【推荐1】Children who spend more time reading with their parents have a greater chance of becoming better readers than those who don’t. With the help from their parents, children can learn techniques to improve their reading skills.

“A lot of parents think after their child learns to read, they should stop reading to them,” Donna George said. “They are sadly mistaken.”

George offers her services to parents at the Title I Learning Centers. She said reading aloud to children may be the most valuable thing parents can do. “It is better for children to hear things at a higher level than where they are,” George said. “Parents are their child’s first teacher.” Parents help their children build listening, phonics, comprehension and vocabulary skills when they read aloud to them.

Before parents can identify reading problems, they should escape the enemy —television and limit the time their children spend watching television. George suggested not allowing kids to have a TV in their bedrooms, setting a schedule of when kids can watch or keeping a list of how many programs children watch. Louise Joines said while her 14-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son enjoy reading, the television sometimes becomes a distraction. So she tries to build the situation by suggesting books the entire family will enjoy reading together, like the Harry Potter series.

Parents who do not read themselves should not count on their children being interested in it. If parents would read to their children at least 15 minutes every day, children would not have so many problems in school. It is the parents’ job to help build that desire in their children, and of course to know what kind of books to read is also important.

【推荐3】Publishers of books for beginning readers are in the business of doing whatever they can to make children develop a love of reading. At times, that means they'll produce books that are more colorful and more packed with pictures. But it turns out that when it comes to learning to read books, more pictures aren't always better.

In fact, simply having more than one picture on a page can negatively(消极地) affect the ability of preschoolers to learn words from that page, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Sussex. “Storybook reading is a great activity to help children increase their vocabularies,” writes co-author Zoe M. Flack in the University's School of Psychology blog.

But the illustrations(插图) can affect how well children will learn new words. “For example,” Flack writes, “We know that children learn words better if illustrations are realistic.” Also, studies have shown that adding bells and whistles(哨声) to storybooks may negatively affect learning, according to Jessica S. Horst, Flack's co-author for the study. “We also know that children look within illustrations for the things they hear in the story, so if the story mentions a girl dropping an ice cream, children will look at the ice cream in the illustration.”

With that in mind, Dr. Horst and Ms. Flack began to wonder what would happen when picture books show many illustrations on a page and how young children who haven't yet learned to read know which illustration to look at while listening to a story. To find out, they read storybooks that displayed either one or two illustrations per page to 36 three-year-old children. As it turns out, children who listened to stories with only one illustration at a time learned twice as many words as children who listened with two or more illustrations.

【推荐1】It takes self-discipline to solve water pollution, air pollution and soil pollution caused by plastic bags    1    . It starts within yourself just at your own backyard and inside house. Here are very simple and effortless things you can do to help resolve plastic bags pollution.

Ban the use of plastic bags

It may be difficult to do that because plastic bags are normally easy and light to carry.    2    , then you are helping the advocacy against plastic bags pollution.

Use eco-friendly or biodegradable (可生物降解的)bags

You do not have to worry about banning plastic bags. There are environmentally friendly bags that you can use as an alternative. When you go out to the grocery store or super market to buy things, have eco-friendly bags with you. In fact, there are now new plastic bags that are biodegradable.    3    .

Reuse plastic bags

It is also possible to recycle the use of plastic bags. Instead of throwing them, have them usable for your next usage.    4    , This is actually the first start on how you can totally ban the use of plastic bags. If you think your plastic bags have been reused for many times, then that’s the time you can throw in the non-biodegradable can.

    5    

From stores to industrial companies, there are places where you can give your plastic bags for recycling. You can even find in your place some recycling centers where you can give away the plastic bags you have. Just give them to these places to help prevent pollution.

【推荐2】With a rise in the number of allergies and worries over exposure to chemicals, more people are looking for alternative ways to clean their homes. To this end, some people are turning to the use of garbage enzyme (酶)--a concentrated liquid produced from fruit and vegetable waste. Garbage enzyme can be easily produced in the home, and has many uses, including as a cleansing agent, insect killer and even shampoo.

At the same time, it is hoped that the production and use of garbage enzyme will help reduce household waste and encourage people to take the initiative in sorting their trash.

The concept of using home-produced enzymes entered China several years ago when a special bucket imported from Japan was promoted by some health experts as a means of making healthy drinks. While the effectiveness of the enzyme drink remains unproven, garbage enzyme has been shown to be effective as an agent for cleaning toilets and floors, and as a fertilizer for plants.

