【推荐2】People believe that climbing can do good to health. Where can you learn the skill of climbing then? If you think that you have to go to the mountains to learn how to climb, you’re wrong. Many Americans are learning to climb in city gyms. Here, people are learning on special climbing walls. The climbing wall goes straight up and has small holding places for hands and feet.

How do people climb the wall? To climb, you need special shoes and a harness around your chest to hold you. There are ropes tied to your harness. The ropes hold you in place so that you don’t fall. A beginner’s wall is usually about 15 feet high, and you climb straight up. There are small pieces of metal that stick out for you to stand on and hold on to. Sometimes it’s easy to see the next piece of metal. Sometimes, it’s not. The most difficult part is to control your fear. It’s normal for humans to be afraid of falling, so it’s difficult not to feel fear. But when you move away from the wall, the harness and the ropes hold you, and you begin to feel safe. You move slowly until you reach the top.

Climbing attracts people because it’s good exercise for almost everyone. You use your whole body, especially your arms and legs. This sport gives your body a complete training. When you climb, both your mind and your body can become stronger.

【推荐3】Parkour Around a City

There are many ways to travel within a city.    1     But no matter which way we travel, we have to follow the route the city planners laid down for us.

    2     To them, there are no designed routes. There are no walls and no stairs they jump, climb and crawl to move across, through, over and under anything they find in their path.    3    

The International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) has noticed that this activity is drawing more and more people to it—there are 100,000 people taking part in parkour (跑酷) today in the UK alone, according to The Guardian and how it is helpful for people to be much stronger: It trains coordination and balance.    4    

But parkour enthusiasts themselves don’t seem to be happy with the idea. They see parkour as “a lifestyle”.    5     Indeed, many do parkour just to escape the daily routine and experience the city in different ways. They see parkour as a way to express themselves through relaxing moves and creative routes while freeing themselves from the pressure.

It’s great that the FIG wants to develop a new sport and stay close to a new cultural form. But it would be greater if they knew that not everything in life is a competition.

【推荐1】Listening to loud music with earphones on an iPod or similar music player for more than 90 minutes a day can damage your hearing, according to a new United States study.

The study of 100 doctoral students concluded that people who listened to music at 80 percent of volume capacity (音量), at which point the sound is considered loud, should stick to under 90 minutes a day.

“If a person exceeds that on one particular day and happens not to use their headphones for the rest of the week, they’re at no higher risk,” study author Brian Fligor told reporters.

The study also found no problems for people who listened to music at 10 percent to 50 percent of maximum (最大的) volume for extended periods. It found, however, that anyone who listened at 100 percent for more than five minutes faced the risk of hearing loss. Fligor said people who consistently listen to high levels of volume don’t realize that hearing loss can take up to 10 years to show up.

“I worry about the teenager who’s going to be 23, 24, 25 years old and has a measurable noise-induced hearing loss and now has another 60 something years to live with his hearing which is only going to get worse,” said Fligor, who will present his study on Thursday to a conference in Cincinnati.

Fligor will also present the findings of another study co-authored by Terri Ives of Pennsylvania’s College of Optometry’s School of Audiology. They found earphones which broadcast sound directly into the ears are no more dangerous than headphones that are placed over the ears.

【推荐2】Like the post-90s generation in China, today’s teenagers in the UK have a problem with how they’re represented. Most of them feel unfairly represented by the media and their lives are negatively (负面地) influenced, says a recent survey.

The survey was carried out by the UK Demos, in which more than 1000 14-17-year-old teens from England and Northern Ireland took part.

The survey report shows that four-fifths of teens (81%) felt there was a false image of young people in the media and wider society. Most of them (85%) said that it is hurting both their self-esteem(自尊) and chance of getting a job.

By researching six UK newspapers over the past 10 years, Demos found that words most commonly connected with “teenagers” and “young people” were “binge-drinking”，“yobs” and “crime”.

“The young people out there are doing good things for the community, but there are always bad things on the news. But we’re not all like that, it’s only a few,” said Becky Brunskill, 18, member of Youth Parliament for Liverpool.

The survey also found that 80% of UK teenagers believed they cared more about social issues than the older generation. This was a view shared by their teachers, 66% of whom agreed in a separate Demos survey of 500 teachers.

The UK youth are also eager to make a difference. But rather than traditional politics, 87% of the teens believed social media was a good way to change society.

Jonathan Birdwell, author of the Demos report, said “They could be the most active citizens we have seen in a generation.”

【推荐3】The curb cut (路缘坡) is a convenience that most of us rarely, if ever, notice. Yet, without it, daily life might be a lot harder—in more ways than one.

Pushing a baby stroller onto the curb, skateboarding onto a sidewalk or taking a full grocery cart from the sidewalk to your car—all these tasks are easier because of the curb cut.

But it was created with a different purpose in mind.

It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the 1970s, most sidewalks in the United States ended with a sharp drop-off. That was a big deal for people in wheelchairs because there were no ramps (斜坡) to help them move along city blocks without assistance. According to one disability rights leader, a six-inch curb “might as well have been Mount Everest” for wheelchair-bound people. So, activists from Berkeley, California, who also needed wheelchairs, organized a campaign to create tiny ramps at intersections to help disadvantaged people dependent on wheels move up and down curbs independently.

I think about the “curb cut effect” a lot when working on issues around health equality. The first time I even heard about the curb cut was in a 2017 Stanford Social Innovation Review piece by PolicyLink CEO Angela Blackwell. Blackwell rightly noted that many people see equality as “a zero-sum game (零和游戏)”. Basically, there is a deeply rooted social belief among them that intentionally supporting one group hurts another. What the curb cut effect reveals though, Blackwell said is that “when society-creates the circumstances that allow those who have been left behind to participate and contribute fully, everyone wins.”

One such example is closed captioning (字幕), originally intended to help deaf people understand movies and TV shows without needing to hear dialogue or sounds. But it’s easy to think of other applications for closed captioning: it’s convenient for customers watching TV in a noisy bar or gym, second-language learners who want to read as well as listen, or students who use it as a study aid.

So, next time you cross the street, or roll your suitcase through a crosswalk or ride your bike directly onto a sidewalk—think about how much the curb cut, that change in design that broke down walls of exclusion for one group of people at a disadvantage, has helped not just that group, but all of us.