【推荐1】“Bing Dwen Dwen” and “Shuey Rhon Rhon” are the mascots (吉祥物) for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games and the Paralympics (残奥会). Here are their self—introductions.

The idea behind these two mascots is to connect traditional Chinese culture with the Games. The panda is designed with its modern look to show our great expectations (期盼) for the Games and our welcome to the whole world. The red image of “Rhon Rhon” reminds people of the celebration of China’s Spring Festival.

【推荐2】For almost 100 years, the Winter Olympics has been a celebration of ice and snow sports around the world. It is a special event that only takes place once every four years.

Although the Winter Olympics started with just five sports across nine disciplines (分项) in France in 1924, it has grown to include seven sports across 15 different disciplines and has been hosted in 12 countries across three continents (洲). In 2022, for the first time ever in the games’ history, Beijing became the first city to host both the Summer and Winter Olympics.

China has come a long way and achieved many goals since it took part in the Winter Olympics for the first time in 1980. In this short period of time, China’s athletes have won medals in six of the sports events. Short track speed skating (短道速滑) has been an area of expertise (专长) for China.

China’s love for winter sports has been growing. The Ministry of Education has set a goal of building 5,000 special schools by 2025 to improve winter sports education. The government has also been encouraging primary and secondary schools to add winter sports to their courses. Many provinces and cities have already acted on this suggestion. Classes will be set up in schools in northern China to boost interest in winter sports. In southern China, schools can partner with ice rinks (溜冰场) and winter sports clubs.

Beijing has already set a good example. Nearly 840,000 students in the city have begun taking winter sports lessons, including skating and skiing lessons, China News Agency reported.

【推荐1】One day, Ammaar Reshi was playing around with a chatbot called ChatGPT. It’s a computer program. It uses AI to think and write in a similar way to humans. Reshi decided to use it to make a children’s book. The chatbot helped Reshi come up with a story about a girl named Alice. Reshi created pictures using another AI program, Midjourney. It translates words into pictures.

The book, Alice and Sparkle, was done in just a couple of days. Reshi posted about the book on Twitter. Not everyone was pleased. Some people praised him for his creativity. But artists disagreed. They said the artwork was poor. The way the art was created was also a problem.

Midjourney searches through millions of pictures on the Internet. Then it is trained to create new ones. “The main problem to me about AI is that it was trained off of artists’ work,” illustrator(插图画家) Adriane Tsai says. “It’s our creations…that we did not agree to being used.” Many artists and writers are nervous about the future. Will people pay for their work if it can be done cheaper using AI?

Some companies(公司) are already choosing AI over human talent. The San Francisco Ballet used pictures created by Midjourney to make its production of The Nutcracker known. At a comedy club, an AI-powered robot told jokes. “It’s deeply troubling to see people looking for cheap choices to real human writing, a reporter.

Reshi says tech companies should protect artists and writers: “It’s really important that the tech industry that’s working on these tools includes artists in the process(过程) of creation.”

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【推荐3】①In the 13th century, Marco Polo, the world known Italian traveler, saw many wonderful things in China. One of the things he discovered was money made of paper. People in the West did not have such kind of money until the 15th century. However, the Chinese began to use it in the 7th century.

②Paper was invented by a Chinese man called Cai Lun almost 2000 years ago. But it was not made in Europe until the year 1100. Four hundred years later, a German discovered that he could make the best paper from trees. After that countries rich in forests, such as Canada, Sweden, America and Finland became the most important ones in paper making.

③Paper can be used in many ways. The common uses include newspapers, magazines and books. But do you know that paper can be used for keeping warm? In Finland, the farmers wear paper boots to keep their feet warm in the snow. And even houses can be insulated (使绝缘) from heat or cold with paper.

④However, we have to understand that paper still comes from trees now. If we keep on wasting so much paper, there will not be any trees left on the earth some day in the near future. Every day people throw away about 2800 tons of paper in our city. It takes 17 trees to make one ton of paper. This means that we are cutting down nearly 48,000 tress every day. The fact is that it takes more than 10 years for a tree to grow.

⑤So we must start saving paper right now. We can use both sides of every piece of paper. We can make useful things out of used paper. We can use china cups instead of paper ones. When shopping, we can use fewer paper bags and reuse them if possible.

⑥In short, we should keep a balance between using paper and protecting trees, and do it now before it is too late.

【推荐1】Have you ever seen vegetables growing in balconies, rooftops (屋顶) and window boxes around your neighborhood? China’s natural environment is good for vegetables’ growth. It has more than 160 kinds of vegetables,they will grow vegetables.

Also, Chinese scientists have built vegetable greenhouses in Antaretic (南极洲) research stations (莴苣), such as the Kunlun Station. They use the greenhouses to grow cucumbers and lettuce.

In 2016, Chinese astronauts successfully planted lettuce on the Shenzhou XI spacecraft. Lettuce there grows upward, just like it does on the earth. But this lettuce grew taller and greener, according to Jing Haipeng, the astronaut who planted it.

China was also open to foreign vegetables. For example,during the Western Han Dynasty, Zhang Qian, brought back carrots, garlic and other vegetables. During the Ming Dynasty, peppers, tomatoes and more vegetables were brought into China. China has a long history of planting vegetables. The Book of Songs (《诗经》) mentions many kinds of vegetables. The poem Cooing and Wooing (《关雎》) mentions xingcai.

China was also open to foreign vegetables. For example, during the Western Han Dynasty, Zhang Qian, who went to the Western Regions, brought back carrots, garlic and other vegetables. During the Ming Dynasty, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes and more vegetables were brought into China.

Chinese people are good at turning vegetables into delicious dishes. Take eggplants for example. In the West, people often grill them, which means cooking them over a fire without a pot. But Chinese people might stir-fry (炒) or steam them.

Planting vegetables brings more than just food. It also brings joy and peace. Poets like Tao Yuanming lived in the countryside and did farm work like planting vegetables. Perhaps, some Chinese people still hope to live a simple life in the country.

【推荐2】When it comes to long-distance space travel, the biggest problem is that spaceships can only get as far as the fuel onboard allows. In 1964, a British writer Clarke came up with the idea of “solar sailing” in his science fiction. He wrote of large, mirror-like sails that collect power from the sun and free spaceships from the limitation of fuel.

This sci-fi idea was first successful brought to reality in 2010 by Japan’s IKAROS satellite. Ever since then, the technology has improved mission by mission, with the latest being NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail 3(ACS3). NASA has recently announced that it’s going to team up with Lithuania’s satellite-building company NanoAvionics to test its new sail in Low-Earth Orbit.

To many, a solar sail may look like a giant solar panel, but it actually works very differently. While solar panels take in energy from the sun and change it into power, solar sails use Photons given off by the sun to create direct power. Besides, solar panels are big and heavy to carry, while solar sails are just the opposite.

According to Abbott, the CEO of NanoAvionics, the upcoming Low-Earth Orbit trial with NASA, if successful, will be followed with deep-space missions that involve larger solar sails. These are ideal for low-cost and long-distance space travel because fuel will no longer be a problem.

“It started as a sci-fi dream,” Popular Mechanics reporter Jennifer Leman wrote. “Now it could be the future of space flight.”