PTE Listening Fill in the Blanks Practice

You wake up in the middle of the night in a strange hotel miles away from home, disoriented , most probably from jet lag, when even the most expensive surroundings can seem empty and dispiriting . You have paid a great deal of money to stay in this first-class hotel with its contemporary technology, but according to recent research carried out by an international travel and public relations company, all is not well.

You might not know how many calories were in that sandwich, but if you got lunch at the Massachusetts General Hospital cafeteria, you could tell with one glance whether you'd made a healthful choice: offerings are color-coded. Simply posting calories does not always get consumers to make healthier choices. So researchers tried something different. Mass General's cafeteria food and beverage options were classified as least, somewhat, or most healthful with red, yellow, or green labels. Green is healthiest. Researchers then tracked some 4,600 employees. About six months after the changes were made, the purchases of red label food decreased by more than 15 percent, and red beverages dropped by 39 percent. Green food and drink purchases increased, according to the study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Making healthy food choices easier could especially help the poor, the undereducated, and the very populations most affected by the obesity epidemic .

You do a million interviews, and you make a lot of public talks. What do people not talk to you about that you would love to talk about regarding CRISPR? "Well, I think a lot of the discussion around CRISPR right now focuses on biomedical applications , which clearly are very exciting. I think something that I don't hear as much, although I'm happy to hear that you have this conversation at a wine event, are the opportunities in agriculture. I think they're going to be huge and I'm really, really excited about the opportunities to use gene editing to create plants that will be drought tolerant , pest-resistant, maybe more nutritious , give farmers opportunities to grow plants in environments where in the past they've been really challenging to grow."

You could imagine, and this is especially true in the video games like Montezuma's revenge , that sometimes you have to take a lot of very specific actions. You have to Dodge hazards, jump over enemies, and you can imagine that a random action like, hey, maybe I should jump here in this new place is just going to lead to a game over, because that was a bad place to jump. And this is especially if you have to, if you're already fairly deep into the game. And so let's say you want to explore level two. If you start taking random actions in level one and just randomly dying, you're not going to make progress on exploring level two. You can't rely on intrinsic motivation alone, which, in the context of artificial intelligence, typically comes from exploring new or unusual situations."

With more and more car accidents attributed to distracted driving, it's become clear just how dangerous it can be to fiddle with your cell phone while behind the wheel. Now it seems more and more people are failing to safely use their mobile gadgets while walking. The number of distracted walkers injured seriously enough to be treated at hospital emergency rooms has more than quadrupled in the past seven years, according to the Associated Press. That's not even counting the untold incidents of stubbing your toe or doing that little trip run, move across the sidewalk. These hospital cases are people who get hit by cars, fall off curbs or even onto train tracks because they're too busy texting, surfing the Web or in some other way, too distracted to watch where they're going. There were about 1,150 such incidents last year. There isn't any hard evidence yet that proves pedestrian gadget distraction increases the chances of pedestrian mishaps. Still, it's hard to argue with the anecdotal evidence available at the nearest street corner. Perhaps you've seen the video of the walker in California who's concentrating so hard on his mobile device that he almost bumps into a bear. Don't be that guy.