【推荐1】Amid growing global condemnation of elephant riding as a tourist activity, Yok Don National Park in southern Vietnam has ended the practice and replaced it with the first ethical (伦理的) elephant experience of its kind in the country.

The formally captive group of four elephants were released from their chains earlier this month and no longer carry tourists on rides through the park. Visitors can instead observe the animals roaming freely in their natural habitat.

The park worked on the initiative with Animal Protection Asia, which campaigns for long-term changes in animal welfare and tourism in Vietnam. The official agreement between the charity and the state-run park was signed on 13 July, and runs until April 2023, with the first tours taking place earlier this month. Over the next five years, it is hoped that the new model will provide as much or even more revenue for owners as riding, and encourage mahouts (管象人) and elephant tourism companies to follow.

This project has entirely changed the lives of the elephants at the park and it also provides a much better experience for the tourists. Misuse has been replaced with respect, and the animals look much healthier and happier than before.

Awareness of the adverse effects of elephant riding has increased in recent years, with a growing number of tourists avoiding cruel attractions and supporting welfare centres and animal protection instead, alongside an increasing number of tour operators refusing to sell elephant treks that include riding.

Many of the elephants used in riding and other activities, such as painting or performing tricks, are caught as babies from the wild, their mothers often killed. Once captured, they typically undergo intensive conditioning known as “crushing the spirit”, where they are kept in tiny pens and beaten and starved, sometimes for weeks. Once trained, many of the animals eventually die from exhaustion. Campaigners and charities hope to continue to educate the industry in Vietnam and around the world, and show how profitable ethical elephant experiences, with retired and rescued animals, can be, instead.

【推荐1】Social media is one of the fastest growing industries in today’s world. A study conducted by the US Pew Research Center showed that 92 percent of teenagers go online daily. The wide spread of social media has changed nearly all parts of teenagers’ lives.

• Changing relationships

High school student Elly Cooper from Illinois said social media often reduces face- to-face communication. “It makes in-person relationships harder because of people’s attention given to their phones instead of their boyfriends or girlfriends,” Cooper said.

Yet, some people believe social media has made it easier to start relationships with anyone from anywhere. Beth Kaplan from Illinois met her long-distance friend through social media. He currently lives in Scotland, but they’re still able to frequently communicate with each other. “I can feel close to someone that I’m talking to via FaceTime,” Kaplan said.

• Wanting to be “liked”

The rise of social media has changed the way teenagers see themselves. The 19- year-old Essena O’Neill announced on the social networking service Instagram that she was quitting social media because it made her unable to stop thinking about appearing perfect online. Negative comments also can do great damage to a teenager’s self-esteem. Teenagers who get negative comments can’t help but feel hurt.

• Opening new doors

However, Armin Korsos, a student from Illinois, takes advantage of the comments he receives over social media to improve his videos on the social networking site YouTube. “Social media can help people show themselves and their talents to the world in a way that has never been possible before,” Korsos said.

【推荐3】If you cut in line, you might just be a bad person. The queue is a regulation where the reward (the ice-cream stand/dining room/ticket booth) is earned through patience. Your choice to avoid this time-honored process will be bound to draw the anger of those you pass by, drawing remarks like “Whoa there, Chief,” the passive-aggressive “There’s a line, you know!” and of course, the incredibly common “Hey, Copernicus, why don’t you guide yourself to the back of the line?”

But, in the moment in which you really cannot wait, for example, the entire royal family has prepared a dinner party upon you last minute, then there is a way to cut the line correctly.

There are a few different ways to consider and a few different methods to employ. The regularity of the situation is very important. If you’re waiting to use the photocopier at work, you might be more likely to manage a successful cut than if you were waiting for a lifeboat on the Titanic. Sure, that might be an extreme example. But the importance of the event does matter.

For those requests in normal situations, emphasizing either the urgency of your task or the simplicity of your task proved to be effective: experimenters who said “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the photocopier?” had a cut rate of 60 percent and experimenters who said “May I use the photocopier because I need to make copies?” saw a success rate of 90 per cent when queuing for the copy machine.

If you have a couple of extra dollars lying around, bribing members of the line also proved to be effective. And most of the time, the person being bribed didn’t end up accepting the money, because even the offer showed that the briber had a sense of desperation.

【推荐2】The Aral Sea was once the world's fourth largest lake. Filled with salt water and at least 24 species of fish, the Aral Sea supported a large fishing industry. In the 1960s, water from the Aral Sea started to be used to irrigate dry fields to produce cotton. Three quarters of the water was pumped from the sea over the next two decades, leaving behind a salt-covered desert. The disappearing Aral Sea split into two separate lakes-the small Northern Sea and a much larger body of water to the south.

By that time, most fish in the Aral Sea were gone. Salty irrigation water soon damaged the soil in the cotton fields, so huge amounts of chemical pesticides(杀虫剂)and fertilizers were used trying to keep the fields productive, which could be found in the groundwater and drinking water although must cotton fields disappeared, And the wind picked up salt from the dried-up lake and carried it to farmland far from the Aral. Besides, people who lived in the area experienced many health problems.

Today, however, there is some hope for the region. In the late 1990s, people in Kazakhstan used sand and soil to build a dam that would prevent the Syr Dar'ya river water that fed the lake from flowing, out of the lake. They also decided to take less water from the river for irrigation. The water level began to rise, and places that had been completely dry for decades began to show signs of life. People who lived nearby began to believe that the Aral Sea might return.

A permanent dam, the Kok-aral dam, was completed in August 2005. By April 2006, the water level had already risen three meters, and the water was less salty. The northern part of the Aral Sea may soon be a much healthier place to live for both fish and people.

【推荐3】Every festival has its own meaning. Labor Day, for example, celebrates the value of hard work. Thanksgiving is about showing thanks to people around you. And Valentines’ Day is a time when you express love to your loved ones. But somehow it now seems that all festivals we just care about one thing — shopping. And that can be a big problem.

“In a way, over-consumption (过度消费) is the mother of all our environmental problems,” Kalle Lasn once told CNN. Lasn is the organizer of Buy Nothing Day, a day set up in Canada in 1992 to fight against unhealthy spending habits, and has now become an international event. It’s held on the day, which is known as Black Friday — a famous shopping day in the US and Canada.

You can see the irony (讽刺) here.

Even though the idea of Buy Nothing Day was brought up 26 years ago, we seem to need it now more than ever. It’s just as Lasn said, all the different kinds of pollution in our lives today — bad air quality, the reduction of forest area, endangered animal species, and plastic bags found in the ocean — seem to be the same cause: over-consumption.

The latest example is the Singles’ Day shopping craze of Nov 11, which saw a new sales record. But as Nie Li, a campaigner at Greenpeace, told Reuters, “Record-setting over-consumption means record-setting waste.” And it was reported that last year the Singles’ Day packages left more than 160,000 tons of waste, including plastic and cardboard. The Collins Dictionary has also just named “single-use” its Word of the Year, pointing out the problem that there’re too many things we tow out after only using them once.

So, Buy Nothing Day might only be here for one day a year, but it’s not just to remind us to the a break from shopping on that day, but to change our lifestyle completely, focusing on fun “with people we care about” rather than wasting money on useless things.