【推荐1】Crosscountry aims to provide the most punctual service possible. However, when delays do occur, we will provide you compensation in line with our Passenger Charter and National Rail Conditions of Travel.

If your train has been delayed by 30 minutes or more to the destination printed on your ticket, you will be entitled to compensation. You can rest assured that your journey is covered whatever happens.

•How much refund am I entitled to?

The amount of compensation that you may be entitled to depends on the length of time your journey was delayed by:

Delays of 30 — 59 minutes

50% of the cost of your single ticket or 50% of the cost of either portion of your return ticket.

Delays of 60 minutes or more

100% of the cost of your single ticket or 100% of the cost of either portion of your return ticket.

Delays of two hours or more for return tickets

If either or both the outward or return legs of your journey are delayed by more than two hours and you have a return ticket, you will be entitled to receive up to 100% of the cost of the return ticket.

Smartcard Tickets

More and more tickets on the UK rail network are available to be fulfilled to Smartcard. If your claim relates to such a ticket, please include a clear image of the front of your Smartcard, and enter your Smartcard number in the “Booking reference/ticket number” field on the form. Your Smartcard number is the 18 digit number on the front of your Smartcard.

·How will I be paid?

Compensation will be paid in National Rail Travel Vouchers or, at your request, in money (for example by cheque or BACS). Rail Travel vouchers can be used as payment or part payment towards any National Rail ticket. Alternatively, you can choose to donate your claim to charity. Our chosen charity at CrossCountry Trains is Brain Tumour Research Charity.

·How do I make a claim under Delay Repay?

Please complete the form below within 28 days of the date of the delay. A readable scanned copy of your ticket is required to make a claim.

Our customer service team will respond as soon as possible and aim to reply within 10 working days. Should you have any difficulties completing the form, please call us on 0344×××123.

Alternatively, you can download our Delay Repay claim form and post to us at the address on the form.

【推荐3】The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report. It stated that the world is quickly running out of time to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the level widely agreed to be the conservative, safety-first goal to prevent serious climate harm. To get there, the world would have to cut current emissions (排放物) by 45 percent by 2030. That sounds absurdly unlikely.

But before we give in to despair, we should remember that the technology to address climate change is going along at high speed. The largest source of US carbon emissions is transportation, and a Green New Deal program for motor vehicles would be quite straightforward.

The reason is simple: With some subsidies (补贴), electric cars and buses are cost- competitive with fossil-fuel vehicles. Electric buses have gone into the market at the greatest speed, because they are a logical choice for electrification. At the end of 2018, electric vehicles were displacing about 280,000 barrels of oil demand per day. That’s more than the whole consumption of Greece.

And the electric car market is also reaching maturity, with appealing designs, longer range, and a quickly-expanding rapid charging network in many countries. It’s worth emphasizing that most of the basic systems necessary to recharge electric vehicles already exist. People often tend to assume that we would need to replace every gas station, but virtually all homes and businesses already have an electrical connection which can be easily improved for fast charging. All that is needed to go fully electric is enough battery capacity and fast charging stations to deal with long trips.

Now America would have to repair its electricity production, rails, shipping, and so on to fully decarbonize (脱碳) the transportation sector. It will be considerably more difficult than simply rooting out fossil fuel vehicles from the market.

But greening America’s vehicles would be straightforward, relatively cheap, and a huge step forward on climate. The politics of climate change are so fearful that despair can seem logical, but the first step in achieving a tough goal is the firm belief that it can be done. And this particular step wouldn’t even be that tough.

【推荐2】To someone stuck in a traffic jam, the ability to soar (高飞) right over other cars seems like a dream. Inventors and businessmen tried to make flying cars, but have never been able to. That may be changing. Many companies are competing to be the first to develop a flying car.

One of the ideas being developed is a car with wings that unfold for flight. But most are more like helicopters instead of cars and they are operated by a battery-powered motor. Still, some companies are moving forward. They see a need for “air taxis” especially as cities grow more congested. These taxis would send passengers to the rooftops of office buildings during rush hours.

Charles Eastlake is a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He says advances in technology have opened the door to a whole new world of flying machines. But he also expresses some hesitancy, “It’s possible that people actually use self-flying air taxis in the next 10 or 15 years. But the challenges are big.”

The key will be making longer-lasting batteries. Batteries now could keep an air taxi in the sky for about 15 to 30 minutes. Depending on how fast it flies, that probably isn’t enough time to transport passengers. Companies will also have to get permission from the government. The government office in charge of flying says further study is needed on flying cars. It thinks the ideas being worked on are good ones, but they must be safe. Reducing noise is another challenge because air taxis will be taking off and landing in areas with a lot of people. Creating enough landing pads to deal with many flying cars at the same time is also a challenge.

Though there are so many challenges for humans to deal with, inventors and businessmen think their dream of making flying cars will come true soon.

【推荐2】Learning Chinese could be one of the most important decisions you ever make. Chinese is becoming the language to learn in the 2lst century. With the world’s largest population and a rapidly growing middle class, China stands to become the engine of the world’s economy in the coming years. This will make learning Chinese very important for people in many industries, or for those of us who wish to visit China or learn from its culture and history.

There is an ongoing effort to modernize the writing system and standardize the language. An increasing number of people learning Chinese are learning the Mandarin, so unless you absolutely need to learn another dialect (such as Cantonese), be sure you are studying Mandarin.

For native English speakers Chinese is one of the most difficult and most different languages to learn. The vocabulary is wholly unfamiliar and unlike anything we know. In addition, in the Chinese tone system, words are spoken in rising or falling tones, which help to distinguish between them. Furthermore, there is the Chinese writing system-a collection of thousands of individual ideograms (表意文字), or symbols, which represent a word or an idea. These ideograms have no phonetic value-that is to say, we can’t tell how the word is pronounced by how it is written. There is a method to present written Chinese in a phonetic script called Pinyin. If you are learning Chinese, you’ll be working with this Pinyin system, but the beauty of the traditional writing system shouldn’t be passed up. All these factors make learning Chinese difficult for us. Yet, for a determined learner, there’s always a way to overcome it.

【推荐3】Tourism wasn’t as important as it is today. In the past, only people with a good deal of money could travel on holidays to other countries. More people travel today than in the past because there is a growing middle class in many parts of the world; that is to say, people now have more money for travel. Special plane fares for tourists make travel less expensive and more attractive than ever before. One person doesn’t travel for the same reason as another. But most people enjoy seeing countries that are different from their own. They also like to meet new people and to taste new food.

Tourism causes many changes in a country and in people’s lives. People build new hotels and restaurants and train native men and women as guides to show visitors around interesting places. There’re new night clubs and other amusements. International tourism is clearly a big business.