The Public Garden’s world-famous Swan Boats is one of Boston’ s most popular tourist attractions.

The pedal-powered boat takes riders on a leisurely tour around the garden’s lagoon (礁湖), giving a unique glimpse of its 24 acres of blooming flowers and lush lawns.

As well as enjoying nature, passengers are supporting a long-standing family business. Robert Paget launched the first Swan Boats in 1877. It’s said that he was inspired by the Richard Wagner opera Lohengrin, where a knight crosses a river in a boat drawn by a swan. While the design of the fleet of boats has evolved through the decades, the Swan Boats continues to be operated by the Paget family. The newest boat in operation is 25 years old, and the oldest is 109.

Training monkeys to pick coconuts(椰子)is a 400-year-old practice in Thailand. Monkeys are superpickers, naturally at home in the tall coconut trees. Males can harvest over 1,000 coconuts a day, females around 600. Humans, on the other hand, are super-slow in the treetops, with a mere 80 coconuts a day to their name. However, it could be argued that monkeys are being exploited(剥削)to meet growing consumer demand for coconut products.

Throughout history, humans have used animal labor to increase productivity or make tasks more manageable. From horses pulling ploughs in the English countryside, donkeys carrying luggage on South American treks, drugsniffer dogs in the US to guide dogs literally everywhere—all of those animals were specifically raised and trained to do their “jobs”.

Perhaps what upsets people about monkeys picking coconuts is that monkeys are so much like us. We share 93% of our DNA with macaques(猕猴). We share many of their behavioral traits. So when we read about them being “abused” or “exploited”, we perhaps feel more strongly about the issue than we do about, say, parrots riding bicycles to entertain tourists in Spain.

According to Operation Blankets of Love(OBOL), a leading animal welfare organization in California, macaques are snatched from the wild as babies and chained up or stuck in cages, which makes them extremely stressed. They’re forced to pick coconuts for human gain and denied (拒绝给予)companionship, mental stimulation and basic freedom.

However, it’s important to note there is no concrete evidence of “baby-snatching” or mistreatment. It could even be argued that the process of training is mentally stimulating, which, being intelligent animals, the macaques would enjoy. Furthermore, coconut farmers insist the monkeys aren’t abused or exploited. They say the monkeys are treated like family pets: loved and cared for, fed and watered, bathed and decorated.

Ethical(伦理的)living can be a minefield in the modern age. But if we stick to the facts and live true to our individual values, we can’t go wrong.

When Dr. Dana Suskind began doing cochlear implants (耳蜗移植) at the University of Chicago — a surgical technique that allows once-deaf babies to hear — in her follow-ups with families, she noticed a big difference in how the now-hearing children acquired language. Once they could hear, some children’s language skills grew rapidly, while others’ languished (停滞不前). Why this was so began to confuse her. What was causing some children to leap ahead in their language skills?

The difference turned out to be the words children heard from their parents and caregivers, millions of them. Baby talk, explaining and describing, asking questions even when they weren’t going to get an answer — adults’ “using their words” is the thing that some parents and caregivers do thousands of times a day and that builds a baby’ s brain.

While attending a course on child language development, Suskind heard about the groundbreaking Hart and Risley study on the differences in how parents from different income levels interacted with their children. After painstakingly following around families and recording how often they talked to their children, Hart and Risley found that the children of professional parents heard approximately 11 million words in a year, while children from poor welfare families heard only 3 million. Hart and Risley predicted that, by the time poor children turned 4, they had heard 30 million fewer words than their richer peers.

There was a direct connection between how much parent talk the children had heard and how prepared they were to learn once they arrived at school. Hart and Risley wrote, “With few exceptions, the more parents talked to their children, the faster the children’s vocabularies grew and the higher the children’ s IQ test scores were at age 3 and later.”

“The truth is, much of what you see in children born into poverty is analogous to children born deaf,” Suskind said. “It’s a really important point. The most fundamental science shows that it’s really language, and all that comes with it, the brain-building aspect of things, that make a difference,” said Suskind.

Like anyone else, I have social media personalities that I like to follow. I watch their Insta stories, YouTube videos and generally keep track of what they are up to by means of social media. These “celebrities (名人)” encourage me to pursue my dreams, and unlike my physical friends, are often more accessible — just a YouTube click away.

So when I found myself telling a story the other day to one of my friends at a cafe and then casually referring to one of these online personalities as “my friend”, I suddenly became aware of the blurred (模糊的) line between my physical and virtual social lives. I was retelling a YouTuber’ s story about how to practice appreciation as if it were my story to tell. The scary part is that it came so naturally that I had to pause and think twice about what had just come out of my mouth. How did I get to the point of referring to someone I had never actually spoken with as a “friend”?

