4 . Where to find your favorite food may be one main thing that comes to your mind while travelling. Thankfully, fast food services are available across the world. Followings are some fast food services across the world.

Papa John’s Pizza

Papa John’s is the fourth largest pizza delivery service in the US. This service is available in 34 countries in total. Out of 4,000 restaurants of Papa John’s, 3,200 are situated in the United States. The founder, John Schnatter opened the first restaurant of Papa John’s Pizza in 1984 in Indiana. “Better ingredients, Better pizza” is the slogan of Papa John’s pizza service.

In 2002, Papa John’s became the first pizza chain service in the United States with online ordering facility. Today, over 205,000 employees work in Papa John’s with a net revenue of US$1.4 billion.

Dairy Queen

The Dairy Queen service is available in 6,000 locations across the world. Dairy Queen operates in 18 countries apart from the United States. Among the US states, Texas has the most number of Dairy Queen restaurants — 600 restaurants.

Dairy Queen was founded by John Fremont McCullough in 1940. The first Dairy Queen store started in Joliet city of Illinois state. Soft serve ice cream is the signature product of Dairy Queen. It has also featured on company logo. The stores of DQ also serve burgers, French fries, processed fried chicken, frozen treats and hot dogs.

Starbucks

Seattle-based Starbucks is the largest coffee company in the world. Starbucks has 23,187 stores across 64 countries. Among them, 12,973 are located in the US. Starbucks serves cold & hot beverages, wines, beer and snacks. Starbucks offers 87,000 drink combinations for the customers.

Starbucks was founded in 1971 by Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker and Zev Siegl. Interestingly, since 1987, Starbucks has been adding minimum two new stores on daily basis. They also use 93 million gallons of milk and 2.3 billion paper cups per year for the service.

Last week, I was having breakfast at Chick-fil-A and as I was sitting in my truck eating, I noticed a homeless guy sitting on the curb (路边) behind the building with his dog.

He was holding a sign asking for money or food donations to help feed him and his dog. I observed him the entire time I ate my breakfast. He mostly just sat there scratching his dog and holding the sign while people drove past ignoring them. When I finished my breakfast, I decided to make another run through the drive-through and ordered a large chicken biscuit combo. As I was leaving, I pulled up alongside him and handed him the bag of breakfast and a small bag of dog food I had in my truck for my dog.

The bag of Chick-fil-A put a huge smile on his face, but when I handed him the bag of dog food, the guy literally lost it and started bawling (放声痛哭) right there on the side of my truck. After regaining his composure, he exclaimed that it had been so long since somebody had treated him like a human being. I asked him if he would be willing to work hard for a decent day’s pay and he immediately straightened up and exclaimed that he could be the hardest worker I had ever seen. I gave him my business card and a fiver and told him to meet me at that spot the next morning and I would put him to work.

The next day I stopped in and sure enough he was waiting there for me. I took him and his dog to the jobsite. He wasn’t kidding about being a hard worker; this guy carried wood around and fetched tools out of my truck for me all day without complaining once. His dog just followed him the entire time. During the day I learned about his misfortune.

At the end of the day I took him to my bank and withdrew his day’s pay which amounted to $80.

When I left him last night, he looked like a different person from the man I saw hanging his head in shame behind Chick-fil-A.

7 . Thinking hard for several hours can leave us feeling mentally tired — and now we may know why. Prolonged concentration leads to the build-up of a compound called glutamate (谷氨酸盐) in regions at the front of the brain. This may provide an explanation as to why we avoid difficult tasks when mentally exhausted: the glutamate overload makes further mental work difficult.

Too much glutamate is potentially harmful, says Antonius Wiehler at the Paris Brain Institute in France, who led the research. “The brain wants to avoid this, so it is trying to reduce activity.”

To learn more, Wiehler and his team used a technique called magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), which measures levels of various chemicals in living tissue harmlessly. They focused on a region towards the front and sides of the brain called the lateral prefrontal cortex (侧前额叶皮层), which much previous work has shown is involved in difficult mental tasks.

The team asked 40 people to do memory tasks while lying in an MRS scanner. These included watching sequences of numbers appear on a screen and stating if the current number was the same as a previous one. Twenty-six of the participants did a harder version of this task, while the other 14 were given an easier one.

