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While it’s widely accepted that drinking too much is bad for you, conventional wisdom—and the government’s dietary guidelines—say that alcohol can be consumed in moderation. The US government defines that as one drink a day for women and two for men. This study, published in the BMJ on Tuesday, finds that drinking around these levels—8 to 12 drinks a week—is associated with a few measures of cognitive decline that showed up on brain scans.Researchers brought 550 Londoners to Oxford and ran them through an MRI machine. But these weren’t just any Londoners—they were government employees who, about every five years since 1985, had been filling out surveys about their health regimens, including how much alcohol they consumed. This enabled the researchers to look for relationships between the individuals’ drinking habits and what showed up on their brain scans.The researchers found that moderate drinking over those 30-plus years was associated with degeneration and shrinking of the hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in memory and navigation, and degeneration of the brain’s white matter. Consuming one more alcoholic drink per week was associated with a 0.01 percent decrease in the size of the hippocampus. For comparison, aging one year is associated with a 0.02 percent decrease.The study only looked at a few hundred Londoners, mostly well-educated and middle-class, so it may not be representative of a wider population. Topiwala, a psychiatry professor at the University of Oxford, pointed out there might have been “selection bias” in the sample—individuals had to get from London to Oxford in order to undergo the MRI scans and then spend an hour in a brain scanning machine and undergo other memory tests—which individuals who were alcohol dependent or had suffered brain damage from alcohol use might be less likely to do.In an accompanying editorial, Killian Welch, a neuropsychiatrist at a hospital in Scotland, wrote that the study might change what we think constitutes a healthy level of drinking. “The findings strengthen the argument that drinking habits many regard as normal have adverse consequences for health,” Welch wrote. This is important. We all use rationalizations to justify persistence with behaviors not in our long-term interest. With the publication of this paper, justification of moderate’ drinking on the grounds of brain health becomes a little harder.48. The US government would probably agree that .49. The subjects of the research .50. According to Paragraph 3, hippocampus .51. The study is questioned, because .52. What can we infer from Welch’s commentary?53. This passage could be best titled .

Chances are that, were you to be asked to imagine a victim of fraud, you’d think of a little old lady being cheated out of thousands of pounds—in person, on the phone or, increasingly, online. In fact, according to a recent report by the Better Business Bureau in the United States, this is far from the case.“We’ve bought into stereotypes about scam victims—they are usually seen as vulnerable and elderly, or gullible and poorly educated,” says the paper’s co-author, Emma Fletcher, product manager at the BBB Institute. “These stereotypes are strongly held—and they are wrong. We are all at risk, but younger and more educated individuals are actually the most likely to be scammed.”Similarly, a 2016 report by Norton, the antivirus company, found that 44 percent of millennials had been the victim of an online crime in the past year, compared with just 16 percent of baby boomers. Research by Barclays this year backs this up. The Barclays Digital Safety Index highlights that almost two thirds of 18-24 year-olds had fallen prey to hackers or viruses. Yet when asked about actions taken to prevent future attacks, millennials were less likely than their older counterparts to take positive actions, such as installing an anti-virus software following a computer breach.Why is this? After all, millennials are meant to have data running through their veins. There are several reasons. One is what is known as optimism bias—the idea that other people might be more vulnerable than you and that you know better. Younger people are usually more knowledgeable about IT than those in the older generations. But, perversely, this makes them less likely to heed advice about staying safe, whereas, perhaps surprisingly, older people are more inclined to listen.But this is not the only reason. Younger people spend far more time online. They shop more there (meaning their card details are entered more often and stored in numerous databases) and they share much more personal information online. According to Ofcom’s 2016 Media Use and Attitudes report, more than 90 percent of those aged 16-34 have social-media accounts. For those aged between 55 and 64, this figure drops to 51 percent. For those 65 and over, it’s 30 percent.Interestingly though, according to the Office of National Statistics, older people are more likely to be victims of repeat fraud. This may be because they tend to be more trusting. Research at the University of California suggests that this isn’t just because they grew up in more innocent times. Rather, age-related changes in the brain mean that as people get older, they tend to trust more and question less.42. The belief that old women are more likely to be cheated is .43. The 2016 report by Norton mentioned in Paragraph 3 shows that .44. We can learn from the research by Barclays that .45. According to Paragraph 4, younger people’s optimism bias refers to their idea that .46. In Paragraph 5, the decrease of the number of old people’s social-media accounts explains why the elderly .47. According to the research by the University of California, older people are more trusting because they .

