阅读与填词opt · cri · divide

1It started on a Monday in March. When Class 2 came in that morning, there was a small paper star on Chen Hao's desk. Inside it, in tiny writing, were the words “Good luck in Saturday's race!”

2The next Monday, a yellow star on Mei's desk said, “Your drawing on the wall is lovely.” A week later, a blue one told Li Tao, “Hope your cold gets better soon.”

3Everyone had a guess. Some thought it was Ms. Lin, their English teacher, but she just smiled. Others thought it was Zhou Bo, the class captain, because he always came to school first.

4“It isn't me,” said Zhou Bo. On Friday, he wrote on the blackboard: “Star-maker, we will catch you!” The next Monday, he arrived at six o'clock, an hour earlier than usual. A green star was already waiting on his desk: “Nice try, Captain!”

5Two days later, Mei saw Aunt Wang, the school cleaner, pushing her cart down the hall. On the cart, she spotted a jar full of thin strips of coloured paper.

6Aunt Wang laughed when the class asked her. “I clean your room every Sunday evening,” she said. “I read your blackboard and the notes on your walls. I've been folding stars since I was a girl.”

7Now Class 2 leaves something for her too. Every Friday, there is a paper star on her cart.

1Crispy outside and soft inside, scallion pancakes are a popular breakfast in many parts of China. They are easy to make at home. This recipe makes four pancakes. Total time: approximately one hour.

You will need

2300 g of flour, 180 ml of warm water, 4 scallions, cut into small pieces, a little salt and some cooking oil.

Steps

3Step 1: Mix the flour with the warm water. The dough will be quite sticky at first. Knead it for ten minutes until it is smooth, then cover it and leave it for half an hour.

4Step 2: Divide the dough into four equal pieces. Roll each piece out into a thin, flat circle.

5Step 3: Brush the circle with oil. Then add a quarter of the salt and a quarter of the scallions.

6Step 4: Roll the circle up like a carpet. Turn the long roll into a snail shape, press it flat, and roll it out again until it is as wide as your hand.

7Step 5: Cook each pancake in a hot pan with a little oil: three minutes on the first side, then two on the other.

Tips

8Don't skip the half-hour rest in Step 1. Without it, the dough will be hard to roll out. If a pancake starts to burn, turn the heat down. The pancakes taste best hot, so eat them at once.

1Walk past a garden spider's web every morning, and it may look exactly the same each time. In fact, you are probably looking at a different web each day. Most orb webs, the round ones that look like the wheel of a bike, are taken down and rebuilt every day.

2Why would a spider work so hard? A web is a trap, and it does not stay a good trap for long. Wind and rain damage its structure, and insects that escape leave holes behind. Worse, the glue on the sticky threads soon gets covered with dust and pollen, and then it can no longer catch anything.

3A spider spins a new web in the same order each time. First, it lets out a thread and waits for the wind to carry it across to a branch or a wall. This “bridge line” becomes the top of the web. Next come the frame and the spokes, which run out from the centre. The spider then lays a spiral of dry silk from the centre outwards. This spiral is only temporary: it holds everything in place while the spider adds the sticky spiral, working from the outside in. For a typical orb weaver, the whole job takes about an hour.

4A web uses some 20 metres of silk, and silk is made of protein, which takes a lot of food to produce. So spiders try not to waste it. Before building again, many orb weavers roll up the old web and consume it. The silk is broken down inside the spider's body, and the protein can be used again to make new silk.

5That silk is worth saving: weight for weight, it is stronger than steel. So the next time you spot a perfect web, remember that it was probably built while you were still asleep.

1Xu Ming's train arrived at ten o'clock at night. It was his first trip alone, to a maths contest in a city he had never visited, and his hotel was on the other side of the river. Before he got into a cab, he checked his phone map: twenty minutes, approximately 35 yuan.

2The driver, a quiet man in his fifties, glanced at the hotel's location on Xu's phone and nodded. For ten minutes they drove along a wide road beside the river. Then, just as they approached the bridge, he turned left into a narrow street.

3Xu looked at his map. The blue line still pointed straight across the bridge. “Excuse me,” he said, “isn't the hotel that way?” “I know,” said the driver, and kept going.

