4 . The United States has over 50 famous, well-traveled national parks. Among them are Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone and Acadia. The country also has several roads called National Parkways. These long, winding paths let Visitors experience nature, history and culture from a car. Like the parks, the roads are managed by the National Park Service.

The parkways cut through some of the most scenic parts of the country. One of the longest and most popular is the Blue Ridge Parkway.

National parkways are made up of scenic roads and surrounding land. They were designed to give people driving cars a chance to see beautiful parts of the country. They have also been important for improving local economies.

The idea for National Parkways began in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a difficult economic time in the United States. Families and communities suffered. Many people were without work.

To create more jobs and improve the economy, the U.S. government built roads that passed through beautiful parts of the country that had suffered during the Depression.

One of these roads was the Blue Ridge Parkway. The early goal for the parkway was to build a road through the Appalachian Mountains that connected Shenandoah National Park with the Great Smokey Mountains National Park.

In the beginning, building the parkway created some problems for local communities. People who had been living in the area were forced to move. Also, people were not permitted to drive vehicles on the parkway while carrying items for sale. But, in the end, the Blue Ridge Parkway brought jobs and money to the communities. And today, it is an important part of the local economy. In the last year, the Blue Ridge Parkway earned over a billion dollars from tourism. That is more money than any other place managed by the National Park Service.

5 . Facebook has developed the first machine learning model that can translate between any two of 100 languages without going into English first. It says the new multilingual machine translation model was created to help its more than two billion users Worldwide. The company is still testing the translation system-which it calls M2M-100-and hopes to add it to different products in the future.

Angela Fan, a research assistant at Facebook, said the model produces better results than other machine learning systems that depend on English to help in the translation process. The other systems use it as an intermediate step-like a bridge-to-translate between two non-English languages.

One example would be a translation from Chinese to French. Fan noted that many machine translation models begin by translating from Chinese to English first, and then from English to French. This is done “because English training data is the most widely available,” she said. But such a method can lead to mistakes in translation.

Facebook says about two-thirds of its users communicate in a language other than English. The company already carries out an average of 20 billion translations every day on Facebook’s News Feed. But it faces a huge test with many users publishing large amounts of content in more than 160 languages.

One difficulty the team faced was trying to develop an effective machine translation system for language combinations that are not widely used, Facebook calls these “low-resource languages”. The data used to create the new model was collected from content available on the Internet. But there is limited Internet data on low-resource languages.

For now, it plans to continue exploring new language research methods while working to improve the new model. No date has been set for launching the translation system on Facebook.

But Angela Fan said the new system marks an important step for Facebook, especially for the times we live in. "Breaking language barriers through machine language translation is one of the most important ways to bring people together, provide authoritative information on COVID-19, and keep them safe from harmful content,” she said.

7 . Do you like potato chips? Can you imagine someone postponing graduation just to make them? This is exactly what happened with Du Haotian, a graduate student from Shaanxi province.

The potato chips Du is making are called guoba, originally made of millet rice, but here Du chose colored potatoes as the ingredients.

Zhenba County, located in the southern part of Shaanxi, has been striving to promote high-quality potato sales, despite the inconvenient geographical conditions. Du Haotian, a graduate student of Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University, together with his team, introduced NWAFU’s colorful potato to solve the problem. After adjusting the recipe several times, it gradually turned into a popular snack at Du’s university. “We sold 10,000 yuan (of chips) in an hour during the trial period,” Du said.

At the end of last year, Du’s team set up their own factory in the village to commercialize the colorful potato and derivative snacks, planting and producing the products locally. At the beginning of this year, the production line was officially put into operation. It can process 5,000 tons of potato snacks per year, increasing the added value by 1,000 yuan to 1,500 yuan per ton of potatoes. However, while helping the local community, Du Haotian is under pressure to graduate.

Although he was supposed to graduate in June 2020, Du applied for a postponement for one year. Du said the production line project is still under construction and he wants to live up to the expectations of the villagers. “A lot of my friends and teachers told me not to do that, but I still want to stay and support the village for another half year. Otherwise, if the factory is built but does not work out, then it would be against my original intention.” Eventually, Du’s mentor supported him. Once, a villager recommended the potato snack to Du before realizing he was the founder. “At that time it warmed my heart and I experienced a sense of recognition.” Recently, Du’s potato snacks took part in a college food competition on behalf of his university. His product once soared to the top of the list with the support of many local villagers, which touched Du.

9 . Chewbaca climbed into the pilot seat of the Milemium Falcon as fireworks exploded above Disneyland in Anahein, California, Wednesday. Chewbacca is an imaginary creature born in the first of the Star Wars series of movies. He was in Disneyland for a ceremony to open the new Star Wars area at the theme park.

“Chewie, let’s fire up the Falcon,” said Mark Hamill, the actor who played Luke Skywalker. He also attended the event to open the more than five-and-one-half hectare area called Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge. It opened to the public Friday.

The furry Chewbacca had trouble starting the huge spaceship, which led actor Harison Ford to Surprise the crowd and offer an assist. Ford played the Siar Wars character Han Solo. He hit the side of the ship and said “Peter, this one’s for you,” in honor of Peter Mayhew, the actor who played Chewbacca in five films and died in April.

Ford stood on stage with Hamil, Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger, Star Wars creator George Lucas, and Bily Dee Williams, who performed the part of Lando Calrissian in Star Wars.

Lucas created the Star Wars movie series in 1977 and sold it to Disney in 2012. He gave high praise to Galaxy’s Edge, which is set in Black Spire Outpost, a settlement on a planet called Batuu that appeared in “Star Wars” books but never in the film.

The Star Wars area offers visitors the chance to step into the Millennium Falcon’s cockpit and control a simulated flight. Guests can also drink blue milk, eat space meat cooked by a pod-racing engine and have a drink at an outer-space restaurant.

Expectations run high from generations of fans. Many of the movie series lovers have waited 40 years since the first film to visit a real-world version of the galaxy far, far away.

Disney also aims to appeal to a broad group of Star Wars lover s as well as people without any attachment to the futuristic series.

10 . If someone says “give me five” to you, do not search your pocket to get five yuan! It will make others laugh! The person is not asking for your money, but your fingers.

In the US, “give me five” or “give me the high five” is a popular gesture (动作). You can see it often in films or on TV. It means the clapping (拍) of each other’s raised (举起的) right hands together.

People do it when they meet for the first time or when something happy or successful happens. For example, when a basketball team wins a game, the players will give high fives to everyone around to celebrate.

This gesture may come from the old Roman gesture of raising the right arm for the emperor (皇帝). This showed that the person raising his arm did not have a sword (刀) in his hand.

Why not try to give the high five to your friends?