1 . Social anxiety(社恐) is a men tal disorder that is often misunderstood. It involves being fearful of social situations, especially unfamiliar ones.     1    

    2    

A person with social anxiety has an increase in heart rate, sweating and dizziness(头晕). In all of these cases, it’s important to slow down your breathing to help you gain control back of your body.

Challenge your thoughts

When you have social anxiety, perhaps you’re worried you might trip over, laugh or cough at the wrong time.     3     They may cause discomfort, but try to challenge these worries and replace them with more helpful thoughts.

Set goals

The idea of goal setting is not only to decide where you want to end up, but to learn about where you are now.     4     Never compare yourself to others in terms of social success. Focus on yourself and how you are doing week by week, month by month.

Say yes

    5     But it’s time to start saying “yes”! If you're invited to do something social, don’t turn it down and accept the invitation. You may feel a little anxious at first. However, over time , the more you attend social activities, the less scared you will feel to go.

2 . Tian Wangui and his wife Lu Min are villagers in Qiantian Village, Liaoning Province. They began planting trees over forty years ago. With their hard work, the two barren (贫瘠的) mountains are covered by trees now.

After leaving the army in the 1980s, Tian got back home and began planting fruit trees on the hills. In 1982, the couple got the contract rights (承包经营权) of two mountains. At first, they planted some young fruit trees on part of the land. In order to water them, they had to carry water up to the top of the mountains many times a day by themselves.

Now, the two mountains are covered by more than 50,000 trees of over 20 kinds. More than 2,000 birds live in the trees in the mountains.

“We cared for the mountains and trees as we cared for our children,” said Lu. “Even as we grow old, our children will protect the woods, watch over the birds and keep our dream alive.”

4 . In ancient times, people didn’t have smartphones or computers to use for fun. Still, they had interesting games to play.

Kites

Kites have a very long history. People first used kites to send messages. In the Song Dynasty, kites got very popular with people. Now, Beijing, Tianjin, Nantong and Weifang are the four most important places of kite making.

Cuju

It is an ancient Chinese football game. At first, soldiers played the game as training. In the Tang Dynasty and Song Dynasty, the game was popular. People across the country loved playing it. Women also played the game.

Chuiwan

Chuiwan is a ball game. It’s a little like golf. The game got popular in the Song Dynasty. It was still popular in the Yuan Dynasty and Ming Dynasty. But the game got less popular in the Qing Dynasty.

Go

Go, or Weiqi, is a game for two players. It has a history of over 4,000 years and is still popular nowadays. People in ancient times thought it was a game for gentlemen.

8 . Today, many people spend a lot of time reading online. Whether reading news or e-books, people are spending more time eyeballing (盯住) screens. While online reading opens up a great deal of knowledge to people, there are some disadvantages too, such as eyestrain, headaches, as well as difficulty in focusing on the text. Now a new reading system, Bionic Reading, developed by Swiss typographic designer Renato Casutt, can help people overcome these issues, and most importantly, it aims to help people read faster online and develop a more in-depth understanding of written content.

The reading system improve the reading process by guiding the eyes through text with artificial fixation points. To make it short: some parts of the words are displayed in bold (粗体). As a result, the reader only focuses on the highlighted letters and lets the brain center complete the rest. Your brain can “read” faster than your eyes, so by essentially reducing the number of letters your eye needs to look at, you can read faster while still preserving the full context.

Cassult discovered the system by accident. He was working on designing a book in a foreign language and realized he could read it if he sectioned it off. He worked for six years to develop Bionic Reading and is still working to adjust it.

A preliminary (初步的) study was conducted by the Swiss Institute InnoSuisee, but more research is needed before it can be definitively shown that the system improves reading. Some people with ADHD (多动症) prove that Bionic Reading helped them focus and comprehend what they are reading. Other people don’t seem to notice a big difference compared to regular text. There’s also no evidence to suggest Bionic Reading is any better than regular text. The best way to know if the Bionic Reader helps you read better online is to try it yourself.

9 . Never Think You’re Too Old to Become a Beginner

As we head into a new year, there is one thing from the outgoing disastrous year we should carry forward and even deepen: the spirit of the beginner.

Many people, in the face of such disorder, decided that they wanted to learn new things. But there’s a warning: The older you are, the harder you’re going to have to work. There’s a happy twist (扭转), however:     1    , the faster they seem to learn — the more they become like younger adults.

How, then, to prepare ourselves to become better beginners? We can draw crucial guidance from a group of research subjects:     2    .

For adults, the lessons are clear.     3    . Babies spend roughly a third of their day for six solid months practicing walking. So don’t worry if you’re still terrible at tennis after a few months.

Babies also remind us that progress is often not a straight process. Babies seem to learn best when operating near the limits of their current skill level. In other words:     4    .

    5    . If it feels easy, you’re not learning. If you don’t learn to fail, you’ll fail to learn. So let “beginner” be your watchword for 2024. But watch for overreach in your resolutions.

10 . Caviar (鱼子酱) is typically associated with sturgeons swimming in the Caspian Sea, but the Mexican version is made from the tiny eggs of ahuautle, an insect also known as “bird fly”. For Juan, a farmer, cultivating and collecting the tiny insect eggs known as ahuautle is a way of life. “It means tradition,” said Juan, one of the only six people known to still harvest ahuautle. They fear they may be the last.

The painstaking collection of “Mexican caviar” is threatened by the drying out of Lake Texcoco, development around the lakeshore and decreasing interest in the ingredient among younger generations. The dish’s survival is seen as an example of “community resistance”, similar to the way in which inhabitants around Lake Texcoco have managed to preserve other traditions, festivals and ceremonies.

For Juan, it’s hard. Dressed in shorts and rubber boots, Juan walks with an effort through the calf-high waters to collect pine branches he has pushed into the muddy lakebed the week before. The branches serve as an anchor for the bird-fly bugs to deposit their eggs. After about two hours, Juan has gathered a pile of sticks covered with thousands of bird-fly eggs. He returns to the edge of the lake to lay the sticks out to dry in the sun, which can take several hours or days, depending on the weather.

“Eating this is like revisiting the past,” said restaurant owner Guerrero, 61. He says the flavor of the ahuautle reminds him of his childhood. But Guerrero acknowledges that “Mexican caviar” is at risk of disappearing because younger generations aren’t familiar with the dish, and ever-fewer people harvest it in the scarce remaining lakes where it is found.

Edday, an entomologist (昆虫学家), said there are more than 430 species of eatable insects in Mexico. He said native people living around the lakes adopted the insect eggs as a source of protein because prior to the Spanish conquest of 1521, they had few domesticated (驯养的) animals. But now, Edday said, the dish “is associated with the countryside, perhaps with poverty, as if it were an undesirable protein.”