【推荐1】Why play games? Because they are fun, and a lot more besides. Following the rules, planning your next move and acting as a team member are all “game” ideas that you will come across throughout your life.

Think about some of the games you played as a young child, such as rope-jumping and hide-and-seek. Such games are entertaining and fun. But perhaps more importantly, they translate life into exciting dramas that teach children some of the basic rules they will be expected to follow the rest of their lives, such as taking turns and cooperating .

Many children’s games have a practical side. Children around the world play games that prepare them for work they will do as grown-ups. For instance, some Saudi Arabian children play a game called bones, which sharpens the hand-eye coordination (协调) needed in hunting.

Many sports encourage national or local pride. The most famous games of all, the Olympic Games, bring athletes from around the world together to take part in friendly competition. People who watch the event wave flags, knowing that a gold medal is a win for an entire country, not just the athlete who earned it. For countries experiencing natural disasters or war, an Olympic win can mean so much.

Sports are also an event that unites people. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world. People on all continents play it — some for fun and some for a living. Nicolette Iribarne, a Californian soccer player, has discovered a way to spread hope through soccer. He created a foundation to provide poor children with not only soccer balls but also a promising future.

Next time you play your favorite game or sport, think about why you enjoy it, what skills are needed, and whether these skills will help you in other aspects of your life.

【推荐2】Chinese athletes were highlighted by a series of inspirational wins in the International Ski Federation’s World Cup circuit recently. China’s Gu Ailing, a Chinese freestyle talent, made history by becoming the first ever back-to-back freeski World Cup winner in two different events at the same venue after claiming the slopestyle title in Calgary, Canada, on Feb.15, 2020. The day before, Gu had stormed to her first Cup gold in the halfpipe competition.

Gu again thrilled the crowds on Feb.15 in the slopestyle with another impressive display of technical riding, landing a string of difficult tricks, including a massive right 900° twist with a tail grab in her second run that earned her 89.18 points to dominate the 18-strong field.

“Honestly, my mind is blown,” Gu told the FIS website after the competition. “Coming in I didn’t have any expectations. I try not to take anything for granted. Honestly, I could not have expected two wins from these events.”

“I really just came in trying to do my best and ski the way I knew I could. Skiing my best is really the best part of this, and being rewarded for it just makes it even better.”

Born to a Chinese mother and an American father in San Francisco, US, Gu, better known as Eileen in the States, completed a naturalization process last June to represent China in international competitions.

Now she has her sights set on doing her mother’s home country proud at the 2022 Beijing Games.

A talented skier who has won many national junior titles in the US, Gu became a hit last month after winning two golds and a silver — in halfpipe, Big Air and slopestyle — at her first appearance in Winter Youth Olympics in Lausanne, Switzerland.

With Gu now on board in freeski, China’s snow sports team, which also features world-class aerial skiers and halfpipe snowboarders, is determined to challenge Western dominance on the snow in 2022.

【推荐1】Why do people lie? Many psychologists agree that lying can start from childhood. There are various reasons why children make false statements. They usually tell untruthful stories to cover up the mistakes that they have done in the past. Lying is also a way to avoid receiving punishments from parents. If parents fail to reprimand their children for making up false stories, then there is a possibility that they will continue to lie during their teenage years.

Teenagers lie because they want to be accepted by their friends. This is the main reason why they create stories that are not true just to become attractive and acceptable to other people. In some cases, teenagers tell untruthful statements to avoid criticisms from their families and friends.

As teenagers grow, lying becomes one of their habits. Their knowledge on making up untruthful stories becomes more developed. People lie in workplaces if they fail to meet the deadlines（截止日期） and if they fail to achieve and do their tasks efficiently. Some of the common lies made in workplaces are getting sick and having emergencies at home. The danger involved in frequent lying is when it becomes a character. Frequent lying causes the development of the condition known to doctors as pathological（病态的） lying.

Pathological lying is a mental health condition, which is linked with individuals who have the strong wish to tell untruthful statements. Patients suffering from it make up stories about everything and anything. These individuals lie to meet the standards of other people who they want to please.

These patients cheat other people because it gives them an unexplained pleasure. One of the best ways of treating pathological liars（撒谎者） is to help them tell true statements and stories at all times. This may be hard for them, but as they are used to it, they will start to realize that they will be more accepted by their families and other people if they stop themselves from making up false stories.

【推荐2】People’s distrust in science has led many scientists to take up arms (or at least keyboards) to defend their enterprise. But in their efforts to fight back against science denial, some scientists say things that just aren’t true-and you can’t build trust if the things you are saying are not trustworthy.

One popular move is to insist that science is right-full stop-and that once we discover the truth about the world, we are done. Or, as famous physicist Steven Smith said, “Even though a scientific theory is in a sense a social consensus (共识), it is unlike any other sort of consensus in that it is culture-free and permanent.” Well, no. Even a modest familiarity with the history of science offers many examples of matters that scientists thought they had resolved, only to discover that they needed to be reconsidered.

Another popular move is to say scientific findings are true because scientists use “the scientific method.” But we can never actually agree on what that method is. Some will say it is the observation and description of the world. Others will say it is the experimental method. Recently a prominent scientist claimed the scientific method was to avoid fooling oneself into thinking something is true that is not.

Each of these views has its merits, but if the claim is that any one of these is the scientific method, then they all fail. In point of fact, the methods of science have varied between disciplines and across time.

In my view, the biggest mistake scientists make is to claim that this is all somehow simple and therefore to imply that anyone who doesn’t get it is stupid. Science is not simple, and neither is the natural world; therein lies the challenge of science communication. What we do is both hard and, often hard to explain. Our efforts to understand and characterize the natural world   are just that: efforts. Because we’re human, we often fall flat. The good news is that when that happens, we pick ourselves up,   brush ourselves off, and get back to work.

Scientific theories are not perfect replicas of reality, but we have good reason to believe that they capture significant elements of it. And experience reminds us that when we ignore reality, it sooner or later comes back to bite us.

【推荐3】Volunteering to help people in need combined with travelling to faraway places is a new trend in the travel industry. It is called voluntourism. People travel to other countries, learn languages and other cultures and gain new experiences. At the same time, they volunteer to help others who are not as well off as they are.

Recent statistics show that in the past few years voluntourism has been one of the fastest-growing areas of tourism. More than 1.6 million people around the world are volunteers in other countries. They work in Orphanages (孤儿院), help build schools, assist in hospitals and do farming work in developing countries. Some of them establish lasting bonds with people far away.

While voluntourism has been around for over a century, modern volunteering started with the Peace Corps, a program that the US government started in the 1960s.

Many people get involved in voluntourism. Students see it as a gap year after school, and others simply want to take time out from a job and do something else. Then there are those who are bored and merely seek adventure. However, many voluntourists do not see volunteering as what it is. They think it is a cheap way of traveling and don’t really want to get involved in hard work.

Critics say that if people really want to help those in need there are many opportunities in their own community to do this. Furthermore, volunteers are often not skilled enough for the tasks that they do. Travel experts point out that in some cases voluntourists are exploited(利用)by the organization that sets the trips.

Job organizations urge volunteers to inform themselves about organizations and projects before applying forjob. Serious development programs are mostly supported by international organizations.