【推荐1】Festivals in 2023

Roskilde Festival

With some of the biggest names in music, the Roskilde Festival in Denmark is preparing to bring fans an experience of a lifetime. Besides rock, electronic, and pop music, fans will also be treated to comedy, poetry, a carnival, and much more at this week-long festival. You can even rent a bike to get around the festival quickly.

Boomtown Fair

Boomtown is considered to be one of the wildest independent festivals in the world. Set up in 2009, in Winchester, United Kingdom, the fair takes place every summer in the city, offering entertainment for visitors of all ages. Additionally, it specially conducts arts and crafts workshops for kids. Tracing its origin (起源) to its “underground” roots, Boomtown offers every type of music, from folk and jazz to disco and punk.

Impact Festival

The festival stays true to its name and truly affect you through the experience you have while you attend the festival. You will spend your day meeting beautiful people, listening to some fantastic live music, seeing an combination (结合) of fashionable costumes and clothing, freeing your mind and spirit refreshed and dancing the night away with a bunch of other people. You will be staying in Lodz, the third largest city in Poland, a beautiful city.

Wilderness Festival

The combination of some kinds of attractive music, amazing food, and a lovely atmosphere come together to give you the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire, UK. Other than live music performances, the Oxfordshire Wilderness Festival also offers an environment for camping and enjoying the quiet backdrop of countryside.

【推荐2】I have been worrying for weeks now about what to give my mother for Mother's Day. For most people, this is a modest problem, solved by the purchase of a bathrobe or a box of candy. For me, however, Mother's Day represents an annual challenge to do the impossible---find a gift that will make neither Mama nor me feel terrible.

Expensive gifts—which Mama defines as costing over $1. 98—are out, because they make Mama feel terrible. (“This is awful," she says, examining an apron（围裙））. "I feel just terrible. You shouldn't have spent the money on me） Inexpensive presents---under $1. 98---please Mama, but they make me fell terrible. There is always the danger that a gift given to Mama will bounce swiftly back to the giver. If I give her a plant, she cuts off the top for me to take home. If I give her something edible (可使用的），she wants me to stay for lunch and eat it.

Papa, a sensible man, long ago stopped trying to shop for Mama. Instead, on Mother's Day, her birthday, and other appropriate occasions, he writes a short epic poem in which he tells of their meeting, courtship, and marriage. After nearly 30 years of poems, Papa sometimes worries that the edge of his poetic inspiration has dulled, but Mama doesn’t complain. She comes into the room while he is struggling over a gift poem and says, "It doesn’t have to rhyme（押韵）as long as it's from the heart. "

This year, finally, I think I, too, have found a painless gift for Mama. I am going to give her a magazine article, unrhymed but from the heart, in which I wish her “Happy Mother’s Day" and tell her there's nothing Papa or I could ever buy, find, or make her that would be half good enough anyway.

French poet Victor Hugo (1802-1885) once said: “To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelt out is a spark.”

Today, when we read books, road signs and posters, it’s probably hard to imagine that only half a century ago, about 40 percent of the world’s adults were still illiterate, according to data from UNESCO. This means that two out of every five adults could neither read nor write in the 1960s. In other words, the “sparks”that now light up our world failed to do the same for theirs.

In response to this situation, UNESCO decided to name Sept. 8 as International Literacy Day, starting from 1967. Every year, the day is celebrated to highlight the importance of literacy and the progress that has been made, which itself is huge — in 2016, the global adult literacy rate rose to 86 percent, while the youth literacy rate was as high as 91 percent, according to UNESCO.

This raises a question: If the mission to boost literacy has basically been accomplished, why do we still celebrate this day?

The truth is that the definition of “literacy” keeps changing. For example, the theme for 2007 and 2008 International Literacy Day was “Literacy and health”, which targeted people’s ignorance of diseases like HIV and malaria (疟疾). For 2017, the emphasis was placed on “Literacy in a digital world”, because not knowing anything about the internet in today’s world is just like lacking basic reading abilities in the 1960s — it’s the “new illiteracy”.

The focus for this year’s International Literacy Day will be “Literacy and skills development”. But the skills in question are not job-specific skills, such as those required to be an electrician or carpenter. Instead, the focus will be on “transferable skills”— communication, critical thinking, multitasking, teamwork, and creativity, to name a few. These are the things that allow us to do our job well — any job.

This echoes what Greek philosopher Socrates said almost 2,500 years ago: “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”

And with more people become literate, it’s only a matter of time before their small flame turns into a big fire.

【推荐3】We've all experienced it. We invite a friend to dinner, only to learn that she is the dreaded "V-word". Vegan is someone who allows a diet that contains no animal meat, fish, eggs, dairy products, or any other food that comes from animals. They differ from vegetarians, who generally still eat dairy and eggs as part of their diets. Vegans also typically abstain from using any other products that come from animals, such as honey and leather jackets.

Back in 2008, vegans only accounted for around 0.5 percent of the U. S. population, or about one million people. As of polls taken in 2014, vegans now make up roughly 2.5 percent of the population. At least in the United States, women seem to be far bigger fans of veganism, making up around 79 percent of vegans.

People on a vegan diet tend to be leaner. In a cross-sectional study of nearly 40,000 adults, meat eaters had the highest mean body mass index, or BMI. Vegetarians were in the middle, and vegans had the lowest. Based on several studies from Finland, some scientists have suggested that vegan diets may be helpful in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis(类风湿性关节炎). Vegans also appear to have lower rates of hypertension(高血压) than both meat eaters and vegetarians. Vegans also typically have lower cardio metabolic(心脏代谢) risks for conditions like heart disease or strokes.

While there certainly may be some health advantages in going vegan, there seems to be some common deficiencies in the diet. One of these deficiencies is with the vitamin B-12. The ADA states that there are no natural plant foods that contain any significant amount of the vitamin. Vegans can still get it, but they need to take a vitamin or consume fortified foods like soy milk and certain breakfast cereals. Omega-3 fatty acids(欧米珈-3 脂肪酸) are also very difficult to come by on a vegan diet, but this can be overcome through the consumption of algae(海藻) supplements. With vegans requiring supplementation to meet their nutritional needs, it supports the claim that veganism is unnatural, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's unhealthy.

Many health organizations, including the ADA, state that well-planned vegan diets are healthy and nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. It seems like no matter what your dietary preferences are, a healthy lifestyle can be achieved on or off a vegan diet.