Between trying to make a living and maintaining social relationships, it has become especially easy for millennials (those born between the early 1980s and 1990s) to turn to artificial social closeness to meet their basic human needs for social interactions. So how do we really know who our friends are in a world where the term “friend” seems so blurred? Is it right to call someone a friend who you’ ve never spoken with in real life?

Sometimes I worry that my online friendships are taking away the time I could be spending forming meaningful relationships in real life. In an article in Psychology Today, Alex Pattakos claims that our quest to create more and more friends through popular social media platforms has led to us feeling more disconnected in reality. His research states that we can only maintain around 150 real friendships and the desire to have more connections leads to emotional attachments to online celebrities, referred to as parasocial interactions, and consequently detachment (分离) from our real life connections.

Do you make a distinction between your online and offline “friends” ? If so, how?

How to forest bathe with your kids

Find your spot

You’re going to ask your child to slow down in order to take in nature, so choose a location where you all will be comfortable and relaxed. While any natural area or park with trees will work for forest bathing, the more wooded the area, the better.     16     , try to find a spot with plenty of trees.

Go slowly

As you begin your practice, start by letting your child know that this is a forest walk, not a hike.     17     , so you can see and feel more as you move through the forest. Walking slowly will help you keep your senses open to notice things and smell the forest air.

    18    

Now it’s time for them to open up all of their senses. Ask them to listen to the sounds of the forest: birds, insects, frogs, the sound of leaves blowing in the wind. Look up at the leaf canopy and pay attention to the light coming through. Take slow deep breaths and smell the fragrance of the forest air. Touch the trees, feel the leaves and soil. Ask them what they can smell. Let them know the phytochemicals that trees release are making us healthy each time we breathe them in.

Stay as long as your child can.

    19    . Two hours is recommended for a complete forest bathing experience. Once you have decided your forest bath is over, check in with your child. Ask them to tune into how they feel inside. Ask them if they feel calmer than before.

You can always start brief and build up. Even taking a 10-minute nature break has health benefits.     20    .

These days, you frequently hear “scaremongering（危言耸听）” on social media, but what about “caremongering” ? Even as I write this article my spelling software ______ that I should change caremongering into scaremongering—because there has never been such a（n）______.

Well, that’ s no longer the ______, since Toronto residents Mita Hans and Valentina Harper set up the first Facebook “Caremongering” groups to ______ people in Canada during the coronavirus epidemic. People are joining the groups to either ask for help or offer help—______     to people most at risk of the more ______ symptoms of COVID-19.

“Scaremongering is a big ______,” Harper says. “We wanted to ______ that and get people to ______ with each other on a positive level. ‘Caremongering’ has spread the opposite of ______     in people, brought out community and ______, and allowed us to ______ the needs of those who are ______ all the time—now more than ever.”

On the Toronto Caremongering group, 10,000 members ______ write one of three typical posts（帖子）: ISO, which stands for “in search of”; OFFER posts, where people offer goods or services to people ______ in self-isolation; SHOPS, which gives ______ about shops that are open or stocked.

However, there are also ______ posts like the one that Harper posted about how learning the Cree language can be something that people can do while isolating themselves. “I think there is an international ______ that the majority of Canadians are so nice,” she said. “As our population is small as a country, we ______ to care about each other, ______ there are a few bad apples who buy all the toilet paper!”

At the Tokyo Olympics semifinals on Sunday, Su Bingtian set     41     new Asian record in the men’ s 100-meter race with a time of 9.83 seconds. Since the digital timer     42    （introduce）, Su, 32, has also become the first Asian athlete to reach the Olympic final of the event.

Su     43    （eventual） achieved his long-time goal in his third Olympic Games. He had already run below 10 seconds in two 100-meter     44    （compete） this year. Su’ s semifinal time matched that of American runner Ronnie Baker,     45     also marked it as a personal best.

It was in May, 2015 at the Prefontaine Classic     46     the Chinese clocked a historic 9.99s,           47    （become） the first Asian to achieve the level. Bingtian hasn’ t looked back ever since adding seven gold medals     48     his name. He rewrote the Asian record at the 2018 Meeting Madrid event clocking a timing of 9.91 seconds.

    49    （bear） in Guzhen, Guangdong, China, Su was noticed by his middle school’s running coach because of his     50    （wonder） physical condition. He also took up the position of associate professor at Jinan University in Guangzhou, before deciding to compete at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

How to make a positive change