One school day Alice returned home very late. With a quarrel in view. I was surprised to see Alice was  3.

“I hope I did the right thing, Mom,”“Alice said. I saw a cat, all bloody but alive. I 4it to the vet's(宠物医院), and was asked to make payment 5. As I couldn't reach anyone at the phone number on the cat's tag(标牌), I had to pay the bill.”

In the following days, the owner still couldn't be 6. Alice paid the vet to continue treatment. I grew 7: what if the family had simply left the cat behind?

         A week went by. A woman called to speak to Alice.

         “She is at school,” I said.

         “You have a 8 daughter,” she said, apparently in tears.

Her family had just returned from abroad, and got a (n) 9 from the vet. Their cat was recovering, thanks to Alice's 10. “We can't wait to hug Cuddles again,” she sobbed.

          Upon her return home, Alice was filled with 11 at the news. So was I. I learned through another woman's eyes that my daughter was still a good person despite her 12 teenage years. Her warm heart would surely guide her in the right direction.

Heads or Tails?

Careful: It's not 50-50

The phrase "coin toss" is a classic synonym for randomness. But since the 18th century, mathematicians have 1 that even fair coins tend to land on one side slightly more often than the other. Proving this tiny bias, 2 , would require hundreds of thousands of carefully recorded coin flips, making laboratory tests a logistical （后勤的，组织协调的） 3 .,

František Bartoš, currently a Ph.D. candidate studying the research methods of psychology at the University of Amsterdam, became interested in this 4 four years ago. He couldn't 5 enough volunteers to investigate it at first. But after he began his Ph.D. studies, he tried again, recruiting 47 volunteers from six countries. Multiple weekends of coin flipping later, including one 12-hour marathon 6 , the team performed 350,757 tosses, breaking the previous record of 40,000.

With one side initially upward, the flipped coin landed with the same side facing 7 as before the toss 50.8 percent of the time. The large number of throws allows 8 to conclude that the nearly 1 percent bias isn't a fluke （侥幸）. "We can be quite sure there is a bias in coin flips after this data set," Bartoš says.

The leading theory explaining the 9 advantage comes from a 2007 physics study by Stanford University statisticians, whose calculations predicted a same-side bias of 51 percent. From the moment a coin is launched into the air, its entire track — including whether it lands on heads or tails — can be calculated by the laws of 10 . The researchers determined that airborne coins don't turn around their symmetrical axis （对称轴）; 11 , they tend to move off-center, which causes them to spend a little more time high in the air with their initial "up" side on top.

For day-to-day decisions, coin tosses are as good as random because a 1 percent bias isn't 12 with just a few coin flips, says statistician Ameli, who wasn't involved in the new research. Still, the study's conclusions should eliminate any lasting doubt regarding the coin flip's slight bias. "This is great experiment-based evidence 13 the bias," she says.

It isn't difficult to prevent this bias from influencing your coin-toss matches; simply 14 the coin's starting position before flipping it should do the trick. But if your friends are 15 the tiny bias, you may as well benefit from your slight advantage. After all, 51 percent odds beat a casino's house advantage. "If you asked me to bet on a coin," Bartoš says, "why wouldn't I give myself a 1 percent bias?"