Making wet garbage into an enzyme solution has been practiced in Southeast Asian countries for decades, greatly reducing household waste and protecting the environment by reducing the use of bleach (漂白剂) and other strong chemicals. Many people have realized that chemicals do harm to human body and the more garbage enzyme they make, the more good it does to the environment.

Any reduction in the volume of household garbage will benefit the city. Shanghai produces the largest amount of garbage than any other city in China. It is also home to the largest refuse landfill in Asia, the Laogang Refuse Landfill in Pudong New Area, which occupies a total area of about 30 square kilometers. It is struggling to accommodate all of the city's garbage, with a fifth phase under construction. The landfill and its surrounding areas are heavily polluted, something that nearby residents have been complaining about for years. The process of making enzyme solution consumes wet garbage. This means residents don't produce wet garbage after they start to make garbage enzyme. They even find the amount of wet garbage produced by their families is insufficient, so that they have to ask for garbage from their neighbors. Another advantage is that producing garbage enzyme encourages people to think more about garbage separation — something the local government has been trying to encourage but which still is not practiced by some residents.

【推荐1】Human activities are killing wildlife at an alarming rate, with causes ranging from environmental pollution to the built environment. For bird species, nighttime collisions (碰撞) with power lines are driving significant population decline. But now scientists have come up with a clever way to make the lines easier for birds to spot, without being ugly to humans.

Industry and U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service guidelines recommended that electricity companies mark their power lines with plastic attachments to make it more visible, but birds were still dying. Biologists reported that 300 Sandhill cranes (鹤) perished in one month in 2019 from collisions with marked lines at the Rowe Sanctuary ‘in Nebraska, where the cranes stopped over during their annual spring migration. “We need forward-thinking methods to protect not only large birds that are naturally at greater risk from power lines but also millions of smaller birds,” said Anne Lacy of the, International Crane Foundation.

Bird species can see ultraviolet light (紫外线) at night. So James Dwyer, a wildlife biologist at a consulting firm, EDM, had the idea of using near-visible UV light to brighten power lines. EDM’s engineering team and the Dawson Public Power District developed such light systems and installed them on a tower supporting a power line at Rowe Sanctuary. Over a 38-night period, crane collisions decreased by 98 percent when the lights were on, the researchers reported in a study published online in May in Ornithological Applications.

Richard Loughery, director of environmental activities at the Edison Electric Institute, who was not involved in the project, says the new UV system adds an important tool for use in hotspots where endangered bird species nest and feed.

“I don’t want electricity companies to build lines wherever they want because there’s a new tool,” says biologist Robert Harms of the U. S. Fish &. Wildlife Service, who was not involved in the work. But for existing lines, he says, the UV system could be absolutely amazing.

【推荐2】The idea that animals can remember past experiences seemed so absurd that few researchers bothered to study it. Surely only humans could be capable of “episodic” memories — recalling a trip to the grocery store last Saturday, for example. We now know that we were mistaken — and a study from the animal world might even help us improve how we treat Alzheimer’s disease(阿兹海默症).

Crystal and her students conducted a study of whether animals are capable of episodic memory. First, they trained 13 rats to memorize 12 odours(气味). They built a special rat “area” with 12 stops, numbered 1 to 12, each scented with a different odour. When the rat identified the odour in a particular stop on the route, such as second-to-last or fourth-to-last, it received a reward. Then the researchers changed the number of odours and watched to see if the training had taken hold: would the rats identify the second-to-last and fourth-to-last odour in the sequence(次序), even if the number of odours was different? This ensured that the rats were identifying the odours according to their position in the sequence, not just by smell. “We wanted to know if the animals can remember a lot of items and the order in which those items occur,” Crystal said.

After a year of these tests, the team found that the rats succeeded in the task about 87 percent of the time. Further tests confirmed that their memories stuck with them, and wasn’t influenced by other memories.

The new genetic tools such as gene-editing allow scientists to create rats with an Alzheimer’s-like condition, making them the perfect subjects to test new Alzheimer’s drugs. In the United States alone, the number of people suffering from Alzheimer’s will increase from 5.8 million today to 14 million by 2050 as the population ages. If rats with episodic memory can help to break the Alzheimer’s code, this thief of the past might finally be defeated.