【推荐1】Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter­gatherers, small, tightly knit connected groups developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 12,000 languages between them.

Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialization, the development of the nation­state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalisation and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.

At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot, wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3，200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number (中位数) of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

Already well over 400 of the total of 6，800 languages are close to extinction, with only a few elderly speakers left. Pick, at random, Busuu in Cameroon (eight remaining speakers), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a question-mark): none of these seems to have much chance of survival.

【推荐2】English is fast becoming the language of science around the world, but what is its future among everyday speakers? One expert points out that the percentage(比率) of native English speakers is declining(降低) globally while the languages of other rapidly growing regions are being spoken by increasing numbers of people. But English will continue to remain widespread and important.

However, British language scholar David Graddol says English will probably drop in dominance(主导) by the middle of this century to rank, after Chinese, about equally with Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu. “The number of people speaking English as a first language continues to rise, but it isn’t rising nearly as fast as the numbers of many other languages around the world, simply because the main population group has been largely in the less developed countries where languages other than English have been spoken,” he says.

In a recent article in the journal Science, Mr. Graddol noted that three languages that are not near the top of the list of the most widely spoken now might be there soon. These are Bengali, Tamil, and Malay, spoken in south and Southeast Asia.

David Crystal, the author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, says about 1.5 billion of the world’s six billion people speak it as a second tongue compared to the 400 million native speakers. But another expert on the English language says Mr. Graddol underestimates (低估) the future of its dominance. “Nobody quite knows what’s going to happen because no language has been in this position before. But all the evidence (证据) suggests that the English language snowball is rolling down a hill and is getting faster,” he said.

【推荐3】Buttons are found on all sorts of clothing. They are usually small and round and made of metal or plastic. They fasten, or connect, one piece of clothing to another. They make sure your clothes don’t fall off. Some buttons can be beautiful and even have very fine details. But are they cute? Babies are often described as cute as a button. Language experts don’t know why. But we do know more about two other button expressions: button-down and buttoned-up.

Men or women often wear button-down shirts to the office. Button-down as an adjective means being conservative (保守的) or traditional. People described as buttoned-down stay as close as possible to the normal way of dressing and behaving. People and events can both be described as buttoned-down. We should note here that as an adjective you can either say “buttoned-down” or “button-down”.

However, the adjective buttoned-up is a little different. If someone is buttoned-up, he seems very businesslike. In personal relationships, a buttoned-up person is cold and indifferent, meaning they physically and emotionally keep away from others.

There are many other ways “button” is used as a verb. When you fasten a button, you can also just say “button a button”. So, you can say to a friend, “Hey, your top button is unbuttoned. You should button it.”

When buttoning a button, you slip it into a buttonhole. A buttonhole traps the button. So, to buttonhole someone means you have trapped them into a spoken conversation. Now, let’s say you find yourself buttonholed in a conversation at a party. The person just keeps talking and talking and talking! Finally, you can’t stand it any longer. You tell the person to button it! “Button your lip” is another equally rude but effective way to stop a person who talks too much.

Another kind of difficult person is someone who pushes your buttons. To push someone’s buttons means you know exactly how to get that person angry or upset. People who push the panic button are not as dislikable as button-pushers. However, they can be tiring to others. In a crisis, it is important to remain calm. Pushing the panic button can make an already tense situation worse.

【推荐2】At 88, my grandmother Vera has dementia and barely recognizes me. But I’m determined to help her age with dignity and grace in her home for as long as she can.

Since 2015, I’ve been a manager at Honor, a technology company that uses a website and an app to pair professional caregivers (we call them Care Pros) with loved ones who need a hand. I want to make sure we are offering all our clients (客户), including my grandmother, a service that is affordable, with people who are reliable, diverse and skilled. On Sundays. Amy, my grandmother’s most-loved Honor professional caregiver, comes over to get her dressed for church. She loves the time she spends with Amy. That’s the best gift I can give her and the best gift I can give myself. Care giving can exhaust a family emotionally and physically. At Honor, we’re trying to create something that makes it easier for women to be moms, daughters, and sisters all at once. That’s why this company was built.

What sets Honor apart from other care giving services is that we’re equally focused on treating the Care Pros well. We pay higher-than-average rates and they can get health benefits and sick leave. Most of our Care Pros are women, and a lot of them are single mothers. The technology behind our app allows Care Pros to set parameters (参数) based on when, where, and how much they want to work so they can control their schedules. The company also allows continuity of care. Each Care Pro notes in the caregivers’ app how the client is feeling or what should happen on the following shift. That way, the client’s family can stay up to date on their loved one’s health.

When I was working with my team at Honor, I wanted to create opportunities for people who looked like me. I’m proud to say that there are single moms and other women without traditional educational training who lead teams here. The makeup of this company proves that people with diverse backgrounds can be part of a successful tech company. This has to be a model for the future.

I’m confident it will happen.