【推荐2】Yang Xiuying, 76, sits at a wooden loom(织布机). As her fingers pass the shuttle back and forth through the cotton threads, the old machine comes to life.

Ever since she was a young girl, Yang has been making indigo(靛蓝的) cloth. “You can never buy this type of handmade cloth at the market," she says.

For the Dong people in Guizhou, making indigo cloth has a long tradition. The skill has been passed down from mother to daughter over generations. Nearly every family makes its own cloth.

This traditional skill, unfortunately, is now under threat. Young people show little interest in it. Some of them have moved to big cities to find better jobs. Local officials are trying to change young people' S attitude. One program has set up several cloth-making factories in Guizhou. After learning how to make indigo cloth, young Dong people can now find jobs easily. They can also work closer to home.

Traditionally, the Dong people consider indigo cloth as important as rice. Many Dong women spend countless hours making the cloth. They rise and start working very early in the morning. To make the cloth shiny, it must be rubbed and beaten hard. The noise of cloth being beaten often wakes the whole village up.

Almost every Dong woman over the age of 40 has a large round container for indigo dye(染料). The cloth has to be placed in the dye over dozens of rounds to gain the rich color. The process of coloring usually takes two weeks.

Yang holds out her purple and winkled hands. “They say she who has the darkest indigo marks on her hands makes the best cloth,” the old lady says.

A．

B．

C．

D．

【推荐1】Sneakers (运动鞋) have come a long way from when they were first invented in 1860s England for the upper-class playing croquet and tennis. But what transformed sneaker culture into a true phenomenon was the 1985 release of Nike’s Air Jordan 1.

In 1984, Michael Jordan was a talented new player who had yet to play in a professional game. Despite that, Nike — better known then as a running shoe company — saw Jordan as the future of their brand. The bet paid off. As Jordan proved to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time, the sneaker’s popularity skyrocketed.

Sneaker culture began to take off beyond the basketball court too. When the influential hip-hop group Run-D. M. C. released their single My Adidas in 1986, it earned the group a first-of-its-kind endorsement (代言) deal with the brand. Soon after, Kurt Cobain of the grunge band Nirvana made Converse a symbol of rebellion and youth.

Meanwhile, another cultural shift was taking place as white-collar businesses introduced casual Fridays. Suddenly, men were allowed to put aside their suits and wear something one day a week that showed people who they really were.

Nowadays, sneakers are also how people express their beliefs — for instance, when NBA player Dwyane Wade wore hiscustom-designed, limited-edition “Black Lives Matter” Li-Nings or NFL placekicker Blair Walsh wore anti-bullying sneakers covered in the words “Speak Out.”

“It’s like art,” says Akio Evans, a Baltimore creative who specializes in turning shoes into wearable artwork. “Even though it is a sneaker that is on the shelves or inside of a box inside a store, the very first thing you are doing is admiring what you see. You look at all the pieces and decide which one appeals to your emotions.”

Decades after their first introduction to the fashion industry, sneakers are finally getting their due as part of our cultural heritage.

【推荐3】For an industry that thrives (蓬勃发展) on creativity, fashion has been slow to introduce new ideas to reduce its distinctly uncool environmental footprint.

On all three fronts in the planetary crisis — climate change, nature loss and waste — manufacturers and retailers (零售商) of clothing could, and must, do better. Their carbon emissions are huge, thirst for raw materials is unsustainable (不可持续的) and waste management systems are rubbish. As just one example, every year we send 350,000 tonnes of clothing to landfill in the UK.

There are growing pockets of green creativity in the industry, but for the most part high-street brands seem to double down on the “fast fashion” business model.

We as consumers must also shoulder a large part of the blame, gladly stuffing our cupboards with cheap, bad and unsustainably produced clothes to be worn a few times and then thrown away. Most people on Earth participate in this wasteful cycle, helping to make clothing one of the most environmentally destructive industries.

Unlike some other damaging consumer choices, such as buying animal products, it isn’t really possible to simply choose out of clothes shopping. But of course there are ways of consuming that are less harmful. If patterns of demand change, such as changing to brands that run buy-back schemes for unwanted clothing, the industry will respond. More powerfully, we can simply choose to wear our clothes for longer. Keeping an article of clothing for an extra year can cut its environmental footprint by 30 per cent.

That, of course, requires a change in our mindsets. But such things can and do happen. A few years ago, plant-based diets were the choice of the unconventional few. Now they are commonplace.

We need the same revolution to happen when it comes to clothing choices. Here’s a make-do-and-mend mindset becoming mainstream — and even fashionable.

【推荐1】One morning a few years ago, at home in the Mänoa Valley on Oahu, scientist Kimberly Carlson looked out of the window and saw a rainbow so bright and clear that it took her breath away. That wasn’t a shocker: Hawaii is possibly the best place in the world to see rainbows today, and Manoa has particularly ideal conditions for clear bows: frequent rain showers and sunlight. But Carlson, now an environmental science professor now at New York University, realized she didn’t know the answer to a simple question: Would climate change affect Hawaii’s and the whole planet’s breathtaking rainbows? She shared the question with some climate scientist colleagues, and it interested them so much that they enlisted a class full of students to investigate.

Rainbows are not special because their basic ingredients are common and governed by relatively straightforward physics. “The basic recipe for seeing any part of the natural rainbow,” says Lee, “is sunlit rain.”

In November, they published their findings. “Climate change is affecting rainbows—now we know that’s true,” says Carlson, the lead author on the paper, which used computer models to simulate future rainbow-ready conditions. As major weather patterns change because of climate change, many parts of the world-particularly places nearer to the poles, like Alaska or Siberia, will get more rain—potentially adding dozens more rainbow-rich days by the end of the century.

The changes follow broader patterns of climate change; in fact, the shifts highlight some of the biggest risks and dangers. The increases in the Arctic, for example, are likely to play out because water that used to fall from the sky as snow will more often drop down as rain in a hotter future. And today’s rainbow-rich Amazon is predicted to suffer more frequently drought—both because the forest, which currently creates it sown rain, will lose that superpower as it shrinks, and because planet-wide climate change is shifting and changing the major weather patterns that cause tropical rainfall.