【推荐2】General Motors (GM) is one of the world’s major automakers (汽车制造商). In January, the company set a goal: It will stop selling gas-powered cars by 2035. It means the company will make more battery-powered vehicles.

This is a big moment for the auto industry. Scientists say it’s important to move away from gas powered vehicles. Doing so will fight climate change. Transportation causes about 25% of global carbon emissions (排放物). Three-quarters of that is from road travel. Countries are taking action. In China, most new vehicles sold must be electric by 2035. The United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands will not allow sales of new gas-powered cars in 2030.

Venkat Viswanathan is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He told TIME for Kids, “It is now very clear that going electric is the future.”

Electric cars run on lithium-ion (锂离子) batteries, which power our mobile devices. Making these batteries has an environmental cost. Lithium is taken from the earth, like the oil used to make gas. But the long-term cost is much smaller. “When you use up a battery, you can recycle the material,” says Jessika Trancik, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Electric cars have another environmental effect. They need energy to recharge. They get the energy from power plants. These places burn oils. But countries can turn to cleaner energy sources, such as wind and solar power. If they do, electric vehicles will get cleaner too. Even now, they’re cleaner than cars that run on gas.

【推荐1】A recent New York Times opinion piece by Daniel Willingham addressed the question of whether listening to a book is the same as reading it. Willingham begins the piece with a frequently asked question—Is it cheating if I listen to an audiobook for my book club?

Willingham argues that they’re both worthwhile but is careful to note that doesn’t mean they have the same value. In line with his points in the article, I listen to audiobooks when I wouldn’t otherwise be engaged in a book—say, at the gym or while walking. That’s certainly an advantage of listening over reading. But I was surprised to find that Willingham didn’t mention what I consider to be the biggest difference between the two: Engagement.

The critical difference, for me, between reading and listening is that reading is something you do, while listening is something that happens to you. Reading is an act of engagement. The words on the page aren’t going to read themselves, which is something they literally do in an audiobook. If you’re not actively taking in written information, then you’re not going to make progress on the book. Audiobooks, on the other hand, make progress with or without your participation.

Willingham refers to this point by saying that harder books—“difficult texts” as he calls them—require more engagement, which is thus better suited to reading. Yet it’s not necessarily true. For example, I’ve recently been listening to David Graeber’s excellent Debt: The First5000 Years, a tough read with lots of information and arguments. While I haven’t grasped every piece of information that he’s presented, I have spent a lot more time thinking about an important topic than I otherwise would. This fill-in-the-cracks nature of audiobooks is a critical advantage.

Ultimately, it’s fair to consider audiobooks and written texts as fundamentally different media. They are different forms based on the same work. Your option depends on what you are willing to give to it(time, above all) and what you hope to get out of it.

【推荐2】Assigning children some chores once they reach a certain age has been an important part of responsible parenting for centuries. Easy tasks like taking out the garbage or cleaning their room are intended to teach children the basics of taking care of themselves and self-control. On the surface, it would seem that this age old practice has stood the test of time. However, a new study finds that childhood chores may not help kids develop self-control after all.

To come to this conclusion, researchers from the University of Houston analyzed data originally collected as part of a 10-year study on Mexican youths at various ages (10, 12, 14, 16 and 19). These children self-reported how much self-control they believed they had, and parents were also surveyed. Besides, the 10-year study also gathered data on various aspects of the children’s lives, including their day-to-day home life and any chores they were typically asked to do.

The research team analyzed all of this data. They were surprised by what they found. “We found no evidence of co-developmental associations between chores and self-control, with four out of four of our assumptions receiving no support. The result was dumbfounding given the strong theoretical basis for our predictions,” says study author Rodica Damian. However, that doesn’t mean parents should give up childhood chores altogether. “Maybe chores don’t matter for personality development, but they still predict future chore behavior,” Damian says. “It is a stable habit and having a tidy home is not something to ignore.”

Damian and her team also looked into another self-control matter unrelated to chores: whether self-control levels between the ages of 10-16 predicted better career outcomes in young adulthood. They found that children who had higher self-control at age 10 had less job stress and better job fit nine years later. Additionally, children whose self-control showed positive changes from age 10 to 16 had higher job satisfaction years later. “The results suggest that improving one’s level of self-control, regardless of where you start, will help you later in life,” Damian concludes.

【推荐3】STEM(Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education is future-oriented (面向未来的). The demands for jobs that need routine skills have decreased, while those requiring more technical (技术的) skills have increased. We should encourage students to choose STEM fields after school.     1    

Improve the image of science.

Many people view science as something tough and boring. Much of this can be blamed on those movies and books that describe scientists as nerdy (书呆子).     2     They can tell students how science has changed the world and say interesting things about the subject. They can encourage their students by showing different scientific experiments.

    3    

If a student sees that a teacher is knowledgeable and passionate about science, then they will try to follow in their footsteps. So, try to act as their role model.

Make it fun.

You should get students involved in science at an early stage and try to make it fun and interesting. You can use hands-on experiments to develop their interest in science.

Connect it to everyday life.

You should show students how science is used in everyday life. We have cellphones, video games, computers, etc. because of science.     4    

Give them opportunities.

You can create competitions and ask the students to use science to come up with new ideas, designs, etc.     5     You can encourage group competitions as well.