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1 In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o' clock, time to get up! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The clock repeated its sounds into the empty house. Seven-nine, breakfast time!

2 In the kitchen the stoveejected from its warm interior eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunny side up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two glasses of milk.

3 "Today is August 4,2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times. "Today is Mr. Featherstone' s birthday. Insurance is payable, as are the water and gas bills." Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.

4 Tick-tock, eight-one o' clock, off to school, off to work! It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; umbrellas, raincoats for today."

5 At eight-thirty the eggs wereshriveled and the toast was like stone. A wedge scraped them into the sink, where hot water whirled them down a metal throat which digested and flushed them away. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.

6 Ten o' clock. The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.

7 Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers sprayed water. The water fell, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned, evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, except for five places. Here is the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn and a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther-over, there is a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, comes the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him stands a girl, hands raised to catch the ball.

8 Until this day, how well the house had kept its peace. How carefully it had inquired, "What' s the password?" and, getting no answer from foxes and cats, it had shut up its windows and drawn shades with self-protection. It did not allow any outsideintrusions.

9 Twelve noon.

10 Two-fifteen. Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls. Playing cards fluttered onto pads. Music played. But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.

11 At four o' clock the tables folded like great butterflies back through the walls.

12 Nine-five. A voice spoke from the ceiling: "Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?" The house was silent. The voice said at last, "Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random." Quiet music rose to back the voice. "Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite...

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,

And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn

Would scarcely know that we were gone."

13 At ten o' clock the house began to die.

14 The wind blew. A falling tree branch crashed through the kitchen window. The bottled cleaning solvent(溶剂) was shattered over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant!

15 "Fire!" screamed a voice. The lights flashed, water pumps shot water from the ceilings. But the solvent spread on the carpet while the voices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"

16 The house tried to save itself. Doors sprang tightly shut, but the windows were broken by the heat and the windfanned the flames.

17 The house gave ground as the fire in billion angry sparks moved with flaming ease from room to room. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain. Somewhere, a pump shrugged to a stop. The rain ceased. The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many days ran out.

18 The fire went upstairs. It burned paintings by Picasso and Matisse in the halls. The fire lay in beds and stood in windows. From the attic, robot faces peered down with faucet mouths letting out green fluid chemical. The fire backed off. But the fire was clever. It had sent flame outside the house, up through the attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered.

19 The house shuddered, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat. Help, help! Fire! Run, run! And the voices wailed. Fire, fire, run, run, like a tragic nursery rhyme. And the voices faded. One, two, three voices died.

20 In the last instant under the fire, other choruses, unaware of what was happening, could be heard announcing the time, setting an umbrella frantically out and in, or slamming the front door, a thousand things happening, a scene of confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming. And one voice, with extreme disregard for the situation, read poetry aloud.

21 The fire burst the house and made it collapse, puffing out spark and smoke. In the kitchen, an instant before the rain of fire and timber, the stove could still be seen making breakfasts.

22 The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Armchair, circuits, beds, and all, were thrown in acluttered pile deep under.

23 Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke.

24 Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble:

25 "Today is August 5,2026, today is August 5,2026, today is……"

* Note: The story was published on May 6,1950. The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima (广岛) and Nagasaki (长崎) took place in August 1945, just five years prior to this story's publication date.

One explanation for why people are likely to be affected by confirmation bias is that it is an efficient way to process information. Humans are forever receiving information and cannot possibly take the time to carefully process each piece of information to form an unbiased conclusion. It is adaptive for humans to rely on instinctive behaviours that keep them out of harm's way. Another reason why people show confirmation bias is to protect their pride. People like to feel good about themselves, and discovering that a belief that they highly value is incorrect makes them feel bad about themselves.

Confirmation bias occurs in several contexts. In decision making, once an individual makes a decision, they will look for information that supports it. Therefore, the person will ignore it or give it little consideration. In studies examining my-side bias, people were able to generate and remember more reasons supporting their side of a controversial issue than the opposing side.

If people are told what to expect from a person they are about to meet, such as that the person is friendly and outgoing, people will look for information that supports their expectations. For example, if Maria expects her roommate to be outgoing, Maria may ask her if she likes to go to parties rather than asking if she often studies in the library.

Confirmation bias is important because it may lead people to give more weight to information that supports their beliefs than what the evidence justifies. However, in reality they have ignored a great deal of evidence contradicting their beliefs. These factors may lead to risky decision making and lead people to overlook warning signs.

Actively challenging your beliefs is one of the most effective ways to reduce confirmation bias. For example, if you believe a certain practice is beneficial, seek out reliable sources that criticize it and evaluate their arguments. This involves engaging in conversations with people who hold opposing views or reading materials from unfamiliar perspectives.

