The reading room on the first floor of the central library in Sapporo still whispers; the ground floor now hums. In what was once a newspaper archive, residents queue for 3-D printers, borrow sewing machines and record podcasts in a soundproofed booth. The booths are booked a week ahead, and a board by the door lists the evening's short classes, from coding for beginners to how to hem trousers. Across the network, the central branch alone now lends out about eighty pieces of equipment a month, most of it free with a standard library card. The logic, librarians explain, is defensive in the best sense. Visits had been drifting down for a decade as search engines answered the questions people once asked at the desk. Rather than mourn, the library asked what it uniquely offers: space, trust and staff who help strangers with complicated things. Membership among eighteen-to-thirty-year-olds, which had slumped, has recovered by about two fifths since the makerspace opened — and the borrowers, it turns out, also borrow books. Traditionalists are not persuaded. Grinders drown out readers, and every broken nozzle is money not spent on books. A library that chases every fashion, they warn, will forget what it was for. Letters to the local paper recall the childhood magic of the quiet floor with real feeling. The head librarian's answer is arithmetic rather than rhetoric. He borrowing of books never actually fell — the new floors added visitors without subtracting old ones. A quiet library was never the point — a useful one was. The whispering upstairs continues, now funded by the humming below.
选词填空：Membership among ______-to-thirty-year-olds, which had slumped, has recovered by about two fifths since the makerspace opened — and the borrowers, it turns out, also borrow books.