【推荐1】When the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), the world’s governing body for soccer, claimed that the 2022 World Cup in Qatar would be “a fully carbon-neutral (碳中和) event”, it attracted worldwide laughter from the environmentalists.

World Cup hosts often maintain that stadiums built for the event will remain in constant use after its conclusion—a claim that allows them to spread their carbon footprint over many years. But it’s hard to believe the claim. After all, Qatari soccer culture is still undeveloped. Even soccer- mad countries such as Russia, Brazil and South Africa-hosts of the previous three men’s World Cups-have been left with a group of relatively useless stadiums.

In addition to the carbon cost of the stadiums, Qatar expects to see 1, 300 daily flights to and from the country during the World Cup. But that’s not the only source of airplane emissions. The grass seeds to give rise to the tournament’s green pitches (球场) have been flown in from North America on climate-controlled planes. And these fields won’t water themselves. The groundskeepers who maintain the eight stadium pitches, as well as the 136 practice fields, douse each field with 10, 000 liters of water every day in the winter. In the summer the pitches require a surprising amount of 50, 000 liters each.

Soccer isn’t alone in this. Three recent Olympics-Tokyo 2020, Rio de Janeiro 2016 and Sochi 2014-earned some of the worst environmental sustainability scores. All this raises an important question: Is it even possible to stage a carbon-neutral sports mega event? The ever- expanding size of these events likely puts net-zero emissions out of reach. One recent study found that between 1964 and 2018, the soccer World Cup and the Olympics were about 60 times as large in terms of the number of sports, athletes, journalists, spectators, marketing and costs involved.

The large sports events, as they are currently organized, are unsustainable. Since FIFA and the International Olympic Committee made more environmental claims back in the 1990s, their events have only become bigger, and their effects have only become more severe.

【推荐2】About the author: Roy Tomizawa celebrated his first birthday on the opening day of the 1964 Olympics. Roy has been a fan of the Olympics. A year after Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Olympics, Roy went searching for an English-language book that recorded the 1964 Olympics — but he couldn’t find one. So Roy decided to combine his love of the Olympics and his skills for writing and record the event that symbolized the determination of the Japanese to survive and thrive after World War II.

About the book: Japan was a physical and psychological wasteland at the end of World War II. With over 3 million dead, 39 percent of city populations homeless, 40 percent of all urban areas flattened, 80 percent of all ships destroyed, and 33 percent of all industrial machine tools not usable, the country was destroyed.

And yet, just 19 years later, Japan stood proud-modern, peace-loving, and open-welcoming the world as the host of the 1964 Olympic, the largest global event of its time.

In 1964 — The Greatest Year in the History of Japan, Roy Tomizawa records how Japan rose from the destruction to create the greatest Asian economic miracle of the 20th century. He shares stories from the 1964 Olympics that created a level of adjustment and national pride never before seen in Japan, leaving an unforgettable mark in the heart of the Japanese for generations.

【推荐2】Governments, financial institutions, employers, border security and police services are increasingly using facial recognition technology. This allows them to quickly confirm an individual's identity. Systems are becoming so competent that a wanted criminal can be picked out. of a crowd of thousands of people. All that's required is an image in a database to compare with the image of any number of people in a crowd.

Ordinary people, too, are using facial recognition to unlock their phones, computers and other devices. Such systems are generally quite secure. They also are instantaneous (瞬间的) and relieve people of the need to memorize passwords or PINs ( Personal Identification Numbers).

Despite these advantages, human rights groups in the U. S. have protested against the growing use of facial recognition technology for two main reasons. The first is that current facial recognition systems frequently make mistakes with certain groups of people. A study conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology examined three systems and found that they wrongly identified up to 34 percent of women who had dark skin. Another government study on facial recognition systems found that their error rates were higher for black women and Asians as well as for African men and women. The systems were much more reliable when they were used to identify white men, suggesting that their facial recognition technology had mainly been trained using white faces.

The second reason is that these systems could be used in ways that would harm human rights. If the systems improved enough to become one hundred percent reliable, police departments might use them to identify people taking part in legal protests and demonstrations. Gathering and storing such information about citizens could violate their privacy rights.