A. Confirmation bias also operates in impression formation.

B. Exposing yourself to diverse viewpoints can help reduce bias.

C. Information that conflicts with a person's decision may cause discomfort.

D. Therefore, people will seek information that supports their existing beliefs.

E. They need to process information quickly to protect themselves from harm.

F. People shouldn't overlook evidence that leads them to question their beliefs.

G. Improving these skills can empower individuals to make more objective judgments.

In the 19th century, during the international competition to decipher the molecular structure of DNA, research on anesthetizing gases, and many other cases, the general impression was that the solution was just around the corner. This phenomenon, called convergence, also occurs in biological evolution, where unrelated species develop similar adaptations due to similar environmental pressures. In scientific discovery, this convergence is explained by similar selective pressures and competing research groups. While these cases differ from typical serendipity stories — since there was a defined problem and intentional competition — they still contained elements of luck. The overall process was not purely serendipitous, but it raises the question: could all discoveries be "in the air", waiting to be found?

Let's assume it's true and luck just speeds up the inevitable. Scientists stand on the shoulders of predecessors. Nonetheless, at some point and in the right circumstances, it was the unknown scientists, not the giants, who managed to see a little farther. No one knows how many different routes were available to arrive at the same discovery. When our minds align a procession of coincidences that have made a surprising outcome possible, we immediately conclude that a mysterious force is responsible for this succession of events. We say that it cannot be a coincidence and hence the discovery was in the air.

To avoid a purposeful view of the history of science, there's an opposing abductive argument. It's not proof but a clue. It is no coincidence that it was the unknown scientist and not the giant who managed to see farther — that is, who opened new frontiers of knowledge. Giants' minds were constrained by prior knowledge and so trapped within the framework of established habits, research questions, and established methods.

The new, little-known scientist, on the other hand, will have seen farther because they will in one way or another have been able to break free of the chains of established knowledge, possibly even betraying it a little. This suggests that innovators, with their receptive and prepared minds, are more likely to encounter serendipitous discoveries — those that are unexpected and not bound by conventional thinking. Therefore, the most impactful scientific discoveries, both past and future, are likely to be the result of serendipity, emerging from unforeseen circumstances that defy the predictable paths of research.

Gait analysis has been around for years, but now it is going mainstream, using precision imaging to measure details the eye can't perceive.

"One of the biggest breakthroughs in the early days of gait recognition was realising that you can recognise someone by their silhouette," says Patrick Connor with Stepscan Technologies in Canada. He is talking about gait energy imaging. This involves taking a series of snapshots of a person's profile as they walk, usually from the side, and merging them into a single image, each unique to their owner. "The head' s in the same place and the torso' s in the same place and you get this kind of blurry limb movement," says Connor. With its help, some systems now can identify 90 percent on enormous databases of tens of thousands of people. It is also beginning to work with less than ideal imagery. Computer scientists in Portugal showed that they could reliably recognise people walking under a downward-pointing camera solely from their shadows. This may mean drones can carry out covert gait analysis - on sunny days, at least.

More conveniently, if people want to be identified, for airport security, for example, there is no need to go to the trouble of measuring silhouettes, as in gait energy imaging. Instead, someone might be asked to wear sensors that would feed back precise information about their movements. Computer scientist Maria De Marsi co at the Sapienza University of Rome uses this method to recognise people from the information sent from the accelerometer inside a standard smartphone as it jerks around in their hand or pocket as they walk. Her team has built a prototype smart door that opens when it recognises an approaching person in this way. In principle, this is much easier than, say, pausing to scan an iris or fingerprint at a checkpoint.

Gait analysis may prompt thoughts of face-recognition technology but it could be even more powerful, since it can work with lower resolution pictures and is much harder to avoid than face recognition systems. But gait analysis is nowhere near as widely used as face recognition yet. This is mainly because it requires a series of sequential pictures that cover the seven stages of walking, as each leg moves and lifts. Processing these images requires serious computing heft and most gait analysis systems don't have enough of this to work in real time, but a crucial requirement for use in law enforcement is that the systems can recognise those they want to apprehend quickly enough to give authorities a shot at detaining them.

For this year's brief, we're asking students to show through a series of five to ten images the first part or earliest stage of something. Be it following a new life, sharing the start of someone's day, following the preparations and beginning of a particular occasion or celebration, or revealing the promise of new technology, the story, approach and photographic style can be in any genre.

Your images can be taken on any device, shot in any style-be black & white or colour-and approached from any angle you feel is best. While innovative responses are encouraged, photographers must stick to the brief.

The Competition is open to all students of photography from World Photography Organisation's selected Universities. All entries must confirm, on application, their acceptance of the rules of the Competition and these Terms and Conditions. Entries must be submitted by 13:00 GMT on 29 November 2025. By entering the Competition, each Entrant agrees and acknowledges that World Photography Organisation (WPO) is permitted to receive his/ her registration data. All personal information will be used by WPO in accordance with its privacy policy.

Students are required to submit Five to Ten images responding to a brief. To enter, students must ensure their institution is registered and images are submitted via www.worldphoto.org. If your institution is not registered yet, you can registerhere. For a list of participating institutions, please see here.

