2 . If our kids don’t fall, they don’t learn to get up. I still remember the day in high school that my mom forgot to pick me up from school. I’m the oldest of four children, and no doubt she’d had a long day with the other kids and it’d slipped her mind. After waiting at school for an hour, I walked the three miles home, and when I got to my house, I shut our front door with anger, stormed into the kitchen and screamed in my mom’s face that she’d forgotten me.

Later that night, my dad told me I no longer had a ride to school the next day. I figured my mom would still take me, but when the morning came, she refused. It was midterm, and as a straight-A student ready to start college applications, being late wasn’t an option (选择). In my mind, missing these tests would have been the end of my academic career. I begged my mom. I told her she was ruining my future and everything I’d worked for. But she held her ground, and that day, I walked to school. And I missed my tests.

My mom didn’t rescue me from failure. She let me suffer from it. She let me figure it out. She let me learn. Now, as a mom myself, I’ve realized that I want my kids to experience failure because failure is how we grow, learn and think outside of ourselves. It’s how we self-educate to learn what’s right and respectable, and what’s not. It’s how we become responsible and enthusiastic. Falling down makes us better because we learn how to get up.

3 . Covid-19 has brought a great deal of trouble for all of us since March 2020. During this time, mobile phones have been the solution for the boredom and restlessness caused from staying indoors. The most downloaded apps on play store 2020 are;

TikTok

TikTok was the most downloaded app. With over 111.9 million downloads, TikTok has seen a huge growth in 2020, twice more than what it got in 2019. 20% of its total downloads were from India and around 9. 3% of the total downloads were in the US.

Zoom

Zoom was the second most installed app in the overall downloads category. With nearly 94. 6 million installs, Zoom is the most used app for online meetings and virtual classrooms. 17% of its downloads were in the US and India. Offices and educational institutes were shut down and to continue working and studying from home, people relied heavily on Zoom for video conferencing and calling.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp ranked third in overall downloads with more than 100 million downloads. It is one of the most popular and widely used chat applications; WhatsApp also supports communication between international phone networks.

Facebook

It ranked fourth in the overall downloaded list. Facebook is the world’s most popular social networking application. Facebook builds technologies that give people the power to connect with friends and family, find communities and grow businesses.

4 . Across Europe, many castles have been changed into hotels. Check out five of the best and most beautiful places to stay.

Hotel Schools Thannegg

Hotel Schools Thannegg lies in the middle of the Austrian Alps, a fairy-tale sight in the snow and the perfect winter break getaway. The ceilings date back to 1150, and the hotel has its own free bus that will take you away on a skiing adventure in winter.

Swinton Estate

The English may not be hugely romantic. But their country castles certainly are. Swinton Estate is the home of the Cunliffe-Lister family, and has been turned into a 30-bedroom hotel. It comes complete with small towers, long passages, grand staircases, and wide balconies.

Hotel de la Cite

There are few better places to base yourself when you explore the city of Carcassonne than Hotel de la Cite. It’s the only hotel that sets inside the walls of the UNESCO World Heritage Site （世界遗产地）. Enjoy a glass of wine on the balcony as the sun sets over France, taking in the impressive views.

Castel Porrona

Deep in the rolling Tuscan hills of Italy—in a delightful village dating back to the 1lth century and surrounded by vineyards （葡萄园）, sunflower fields and olive groves. Bach of its 25 rooms offers wonderful views of the village, the castle grounds and the whole landscape.

Pousada de Óbidos

There are only nine rooms —so plan your booking in advance. Within the city walls of Obidos lies the Pousada di Óbidos, which has been turned into one of the country’s finest hotels, and one of the first to become a pousada, a traditional or historical Portuguese hotel. The hotel is charming and intimate （温馨的）, particularly popular in the summer months.

5 . A horse fair is an interesting place. There were young horses from the country, little Welsh ponies and many beautiful horses too. But there were also a lot of poor, thin horses, tired from hard work. I was very sad to see them.

At the horse fair there was a man with a gentle voice and kind grey eyes. He offered 23 pounds for me, but they refused. Then a man with a very loud voice came. I was afraid he was going to buy me, but he walked off. Then the grey-eyed man came back again and said,

“I'll give 24 for him.”

“Done,” said the salesman. “He's a quality horse and if you want him for cab work, he's a bargain.”

Half an hour later we set off for London, along country roads, until we came to that great city. There were streets to the right, and streets to the left. We went into one of the small streets, and then into a very narrow street, with small, old houses.

My owner stopped at a house. The door opened, and a woman, a little girl and a boy, came out.

"Is he gentle, father?"

“Yes, Dolly, as gentle as a kitten; you can pat him.”

Dolly, the little girl, patted my shoulder without fear. It felt so good! They led me into a comfortable, clean stable, and after a delicious meal I lay down to sleep, thinking “I'm going to be very happy here. ”

My new owner's name was Jerry. His wife was called Polly and they had two children, Harry and Dolly. The next morning they came to see me. I loved it when they patted me and spoke in gentle voices.

"Let's call him 'Jack', after the old horse, shall we, Jerry?” said Dolly.

“Yes, let's," said Jerry.

The first week of my life as Jack, the London cab horse was very hard. The noise and the people and the traffic on the streets scared me. But Jerry was a very good driver, and that helped a lot. Jerry soon found that I was ready to work hard and do my best, and he didn't whip me.

He kept me very clean, and gave me as much food as I wanted. But the best thing was that I had Sundays off.

6 . In 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.

