【推荐1】To have a good conversation is a pleasure for most people.     1     Sometimes there are awkward silences while people try to think of something to say. Some conversations are one-sided. One person asks all the question, and the other just gives one-word answers. Actually, a good conversation needs two or more people to keep it going. They need to say things that others can answer and expand on.

    2     “What do you do?” is a good place to start. You can also simply say, “Tell me about yourself.” Most people love an opportunity to talk about themselves.

As the other person begins to respond to your question, look for common ground.     3     When the person finishes their story, you can comment and mention something that you did. Then you can talk about those activities and your plans for the coming weekend.

When the other person is talking, listen to them. Do not interrupt. When they finish, ask some more questions, and listen to the answers. Similarly, if you are answering a question, don’t go on and on.     4     A good verbal exchange is a little like a tennis game, in which the ball goes back and forth. Also, avoid yes/no questions. They can stop a conversation. Instead, ask open-ended questions using what or why.　　

A conversation should end well, too. After you’ve conversed for a bit, you can say, “I need to run now.” You may also give a reason.     5    

Now go out and enjoy a good conversation.

【推荐1】At a recycling center, two team members spend all day pulling items from a conveyor belt covered in garbage. One pulls out juice cartons and plastic bottles that can be reprocessed, while the other searches for pollutants in the stream of paper products. They are AI- powered robots that each look like a supercharged mechanical arm. This is one scene where materials recovery facilities (MRF) has gotten involved in the AI revolution.

In theory, MRFs gather the wastes, sort them out, and then sell the materials to companies that can reuse them. In practice, the MRFs aren’t all that good. The issue is that it’s long been too hard for recycling factories to sort materials with the level of specificity needed to reuse them. The traditional recycling methods succeed in separating waste into broad categories of paper, glass, and metal. But finer layers of detail often go unnoticed, especially with plastic. It’s hard for recyclers to determine whether, say, a container is a milk container or a pesticide (杀虫剂) container.

AI stands to make a change, giving recycling factories a far more detailed view into packaging. The AI- powered recycling robots are “vision systems”: In the same way ChatGPT is trained, they ingest lots of photographs of thrown-away items in various states of damage. The robots are then able to identify even tiny differences in a product’s color, shape, texture, or logo. Recycling operators said that traditional systems tend to be 85 to 95 percent accurate, while robotics companies claim up to 99 percent accuracy.

That is not to say that the turn to AI has already fixed recycling. The high-tech systems won’t come cheap — an individual robot can cost as much as $300,000. Even if costs eventually decrease, recycling robots can’t change the fact that recycling, even at its best, is just not a particularly efficient way of dealing with single-use products   From a plastics-pollution standpoint, what's better than a recyclable single-use cup is not using one at all.

【推荐3】Urban agriculture, the practice of farming within the limits of a city, is becoming increasingly popular worldwide and is considered a way to make cities and urban food systems more sustainable. Despite strong evidence of the social and nutritional benefits of urban agriculture, its carbon footprint remains understudied.

Most previously published studies have focused on high-tech, energy-intensive forms of urban agriculture —such as vertical (垂直的) farms and rooftop greenhouses. The new study aimed to fill some of the knowledge gaps by comparing the carbon footprints of food produced at low-tech urban agriculture sites to conventional crops.

The researchers calculated the greenhouse gas emissions (排放) associated with on-farm materials and activities over the lifetime of the farm. The emissions, expressed in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents per serving of food, were then compared to foods raised by conventional methods.

Farmers and gardeners at urban agriculture sites across the world were employed to use daily diary entries to take down inputs—the materials used to construct farms and cultivate crops—and harvests from their food-growing sites throughout the 2019 season.

“By assessing actual inputs and outputs on urban agriculture sites, we were able to determine climate change impacts to each serving of produce,” says study co-lead author Benjamin Goldstein, assistant professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability. On average, food produced through urban agriculture released 0.42 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalents per serving, six times higher than the 0.07 kg CO₂e per serving of conventionally grow n produce.

