2 . Office Manners

Be punctual. As a newcomer, you should arrive early, not just on the first day and don’t be the first to leave at the end of the day.    1    It shows that you respect your colleagues’ time and, in return, they will respect your time, too.

Respect other people’s privacy. Knock before you enter someone’s office and do not read any correspondence lying on somebody’s desk. If you need to discuss a private matter with a colleague, make sure nobody else can overhear you.    2    

Be neat and clean.    3     It shows respect for both your colleagues and clients and is a sign that you are professional. Keep your personal workspace clean and neat at all times, for a messy desk will make people think that you’re an unorganized person.

    4    Remember to leave the photocopier in working condition. Return the stapler (订书机) that you borrowed with at least a few staples left inside. When you use up all the paper in the printer, put more in it for the next person. If a machine jams, try to undo the jam or to tell somebody else about it.

Don’t disturb others. Always apologize if you interrupt a discussion, someone’s concentration or other activities. Be aware of how loudly you may be speaking. If people in other offices comment on your conversations, perhaps your voice is too loud.    5    

In short, office manners are about being respectful and polite in the office. It is an essential part of growing professionally and becoming a more mature person in the business world.

3 . China is one of the countries most affected by typhoons in the world. While summer is the peak typhoon season, autumn typhoons might be more dangerous.

In September, Typhoon Conson and Chanthu formed successively in the northwest Pacific Ocean. Chanthu has become a super typhoon, bringing “gale-force winds and rainstorms to regions including Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu,” reported Xinhua on Sept14.

It’s no surprise that super typhoons occur in September. From the vernal equinox (春分), the subsolar point (太阳直射点) moves from the equator to the Tropic of Cancer (北回归线), heating the tropical ocean in the northern hemisphere(半球). The sea temperature reaches the highest from August to September, according to Weather China website.

“The warming ocean, especially the warming northern South China Sea, enhances typhoons before landfall(着陆),” said Xiao Zhixiang, a researcher of the Guangxi Institute of Meteorological Sciences, in the conference of the Japan Geoscience Union in 2020.

Autumn brings cold air, and when that cold air meets a typhoon, it could make it more destructive. “This will develop into a powerful typhoon due to the greater temperature difference between the cold continent and the hot sea,” said Woo-Sik Jung, a researcher at Inje University in South Korea, at the conference. “In other words, the larger the temperature difference, the stronger the wind, the more powerful the autumn typhoon can be compared to the summer typhoon.”

Megi, the 13th typhoon of 2010, was generated in October. Before making landfall in Taiwan, it entered the South China Sea and then headed north to land in Zhangpu, Fujian province, where Megi met cold air from the north. The typhoon led to more than 1,000millimeters of rainfall in Ilan, Taiwan, resulting in many deaths, according to Weather China.

Autumn typhoons are not only powerful but also often unpredictable. Three typhoons “with the most complicated paths in China” include Wayne in 1986, Nat in 1991 and Nari in2001. Among them, Nat and Nari were formed in autumn, according to the National Meteorological Center.

4 . This year’s Olympic Games have been closed to most spectators (观众) because of COVID-19, but the eyes of the world are still on the athletes thanks to five extra cameras—the first step in a 3D tracking system that supplies spectators with instant insights into each step of a race.

The tracking system being used in Tokyo, an Intel product called 3DAT, feeds live footage (影像) into the cloud. There, an artificial intelligence program uses deep learning to analyze an athlete’s movements and identifies key performance characteristics such as top speed and slowdown. The system shares that information with viewers by displaying the action of slow-motion, highlighting key moments. The whole process, from capturing the footage to broadcasting the analysis, takes less than 30 seconds.

“It’s like having your own personal commentator point things out to you in the race,” says Jonathan Lee, director of the Olympic technology group.

To train their Olympic AI via machine learning, Lee and his team had to capture as much footage of best athletes as they could. They needed recordings of human bodies performing specific moves, but the preexisting footage shows average people in motion, Lee says. “People aren’t usually seven feet in the air,” he notes, but world-class high jumpers reach such heights regularly.

In the footage, a team at Intel record every part of the body—eyes, nose, shoulders, and more. Once those key points were identified, the model began connecting them in three dimensions (维度) until it had a simplified performance of an athlete’s form. Lee thinks the AI could help everyone from Olympians to average gymgoers correct their form and track changes in their moves that may indicate upcoming injury. “Long-term, what this technology will do is help improve an athlete’s performance by giving them more information,” two-time Olympic champion Ashton Eaton said.

For many people in the world, food waste has become a habit: buying more food than we need at markets,     1     (let) fruit and vegetables spoil at home or taking more than we can eat.

These habits put extra pressure     2     our natural resources and damage our environment. When we waste food, we waste so much labour, effort,     3     (invest) and the precious resources that go into producing it, not to mention the resources in transporting and processing it. In short, wasting food increases greenhouse gas emissions and     4     (contribute) to climate change.

It's     5     urgent issue. In fact, tons of food is lost or wasted     6     (global) every day. The part of food that is lost from harvest up to, but not including, the retail level is called food loss. The part wasted at the consumer or retail level     7     (refer) to as food waste. We make this distinction to address those root     8     (cause) of this problem, a problem that everyone from farmers and producers to customers can help end.

Reducing food loss and waste is essential in a world     9     millions of people go hungry every day. When we reduce waste, we respect that food is not a given. It's up to us     10    (change) our habits to make not wasting food a way of life!

9 . Wearing a caveman mask, Dr. John Marzluff walks across the campus at the University of Washington in Seattle. Crows (乌鸦) circle and squawk (尖叫), diving at him and away.

Beneath the mask, he smiles. Days before, he and his students, wearing caveman masks, trapped them and placed colored plastic bands on their legs. Then they released the unhappy birds. When the researchers wandered around campus without the masks, the crows they had caught and banded did not react to them. But when the same humans walked by while wearing the masks, the crows scolded loudly and dived at their “enemies”.

At first, only the banded birds reacted aggressively to the people in masks. But in later tests, more and more crows joined in, and even when the banded birds were not around. “Crows think and dream, fight and play, reason and take risks,” he says. “Their antics confuse us.”

This led him to study how crows’ brains work. He and his students wore one type of mask as they captured crows and brought them into the lab, training them to link that face with danger. Then a different kind of mask for more positive activities, such as feeding and caring. Then he worked with scientists at the university who scan animal brains to see which parts of a crow's brain do certain tasks. Surprisingly, the scientists found that when the crow saw the “danger” mask, one part of its brain became active. When the crow saw the “care and feeding” mask, a different part of its brain lit up. The team has shown that crows use the same parts of their brains for recognition that humans do — something that was not known before!

More than 10 years after the first mask experiment, campus crows still scold the “cavemen”. Crows also recognize people who are kind to them. Crows are always watching us... and they remember.