Paper was invented by a Chinese man called Cai Lun almost 2,000 years ago. But it was not made in Europe until the year 1,100. 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.

Paper 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.

However, 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 2, 800 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 trees every day. The fact is that it takes more than 10 years for a tree to grow.

So 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 we have some.

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

7 . Summer Fun at Happy Kids’ Learning Centre

Are you looking for something that can add color to your summer holiday? If yes, here are the summer courses that you cannot miss!

Children Can Cook

The course is to improve children's knowledge in the kitchen. They will learn basic cooking skills, kitchen safety, and how to buy proper ingredients （原料）and follow steps in recipes （食 谱）.Children can sit comfortably and eat what they have cooked at the end of each lesson.

Little Writers

The course is divided into two parts. In the first part, children are introduced to famous stories and their writers. In the second part, they are taught to write their own stories. Children also get the chance to write other text types, such as poems and plays.

Acting for Fun

This is a course that lets children enjoy the fun of acting. Through acting and speaking in front of people, children will be more confident. Parents are welcome to watch the performance given by the children at the end of the course.

Watercolor Painting

This course teaches children the basic skills of painting people and animals. We encourage children to watch, imagine and create their own works.

8 . Today we can do everything with apps: pay bills, order food and shop for anything. Mobile technology means we can hold the world in our hands. However, when it comes to technology and health care, chances and challenges come together.

Let's start with the ways to get health care. Telemedicine can allow a patient to use technology to see the doctor online and get a diagnosis and instructions without leaving home.

In addition, there are many patient websites. These allow for different kinds of interactions about our health needs without involving the medical team. Setting a date with doctors and reading lab results are readily achieved by technology.

A whole new age of medical care seems likely to come in the future. But every coin has two sides. What might be on the other side of techno-health care?

Firstly, we should think about the health care experience as a whole. A usual visit to a doctor begins with a receptionist, who can see and tell how a patient is doing. This may influence the treatment effect. It's unlikely that a patient website will have such intuition.

Next, sharing the details of one's life requires trust, which takes time to build. This is certainly true in health care, where some of life's best and worst moments involve doctors. The human touch should not be undervalued and is unlikely to be there over the smartphone.

Lastly, test results can be difficult to understand. When someone without a medical degree sees a flagged result with no explanation on the website, there's room for all kinds of stories to form in their minds—and also great worry .

So how does medicine adapt to the new technology age? Very talented companies are working on it. There is medical equipment that can be used at home to send necessary signs and heart sounds through telemedicine. It seems likely that some companies will find a way to explain test results.

But what it will not achieve is the warmth of human interaction and touch. Patients often need someone to listen to-and care about — their journey story, which will never be realized through a human-less technology. Technology should be a tool, but depending on it totally will most certainly have unexpected effects. Let's not allow our humanity to be one of them.

9 . The pandemic has put the future on fast-forward, with one noticeable idea: the drive-in cinema.

In the early 1930s, Richard Hollingshead, a car-parts salesman, had an idea. He'd heard his mother complain about how uncomfortable she found the wooden seats in cinemas. What if she could watch a film from the comfort of her car? To test the thought in his driveway, he put a film projector on the front part of his car, hung a sheet from some trees and invited his neighbors. He patented the idea and in June 1933 opened his first drive in cinema near Camden, New Jersey.

But the idea was slow to take off. By 1945 there were only 96 drive-ins in America. Everything changed in 1949 when Hollingshead's patent was overturned, allowing other companies to open drive-ins without having to pay him tax. With the development of an in-car speaker and perfect synchronization with the on-screen image, the number of drive-ins in America jumped to 2,000 by 1950 and more than 4,000 by 1958.

Drive-in cinemas went into a fall in the late 1950s as shopping malls sprang up in American suburbs. The space occupied by drive-ins was more valuable to property developers as a location for daytime shopping, rather than just showing films in the evening. Besides, more and more people had televisions at home.

The few hundred remaining drive-ins have experienced an unexpected rebirth in 2020 as social-distancing requirements forced indoor cinemas to close. This summer 160 Walmart parking lots were turned into temporary drive-ins. In many ways, the covid-19 outbreak has driven us into the future, promoting the adoption of remote working, online learning, e-commerce and telemedicine. When it comes to drive-ins, however, the pandemic has taken us back to the past.

10 . A study has found that a lifetime of regular exercise and activity can slow down the aging process and a life of movement and exercise may help us live longer and healthier.

For their study, the researchers looked at two groups. The first group was made up of 125 non-professional cyclists between the ages of 55 and 79. This group included 84 healthy men and 41 healthy women. We will call this group the “cyclists”.

Researchers then found 130 people to make up a second group. Within this group, 75 people were aged from 57 to 80. The other 55 were between the ages of 20 to 36. The people in this group were also healthy, but they didn’t exercise regularly. We will call this group the "non-exercisers". Smokers, heavy drinkers of alcohol (酒) and people with other health problems were not included in the study.

Then, researchers gave both groups a series of tests. They tested their muscle mass (肌肉质量) , muscular strength, percentages of body fat and the strength of their immune systems (免疫系统). Then the researchers compared the results of the two groups.

Results showed that the cyclists didn’t experience body changes usually regarded as a normal aging process. For example, they didn’t lose muscle mass or muscular strength. Also, their body fat didn’t increase with age. The researchers also found something they had not expected. The study showed that the immune systems of the cyclists didn’t age either. The researchers advise us all to find an exercise that we like in our lives.