Your entry may feature manipulation, but where entries are manipulated, the extent of which must be described in the image description section when submitting. For the avoidance of doubt, all Entries must originally be from either an analogue or digital photograph which may have then been manipulated. Computer generated content cannot be the origin of the entry. Should a question arise through the judging process regarding the extent of your entry's manipulation, you may be requested to submit the original photograph and image file to verify.

The overall winning university is given Sony digital imaging equipment worth approximately €30,000 as well as the flights and accommodation for one student and one tutor to the awards ceremony in London.

Boiled chicken, rice (cook) with chicken oil, and dip make up the simple and delicious Hainanese chicken rice, which has provided lingering nostalgia for overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. More than a century ago, large numbers of Hainan people spread across Southeast Asia, taking them their native dish Hainanese chicken rice. As time went by, Hainanese chicken rice gradually became a popular dish in Southeast Asian countries. Hainanese chicken rice not only (satisfy) the diners, but also embodies the taste of home for overseas Chinese from Hainan. It is a vivid (reflect) of cultural exchanges of people along the Belt and Road countries from history to reality.

As Miller defines it, hope is not a naive approach to seeing the world, where we ignore problems and engage in "wishful thinking". Instead, hope is a complex response, (involve) "feeling, thought, action, vision, a life force, and a way of seeing or being". Having hope, as opposed to living in fear, he argues, helps us to see possibility in present-day circumstances and not become overwhelmed. People who feel hopeful are good problem-solvers, more engaged and productive at work, more (create) and adaptable, and better at recovering from adversity. For these reasons and others, inputting more hope into ourselves means we (equip) to handle problems more smoothly.

A group of STEM students from New Britain High School teamed up to build fully-functioning electric carts for families who are not able to afford adaptive wheelchairs. The student volunteers (spend) months working on these cars. On the day the students completed the carts, Kelicia and Mosiah's families went to New Britain High School to test them out for the first time. When each child got into their brand-new cart, their faces lit up. The cool, red electric cars gave kids with disabilities a way (move) around independently with a huge smile on their face. It was the single moment the builders looked forward to most.

The guard remained2 as tourists approached to touch the horse's nose, her professional manner unshaken. However, everything changed when she3 two familiar faces in the crowd. Her parents, holding umbrellas, made their way to the front. Her father, dressed in a dark coat, gently stroked the horse and spoke softly to his emotional daughter. She struggled to hold back her4, but her feelings were clear for all to see.

Her mother stepped closer, asking her a question. The guard gave a slight5 before her emotions overcame her. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she quickly wiped them away with her white gloves. In spite of the rain, a kind member of the crowd offered to take a picture of the family. The parents stood6 on either side of the horse, their faces glowing. After the photo was taken, they quietly stepped aside, allowing their daughter to return to her duties.

The tourists, unaware of the emotional moment that had just occurred, continued posing with the guard and her horse. The guard, though moved by her parents' surprise visit, soon7 her professional posture. Her father, from a distance, took another photo of her sitting upright on the horse, focused and8 to her role.

The rain9. The guard stood taller than before. The brief visit from her parents reminded her of what truly matters — the unshakable love and pride shared within a family. In the soft rain, her sense of duty and her family's unwavering support came together, giving her strength to carry on with dignity and10.

When I was in middle school, my social studies teacher asked me to enter a writing contest. I said no without thinking. I did not love writing. My family came from Brazil, so English was only my second language. Writing was so difficult and painful for me that my teacher had allowed me to present my paper on the sinking of the Titanic by acting out a play, where I played all the parts. No one laughed harder than he did. So, why did he suddenly force me to do something at which I was sure to fail? His reply: "Because I love your stories. If you're willing to apply yourself, I think you have a good shot at this."

Encouraged by his words, I agreed to give it a try. I chose Paul Revere's horse as my subject. Paul Revere was a silversmith in Boston who rode a horse at night on April 18,1775, to Lexington to warn people that British soldiers were coming. My story would come straight from the horse's mouth. Not a brilliant idea, but funny, and unlikely to be anyone else's choice. What did the horse think, as he sped through the night? Did he get tired? Have doubts? Did he want to quit? I sympathized immediately. I got tired. I had doubts. I wanted to quit. But, like Revere's horse, I kept going. I worked hard. I checked my spelling. I asked my older sister to correct my grammar. I checked out a half-dozen books on Paul Revere from the library. I even read a few of them. When I handed in the essay to my teacher, he read it, laughed out loud, and said, "Great. Now, write it again." I wrote it again, and again and again. When I finally finished it, the thought of winning had given way to the enjoyment of writing. If I didn't win, I wouldn't care.

注意：

续写词数应为100个左右；

请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。

A few weeks later, when I almost forgot the contest, there came the news.

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注意：1. 写作词数应为80左右；

2. 标题和格式已给出，不计入总词数。

The Proper Use of Electronic Products

Dear teachers and fellow students,

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