E-TRASH

Nowadays, every household produces electronic trash (or e-trash)—an old TV or computer, a printer, or an out-of-date cell phone. But when we throw these everyday items away, not many of us know    1    they go. The journalist and photographer, Peter Essick, decided to follow this e-trash    2    several countries around the world.

In particular, Essick found that a lot of e-trash goes to Ghana. There, he saw    3    (mountain) of old computers in the local markets. The sellers resell some of them,    4     not many work. Instead, they recycle the broken computers by melting the parts inside. These parts contain a little metal such as copper or even gold. However, this recycling process is    5    (danger) for the workers because    6    produces a lot of toxic chemicals.

As a result of his journey, Peter Essick thinks it’s important to stop     7    (export) e-trash. It’s bad for the environment and it’s bad for    8    (people) health. Instead, he believes manufacturers need    9     (produce) more eco-friendly electronics, in other words, electronic products that you can recycle cheaply, safely, and in the country where they    10    (make).

Once，it was difficult to imagine a morning without a newspaper. But，the world     1     （change）. The news isn’t waiting for you.

It’s happening now. In order to get the     2     （late）news，just go to the Internet. If you like，you can get news     3     （send）to your mobile phone. Statistics（统计资料）show that     4     number of readers of newspapers around the world is falling every year，and this is understandable. The younger people do not have a natural     5     （attractive）to newspapers and books. They are fans of the computer and the Internet. Therefore，it is clear that     6     （gradual）many newspaper readers will turn     7     the Internet.

In my opinion，I，and my family，have not read newspapers for a long time，and it happened as soon as I realized that all the news that I read in newspapers can     8     （find）on websites or TV. If the newspaper does not give new information，why do we buy it and spend precious time？

Online news saves time，allows you     9     （choose）the items that you are interested in. I like sites that collect news from different sources，     10     you can get reliable and objective. （客观的）information.

There have been a lot of     1     (argue) about the junk (垃圾) that pops up in the form of game-related push notices on smartphones where their kids play video games. In fact, that happens because app developers take advantage of algorithms (演算法) to get more hits and reading counts,     2     they believe increase their data flow and trick users to visit their pages.

However, this kind of “smartness” is bad for users, for the information sent this way is rarely of any educational value and beyond the     3     (recognize) of children. Once they get trapped in this “information cocoon (保护罩)”, it isn’t     4     (benefit) to their learning process.

To prevent that from happening, market regulators need to     5     (strength) management of app algorithms and they could also improve the technology to prevent users from getting addicted to junk information.     6     (addition), the laws must     7     (make) so that smart phone apps don’t continue helping those advertisers     8     target is to make profit by spreading junk. Although increased data flow is meant     9     (attract) commercial advertisements, media outlets shouldn’t pursue profit at the cost of youngsters’ mental growth. Finally, children need to be taught how to tell junk from useful information, thus keeping them     10     (concentrate) on the right thing.

For that to happen, both schools and parents need to make joint efforts to teach them how to use apps to broaden their knowledge and avoid getting lost in the ocean of useless information.