In response to such concerns, the U. S. city of Portland has forbidden the use of facial recognition by government agencies as well as by stores, restaurants and hotels in the city.

【推荐1】Bookstores are second homes for readers. Although many people can now buy books online, many readers still like the feeling in bookstores. They can touch the books and smell the print.

In China, there are many special bookstores. Sanlian Taofen Bookstore became the first 24-hour bookstore in Beijing at the beginning of April. Popular Holdings in Shanghai is a film-themed bookstore. It has film books and posters. Eslite Bookstore in Taiwan often has activities like talks with famous writers.

At the same time, bookstores outside China can be very colorful, too. Scarthin Books is a small bookstore in the UK. It sells new and second-hand books. There are more than100,000 books lying on the shelves of the store’s 12 rooms. Bart’s Books in the US is a good place to enjoy the sunshine while you are reading books. It’s an outdoor bookstore. Bookshelves are on the street. When the store is closed, people can still buy books. They just put money into the door’s coin box. Where can you find a cafe, bar and bookstore in just one place? The answer is probably El Pendulo in Mexico. Books line the walls of the store. On the second floor, visitors can order everyday meals in the cafe and drinks from the bar. In order to keep cool, there are green plants and trees inside. Does it look like a park?

【推荐2】If you’ve been joining in chat room conversation, or exchanging e-mail with your e-pals, you have become one of the millions who write in a special short form of English. And you’ve got a sense of humor about short forms like SOHF (= sense of humor failure) to describe Internet newcomers who don’t understand you.

Across the globe, every night teenagers and their elders are “talking” online — many of them all talking at the same time. It’s fast: try talking to six people at once. It’s brief: three or four words per exchange. It takes wit (风趣) and quick fingers.

And it requires tremendous linguistic economy (语言省略). There’s neither time nor space for explanations. Why consume precious key-strokes telling six friends you have to leave for a moment to take care of your little brother when BRB (be right back) will do?

Want to enter a conversation? Just type PMFJI (=pardon me for jumping in). Interested in whom you’re talking to? A/S/L, the nearly universal request to know your pal’s age, sex and location. You may get 15/M/NY as a response from your pal.

If something makes you laugh, say you’re OTF (=on the floor), or LOL(= laughing out loud), or combine the two into ROTFL (= rolling on the floor laughing).

And when it’s time to get back to work or go to bed, you type GTG (got to go) or TTYL (= talk to you later).

People want to write as fast as possible, and they want to get their ideas across as quickly as they can. Capital letters (大写字母) are left in the dust, except when expressing strong feelings, as it takes more time to hold down the “Shift” key and use capitals. Punctuation (标点) is going, too.

【推荐3】When thinking about intelligence, we often place humans at the top of the ranks. However, there is a species whose intelligence is far more advanced and perhaps more similar to humans than we'd thought - crows （乌鸦）.

In 2002, a crow named Betty wowed Oxford University by picking up a piece of wire in her cage and bending it at one end using another object to shape the wire into a hooked (钩状的)tool. The hooked tool was then used to lift a small container containing a pig's heart from inside a plastic tube for the bird to eat. Many years later, researchers found that bending tools was in fact, not that unusual for New Caledonian crows.

Part of the Corvid family of birds, the brains of New Caledonian crows and others within the family have been studied more closely. Corvids have shown amazing cognitive（认知的）abilities. Unlike humans, corvids do not have a neocortex—a brain structure that allows for advanced cognitive development. Instead, their brains are filled with neurons(神经元)which have enabled the birds to have similar mental capacities.

According to a paper published earlier this year, New Caledonians are fastidious about the type of plant stem （茎）used to make their hooked tools and are able to figure out what the best plant stem is for them. They are capable of looking for that plant stem even when it is disguised(伪装) with leaves from a different plant species. Crows are also able to apply their abilities to advanced problem-solving. Through only learning individual steps of a challenge, a crow successfully solved it by arranging the steps in the correct order. This shows the bird's ability to make judgements through context. Crows also seem to use their cleverness for fun, much like humans do, as young birds love to play.

New Caledonian crows have emotions and memories and are cognitively skilled animals. They just might not be so different from us humans after all!