Passage 1

        Since the early twentieth century, the grocery shop has played an important role in Chinese settlers’ immigration into the Caribbean region. Family-based grocery shops served as an ideal place for the Chinese settlers to sustain their connectedness and self-sufficiency. Families usually lived behind the shops； wives and children worked as helpers； and family members shared food to decrease living costs. Most shops contained bars and restaurants, providing a space for gossip and social exchanges, enabling the immigrants to mingle with the local people.

        The Chinese could shelter their clannish, distinct traits within the domain of grocery shops as they received protection and enrichment from the home and shop. Indeed, most of these earliest migrants came from the same provinces in southern China, identified as “Hakka” or “the Guest People,” who were known to be industrious and thrifty and whose renowned adaptability was regarded as ideal for contract labor in a similar climate such as the Caribbean.

        In real-life learning situations, knowledge is seldom ＿21＿ into different subjects. For example, what we know about a particular river, we know it ＿22＿ and we don’t partition this knowledge in our minds by subjects. In this regard, an integrated school curriculum makes our learning more meaningful. This is not to say that organizing our teaching or learning by subjects should not ＿23＿ at all. To enrich the learning of each subject, instructors should create ample opportunities for students to draw on the knowledge from different＿24＿. ＿25＿ interdisciplinary projects, learners will have a better chance to integrate and apply the knowledge from different domains to address various issues in their life.

     ＿26＿, our instructors will design and implement an interdisciplinary science program for our students. In terms of content, this particular 6-week program will focus on falling objects and projectile motion. This topic is essential to the study of Newtonian Mechanics as it ＿27＿ the motion of all thrown or falling objects on or around our planet. It is a topic that is relevant to students’ everyday ＿28＿. An understanding of gravitational forces is required as well as the basic concept that a force acting in one direction will not affect an object ＿29＿ perpendicular to it. Other concepts and themes to be explored include motion in a plane, forces, inertia, momentum, orbits, Newton’s Laws of Motion and trajectory of a projectile. Students will be ＿30＿ that by the end of the program, each group of 4-5 students will be expected to design and ＿31＿ a machine that will throw a basketball from the free throw line through the hoop. Some class time will be devoted to 32 students for this final project, but much work will need to be performed outside of class as well. Students will have to research all possible problems in order to design and improve their machines. At the end of this program, students will be able to ＿33＿ the scientific knowledge and skills related to falling objects and projectile motion. ＿ 34 ＿ , students will be able to do an interdisciplinary project, which consists of designing and constructing a machine with their team members. It is also hoped that students are able to give a detailed explanation of how their machine works and how they have ＿35＿ their knowledge and skills related to falling objects and projectile motion.

      She canvassed experts, called up cancer centers, and spent hours doing research online, 38 she learned about immunotherapy, a new approach to cancer that oncologists are calling the most promising in decades—and probably ever. Veronica read of an ongoing Duke University trial of a drug called pembrolizumab that is approved and used to treat melanoma and was showing early promise against cancers in other parts of the body too. It’s the same drug that just a few months later would send former President Jimmy Carter’s melanoma, which had spread to his brain, into remission seemingly overnight. In August 2015, Mike learned he’d been accepted into a trial for that same drug. In principle, immunotherapy is simple.

        It’s a way to trigger the immune system’s ability to seek out and destroy invaders. That’s how the body fights off bacteria and viruses. But it doesn’t do that with cancer, which occurs when healthy cells ＿39＿ to outsmart those built-in defenses. That’s where immunotherapy comes in. “Instead of using ＿40＿ forces, like a scalpel or radiation beams, it takes advantage of the body’s own natural immune reaction against cancer,” says Dr. Steven Rosenberg, an immunotherapy pioneer and chief of surgery and head of tumor immunology at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). These strategies don’t target cancer itself but work on the body’s ability to fight it. These therapies, administered in pill or IV form, trigger the immune system to fight cancer cells while keeping healthy cells intact. For someone as frail as Mike, that was an especially appealing prospect.

