【推荐1】Nowadays more and more children seem to get lost in a “sea of digital technology”. As they use digital technology too much, they are losing their ability to do the simple things. They can’t make toys themselves with hands or help mum cook dinner. And worst of all, they seem to be losing interests in communicating with others.

“I have talked with a number of teachers. They care about increasing numbers of young pupils who can play with computers or smart phones, but few or no skills to play with making things,” said a teacher, Colin Kinney. “Many pupils can’t communicate with other pupils but their parents talk proudly of their ability to use a computer or smart phone.”

Instead of playing with other children, more and more children are choosing to stay indoors and quietly play on a tablet on weekends and after school. How can a child grow up to be a very good artist if he doesn’t learn how to use a paintbrush and develop his painting skills? How can a child learn to making friends as he gets older if he doesn’t learn to communicate with others at a young age?

Digital technology can be used for good or bad. We can use stone to either break a window or build a house. We shouldn’t blame the children. We should help them make right choices. It is certainly necessary for children to know how to use digital technology in today’s world, but what is more important, we should encourage them to develop social abilities, which will do them good when they grow up.

【推荐2】How will the Internet change the world? Will we enjoy a smarter life in the future? Recently, many of the world’s biggest Internet companies took part in an important meeting. They talked about how to build a future for our online world. The Internet can make our lives easier in many ways. The companies at the meeting showed us some of their latest technology. Here are some examples. Let’s take a look.

Lip reading machines

They can not only read faces. They can also read your lip movements. The Chinese Internet company Sogou has made lip reading technology. You don’t need to speak aloud. The machine turns your lip movements into voice or text. This could be very useful if you are in a noisy place and people cannot hear you on your phone. Police can also use this technology. Sometimes they see criminals on city-monitoring cameras, but they don’t know what they say. The lip reading technology can help people with this.

Smart shoes

Your feet might hurt if your shoes don’t fit you. This won’t happen if you wear “smart” custom-made shoes. The Xiemofang company brought a machine to the meeting. The machine scans your feet. It records 39 parts of your feet. It also has a database (数据库). The database has more than 10,000 kinds of shoes. You can choose the colour and style. It also gives you suggestions for your choices. The suggestions are based on records of other people’s feet. You can get your new shoes after 10 days.

Unmanned supermarkets

You walk into a supermarket, pick out your goods and go to check out. But there is no worker. There is just a tablet (牌子) that says “Please smile”. When you smile, it gives you a discount (打折). Your money goes from your Alipay account to the supermarket. You don’t need to do anything. The Alibaba company has made this supermarket. When you go into the supermarket, it knows your face and your Alipay account. It also knows your facial expressions. So it knows how much you like your goods. The supermarket not only makes shopping easier, but also comprehends you.

【推荐3】Developed by US company OpenAI, ChatGPT has taken the internet by storm, winning 100 million users since it came out in November 2022. People can ask the robot to write stories and emails, create instructions for cooking a certain food, translate languages, and answer all kinds of questions. In its own words, it is “a language model trained in a large amount of internet text to help users get human-like text.”

Compared with Siri or other chatbots, ChatGPT uses a much bigger information center for training. It also uses stronger software (软件) and hardware to learn things by itself. For example, if it provides a wrong answer to your question, you can tell it the right one and it will correct itself. “It’s a totally different chatbot,” computer scientist Liu Xiaoguang from Nankai University told Tianjin Daily. “The knowledge level ChatGPT shows is the same as a university student. That’s why it shocked the world.”

But one big problem with ChatGPT is that it makes mistakes or even gives false information. When Rezza, a 28-year-old from Indonesia, used the robot to write an essay (论文), it “gave out many examples which other writers actually hadn’t mentioned at all”, he told The Guardian. Since the robot is trained using words from the internet, it can also pick up biases (偏见) about certain groups. These are all things that need to be dealt with.

【推荐1】Tom, Jean, Jack and Lucy are talking about the movie theaters in the city.

【推荐2】①Open an app, place your order, and wait for your food to be delivered (递送) to your home—this is how many people eat in China these days. Delivery service has spread all over China’s cities and rural areas. According to the latest data from the China Internet Network Information Center, about 421 million Chinese people use online food delivery services. That’s about half of the total number of Internet users in China.

②Which group of people is ordering food online the most? It’s undisputed that it’s mainly young people. A recent report showed that 86. 3 % of the service’s users are between 20 and 34 years old. These people, who live in small families, are the main groups driving the development of the food delivery.

③Small families depend greatly on food delivery services. Chinese families have changed in size over the past 20 years. In 2002, only 7. 7% of families were one-person family. But this number increased to 15. 6% in 2022. The percent of two-person families went up from 18. 4% in 2002 to 27. 2% in 2022. For small families, cooking will be spent more time and will make wastes, so ordering food online has become more popular.

④The improvement of China’s food delivery services has also attracted (吸引) more customers. According to Meituan’s report, it takes to make a food delivery dropped from 38 minutes in 2016 to 29 minutes in 2022. Many delivery platforms (平台) are also offering more services, delivering products such as fruit, vegetables, medicine and flowers. As its services continue to improve, it's likely that the food delivery industry will keep growing.