【推荐1】 Recently, the UK Department of Health (DoH) says in one of its reports that measures taken to deal with the advertising of rubbish food to children seem to be taking effect — at least in terms of television advertising. According to DoH, a child­themed ad is an ad that has a connection with a children’s TV programme, film, book, computer game or a licensed character, a new product or packaging designed to appeal to children.

The advertising of HFSS foods (high in fat, sugar and salt) has become something of a battleground between the industry and health defenders, with the former saying that efforts are being made to guarantee that children are targeted less, and the latter arguing that these efforts are inadequate (不适当的)．

However, advertisers may be turning their attention to other media. In the press, money spent on general food and drink child­themed advertising between 2004 and 2009 increased. Annual child­themed ad spending on radio and the Internet also increased by 11 percent.

UK Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo responded to the report, “I am pleased that there are now fewer ads on TV that are making our children fall into bad eating habits — but we must keep an eye on other types of media. I hope that the industry will continue to play its part in reducing the exposure that children have to the advertising of HFSS foods.”

【推荐2】Pollution is a disaster for the soil. When chemicals go into the ground, they slowly reduce the fertility of the soil and make it unsuitable for farming. They may also change the structure of the     soil , which gets more easily destroyed by water and air.

For ordinary consumers, the influence of soil pollution can be felt most strongly in the supermarket. Exposure( 暴 露 ) to soil pollution can pollute foods grown in the field, harming people’s health.

One example of this is the “ poisonous rice event” that surfaced in 2013. Some rice from Hunan province was found to contain higher levels of cadmium(镉), a kind of metal likely to cause cancer, because Hunan has some of the worst soil pollution in China, according to CBC News. All the samples collected from this area were heavily polluted by cadmium. Sometimes, the cadmium level is 20 times higher than the national standard.

According to scientists, high levels of cadmium have been linked to organ( 器官) failure,weakening of bones and cancer. “ Cadmium is likely to store up in the kidney and liver,” Chen Nengchang, a scholar at the Guangdong Institute of Eco-environment and Soil Sciences, told The New York Times. “ When the amount reaches a certain point, it will cause a serious health risk for the organs.”

Unfortunately, fixing the problem was not as simple as destroying a few piles of rice. Since the outer covering of rice are often used to feed farm animals, the meat we eat and the milk we drink may both be at risk.

Luckily both the government and Chinese consumers have becomes more and more aware of this kind of pollutions, and aim to fight the situation with combined effort. There are many things we, as individual, can do to help. Eating organic foods are one of them.

Organic food is not only better for our health but also for our environment, especially the soil. To grow organic food, farmers stop using all artificial chemicals------including fertilizers, and pesticides. This production method does not cause any risk of soil pollution, unlike traditional   farming, which uses tons of artificial chemicals. By consuming organic foods, we support healthier soil.

【推荐3】While some people might view breakfast as optional, most Shanghainese, despite living in arguably the most fast-paced city in China, won’t be caught skipping this meal no matter how busy they are.

In fact, Shanghai was even named by the Ministry of Commerce as a pilot city for the National Breakfast Demonstration Project in 2011. According to the authorities, the project is aimed at improving the quality of life and making high-quality breakfast options more accessible to the masses. Since the beginning of the project, the city has built 24 industrialized and standardized central kitchens which supply food to 7,800 stores selling breakfast items. By August 2020, there were more than 20,000 shops in the city offering breakfast food.

In the current stage of the ongoing project, the focus has shifted from increasing options to improving the convenience of purchasing this meal. To do so, the local government issued a guideline last August to promote digital breakfast services in convenience stores, mobile food trucks, retailers, and Internet platforms. Companies have also been encouraged to come up with new nutritious meals and adopt the use of eco-friendly packaging materials.

For office workers like Qian Li, buying breakfast no longer involves having to brave long queues. Rather, all she has to do now is place an order using the app for the Ego convenience store near her work place before picking up her freshly made meal from a smart locker.

