When you say that someone has a good memory, what exactly do you mean? Are you saying that the person has fast recall or that he or she ______ information quickly? Or maybe you just mean that the person remembers a lot about her or his childhood. The truth is that it is ______ to say exactly what memory is. Even scientists who have been studying memory for decades say they are still trying to ______ exactly what it is. But we do know that a particular memory is not just one thing stored somewhere in the brain. ______ , a memory is made up of bits and pieces of information stored all over the brain. Perhaps the best way to ______ memory is to say that it is a process-a process of recording, storing, and getting back information. Practice and repetition can help to ______ the pieces that make up our memory of that information.

Memory can be negatively affected by a number of things. ______   nutrition can affect a person’s ability to store information. Excessive alcohol use can also ______ memory and cause permanent ______ to the brain over the long term. A vision or hearing problem may affect a person’s ability to notice certain things, thus making it ______ to register information in the brain.

When people talk about memory, they often ______ both short-term memory and long-term memory. If you want to call a store or an office that you don’t call often, you look in the telephone book for the number. You dial the number, and then you forget it! You use your short-term memory to remember the number. Your short-term memory lasts about 30 seconds, or half a minute. ______ , you don’t need to look in the telephone book for your best friend’s number, because you already know it. This number is in your long-term memory, which ______ information about things you have learned and experienced through the years.

Why do you forget things sometimes? The major reason for forgetting something is that you did not learn it well enough ______. For example, if you meet some new people and right away forget their names, it is because you did not ______ the names at the first few seconds when you heard them.

Tidying your desk, watering your plants, folding clothes — these household chores are hardly the height of pleasure. Yet I often find myself ______ these little tasks.

If I’m stuck in writer’s block with a deadline ______, I’ll have to clear up the papers placed around my office — and it’s sometimes the most ______ I feel all day.

I’m not ______ in this. As we faced the stresses of the pandemic, many people reported finding renewed interest in ______ their homes as a way of coping with uncertainty.

Psychologists suggest there are many potential mechanisms (机制) that can explain the pleasure from these tasks and their benefits — these may well encourage you to ______ these odd jobs more often.

Little chores may be useful because they ______ the mind, leading us to devote fewer resources to the things that ______ us. Even if we struggle with activities that are meant to help us relax, we may find household tasks can help us appreciate the here and now. But this depends on where we place our ______.

In one of the few studies to examine the mental health benefits of washing the dishes, researchers at Florida State University divided 51 ______ into two groups. Half read a text that encouraged them to ______ focus their thoughts on the activity. “While washing the dishes, one should be completely ______ of the fact that one is washing the dishes,” they were told. The rest read factual instructions on how to do washing up without being encouraged to focus their awareness on the activity.

Afterwards, the participants were asked to take a questionnaire about their ______. Those who had fully engaged with the experience reported a significantly better mood. This included ______ nervousness and even a sense of “inspiration”, as if the simple activity had ______ their minds.

It was thought that Microbes (细菌) in sediments — solid material that settles at the bottom of a liquid beneath the seafloor died above 80°C, but scientists have found some that can survive up to 120°C and possibly higher temperatures. The discovery shows that life in seafloor sediments can survive higher temperatures than previously thought.

“I would think that wherever there’s energy that can be exploited by microorganisms, _________ find(s) a way.” says Tina Treude at the University of California, Los Angeles. It is possible that there is life at even higher temperatures. “The only way to find out is to go back and _________ deeper,” she says, though in lab experiments so far, no microbes have been found to grow above 122°C.       

The researchers were also able to _________ out and count cells using a special device. Together, the findings show that relatively few cells survive at these temperatures, but those that do have very high metabolic (新陈代谢的) rates. “It was astonishingly high,” says Treude.   

This surprised the team because it is the _________ of what has been found in shallower sediments, where it is much colder. Microbes are _________ there, but their metabolisms are extremely slow and individual microbes might live for millions of years. At 120°C, the heat is doing a lot of damage to cells, so microbes may need high metabolisms to generate enough energy to repair this damage. It is a(n) _________ to stay alive, says Treude.

It isn’t clear what these heat-loving, or thermophilic, microbes are, as the team was unable to _________ their DNA. Nor is it clear how they came to be in the sediments, given that this would have been a very cold environment for a long time after the sediments that the samples came from were first _________.               

However, a few thermophilic microbes would have been present when the sediments were deposited, and they may have somehow _________ until temperatures began to rise due to being __________ under more material, says team member Felix Beulig at Aarhus University in Denmark.

As the temperatures rose, all the microbes that weren’t __________ of heat would gradually have died off, says team member Florian Schubert at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. “The microbes that cannot __________, they just die,” he says.

Patrick Forterre at the Pasteur Institute in Paris says that while there are __________ results showing microbe growth at 106°C, nobody has been able to exactly copy the two lab studies claiming growth at 122°C. “It’s very difficult to __________ the upper temperature limit,” he says.

He is therefore __________ of the idea of microbes living normally at 120°C, but he does think it is possible that they could somehow survive and became active again at lower temperatures.