【推荐1】Trees are useful to man in three very important ways: they provide him wood and other products; they give him shade; and they help to prevent drought (干旱) and floods.

Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, man has not realized that the third of these services is the most important. In his eagerness to draw quick profit from the trees, he has cut them down in large numbers.

Two thousand years ago, a rich and powerful country cut down its trees to build warships, with which to gain itself an empire. It gained the empire but, without its trees, its soil became bare and poor. When the empire fell to pieces, the country found itself faced by floods and starvation.

Even where a government realizes the importance of a plentiful supply of trees, it is difficult sometimes to make the people realize this. They cut down the trees but are too careless to plant and look after new trees. So unless the government has a good system of control, or can educate the people, the forests slowly disappear.

This does not only mean that there will be fewer trees. The results are even more serious: for where there are trees, their roots break the soil up, allowing the rain to sink in, and also bind the soil. This prevents the soil from being washed away. But where there are no trees, the rainfalls on hard ground and flows away on the surface, and this causes floods and the rain carries away the rich top soil in which crops grow. When all the top soil is gone, nothing remains but worthless desert.

【推荐2】Twenty years ago, crises like the California’s wildfires and Hurricane Laura that occurred last year could have been described as “natural disasters”. Thanks to climate change, this is no longer the case. Around mid-August last year, the temperature in Death Valley once reached the highest ever recorded on Earth. A hotter, drier California is much more likely to burst into flames. The Gulf of Mexico too is heating up. Hurricanes draw their energy from the warmth of the surface waters and so are becoming stronger and more likely to increase. Perhaps we should call these events in a new term, “man-made natural disasters”.

People now play such an important role on the planet. By cutting down forests and digging mines and building cities, we’ve changed half of the ice-free land on Earth. With our advanced tools, we move around more earth than all the world’s rivers and streams. As a result, all sorts of disasters extend across the line between man and nature. Many earthquakes, for example, are now caused by human activity. Meanwhile, as the climate continues to warm, wildfires will grow even larger and storms more damaging.

What’s to be done? According to some scientists, the best way to deal with human intervention in the natural world is to intervene better. Old technologies got us into this situation; new ones will get us out. Supporters of this view note the striking advances that are being made all the time, in fields ranging from computing to material science. To prevent climate change, engineers have built machines that take CO₂ out of the air. Today the numbers are limited, but perhaps one day they’ll be as common as telephones.

As for me, I think that the choice we face is not whether to change the world; that decision unfortunately has been made. The decision going forward is how are we going to change it. Over the years I’ve interviewed scores of scientists, inventors, and industrialists, and I’m continually impressed by how clever humans are as a species. But then the wind blows in smoke from 3,000 miles away, and I’m reminded of how dangerous we are as well.

【推荐1】Guests arriving at the Aloft Hotel in Manhattan or one in Silicon Valley will soon be able to do something hotels have dreamed about offering for years: walk past the check-in desk and enter their rooms by using a smartphone as a room key. The boutique hotel brand from Starwood to Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. plans to offer this feature at two hotels before the end of the quarter.

Starwood officials are hoping this will be one of the biggest technological changes in the industry since free Wi-Fi. “We believe this will become the new standard for how people will want to enter a hotel.” says Frits van Passchen, Starwood’s CEO.

Not everyone is so sure. Past attempts to use technology to streamline the check-in process have had mixed results. Robert Habeeb, president of the First Hospitality Group, says he pulled out check-in desks at two of his Holiday Inn hotels after finding that most guests ignored them. He found that many travelers will talk with a staff member and ensure their room has the right view or location, or to try for an upgrade. Other guests may still want to be greeted when they arrive.

Hotels have never been known for being in the forefront of technology, partly because many hotels are owned and managed by small companies. Many hotel operators, though, have been searching for ways to remove the bottlenecks (瓶颈) at a hotel’s front desk. “Everybody has to check in, but we are all doing it pretty much the same way we were 100 years ago,” says Christopher Nassetta, CEO for Hilton Worldwide holdings Inc. “It’s something we are seriously addressing.”

Yet it is still not clear that virtual keys will do better than previous attempts to beat traditional check-ins. An effort several years ago to allow guests to enter rooms with the magnetic strip (磁条) on their credit cards never became popular. Guests worried about security and were unwilling to give their kids credit cards instead of room keys.

【推荐2】Distance learning has become the new form of education since schools closed, and teachers have adapted — with the help of some truly amazing online applications.

This popular application allows teachers to create online forums to share courses, news, or lessons as well as a platform to assign, collect, and give feedback on student work. I’ve used Google Classroom for years, and it has become the cornerstone of my classroom throughout distance learning.

This application is often used to gather information in a variety of contexts. Its test feature can be enabled to block users from opening other windows. It also offers auto-grading for multiple-choice tests. It has become a daily application in my classes during distance learning. I use it for pre-assessments, tests, and surveys.

Flipgrid is a free online application that allows students and teachers to record short online videos Teachers can easily create accounts and then within accounts create “classrooms.” From there, teachers can create posts for students to respond to via short videos.

Google Meet is an online meeting platform where teachers can share their screens with all participants to see as well as record the meeting. I’ve recorded all of my daily lessons and then posted the recordings to Google Classroom at the request of my students. This is a practice I’d like to continue even after distance learning as students really like the option to return to a recording of the day’s lesson to review it at their own pace.

【推荐3】English and Chinese have for a long time been the languages most studied around the world but the line up of other languages of study is ever-changing.

In 2020, Spanish overtook (超越) French as the second most learned language on the popular language learning app Duolingo. This could be explained by a number of factors. The Spanish-speaking community is increasingly influential in the US and Latin America is seen as increasingly influential worldwide. It could be that for many people in the US there’s a practical need to speak Spanish domestically (国内地) that has overridden (比……更重要) the wish to speak French for travel.

Asian languages are also increasing in popularity. There’s recently been great interest in Japanese from China, as well as from some African countries including Chad and Ethiopia. We can mainly relate this growing interest to Japan’s cultural output and general attraction to its unique culture. Not to mention the Olympics getting the interest of language learners from around the world.

What’s striking is that Chinese is now a more popular choice than Russian for language learners. That’s probably because the increasing global influence of China means it is seen as a more useful language to speak compared to Russian. Over 100 million learners are thought to be studying Chinese worldwide with interest from the UK, US, India and Africa. It’s interesting to see a relatively new superpower overtake a more established one — in language terms at least.

It’s hard to judge the cultural influence of a country but the number of people spending time learning more about it through its language is surely a sign that it is exerting (施加) influence.