The guideline has also resulted in developments like cooperative deals between e-commerce giant Alibaba and three major food truck enterprises. According to this agreement, mobile breakfast trucks, including those operated by local food company LiangFood, can establish a digital presence on Alibaba’s take-out and delivery platform Eleme, allowing customers to order their meals online without having to queue.

The introduction of more healthy breakfast options is also in preparation. To date, 12 enterprises have developed 208 nutritious breakfast sets catering to specific groups of people—patients with diabetes, the elderly, children and teenagers.

Edison and Popular Culture

Whenever we play music or go to the movies, we enjoy the benefits of Thomas Edison’s genius and hard work. Although Edison is perhaps most famous for his light bulb, his inventions in sound recording and motion pictures has contributed to entertainment industry.

After his successful development of the first phonograph in 1877, Edison and his researchers made countless improvements to the phonograph (留声机) striving for the finest sound reproduction possible.     1     What the public really wanted, however, was a machine to play music. Recognizing the biggest market for the phonograph, Edison began producing musical records in the early 1890s. However scratchy and rough those early records seemed, they were amazing to buyers who were hearing recorded sound for the very first time. The development of records, cassette tapes and finally digital music traces back to Edison’s early experiments with sound recording.

    2     In October 1888, Edison intended to do “for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion.” Thus began Edison’s development of the kinetograph (motion picture camera) and kinetoscope (motion picture viewer).

Over the next years, Edison experimented with the making of motion pictures, constructing the Black Maria, the world’s first structure especially built to be a motion picture studio. The first motion pictures were not projected on a theater screen.     3     For a 5-cent coin, viewers could look through the peephole (窥孔) to see Blacksmith Scene, or the Barbershop. Although the first films lasted less than a minute, they excited audiences as much as any film seen today.

The first films were silent, but in 1895 Edison attempted to combine sound recording and motion pictures in a device he called the kinetophone. Unfortunately, this early effort at talking motion pictures proved unsuccessful. More than thirty years would pass before sound films would become widespread.

Edison wanted to invent things to improve the lives of all people, whether it was electric light bulbs to light their homes or phonographs and motion pictures to inspire their imagination. Every time we turn on a light switch or watch movie, we enjoy the gift of Edison’s genius. But true genius, said Edison, relies on “hard work, stick-to-initiativeness, and common sense”.     4    

【推荐3】The Global Heritage Fund,a nonprofit organization, aims to protect places of cultural importance in developing countries for the reason that these countries often have few resources to protect such places and that other major cultural organizations often pay more attention to protecting places in the developed world. For example, the UNESCO has 45 World Heritage places in Italy, 42 in Spain, but Peru, famous for its ancient Incan buildings, has only 9 World Heritage places. Guatemala has only 3.

The fund recently released a list of cultural treasures in the developing world that are in danger of disappearing. These places are important because they are records of our human civilization. Globalization has created an international culture that is about sameness. But the endangered places it is trying to protect represent the rich differences of human culture throughout history.

One of the fund's current projects is in Guatemala's (危地马拉) Mirador Basin, which contains several important examples of ancient Mayan settlements. The buildings are surrounded by forest.

Centuries of tree growth have covered the pyramids and religious buildings, which provide some of the finest examples of the early part of the Mayan civilization (玛雅文明). But this area is in danger from robbers and people cutting trees illegally. Also, over the past ten years, over 70% of the natural environment in the area has been destroyed by fires.

The fund has 3 goals for its Mirador project. One is helping the government obtain UNESCO recognition. Another is establishing permanent protection for the area. And the third is working to make the area a sustainable protected area within 10 years.

To meet these goals, money from the fund will go toward restoring the buildings of El Mirador and mapping and exploring newly discovered buildings. The fund is also paying to train local guides on how to stop theft and illegal tree-cutting. Educational programs are helping to give people in the area the skills they need to have jobs that do not endanger this protected area.

The Global Heritage Fund says we have a duty to the people of the past, present and future to make sure we do not lose these examples of human history. Every country, organization and individual can play a role in helping to protect this rich history.