just

Bottura started the project to__(6)____leftovers from the eateries of

Unlike traditional _____(8)____, the guests do not have to wait in a line

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization says about

I‘m Jonathan Evans.

 You meet a new_____(1)_________, and as you go to shake hands

 We break down 7 clever tips to avoid forgetting names in our newest

 Confusingly, we speak of love as one thing, rather than discerning the

Opposition lawmakers are calling on the government to investigate why so

Caleb Amisi is an opposition lawmaker. He told reporters that parliament

"Kenya National Examination Council must be ordered to prepare and

Mark Nyamita, an opposition lawmaker, says the problem needs to be

I'm John Russell.

 Bitcoin, the cryptic currency which was_____(1)______ to disrupt

___(4)____ with frequent fighting — but not necessarily the bloodiest

Most of the time, wildlife populations do survive. Researchers have found

"With or without war, ____(9)_____ is the threat to wildlife in Africa

"The effect of war on wildlife is bad," Pringle said. "But it's

I‘m Susan Shand.

 Most machines of any degree of _______(1)______ that we opt to

The Japanese public broadcaster NHK ___(1)____ sent out a message

There were no immediate ___(4)___ of widespread panic as a result of the

Hawaiian Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard criticized officials for the long

 Sometimes you can catch important things about human nature in

Winnicott knew, mental well-being depends on having to hand a

 Today, a hidden but ____(1)____ crisis exists in America. One in

 Through Share Our Strength‘s Cooking Matters Program, Lily‘s mom

 A fundamental belief of the modern world, which explains a lot of our

redemptively more complicated – as we must realise as soon as we‘ve

 Humans have long ____(1)_____ the Fountain of Youth and with

pill" that reverses ageing is several years away, ___(9)____ due to

concerned with being admired and famous might be sent to

 The International Olympic Committee, or IOC, has banned Russia

 On December 4, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said

to the physics of sediments slowly shifting and surging towards the

 Syria announced it would sign that agreement Tuesday in Bonn,

 However, in June, President Donald Trump _____(4)_____ the

 Nicaragua signed the agreement last month. Environmental

 Senator Michael Bennett is a Democrat from the state of Colorado.

 A user with the name Curious Doubter replied to Bennett, ―It‘s 30

 On Facebook, user Brian McNoldy noted that Syria

giants, ____(9)_____-world developing countries, and everyone in

 I‘m Caty Weaver.

 One of the odder _____(1)_______ of relationships is the

 If we think of love as being in perfect agreement all the time, we will

 We're continually being bombarded with suggestions about what we

 You're in line at the grocery store when, uh oh, someone sneezes on

 Very many of us suffer from a peculiar-sounding problem: an

of it is how much of that event we actually spent anticipating an

 Imagine as a thought experiment that you live in a small village and

 Being a good listener is one of the most important and enchanting

YouTube says it has_(1)___an American blogger over a video that

YouTube said in a _(4)__ that it has removed Logan

YouTube _(7)__violent content that is shown in a shocking or

Bottura started the project to(6)__leftovers from the eateries of

Unlike traditional _(8), the guests do not have to wait in a line

 You meet a new_(1)_____, and as you go to shake hands

 Bitcoin, the cryptic currency which was_(1)__ to disrupt

_(4)__ with frequent fighting — but not necessarily the bloodiest

"With or without war, (9)_ is the threat to wildlife in Africa

 Most machines of any degree of _(1) that we opt to

The Japanese public broadcaster NHK _(1)__ sent out a message

There were no immediate _(4)_ of widespread panic as a result of the

 Today, a hidden but (1) crisis exists in America. One in

 Humans have long (1)_ the Fountain of Youth and with

pill" that reverses ageing is several years away, _(9)__ due to

 However, in June, President Donald Trump _(4)_ the

giants, (9)_-world developing countries, and everyone in

 One of the odder _(1)___ of relationships is the

 DHT causes shrinkage in these _(7)__ sensitive follicles,