A second-grade education has not stopped garbage collector Jose Gutierrez from bringing the gift of reading to thousands of Colombian children. Gutierrez started rescuing books from the trash almost 20 years ago. He was driving a garbage truck at night through the country’s wealthier neighborhoods. The discarded (丢弃的) reading material slowly piled up. And now the ground floor of his small house is a makeshift (临时的) community library with about 20,000 books ranging from chemistry textbooks to children’s classics.

He says books are luxuries (奢侈品) for boys and girls in low-income neighborhoods such as his. New reading material at bookstores is too expensive. There are 19 public libraries in Bogota. It is a city of 8.5 million people. But the libraries tend to be located far away from poorer areas. “This should be in each corner of every neighborhood, in all the towns and all the rural areas,” says Gutierrez. “Books are the poor children’s lifesavers. And that is what Colombia needs.”

The 53-year-old Gutierrez has a love of reading that he says comes from his mother. She always read to him even though she was too poor to keep him in school. Up to now he has traveled to book fairs in Mexico and Chile to share his experience of starting a library with discarded reading material. And his fame as Colombia’s “Lord of the Books” has also brought him thousands of donated books.

Gutierrez is an enthusiastic reader of works by authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and Mario Vargas Llosa. He says he does not reject technology that allows books to be read digitally. But he prefers to read the printed word on paper. “There is nothing more beautiful than having a book in your pocket, in your bag or inside your car.” he says.

For more than 5,000 years, chopsticks have been the preferred dining utensil (用具) of a sizable swath of humanity. Nowadays, around a third of the global population uses chopsticks daily. This is both a fact of life and these implements are often single-use, a serious environmental problem.

Every year, around 80 billion pairs find their way to landfills. “In Vancouver alone, we’re throwing out 100,000 chopsticks a day,” says Felix Böck, founder of the Vancouver-based startup ChopValue. “They’re traveling 6,000 or 7,000 miles from where they’re manufactured in Asia to end up on our lunch table for 30minutes.”

Since 2016, Böck has been on a mission to rethink disposable chopsticks. Rather than try to eliminate them, the engineer has been building a circular economy by giving them a second life. In their home base of Vancouver, company staff pick up around 350,000 used chopsticks from 300-plus restaurants every week, all of which become book shelves, cutting boards, coasters, desks, and custom decorations. According to Böck, the startup has saved more than 50 million pairs of chopsticks from landfills since its launch.

“Once you see the volume, you think maybe that little humble chopstick can be the start of something big,” Böck says. “My expertise is in bamboo, so I always looked at chopsticks differently. I used to joke to my friends that I would make something out of chopsticks, since most of the ones we use in North America are made of bamboo.”

Chopsticks are far from the only disposable dining implement to come under scrutiny in recent years. From plastic straws to polystyrene takeout containers, many components of our food cycle sacrifice environmental impact for convenience.

“I think change starts small, and change can be a very relatable thing that we all know from daily life,” Böck says. “Right now, we’re focusing on the chopstick because it’s a very powerful story.”

Ryder was born with a serious illness and has never been able to walk. When he started attending preschool, he had to be ________ to the end of the road in the ________ to wait for his school bus by his parents every day. As Ryder was unable to ________ for this bus if he was running late like his schoolmates, he would have to ________ for up to 15 minutes out in whatever ________ there was. Although his father had ________ a patio(露台) umbrella at the end of his driveway to provide some ________ from harsh weather,   he still would get wet and not stay ________.

Then his father ________ to reach out to their community to see if anyone had anything that would work to ________ Ryder. He placed a post on Facebook looking to see if one of his friends might have an old bus ________. After the post, he was advised to reach out to the ________ class at Westerly High.

He sent Dan McKena, who had been teaching construction technology at Westerly High School, an email asking if he’d be ________ in this kind of project. Delightfully, Dan ________ with an “absolutely” and then he worked hard on the project with his students for ________ weeks, learning new skills through YouTube as they built the hut. Meanwhile, after hearing about his problem, Home Depot ________ about $300 worth of wood for the project.

The hut made of wood was ________ enough to shelter both Ryder and one of his parents or a nurse comfortably, and was finally ________ to the home six weeks later. Now, Ryder ________ it every day before school and his parents wait inside it every day while they await his return home. He ________ the hut and does like to go hang out in it from time to time.

After     41    (orbit) Earth for six months, the three crew members of China’s Shenzhou XIII mission     42    (depart) from the Tiangong space station and returned to the mother planet, finishing the nation’s longest manned spaceflight.

Zhai Zhigang,     43     was the mission commander, Wang Yaping and Ye Guangfu breathed fresh air for the first time after the half-year space journey     44     ground recovery personnel opened the hatch of their re-entry at 10:03 a.m. Medical service workers on the site told China Central Television that the astronauts are     45     good condition. The reentry capsule     46    (touch) down on the Dongfeng Landing Site in the Gobi Desert at 9:57 am. Carrying the mission crew, the Shenzhou XIII spacecraft separated from the Tiangong station at 12:44 am. It circled the Earth several times to     47     (gradual) approach the mother planet. In the last hours of     48    (they) stay inside the Tiangong, the astronauts worked with ground     49    (control) to configure (设置) the station, transmit some     50    (experiment) data back to Earth and sort out materials.

I have always thought that going to the village market is so much fun. Between the holidays, I visited my aunt living in the village. The pleasant part was having to get up a little early by my standards, 6 in morning, but I managed that. I carry my aunt’s basket as we walked into the busy market. Though it was so early, but it was busy. My aunt walked around the stalls, looked at the wares. There were a lot of interesting vegetable in the market which I was not able to identifying. I bought my parents gifts respectively. I was sure that he would like them. Walking in the open air gave me a sense of peaceful and belonging.