【推荐1】Art is all around us. It can be found everywhere, including fancy galleries, people’s living rooms, and on the sides of buildings. So, why is art important?

It promotes expression and creativity. As humans, we’re naturally drawn to art as a form of expression and communication.     1     It’s a way for them to express themselves before they’re able to speak. In fact, participation in the arts may even assist kids with language, motor skills, and visual learning development.

    2    . When someone applies for a job, there are certain skills they need to have like data analysis or bookkeeping. However, many employers also understand the very important need for the skills which are hard to measure and often difficult to define. Some examples include a person’s ability to adapt to change, think creatively, or collaborate with team members.

It provides historical context.     3    . This is why people dedicate their lives to studying cave art, Shakespearean plays, and so much more. When we take the time to dive into art created in the past, we can learn about other generations and eras. We can study art to find out what those before us were facing and how they overcame it.     4    .

In therapy (疗法) settings, art also provides an opportunity for digging deeper and expressing emotions that are difficult to discuss.     5    . In one important study, children between 6 and 12 were asked to draw a house as a distraction after thinking about something upsetting. This group was able to improve their mood when compared with children who were instructed to draw the negative event or simply copy another drawing.

【推荐2】When it comes to the most famous 20th century painters of the United States, Grandma Moses should be mentioned, although she did not start painting until she was in her late seventies. As she once said to herself, “I would never sit back in rocking chair, waiting for someone to help me.” No one could have had a more active old age.

She was born on a farm in New York State, one of five boys and five girls. At 12, she left home and was in domestic service until at 27 she married Thomas Moses, the hired hand of one of her employers. They farmed most of their lives, first in Virginia and then in New York State, at Eagle Bridge. She had ten children, of whom five survived; her husband died in 1927.

Grandma Moses painted a little as a child and made embroidery（刺绣) pictures as a hobby, but only changed to oils in old age because her hands became too stiff(僵硬的) to sew and she still wanted to keep busy and pass the time. Her pictures were first sold at the local drugstore and at a market and were soon noticed by a businessman who bought all that she painted. Three of the pictures were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1940 she had her first exhibition in New York. Between the 1930’s and her death, she produced some 2,000 pictures: careful and lively portrayals of the country life she had known for so long, with a wonderful sense of color and form. “I think really hard till I think of something really pretty, and then I paint it,” she said.

【推荐1】Wherever we go, we are surrounded by history. Across the globe, cultural heritage is passed down through the generations. It is in the buildings and structures around us. It is in the arts and artifacts (手工艺品) we treasure. It lives in the languages we speak and the stories we tell. But today, it is under attack as never before. Not only are the damages of time threatening our cultural heritage, but climate change, globalization and tourism are all exacting a heavy price. Technology is now the most important weapon in the battle. Here’s how technology is preserving our cultural heritage.

As you can imagine, creating the replicas (复制品) by 2D images is extremely time-consuming. Increasingly, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms (算法) allow millions of images to be stored in a matter of hours. AI will also make restoration and preservation of existing cultural heritage far easier and better than previous methods.

Virtual reality (VR) technology will play a leading role in preserving our cultural heritage in the coming years. Many of the most important sites and architecture are easily damaged. Human interaction with these locations is doing a great deal of harm. Wastes pile up everywhere, causing serious problems. As more cultural heritage sites and objects are digitally mapped and recorded, VR technology will increasingly become the way that people experience them. We’ll all finally be able to walk through places, look at (and touch) artifacts and works of art without ever seeing them with our own eyes.

Finally, our cultural heritage will be preserved by technology. Efforts in research, data sharing and project work will help promote and preserve the cultural heritage of countries all across the world.

【推荐3】As our global population continues to rise, some assessments suggest it could reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050. To feed that many people, we will need to produce quantities of food.

With only 30 seasons of planting and harvest left before the population could hit that 10 billion figure, it’s clear that agriculture has to change, if we are to have any hope of feeding the planet.

Over the past six months I’ve travelled all over Europe speaking to pioneering scientists and engineers, global-thought leaders, and of course, knowledgeable farmers, for the BBC World News and BBC Future series, Follow the Food in order to examine issues around food supply and even find some potential solutions for our future.

