Think back to your last job interview. If it felt like the hiring manager was more (26) ______ on how you look, whether you smiled and your age and race than your qualifications for the job, you could be right. Fairy godboss surveyed 500 hiring professionals (50.2% female and 49.8% male) in October and showed them photos of women of varying ages and races with different body shapes, hairstyles, demeanors and clothing. The hiring managers were asked to pick three adjectives to describe each woman from a list of 11 adjectives- professional, unprofessional, leadership material, confident, intelligent, friendly and (27) ______. The candidate (28) ______ hiring managers most frequently selected as most likely to be hired was a young and thin.
The only way to achieve parity in hiring practices is if applicants and managers are aware of these (29) ______ biases and incorporate ways to overcome them. (30) ______, hiring managers need to ask themselves, if they‟re not sure if someone is leader, is it because the candidate looks a certain way or because the candidate doesn‟t have any leadership experience.
(Adapted from www.forbes.com)

Job recruiters say that it‟s getting more and more difficult today to convince candidates to relocate. Instead people are increasingly open to “extreme commuting” as an alternative to relocation. Extreme commuting is the term used to describe a daily journey to work by car or train that takes more than 90 minutes each way, or a plane journey to work and back each week. Family ties are the leading reason for resistance to relocating, according to half the recruiters surveyed, while lifestyle preferences (25%) and housing market costs (10%) are also contributing factors.
Nick Thomer works in publishing in the UK. He commutes every day to get from his home in south-east London to his office in Oxford, and then back again. “My journey to work and back usually eats up to 6 hours of my day. The morning trip involves getting up at the crack of dawn. Going home is marginally more tiring because I have to contend with rush-hour traffic. If I leave the office by 5.15 p.m, I‟ll normally struggle through my front door by around 8.30 p.m. I‟ll then have an hour to eat, read a story to my daughter, and iron clothes for next day before I go to bed.
I do it because my wife and daughter are quite settled where we are and they‟d prefer not to move. For my part, I enjoy my job so feel it‟s worth the commute. The long journey does have its advantages, too. It gives me some precious „me time‟ when I can listen to music or radio programmes that my family don‟t like listening to at home.”
(Adapted from New English File by Clive Oxenden and Christina Latham-Koenig)

Renewable energy technology has developed drastically in recent years, with improved efficiency and lower cost. But one major issue is that they don‟t provide a perpetual supply of energy. Wind and solar farms only produce energy when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining - but we need electricity all the time. A possible way around this would be to generate solar energy in space.
There are many advantages. A space-based solar power station could orbit to face the Sun 24 hours a day. The Earth‟s atmosphere also absorbs and reflects some of the Sun‟s light, so solar cells above the atmosphere will receive more sunlight and produce more energy. But one of the key challenges to overcome is how to assemble, launch and deploy such large structures. Using lightweight materials will also be critical, as the biggest expense will be the cost of launching the station into space on a rocket.
Many possible solutions have been proposed, including the development of a swarm of thousands of smaller satellites that will come together and configure to form a single, large solar generator. Meanwhile, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have outlined designs for a modular power station, consisting of thousands of ultralight solar cell tiles that only weigh as much as a playing card. At the University of Liverpool, researchers are exploring new manufacturing techniques for 3D-printing ultralight solar cells on to solar sails, which are foldable, lightweight and highly reflective sheets capable of harnessing the effect of the Sun‟s radiation pressure push a spacecraft forward without fuel.
There is still a lot of work to be done in this field, but the aim is that solar power stations in space will become a reality in the coming decades. Researchers in China have designed a system called Omega, which they aim to put into operation by 2050. To produce that much power with solar panels on Earth, you would need more than six million of them. Smaller solar power satellites could be operational even sooner.
For a long time, the concept of giant solar power stations floating in space, was mainly an inspiration for fiction writers. A century later, however, scientists are making huge strides in turning the concept into reality. Our hope is that they could one day be a vital tool in our fight against climate change.
(Adapted from bbc.com)