【推荐3】We watch our salt and fat intake to protect our hearts. We exercise and take calcium to protect our bones. We apply sunscreen to protect our skin     1    

Invest in high-quality sunglasses. Protecting eyes from sunlight is very important. To protect your eyes, wear sunglasses certified to block out 99% to 100% of UVA and UVB light   The lenses (镜片) are essential.     2     In fact, if the lenses are dark but not UV protected, that’s worse for your eyes.

Take a break from screens. There is some medical evidence that the light from electronic screens damages eyes.     3     One of the best ways to prevent that is drinking four or five glasses of water a day. If you still feel your eyes are dry or tired, use eye drops to keep your vision clear.

    4     Firstly, stop smoking. Obviously, it is hard to stop smoking, but it is not only bad for your lungs but also harmful to your eyes. It causes dry eyes and even increases the risk of eye diseases. Besides, try not to rub your eyes often. Rubbing makes infection worse. The more you rub, the more itchy your eyes will get. Instead, take medication or use eye drops for dry eyes.

Have an eye test. Don’t forget to see an eye specialist for a checkup regularly, if possible.     5     But medical equipment can detect them. All are best treated when found early. For most people, unless there are problems, that means having your eyes tested by a health care provider every one to two years.

【推荐2】Lots of people may wonder why so many children feel anxious and depressed, despite good family situations, a wealth of educational resources and the care of their parents and teachers. The other day when I met with my interviewees for their stories and discussed the problem with them, the same question occurred to me.

I understand that hardworking parents want their children to perform well in all aspects, including their life and study and have a bright and promising future, but it seems that most of the time parents cannot give their children proper guidance based on actual situations. Many kids are their family’s only child, so they lack interaction with their siblings. As a result, when they don’t know how to get along with their classmates at school, they tend to become overwhelmed.

The symptoms of childhood depression are rarely obvious, meaning parents often fail to notice them early, which results in low diagnosis rates. Usually, by the time the seriousness of the problem has been realized, the child has entered a more serious state. Worse still, many parents have no idea on how to treat their child’s mental problems. They seem more inclined (有……倾向) to believe that the child is undergoing a phase of adolescent rebellion (叛逆) rather than a mental health issue.

After this interview, my understanding is that depression itself is not the thing that hurts those with such problems. Instead, the damaging thing is the perception of the problem. Society’s limited understanding of the condition may actually hinder (阻碍，妨碍) the patients’ recovery. One interviewee said that letting people know that there is a mentally ill person in your family often results in ridicule (嘲笑) and misunderstanding rather than friendly empathy (共鸣，同情), especially in smaller communities.

In spite of fierce competition in all walks of life, I still think that giving children a healthy and happy growth environment will play a more important role in producing a bright future than examination results.

【推荐3】Don’t feel too bad if you’re the type to still be in bed past 11am on a Saturday. Yes, those up-at-6am types might look self-satisfied with their Instagram stories of sunrise yoga and morning museum trips, but it turns out that getting some extra rest at the weekend could be good for your mental well-being.

Having a lie-in could halve your risk of getting depression, suggests research from Yonsei University. But researchers waned -this benefits only apply if you sleep for an extra two hours. Any more than that and you actually increase your risk.

Researchers at the South Korean university came to this conclusion after tracking 5,500 people who said they often missed out on a full night’s sleep during the working week. They found that those who caught up on sleeping by having a lie-in of an extra two hours at the weekend were 48% less likely to develop depression.Those who had a one-hour lie-in reduced their risk of low mood by a third. But for people who slept for longer than two hours extra on Saturday and Sunday, depression rates were 16% higher.

These findings are backed up by a 2018 study from Sweden, which suggested that if y could bring up your average duration of sleep by staying in bed later at the weekends, you could be in better health. What’s even better than a lie-in at the weekend,though,is not needing one. If you can increase the duration and quality of your sleep during the week thus upping your overall average and reducing the need to sleep extra hours at the weekend,that’s likely to promise even more positive effects for your mental and physical well-being

It’s still recommended that you get between seven and nine hours of sleep a night so make that your aim rather than pretending a lie-in erases all the damage from late nights every other day.

【推荐2】Do you like to drink Coca-Cola? You can thank enslaved Africans. They brought the kola nut — one of the main parts of Coca-Cola — to what is now the United States. They also brought watermelon, black-eyed peas, some peppers and many more. These foods are eaten in the U.S. today. They show how Africans forced into slavery — beginning in the 1500s — influenced the American diet.

History professor Frederick Opie wrote a book about some of the foods that connect Africa and America—Soul Food from Africa to America. He says, “If you know what people eat, you can find out where they’re from.”

Opie explains that people who were bringing enslaved Africans to North America wanted to keep them alive and earn a profit. As a result, Africans on the slave ships were fed food they knew and liked. Those foods landed along with the people. Fruit and vegetables brought from Africa grew well in America. One reason is that enslaved Africans planted their own gardens to help feed themselves. In time, the plants from Africa slowly moved from gardens of the enslaved to those of the wealthy and powerful. For example, the homes of U.S. presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had gardens planted with seeds from Africa.

Those fruit and vegetables changed the way cooks made foods in America. Take pies as an example. In England, pies were made with meat. African-Americans took the English meat pie and made it with fruit or vegetables, such as sweet potatoes. Yet for the most part, the skilled black chefs have been written out of American history. In fact, both their work and their skill shaped American food. Some ways of cooking that are well-known in the U.S. today were reported in West Africa before 1500. They include deep frying fish and barbecuing meats.

【推荐3】In a recent interview, renowned linguist and cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky gave his thoughts on the rise of ChatGPT, and its effect on education. For him, the key all lies in how students are taught, and, currently, our educational system is pushing students toward ChatGPT and other shortcuts. “I don’t think it has anything to do with education,” Chomsky tells interviewer Thijmen Sprakel of EduKitchen. “I think it’s undermining it. ChatGPT is basically high-tech plagiarism (剽窃).” The challenge for educators, according to Chomsky, is to create interest in the topics that they teach so that students will be motivated to learn, rather than trying to avoid doing the work.

Chomsky, who spent a large part of his career teaching at MIT, felt strongly that his students wouldn’t have turned to AI to complete their coursework if they were invested in the school material. If students are relying on ChatGPT, Chomsky says it’s “a sign that the educational system is failing. If students aren’t interested, they’ll find a way around it.”

The American intellectual strongly feels like the current educational model of “teaching to test” has created an environment where students are bored. In turn, the boredom turns to avoidance, and ChatGPT becomes an easy way to avoid the education.

While some argue that chatbots like ChatGPT can be a useful educational tool, Chomsky has a much different opinion. He feels that these natural language systems “may be of value for some things, but it’s not obvious what.”

Meanwhile, it appears that schools are trying hard to figure out how to counteract the use of ChatGPT. Many schools have banned ChatGPT on school devices and networks, and educators are adjusting their teaching styles. Some are turning to more in-class essays, while others are looking at how they can incorporate the technology into the classroom.

It will be interesting to see if the rise of chatbots helps steer us toward a new teaching philosophy and away from the “teaching to test” method that has become the driving force of modern education. It’s the kind of education that Chomsky says was “ridiculed during the Enlightenment,” and so indirectly, this new technology may force schools to rethink how they ask students to apply their knowledge.