Danger in the desert

That day we were deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert. There the 【小题1】   could often be compared to Mars. Our team of four female microbiologists watched as a car full of curious men pulled up beside us. Because we were strangers in a(n)   【小题2】 place, our minds immediately jumped to ways we could protect ourselves. So, 【小题3】 , our Chilean fellow guide lifted the strong tool she’d been using to dig up plant roots. The rest of us tried to look braver than we felt.

We had come to this desert to conduct DNA studies on giant horsetails that somehow grow well in one of Earth’s driest places. We were searching for plants in the most remote locations, where they would be 【小题4】 by human activities such as mining and agriculture.

We’d been warned that the trip could be dangerous. Because we were traveling so far from fuel sources, we were told to take along a can of gas. Our destination was at the end of a(n) 【小题5】   single-lane dirt road lined with burned-out vehicles that had not successfully negotiated the steep downslope. Our sample site was near a village, and the people might not, we were told, 【小题6】 positively to us. We were instructed to report our travel plans at the nearest police station so that search parties would know where to look for us if we disappeared.

We had found the amazing plants and their bright green stocks   【小题7】   over our heads. They aroused the 【小题8】   of ancient wetland plants. The men approached as we finished collecting our samples. We waited tensely as a man 【小题9】   the car and walked toward us. To our surprise and relief, he politely invited us to visit their village—they wanted to show us a lovely church of which they were proud. That day, we learned about more than the microbiomes that help desert plants grow well. We also met a(n)   【小题10】   community who had likewise beautifully adapted to their challenging home.

When Coca-Cola was first sold in 1886, nobody thought it could be improved. Nearly a century later, in 1985, New Coke was introduced to replace the original recipe of Coke in order to rebrand the product amidst falling sales——Coke was losing customers to Pepsi, whose sweeter taste was finding 【小题1】. Unfortunately, the Coca-Cola Company saw a significant drop in sales soon after the release of New Coke. Some customers just preferred the “classic” recipe. The old adage(格言), “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” seems to apply here.

Something similar is happening with A Bite of China, a 【小题2】 food documentary focusing on the stories, traditions and culture surrounding interesting regional dishes from around China. The first two seasons of the show saw great success. However, when the third season began last month, the reviewers were not so “sweet”. With an entirely new production team, Season Three steers away from(偏离) the show’s core focus on 【小题3】 dishes and towards intimate life stories, non-food-related subject matter and even product placement(植入广告).

In the first episode of Season Two, a teenager in the countryside collects honey high up in a tree. The scene is stunningly filmed, telling a moving story about the dangerous 【小题4】 to which people go to gather food for their families. In the third season, however, the focus is taken almost completely away from the food. In one of its most infamous episodes, DIY lipstick using questionable ingredients bought online is 【小题5】. Viewer response has been swift and severe, with several commentators wondering whether it is still suitable to call the show a food documentary. The production crew have 【小题6】 the changes, claiming that the innovation is meant to keep the show fresh and interesting to an expanding audience. While this may 【小题7】 in part, to explain the show’s creative differences from previous seasons, it doesn’t 【小题8】 the show’s declining professionalism, which has led to some silly mistakes such as mixing up ingredients or confusing the correct names of regional dishes.

Innovation is generally 【小题9】 in industries big and small, but a winning formula that has popular 【小题10】 is not necessarily something that requires changes. Innovation is a tool often best used when a new direction is called for. By trying to reinvent the wheel, one might just end up with a flat tire. It’s time that A Bite of China took a page out of Coca-Cola’s playbook and returned to the classic recipe, where success has never tasted so sweet.

The night before the March on Washington, on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King asked his aides for advice about the next day’s speech. “Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream’, his adviser Wyatt Walker told him. “You’ve used it too many times already.”

King had indeed employed the refrain（repeated sentences）several times before. It had featured in an address just a week earlier at a 【小题1】 in Chicago, and a few months before that at a huge rally in Detroit. As with most of his speeches, both had been well received, but neither had been regarded as momentous.

This speech had to be different. While King was by now a national political figure, relatively few outside the black church and the civil rights movement had heard him give a full 【小题2】. With all three television networks offering live 【小题3】 of the march for jobs and freedom, this would be his oratorical（演说的）introduction to the nation.

After a wide range of conflicting suggestions from his staff, King left the lobby at the Willard hotel in DC to put the final 【小题4】 to a speech that he hoped would be received, in his words, “like the Gettysburg Address”.

A few floors below King’s suite, Walker made himself 【小题5】. King would call down and tell him what he wanted to say; Walker would write something that he hoped worked, and then head up the stairs to 【小题6】 it to King.

King finished the outline at about midnight and then wrote a draft in longhand. One of his aides who went to King’s suite that night saw words 【小题7】 out three or four times. He thought it looked as though King were writing poetry. King went to sleep at about 4 am, giving the text to his aides to print and distribute. The “I have a dream” section was not in it.

A few hours after King went to sleep, the march’s organizer, Bayard Rustin, 【小题8】 on to the Washington Mall, where the demonstration would take place later that day, with some of his assistants, to find security personnel and journalists 【小题9】 demonstrators. Political marches in Washington are now commonplace, but in 1963 attempting to 【小题10】 a march of this size in that place was unprecedented.