B2 Reading: Will We Live Forever?
Read the article about the future and fill in the gaps.
Word Bank
Tap a word, then tap a gap. On a computer you can also drag it.
sceptical
breakthroughs
ahead of their time
forecast
cutting-edge
far-fetched
in the long run
crystal ball
predictions
time will tell
milestone
approve
People have always wanted to know what the future holds. In the past, they paid fortune tellers to look into a . Today we ask scientists and tech companies, and their answers can be just as surprising.
Some changes arrive faster than anyone expected. When ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022, it reached 100 million users in just two months, a that had taken TikTok nine months. Its record did not last long: in July 2023, the Threads app did it in under five days.
Food is changing too. In 2020, Singapore became the first country to the sale of meat grown from animal cells. The United States followed in 2023, Israel in 2024 and Australia in 2025. For now, lab-grown meat is expensive and hard to find, but supporters believe that it could replace much of the meat from farms.
Medicine has also seen some remarkable . In January 2025, surgeons in Boston gave a 66-year-old man a kidney from a gene-edited pig. It worked for a record 271 days, until he could receive a human kidney. Meanwhile, brain implants are allowing people who cannot move their arms or legs to control computers just by thinking. By September 2025, one company, Neuralink, had given its implant to 12 patients.
Then there are the bolder . The inventor Ray Kurzweil believes that in the 2030s, tiny robots will travel through our blood into the brain and connect it to the internet, and that one day people could upload their minds and live forever as software. Many scientists are . They say we still understand far too little about the brain, and that the idea is .
So, will we live forever? Nobody knows. Some inventions that seemed are now part of daily life, while the flying car is still waiting. Perhaps the safest is that the future will surprise us. As always, only .
Some changes arrive faster than anyone expected. When ChatGPT was launched at the end of 2022, it reached 100 million users in just two months, a that had taken TikTok nine months. Its record did not last long: in July 2023, the Threads app did it in under five days.
Food is changing too. In 2020, Singapore became the first country to the sale of meat grown from animal cells. The United States followed in 2023, Israel in 2024 and Australia in 2025. For now, lab-grown meat is expensive and hard to find, but supporters believe that it could replace much of the meat from farms.
Medicine has also seen some remarkable . In January 2025, surgeons in Boston gave a 66-year-old man a kidney from a gene-edited pig. It worked for a record 271 days, until he could receive a human kidney. Meanwhile, brain implants are allowing people who cannot move their arms or legs to control computers just by thinking. By September 2025, one company, Neuralink, had given its implant to 12 patients.
Then there are the bolder . The inventor Ray Kurzweil believes that in the 2030s, tiny robots will travel through our blood into the brain and connect it to the internet, and that one day people could upload their minds and live forever as software. Many scientists are . They say we still understand far too little about the brain, and that the idea is .
So, will we live forever? Nobody knows. Some inventions that seemed are now part of daily life, while the flying car is still waiting. Perhaps the safest is that the future will surprise us. As always, only .