One of the most shocking facts I learned is the amount of good and eatable food that gets wasted. According to the United Nations, “A third of all food produced ends up rotting (腐烂) in the dustbins of consumers and markets, or damaging due to poor transportation and harvesting practices.”

Spending time with farmers, producers, and consumers, I quickly saw how our current ways of growing, processing and selling food just aren’t sustainable (可持续的).

The only way we can feed 10 billion people by 2050 is if the farming and food industries become much more sustainable. And that requires changes to the whole model of growing, processing, transporting, storing and selling. It means a lot of businesses and governments need to take action. But so too do we all. Whether that’s going to the market and choosing the most “ugly” vegetables for dinner, encouraging supermarkets to change their labelling to show us the carbon footprint of our food, or using new tech to avoid waste, there’s so much we can do to value our food and its producers.

【推荐1】Vincent Van Gogh, for whom color was the most   important form of expression, was born in Holland in 1853. Brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere, Van Gogh was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence. Between 1860 and 1880, when he finally decided to become an artist, Van Gogh had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore and an art salesman. He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty. One of his famous paintings is The Potato Eaters (1885)．

In 1886, he went to Paris to join his brother Théo. In Paris, Van Gogh studied with Cormon, later met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette(调色板)．His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with bad results. Near the end of 1888, an incident led Gauguin to finally leave Arles. Van Gogh                           ran after him with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a part of his own ear off. Van Gogh then was sent to a mental (精神的) hospital for treatment.

In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr Cachet. Two months later he was dead,   having shot himself “for the good of all”．During his brief career he had sold one painting. Van Goghˈs finest works were produced in less than three years. His great fusion (融合) of form and content is powerful, dramatic and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence (精华) of man and nature.

【推荐2】The Peales were a famous family of American artists. Charles Willson Peale is best remembered for his portraits of leading figures of the American Revolution. He painted portraits of Franklin and Jefferson and over a dozen of George Washington. His life-size portrait of his sons Raphaelle and Titian was so realistic that George Washington reportedly once tipped his hat to the figures in the picture.

Charles Willson Peale gave up painting in his middle age and devoted his life to the Peale museum, which he founded in Philadelphia. The world’s first popular museum of art and natural science mainly covered paintings by Peale and his family as well as displays of animals in their natural settings. Peale found the animals himself and found a method to make the exhibits more lifelike. The museum’s most popular display was the skeleton (骷髅) of a huge, extinct elephant, which Peale unearthed on a New York farm in 1801.

Three of Peale’s seventeen children were also famous artists. Raphaelle Peale often painted still lives of flowers, fruit, and cheese. His brother Rembrandt studied under his father and painted portraits of many noted people, including one of George Washington. Another brother, Rubens Peale, painted mostly landscapes and portraits.

James Peale, the brother of Charles Willson Peale, specialized in miniatures (小画像). His daughter Sarah Miriam Peale was probably the first professional female portrait painter in America.

【推荐3】For centuries, artists usually give people an impression: they are the “Starving Artists”, struggling to make ends meet. Henri Murger proved that. He was born the son of a doorman in France. Living in Paris, he was surrounded by creative geniuses (天才) and dreamed of joining them, but he grew upset with his failure to earn money.

In 1847, Murger published a book. It’s a collection of stories about poverty, which launched the concept of the “Starving Artists” into the public’s understanding as the model for a creative life. To this day, it continues to exist as the model for what we imagine when we think of the word “artist”.

Today, what we forget is that the story of the “Starving Artist” is, in fact, just an imaginary story. Due to the power of the concept in Murger’s book, many of us just want to become lawyers instead of writers, bankers instead of poets, and doctors instead of painters. Nobody wants to struggle financially for a lifetime.

In the early Renaissance (文艺复兴), artists did not have reputations for being diligent workers. They were considered manual laborers, receiving small amounts of money for their work. Michelangelo Buonarroti, however, changed all that. He was not only a master sculptor but also the most affluent artist of his time. He established (确立) the idea that an artist could become financially successful.

Michelangelo did not need to starve for his creations, and neither do you. When we hear the tales and warnings about what it means to be an artist, we must understand an important truth — you don’t have to starve and you might as well make a living from your creative talents.