It’s also found that most of the climate impacts at urban farms are driven by the infrastructure (基础设施), such as the raised beds in which food is grown, or pathways between plots. “These farms typically only operate for a few years, so the greenhouse gases used to produce those materials are not used effectively. Conventional agriculture, instead, is very efficient and hard to compete with”, Goldstein says. For example, conventional farms often grow a single crop with the help of pesticides and fertilizers, resulting in larger harvests and a reduced carbon footprint when compared to urban farms, he says.

【推荐1】It’s an unconventional setting. Children of varying ages are reading actively. Seated next to them are teenagers, many of them girls, staring at the Hindi alphabet(字母表)on the blackboard. In charge of this class are three young girls, not much older than their students. But when Tabassum, Tarannum and Rubina, no more than 22, start speaking, you know the difference. Their confidence takes you by surprise.

A little over 10 kilometres from Varanasi lies the village of Sajoi where illiteracy(文 盲)was quite common. It had blocked out modernity until recently, especially when it came to its women. Educating girls was considered pointless, and the possibility of women stepping out of their homes, unthinkable.

Things began to change in 2010 when Human Welfare Association (HWA), identified Sajoi for a planned intervention. HWA set up a centre in Sajoi to offer free education but the villagers needed to be convinced to join in. The organization needed volunteers who valued education. Tabassum, Tarannum and Rubina embraced the opportunity.

After completing their high school education, the girls set out on another important mission-persuading the locals to send their children to schools. “We went knocking at every door, talking to elders, “recalls Rubina. Some villagers asked them to mind their own business. “We didn’t let all this distract our attention from the main goal, ” Rubina says.

The girls honed their approach. They didn’t ask people to stop their children from working, but urged them to send them to schools for an hour or two. Slowly, children started trickling(缓 慢增加)in. Motivational Learning Centre, as the girls call it, is no replacement for school. It is there, in fact, that they create the hunger for knowledge. It also helps school-going children so they don’t lose interest and drop out.

Those who doubted the girls’ intentions now recommend the centre to others. The number of admissions to schools has steadily increased and the dropout rate in Sajoi has fallen.

【推荐2】It is true that people with better education are usually able to get better paying jobs. In other words, they have more chances to choose a good job while people with little or no education don’t. It seems that the purpose of education is to make people get jobs. But this isn’t accepted by all people.

Some people may think that a person should spend the best years of his life to get education only for a way of living. This was probably one of the earliest reasons of education. In fact, if education is just a way of making a living, people don’t need to spend so much time in school. People can get education for a living in a short time. Subjects like history and geography need not be taught to everyone. Even languages and mathematics need not be taught in detail, either. Here it is clear that education is much more than teaching a man to get a way of living.

Education is well-rounded and it is mainly for improving a man. It is not only to teach him to speak, read and write, but also to develop his creative thinking and other abilities. After that, it is to make him a wise man and thankfully enjoy the achievements of humans. Education is to make a man lead a better life. Educated people are expected to be able to listen to good music, read good books, watch plays, and most of all, take an interest in the world.

I would agree that making a good living is an important reason for education, but certainly not the most important or the main reason.

【推荐3】Whether your kid can count on a sizable inheritance (遗产) or your family is living pay period to pay period, a college degree is a must. Along with the invisible life skills you get from those formative years on campus, college comes with a bankable payout: A Georgetown University study found that, on average, college graduates make a million dollars more over a lifetime than people who stop at high school.

Recently, a Bronx nonprofit asked me to speak to a group of high schoolers whose families were struggling financially. The participants were (rightly) worried about taking on too much college debt. Here’s what I told them: Even when you subtract (扣除) tuition, lost earnings during the college years, and other factors, an average college grad will still take in $300,000 more than those without a college degree.

And while rising tuition fees are a serious worry, free college programs of one kind or another have sprung up in more than 20 states. My own home state, New York, boasts one of the most comprehensive efforts. The Excelsior Scholarship program guarantees that students at public institutions attend tuition-free if their family earns under $110,000 a year.

Even in Silicon Valley, where there are many successful people who don’t own a college degree, I asked a group of parents there if it’s true that kids are giving up a college degree because they’re sure they’ll be rich people. The answer was a resounding, unapologetic no.

The truth is that in this STEM (science, technology, engineering and math)-centric age, any form of home-schooling or social education can’t replace the formal school education. Especially in an age when many low-end careers are being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI), a college degree can give your kid an edge.