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,” wrote Ernest Becker in his book. But we don’t need to worry so much, according to new research comparing our perception of what it’s like to die with the accounts from people facing imminent death. Researchers analyzed the writings of regular bloggers with either terminal cancer who all died over the course of the study, and compared it to blog posts written by a group of participants who were told to imagine they had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had only a few months to live. They looked for general feelings of positivity and negativity, and words describing positive and negative emotions including happiness, fear and terror. Blog posts from the terminally ill were found to have considerably more positive words and fewer negative ones than those imagining they were dying—and their use of positive language increased as they got closer to death.Lisa Iverach, a research fellow at the University of Sydney, explained that the study highlights how the participants may have been less negative because the mystery around death was removed. “Individuals facing imminent death have had more time to process the idea of death and dying, and therefore, may be more accepting of the inevitability of death.” But not all of us will know how, or when, we’re going to die in advance, and therefore will miss out on any benefits to be had by uncovering its uncertainty.Havi Carel, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, agrees with the study’s findings on how adaptable we are. “The initial shock after receiving a poor prognosis is horrific, but after months or years of living with this knowledge, the dread subsides,” she said. However, Carel also pointed out that there’s an important distinction between positive responses and pleasantness, and that there are some unpleasant and painful events we’d still be positive about, such as childbirth.In Western culture, we tend to pretend death doesn’t exist, whereas research has indicated that the East Asian yin and yang philosophy of death—where life can’t exist without death—allows individuals to use death as a reminder to enjoy life. “I think the UK and the US are death-denying cultures, in that death is mostly avoided as a topic.” Heflick said. “While avoiding talking about death can reduce discomfort in the short term, it probably makes most of us much more anxious about death in the long term.”36. According to Ernest Becker, people usually .37. According to the researchers, people faced with imminent death than those who imagined they have cancer.38. According to Lisa Iverach, people who have been diagnosed with cancer are more positive, because .39. According to Havi Carel, the positive feeling and unpleasant feeling .40. In Asian culture, people take death as something .41. People in Western cultures avoid talking about death because .

Physicists aren’t often reprimanded for using risqué humor in their academic writings, but in 1991 that is exactly what happened to the cosmologist Andrei Linde at Stanford University. He had _1_ a draft article entitled “Hard Art of the Universe Creation” to the journal Nuclear Physics. In it, he outlined the _2_ of creating a universe in a laboratory: a whole new cosmos that might one day _3_ its own stars, planets and intelligent life. Near the end, Linde made a seemingly flippant suggestion that our universe itself _4_ knocked together by an alien “physicist hacker”. The paper’s moderator objected to this “dirty joke” on the grounds that religious people might be offended that scientists were aiming to steal the _5_ of universe-making out of the hands of God. Linde changed the paper’s title and abstract but held firm _6_ the line that our universe could have been made by a (an) _7_ scientist. Fast-forward a quarter of a century, and the notion of universe-making—or “cosmogenesis” as I dub it—seems less comical than _8_. I’ve travelled the world talking to physicists who take the concept _9_, and who have even sketched out rough blueprints for how humanity might one day achieve it. Linde’s moderators might have been right to be concerned, _10_ they were making the wrong assumptions. The issue is not who might be offended by _11_, but what would happen if it were truly possible. How would we handle the theological implications? What moral responsibilities would come with fallible humans taking on the _12_ of cosmic creators? Theoretical physicists have grappled for years with related questions _13_ part of their considerations of how our own universe _14_. In the 1980s, the cosmologist Alex Vilenkin at Tufts University in Massachusetts _15_ a mechanism through which the laws of quantum mechanics could have generated an inflating universe from a state in which there was no time, no space and no matter.

Their work will ________, but they ought to try to improve it.

The Egyptians used to believe that literacy was divine. Scholars no longer ________ that theory, but why ancient civilizations developed writing was a mystery for a long time.

Mist steals silently in, turns familiar landscapes strange, dampens sounds, ________ vision—then clears suddenly and without warning.

She was keen to ________ a cause, and has become an advocate against child obesity.

His pictures of the snow evoke its contradictions, the way it both conceals and ________.

In the ________ of developments in science and technology, man has become more capable of conquering nature.

The results of the various lab analyses now ________ are eagerly awaited and will be reported in a slew of scientific papers.

He shouted in ________ of the policeman’s warning to be quiet.

When a book goes into translation, all those linguistic ________ get lost.

She depicted the ________ life of human beings, and particularly their moral stresses and strains.

The habit of travelling by air is becoming more ________.

It’s well known that the brain is a food-guzzling greedy guts, consuming 20% of the body’s energy though it only ________ 2% of its weight.

We need someone who has an ________ view as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

She is a very ________ woman to shout like that at the top of her voice.

You are accident ________ because you’re a bit careless in what you do.

This report tells about twin girls separated at birth, raised in strikingly different homes, who ________ have strikingly similar psyches.

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