4Xu's heart sank. He had read stories online about drivers who took visitors the long way round to charge them more. Was there a traffic jam ahead? The main road had looked empty. He tried to follow their route on the map, but in vain: the streets turned so often that the little blue dot kept jumping about. And the meter kept climbing: 40, 50, 60.

5Forty minutes later, they stopped outside the hotel. The meter read 82 yuan. Xu was ready to argue, but before he could say a word, the driver switched the meter off. “Thirty-five,” he said. “The bridge is closed at night this week for repairs. I heard it on the radio this afternoon. That isn't your fault, so you pay what the trip should cost.”

6Xu paid and felt his face go hot as he carried his bag inside. The next morning, on his way to the contest, he walked past the bridge. A sign stood at one end: CLOSED 10 P.M. TO 6 A.M., MAY 3 TO 9, FOR REPAIRS.

1Fly from Shanghai to Lhasa, about 3,650 metres above sea level, and you will soon feel the difference. Even bending down to tie a shoelace can leave you out of breath. Many visitors get headaches and lie awake on their first night, typical signs of altitude sickness. Meanwhile, local teenagers play basketball in the same thin air as if nothing were different.

2The problem is oxygen. The higher you go, the thinner the air, so every breath carries less of it. On the parts of the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau where Tibetans live, the oxygen level is only about 60 percent of that at sea level. When lowlanders arrive, their bodies respond by producing extra red blood cells, which carry oxygen around the body. That helps at first. But for people who stay, the blood keeps getting thicker and the heart has to work harder. The consequences can be serious, including high blood pressure and heart attacks.

3Tibetans, by contrast, have red blood cell levels close to those of people living at sea level. In 2010, scientists comparing the DNA of Tibetans and Han Chinese found a key reason: a special version of a gene called EPAS1, which is switched on when oxygen in the blood drops. This version raises red blood cell levels only slightly. About 87 percent of Tibetans carry it, compared with about 9 percent of Han Chinese.

4In 2014, a team reported in the journal Nature that part of the gene is almost identical to one found in the Denisovans, an extinct group of early humans first identified from a finger bone in a Siberian cave. Tens of thousands of years ago, the shared ancestors of Han Chinese and Tibetans had children with Denisovans, and the gene was passed down. For a long time it was uncommon. Only after some groups moved onto the plateau did it become an advantage: people who carried it were more likely to survive and raise healthy children there, so over many generations it spread.

5The Denisovans disappeared tens of thousands of years ago. Yet a small piece of their DNA is still at work on the roof of the world, helping people adapt to air that leaves most visitors fighting for breath.

1“This will take me an hour,” you tell yourself on Sunday afternoon as you open your history essay. At eleven that night, you are still writing. What is strange is not that this happens once. It is that it happens almost every week, and every Sunday you make the same promise.

2Psychologists call this the planning fallacy. In a well-known study published in 1994, Roger Buehler and his colleagues asked 37 university students when they expected to finish their senior thesis, a long research paper written in their final year. On average, the students guessed 33.9 days. The researchers also asked how long it would take “if everything went as poorly as it possibly could”. The average answer was 48.6 days. In fact, the students took 55.5 days on average, longer than even their worst-case guess. Only about 30 percent finished within the time they had predicted.

3Why are we so optimistic? The researchers found that when people make a plan, they think almost entirely about the future: they picture themselves working through the task step by step, and they assume nothing will get in the way. What they leave out is their own past. Even when they remember that an earlier task ran late, they tend to explain it away as a special case, such as a cold, a football match or a friend's birthday, rather than treat it as a warning.

4Critics will say that this kind of optimism is no bad thing. If we knew how long hard things really took, they argue, we might never start them at all. They have a point. Confidence about whether we can do something is valuable. The trouble comes from confidence about how long it will take.

5So my advice is to plan like a pessimist. First, divide the job into small parts and estimate each part separately; research suggests that breaking a task down makes people's guesses more realistic. Second, before you allocate time to a new task, look at how long the last similar task actually took, not how long you feel this one should take. If your last three essays each took three hours, this one probably will too, whatever you tell yourself on Sunday afternoon.