【推荐1】“Robots, drones (无人机) and AI will do around 90% of the housework by 2040.” scientists from Kings College said.

Mischa Dohler and Dr. Ian Pearson are two of them. They wrote the report Life More Automated Report to predict what homes will look like in 20 years. In it, they said that housework like washing clothes and dishes would be much easier because of technology progress (进步). If technology kept making progress, they expected that people would spend less than two hours a day in doing housework.

But most British people still don’t believe their predictions. Just two in five think that house robots will become a reality(现实) by 2040.

Predictions of Automation (自动化) by 2040

________

They will appear in people’s homes. They’ll be able to do some of the housework all by themselves.

Drones

Small drones will be common. Some will keep the house clean, water plants and keep an eye on the house for you. Some will shine special light on you to warm you as you move around the house.

AI Servants

It will do almost everything for you. They’ll be able to pay the bill (账单), do some shopping and find ways to save your time and money.

Super Smart Fridges

They will learn what you eat. They can tell you how much food here is in the fridge, and even recommend (推存) recipes.

【推荐2】Trees are important and they can help us in many ways. However, some of them are in danger and need to be taken care of as much as possible. There are some ways to save trees.

Use paper wisely. We can save trees by using paper in a right way. What can we do? Use both sides of paper when doing homework. Borrow books to read when you needn’t buy them. Never throw old books away, but be kind to donate them to others who need them. Use cloth towels instead of paper towels.

Plant trees. To save trees, it’s a great idea to plant them. Spring is the best season to plant trees. If everyone around us does it, millions of trees will appear and make our world become green and beautiful.

Tell people to understand the importance of trees and help save trees. Try to write letters to government officials (官员) and persuade (劝) them to use as little paper as they can.

【推荐3】Look at the Earth from space. Why does our planet look so blue? It’s blue because water covers almost three quarters of the Earth’s surface. Water is not just an important part of our planet. It is an important part of our body, too. More than half of our total body weight is water.

Our body loses water whenever we exercise or go to the toilet. That’s why we need to drink plenty of water every day. We drink water. We use it to cook, clean, and carry waste out of our homes. Farmers use it to grow vegetables and crops like rice and corn; factories use it to make products.

Since the 1950s, the amount（数量）of water people use has increased by three times. But the water supply（供应）hasn’t. Scientists worry that soon there won’t be enough water for us, as well as for the animals and plants that share our world. What can we do to help? Use water wisely.

Having enough water isn’t our only problem. We also need it clean.

Right now, ships and factories are putting wastes into seas, rivers and so on. Even chemicals that farmers use are running into rivers and lakes. All this pollution can make the water dangerous to drink. It can also harm fish and other water-living lives.

We must do something to stop pollution. It’s the best way to protect our world’s most valuable natural resource（资源）.

Traveling between Earth and space in an elevator (电梯), moving Earth away from the sun with huge engines . . . If you have watched the sci-fi blockbuster (大片) The Wandering Earth II, you must have been wowed by these amazing technologies. How far are these imaginative ideas from reality? Could we really achieve these things someday? Let’s take a look.

● Earth engines

In the movie, the sun is becoming bigger and will “eat” Earth. People plan to build tens of thousands of engines on Earth in order to push it away from the sun. The energy will come from a nuclear fusion reaction (核聚变反应). Would this be possible?

Wang Teng at the Chinese Academy of Sciences told Xinhua that in theory (理论上), nuclear fusion is powerful enough to move Earth. According to Wang, controllable nuclear fusion is one of the key problems scientists all over the world are working on. In the reaction, two atoms (原子) join into a heavier one, which creates a great amount of energy. It’s the same energy that powers the sun and other stars.

In December 2022, US scientists made a big breakthrough (突破). For the first time in history, they made a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it cost. Although the energy gain (获得) was not much—only enough for boiling about 9.5 liters of water, scientists are positive they could use this reaction to produce clean energy in the future.

● Space elevators

The space elevators in the movie look really cool. They travel fast between cables that connect Earth and the space station. According to Wang Yuanzhuo from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, this idea first came from Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895 after seeing the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The basic idea for space elevators is to connect one end of the cable to Earth and the other end to a space station that flies at the same speed Earth rotates (旋转). But the challenge, as experts told Xinhua, is to find the right material for the cables. A carbon nanotube (碳纳米管) might work. A short tube of 1.6 grams can hold more than 800 tons, which is about 160 elephants. Since its discovery in 1991, scientists have been trying to create a tube that is as long as possible. But the longest tube was only about half a meter, developed by a team at Tsinghua University in 2013.

If we can bring the design into reality, space elevators can save lots of energy and money compared with rockets. It will also make our trip to space a lot easier.

【推荐3】The Internet is a big place. Nobody has time to look at every website to find something. Search engines(引擎) like Yahoo give us the help we need.

Yahoo started in 1994 as the work of two Stanford University students, David Filo and Jerry Yang. They started by making a list of their favorite websites. As their websites got more , they made a database (数据库) to keep their information. They let everybody use it for free. Soon, thousands of people were using their service.

Then they made a new kind of software (软件). It looked at websites all over the Internet. It could take the information and plan for people to look at. If you search for “blue whales”, the engine will give you all the websites with those words.

Yahoo became a public company in 1996. Filo and Yang, still young men, had much money. As their company grew, they still worked hard. They improved their software. They also added (增加) more services like shopping, free e-mail, to many different countries with different languages.

Yahoo. com is famous on the Internet. And unlike most other web companies, Yahoo earns (挣) money in fact.