Levels of eight different brain chemicals were measured, including glutamate. After completing the memory tasks for six hours, those doing the harder version had raised levels of glutamate in their lateral prefrontal cortex compared with the start of the experiment. In those doing the easier task, levels stayed about the same. Across all participants, there was no rise in the other seven brain chemicals that were measured.

Among the participants doing the harder tasks, their glutamate level rise corresponded with dilation (扩大) of the pupils (瞳孔) in their eyes, another broad measure of exhaust. Those doing the simpler task reported feeling tired, but had no glutamate rise or pupil dilation.

“Measuring brain glutamate could be used to reveal how hard a region of the brain has been working,” says Reto Huber at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “We never had a good measure for that on the molecular (分子的) or neurotransmitter (神经传递素) level. This looks really promising. It could potentially be used by doctors to assess people with conditions that can make concentrating difficult.”

8 . Electric vehicles (EVs) have long been advertised as environmentally friendly vehicles. This is true, to some extent. EVs do not emit any carbon dioxide into the environment, unlike conventional cars.

But scientists foresee a new problem. Cars run on batteries, and electric cars are no different. So once the battery reaches the end of its useful life, what will be done with it?

As the number of electric vehicles in use increases greatly, scientists must discover an effective recycling method for EV batteries.

While electric cars and gas-powered cars essentially function in the same way, a major difference between the two is their batteries.

Electric vehicles use lithium-ion (锂离子) batteries, which are larger and heavier than a non-EV car’s lead-acid (铅酸) batteries. Instead of fuel, EVs rely directly on their batteries for a source of energy.

When charging, electricity triggers (引起) chemical changes within the battery. On the road, the chemical changes are converted into electricity, thus powering the car. The continuous charge-discharge process reduces the charge (电荷) the battery can hold. Thus, the distance and time between the car’s next charging session decreases.

The battery’s average lifespan ranges from five to eight years to 10-20 at most, so drivers will need to replace EV batteries many times in the car’s life.

A major issue with EV batteries is the inconvenience they pose during dismantling (拆卸). EV batteries are made up of several hundred lithium-ion cells. Each cell contains risky materials and must be dismantled individually. If not dismantled correctly, the battery cells may even explode.

Additionally, recycling methods that do exist for these batteries are energy- and cost-intensive. In fact, in the European Union and the US, lithium-ion battery recycling rates are only 5%.

Companies are trying to find solutions. Nissan, a car company, is reusing their electric car batteries in automated guided vehicles in their factories. These vehicles deliver car parts to workers. Volkswagen also uses its batteries like Nissan, but also recently opened its first recycling plant.

9 . In Molly Pollak’s second-floor Manhattan apartment, the spare bedroom is filled with decades of classroom memories.

“Those are all my high school yearbooks,” Pollak says, ________ to a shelf. “Those are my middle school yearbooks. I really need to throw them away,” she admits.

But after 40 years teaching English to middle and high school students, there’s one book Pollak will never ________ . It’s a big book with an orange cover. She ________ this book a few months ago. It was the________of the school year and the students were taking off for the summer. But Pollak was taking off for, well, forever.

As news of her ________ spread, Ora Bayewitz-Meier, one of Pollak’s former students, reached out to other former students and ________ them to write in. They did eagerly.

She received 75 ________. These weren’t just a paragraph or two — many were pages long. “I don’t think it is an exaggeration (夸张) to say that you________ my life,” wrote Rebecca Rosenthal. “There are a handful of people that ________ who I am and you are one of them,” wrote Chris Ryan, one of her students in the 80s. Other letters tell of a trying moment in middle school.

When Pollak and her husband first sat down to read this book, she________ something: The ________from Pollak’s first year of teaching back in 1974, and the ones from 40 years later, are very ________. They saw the same themes over and over.

So Pollak did what English teachers do: She________those themes and found a thesis statement (中心句). “And the thesis statement is not what you ________ it is,” she says.

It’s essentially this: “Molly________ us like adults when no one else did. She challenged us to rise to the occasion.” That’s from the letter Jackson Krule wrote. He had Ms. Pollak as his teacher in 10th, 11th and 12th grade.