When it comes to choosing your seat in class, where will you choose to sit in the classroom?     1     Let’s see what kind of student you are.

Front Row

If you choose the front row, you love school.     2     You enjoy yourself in class. To get good grades, you don’t mind doing a lot of homework!

Middle Row

You are an ordinary: student. You aren’t the best student, but you aren’t the worst, either. You don’t care about getting good grades.     3    

Back Row

Though you sit in the back, you might plan to pay attention to learning. You don’t like too many people to sit behind you, and that’s why you sit in the back.     4    You are a cool student to be around.

Back Row Against the Wall

    5    You might plan to copy others’ homework in class because you stayed up playing online games the night before. You don’t like school because you get poor grades.

【推荐3】Online classes are becoming more and more popular around the world. But where do you usually take online classes? Most of us might be studying in a comfortable bedroom. However, Alexei Dudoladov, a Russian student, has another story to tell.

To attend classes online, he has to go a long way and climb up a very high tree where he can have an Internet connection. The 21-year-old young man lives in a remote Siberian village in Russia. He is a college student at the Omsk Institute of Water Transport. These days both the weather and the pandemic (疫情) make it difficult for the people in Omsk to live.

Dudoladov is a popular blogger who seems active on local social media. Now his action studying online on the top of a snow-covered tree has got the local government’s attention.

Since last week, his picture has been viewed 1.9 million times on TikTok and more than 56, 000 times on Instagram. Dudoladov wishes the local government could improve the service of his home Internet to connect to his online classes. “That’s why I have been forced to come up with such a creative solution,” he says.

The local education department said it was preparing an individualized (个性化的) study plan for Dudoladov. In this way, he could study in Stankevichi.

New research shows that the cost of raising a child in China is nearly seven times its GDP per capita(人均国内生产总值), far more than in the United States and Japan.

GDP, or gross domestic product, is the measure of the total value of goods and services in a country. GDP per capita is a measure resulting from GDP divided by the size of a nation’s total population.

The high cost of child-raising is one more difficulty Chinese policymakers (决策者) face as they try to deal with quickly decreasing(递减的) birth rates (比率).

Experts warn China’s aging population will put pressure on its health and social security (保障) systems. A decrease in workers could also seriously limit growth for the world’s second largest economy (经济) in the coming years.

New policies allow families to have as many as three children. But China’s birth rate dropped to 7.52 births per 1,000 people in 2021. That is the lowest since the National Bureau of Statistics (国家统计局) began recording the information in 1949.

The high costs of raising a child have caused officials in China to place restrictions(限制) on the private tutoring industry (私人家教行业). Some areas have been giving couples money for having a second or third child.

The average cost of raising a child to the age of 18 in China in 2019 was 485,000 yuan for a first child. That is 6.9 times China’s GDP per capita that year. That information comes from a recent report from the YuWa Population Research Institute(学院，机构) in Beijing.

China ranks second highest among the 13 countries included in the study. The country is behind only South Korea, which has the lowest birth rate in the world. The United States number, based on 2015 data(数据), is at 4.11 times GDP per capita. Japan stands at 4.26, based on data from 2010.

Child raising costs are even higher in China’s major cities, reaching more than 1 million yuan in Shanghai and 969,000 yuan in Beijing. Birth rates in the two cities are even lower than the national average.

YuWa warned the decreasing birth rate would “profoundly affect (严重影响)” China’s economic growth potential(潜力), its ability to create and its welfare(福利) problems.

The study found that China would need to spend at least 5 percent of its yearly GDP to provide reasons for couples to have more children. That would include education funding, special housing loan (贷款) rates and tax breaks(税收减免). Other considerations include equal time for mothers and fathers to be away from their jobs and the building of more childcare centers.