1 . Italian company Lablaco is working with fashion houses and brands to digitize their clothes in the growing “phygital” fashion market. Lablaco was founded in 2016 by Lorenzo Albrighi and Eliana Kuo, who both had backgrounds in luxury fashion. They were looking to improve the industry’s sustainability and promote circular fashion — the practice of designing and producing clothes in a way that reduces waste.

Pushing fashion into digital spaces helps generate data that is vital in efforts to move toward circular fashion. With Lablaco’s model, customers can buy both a physical fashion item and its digital “twin” designed to be collected or worn in virtual environments. The physical and digital items remain paired even after sale, so if a physical item is resold, the digital one is transferred to the new owner’s digital wallet. The item’s creator can follow its after-sales journey. Without digitizing the product, as Albrighi emphasizes, there wouldn’t be any data to analyze and understand the fashion’s impact.

The fashion industry creates roughly 92 million tons of waste annually, and it is believed that digital fashion could have a role in reducing that figure. Kuo said digital spaces could be used as a test bed for the physical world. For example, a designer could release an item of digital clothing in 10 colors in digital spaces, and use the sales data to inform which colors to use for the real-world version. This on-demand model can help reduce fashion waste. Trying on virtual clothes could also reduce the amount of clothes that are returned in the physical world. Additionally, staging fashion shows in virtual spaces reduces the need for the fashion world to travel, thereby reducing its carbon footprint.

But for this innovation to become widespread, Albrighi says motivating brands is the key. With the phygital model, they can receive royalties (版税) when an item is sold and resold throughout its lifetime — a way to “produce less and actually earn more”.

The 19th China International Cultural Industries Fair kicked off in Shenzhen in South China’s Guangdong province on June 7, 2023,    1    is expected to promote the development of the country’s cultural industry. The five-day national-level fair,    2    (feature) mainly offline events, has attracted more than 3, 500 government bodies, cultural organizations and enterprises.

A digital China exhibition area has been setup for the first time to highlight and promote national-level market players, major platforms, and the    3    (late) technological innovations in the cultural industries.

Since its founding in 2004, the cultural fair has seen a continuous    4    (expand) in its exhibition scale, visitor number and degree of internationalization. It has become     5    important platform to promote the development and opening up of the Chinese cultural industries.

Abduk Basit Khan, a Pakistani exhibitor participating     6    the expo for the second time, attended the fair. He showed Pakistani jade(玉器) products,    7    (special) designed for the Chinese market, and expressed hope for a better year    8    (compare) to the previous one. He mentioned that the Chinese market is significant for jade products, and his business    9    (operate) in China for 10 years.

Chinese experts noted that China is building    10    (it) as a leading country in culture and improving Chinese culture with the spirit of openness, while the Chinese civilization has also inspired other civilizations across the world through exchanges.

3 . The value of money is determined by the demand for it, just like the value of goods and services. You can measure the value of money by what people will exchange for it and by how much of it there is.     1    

Foreign exchange rate. The first way to measure the value of the dollar is by how much the dollar will buy in foreign currencies.     2     Foreign exchange traders on the foreign exchange market determine exchange rates. They take into account supply and demand, and then they factor in their expectations for the future. For this reason, the value of money changes throughout the trading day.

    3     The second method to measure the value of the dollar is the value of Treasury note. They can be converted easily into dollars through the secondary market for the Treasury note. When the demand for the Treasury note is high, the value of the US dollar rises.

Foreign exchange reserves.     4     That is the amount of dollars held by foreign governments. The more they hold, the lower the supply is. That makes US money more valuable. If foreign governments were to sell all their dollar and Treasury holdings, the dollar would collapse. US money would be worth a lot less.

Why does the dollar change in value? No matter how it’s measured, the value of the dollar reduced from 2000 to 2011. That was due to a relatively low federal funds rate, a high federal debt, and a slow-growing economy. Since 2011, the US dollar has risen in value despite these factors. Why? Most of the economies in the world had even slower growth. That made foreign exchange traders want to invest in the dollar as a safe haven.     5    

Thanks to the Beijing 2022 Olympic Winter Games, consumption     1     is related to the ice-snow industry has gained steam across China.

While people of northern provinces remain the main consumers of winter sports because of     2     (relative)favorable snow conditions and temperatures, data shows that such recreational activities are also increasingly sought after in southern Chinese cities.

Ice and snow scenic     3     (spot)in the cities of Xianning and Yichang, in central China’s Hubei Province, both received over 30,000 tourists. So far Shanghai and Guangzhou     4     (list)among popular destinations for activities     5     (involve)the ice and snow industry.

Due     6     the COVID-19, consumers in southern China no longer go on inter-provincial ice and snow tours as before, but     7     (they)repurchase rate of ice and snow sport activities in places nearby is     8     (high)than before, with more focus on the professionality of the equipment and venues.

“The ice-snow industry has always been popular in both northern     9     southern parts of China,” said Dai Bin, president of the China Tourism Academy. “The country’s investment in this field has shifted from scale expansion to high-quality     10     (develop), and new forms of ice and snow products can be seen in every province.”

5 . There’s more information out about the results of Finland’s much-watched basic income experiment, and it should prove particularly interesting to policymakers around the world who are considering introducing such a system.

The idea of a basic income involves giving citizens a fixed amount of money for nothing. Finland ran an experiment with two thousand unemployed people through 2017 and 2018, and its Labour Institute for Economic Research (Kela) started reporting on the results in February.

In its first report, Kela said the basic income didn't much affect the amount of work that the subjects picked up during the experiment, but it did make them feel more confident about their ability to find work.

On Thursday, Kela released further results, noting that survey respondents felt less stressed about their finances and more in control of their lives but also that the basic income appeared to change the way they felt about society.

Here’s where it gets interesting for policymakers. According to Kela, “Respondents who received a basic income had more trust in other people and in public institutions politicians, political parties, police and the courts than members of the control group.”

The idea of basic income has gained attention in recent years, largely due to fears over automation’s effect on employment. In the US, a universal basic income is one of the core proposals of 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who insisted that it would not make people lazier. The Finnish results seem to back him up on that. In India, the Congress party is promising basic income for 250 million of India’s poorest people. The UK’s Labour Party is also warming to the idea, and plans to add a basic income to its next campaign.

6 . Some documents have been making the rounds lately — where people who work various positions in different industries share how much they’re paid.

Bravo! It’s about time we blew up that old belief that salaries have to stay secret. This is not just a matter of curiosity. Having information about salaries can help narrow the gender wage gap, which has barely changed for more than a decade. Recently released date from the US Census Bureau shows that, on average, women working full time still are paid only 82 cents for every dollar paid to a man. And the gap is even wider for many women of color: Black women make 62 cents, and Latinas just 54 cents. What’s more, the pay gap even extends into her retirement. Because she earned less and therefore paid less to the social security system, she receives less in social security benefits.

Having greater access to salary information is helping to speed things up. A new research report by the American Association of University Women shows that the wage gap tends to be smaller in job sectors where pay transparency (透明) is a must. For example, among federal government workers, there’s just a 13 percent pay difference between men and women, and in state government, the gap is about 17 percent. But in private, for-profit companies, where salaries are generally kept under wraps, the gender wage gap jumps to 29 percent.

Fortunately, salary information is increasingly available on some websites. Certain companies and many human resources departments are pushing ahead with this practice. Of course, it’s going to take more than salary transparency to equalize earnings between women and men. But sharing salaries can and must be part of the solution. The more information women have about how jobs are valued — and what different people earn — the better they will understand their value in the labor market and be able to push for the pay they deserve.