【推荐1】①Nowadays the intelligent parcel lockers (智能包裹储物柜) like Hive Box started to play an important role in our life.

②Before the introduction of intelligent parcel lookers, although a large part of the delivery (派送) process started to use machines and technologies, last-mile delivery mainly depends on deliverymen. With the increase of express orders there are more problems such as being short of deliverymen and too much work pressure. At the same time, because of different addresses and the uncertainty of the picking time as well as other reasons, the speed of deliverymen was very low. What’s worse, second deliveries often took place. Under such situation, intelligent parcel lockers were put into use. They greatly improve users’ experience and delivery speed.

③However, some serious problems actually get in the way of its development. That’s why it doesn’t develop as fast as we expect. The cost of using the lockers at the early stage is expensive. Although the free storage with no time limit (限制) used to make a large member of users interested, such kind of method is not practical in the long run and has caused losses (损失) these years.

④Take Hive Box as an example, it’s the leading company and it’s also the owner of the China’s largest self-service parcel locker in this industry. In 2019, the intelligent parcel lookers of the Hive Box led to a wide-spread discussion. Because the locker put up a notice that tried to let the users pay I RMB to get their parcels without informing(告知) at first. On April 30, 2020, Hive Box began a membership system. It also caused dissatisfaction.

⑤It seems that the intelligent parcel lockers industry has been looking for its way to make more money and reduce losses. But so far, there has been no perfect solution. So more actions should be taken and more studies should be done to guide it to the correct way to a better development.

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Researchers have developed paper that can be printed with UV light, free from the need for ink. People can clear the information away on the light-printable paper by heating it to 120℃ and it can be reused more than 80 times.

The research was carried out in order to reduce the effects of paper production. People just cut down too large amounts of trees every year to produce paper, which would destroy forests one day. That does harm to the environment. If people use the light-printable paper instead of paper they use now, the situation may be changed. The researchers, from Shandong University in China and the University of California, Riverside, said that the secret behind the technology is a color-changing chemical. A thin coating of the chemical can be used on usual paper and turn it into a reusable, light-printable one. Heating the paper for 10 minutes can help clear the information away more quickly.

Professor Yadong Yin, a chemistry professor at the University of California and a co-author of the study, said, “The greatest importance of our work is the development of a new technology to produce an ink-free rewritable paper that has the same feel and appearance as usual paper.” Their work is believed to have great economic and environmental influences on the modern society. Paper production has a bad influence on the environment. It’s the main reason to cause the industrial pollution, paper which is thrown away by people makes up about 40% of landfills where waste is buried under the ground.

It is said that light-printable paper will be inexpensive in the future. The printing process is also more cost-effective than the usual one because no ink is needed. Most importantly, it can be reused many times, which greatly reduces the cost.

【推荐3】A plane without oil! Super Google glasses! Sound like the year 2050? Take a look at the coolest inventions of 2013.

Solar­powered plane. A plane flew for more than 18 hours over the U.S. on Saturday and didn’t use a drop of oil! How? Solar Impulse is a solar­powered plane, the biggest such plane in the world. It has the same weight as a small car. It carries only one person. It can get solar power from the sun.

Super light camera. It weighs only 36g. It’s as light as six coins. It’s easy for you to take this small camera with you when travelling. It’s small, but it also has many uses. You can take a colourful photo or a black and white one. There are many shapes you can use. You can also use the camera as a key ring.

Google glasses. They are the latest technology from Google. People who wear the glasses can record what they see and hear around them, and put them on the Internet for the world to see. There is a GPS system in the glasses, and it will find where you are and tell you where you need to go. Google glasses are a bit like a helpful secretary. You can tell them what you want to write in an e­mail and they will type it for you.

【推荐2】We can see fans everywhere in our life. But how much do you know about them?

China is named the kingdom of fans. It is said that fans were first used to cool the air during the Shang Dynasty. At that time, they were made of feathers, bamboo or silk. Some of them were round, while others were square.

Folding paper fans first became popular during the Song Dynasty. There were usually beautiful pictures on the fans. Some were mountains and rivers, and others were flowers and animals. Many people, including Su Dongpo, a poet of the Song Dynasty, and Tang Bohu, a scholar of the Ming Dynasty, even painted and wrote poems on fans. This made the fans into art works. Many rich and important people liked holding fans.

Today, fans are popular gifts. During the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, folding fans were given to leaders and officials from other countries, as well as audience members. While they were using their fans to get cool air, they were also experiencing Chinese culture.

【推荐1】Do you know the word migrate? It is a word usually used to talk about certain animal such as birds, fish and so on. When animals migrate, they travel a long way from one part of the world to another according to the season. For example, swallows(燕子) migrate south in winter. Many animals migrate—they do this often at the same time and to the same place each year. They move to places where conditions are better—where the weather is warmer, where there is more food and water, or where their young will be safer.

People also migrate. When people migrate, they go to live in another area or country, especially in order to find work. In English, when people leave their home country in order to live in another country, we use the word emigrate instead of migrate. From migrate and emigrate come the words migration and emigration. However, if people move from their home country to another to live there forever(永久地), the word changes from emigrate to immigrate in the English language. Then the word immigration is born.

Isn’t word-making of the English language interesting? And can this process(过程) of finding out the relationships between words and learning them in a group or groups be a way for you to learn the language?

Based on Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 6th edition.

【推荐2】

Imagine you walk into your office, with the temperature just right. You sit down and a very valuable and meaningful day begins. This is the kind of smart office that engineers are trying to make. It uses technology to help workers perform their best at work.

It can be bad for your health if you sit in front of a desk for too long. For example, it can cause pain in the back and the neck. Sanon, a company in Zhejiang, built UP7 to deal with this. As a smart lifting desk, UP7 can tell how long a user has been sitting in the chair. When it reaches the setting time, it will “tell” the user to stand up and walk around. It does this by either shaking the table or sending messages to the user’s phone.

The company also invented a kind of smart chair to match with the table. “The chair is so comfortable. It can adjust its arms and height according to your body shape,” a user in Zhejiang said on Xiaohongshu.

In smart offices, you probably won’t use paper notebooks. Instead, you can try electronic paper books to put your work online. N10 from Hanvon Technology in Beijing, is a new “notebook” like this. It uses a screen that doesn’t produce much light. Users write or draw with an electronic pen on the screen.

“It is just like reading and writing on real paper,” a user said. “You can organize, search and save notes easily. You usually need several big paper notebooks to do what the electronic notebook does.”