        With every whiff you take as you walk by a bakery, a cloud of chemicals comes swirling up your nose. Identifying the smell as freshly baked bread is a complicated process. But, compared to the other senses, the sense of smell was often underappreciated. Recently, scientists studying olfaction have shed new light on how our sense of smell works and provided compelling evidence that it’s more sophisticated than previously thought.

        In a recent survey of 7,000 young people around the world, about half of those between the age of 16 and 30 said that they would rather lose their sense of smell than give up access to technology like laptops or cell phones. So, what do we know about the sense of smell? 

 The Nose Knows

        Smell begins at the back of nose, where millions of sensory neurons lie in a strip of tissue called the olfactory epithelium. The tips of these cells contain proteins called receptors that bind odor molecules. The receptors are like locks and the keys to open these locks are the odor molecules that float past, explains Leslie Vosshall, a scientist who studies olfaction at Rockefeller University. 

        People have about 450 different types of olfactory receptors. Each receptor can be activated by many different odor molecules, and each odor molecule can activate several different types of receptors. However, the forces that bind receptors and odor molecules can vary greatly in strength, so that some interactions are better “fits” than others.

       “Think of a lock that can be opened by 10 different keys. Two of the keys are a perfect fit and open the door easily. The other eight don’t fit as well, and it takes more jiggling to get the door open,” explains Vosshall.

      The complexity of receptors and their interactions with odor molecules are what allow us to detect a wide variety of smells. And what we think of as a single smell is actually a combination of many odor molecules acting on a variety of receptors, creating an intricate neural code that we can identify as the scent of a rose or freshly-cut grass. 

 Odors in the Brain

       This neural code begins with the nose’s sensory neurons. Once an odor molecule binds to a receptor, it initiates an electrical signal that travels from the sensory neurons to the olfactory bulb, a structure at the base of the forebrain that relays the signal to other brain areas for additional processing. 

       One of these areas is the piriform cortex, a collection of neurons located just behind the olfactory bulb that works to identify the smell. Smell information also goes to the thalamus, a structure that serves as a relay station for all of the sensory information coming into the brain. The thalamus transmits some of this smell information to the orbitofrontal cortex, where it can then be integrated with taste information. What we often attribute to the sense of taste is actually the result of this sensory integration.

       “The olfactory system is critical when we’re appreciating the foods and beverages we consume,” says Monell Chemical Senses Center scientist Charles Wysocki. This coupling of smell and taste explains why foods seem lackluster with a head cold.

       You’ve probably experienced that a scent can also conjure up emotions and even specific memories, like when a whiff of cologne at a department store reminds you of your favorite uncle who wears the same scent. This happens because the thalamus sends smell information to the hippocampus and amygdala, key brain regions involved in learning and memory. 

 A Better Smeller 

       Although scientists used to think that the human nose could identify about 10,000 different smells, Vosshall and her colleagues have recently shown that people can identify far more scents. Starting with 128 different odor molecules, they made random mixtures of 10, 20, and 30 odor molecules, so many that the smell produced was unrecognizable to participants. The researchers then presented people with three vials, two of which contained identical mixtures while the third contained a different concoction, and asked them to pick out the smell that didn’t belong. Predictably, the more overlap there was between two types of mixtures, the harder they were to tell apart. After calculating how many of the mixtures the majority of people could tell apart, the researchers were able to predict how people would fare if presented with every possible mixture that could be created from the 128 different odor molecules. They used this data to estimate that the average person can detect at least one trillion different smells, a far cry from the previous estimate of 10,000. The one trillion is probably an underestimation of the true number of smells we can detect, said Vosshall, because there are far more than 128 different types of odor molecules in the world. 

        No longer should humans be considered poor smellers. In fact, many recent studies have shown that our noses can outperform our eyes and ears, which can discriminate between several million colors and about half a million tones.