1 . Want to explore new cultures, meet new people and do something worthwhile at the same time? You can do all the three with Global Development Association(GDA). Whatever stage of life you’re at, wherever you go and whatever project you do in GDA, you’ll create positive changes in a poor and remote community(社区).

We work with volunteers of all ages and backgrounds. Most of our volunteers are aged 17-24. Now we need volunteer managers aged 25-75. They are extremely important in the safe and effective running of our programmes. We have such roles as project managers, mountain leaders, and communication officers.

Depending on which role you choose, you could help to increase a community’s access to safe drinking water, or help to protect valuable local cultures. You might also design an adventure challenge to train young volunteers.

Not only will you help our young volunteers to develop personally, you’ll also learn new skills and increase your cultural awareness. You may have chances to meet new people who’ll become your lifelong friends.

This summer we have both 4-week and 7-week programmes:

GDA ensures that volunteers work with community members and local project partners where our help is needed. All our projects aim to promote the development of poor and remote communities.

There is no other chance like a GDA programme. Join us as a volunteer manager to develop your own skills while bringing benefits to the communities.

Find out more about joining a GDA programme:

Website:www.glodeve.org

Email:humanresources@glodeve.org

6 . Plastic-Eating Worms

Humans produce more than 300 million tons of plastic every year. Almost half of that winds up in landfills(垃圾填埋场), and up to 12 million tons pollute the oceans. So far there is no effective way to get rid of it, but a new study suggests an answer may lie in the stomachs of some hungry worms.

Researchers in Spain and England recently found that the worms of the greater wax moth can break down polyethylene, which accounts for 40% of plastics. The team left 100 wax worms on a commercial polyethylene shopping bag for 12 hours, and the worms consumed and broke down about 92 milligrams, or almost 3% of it. To confirm that the worms’ chewing alone was not responsible for the polyethylene breakdown, the researchers made some worms into paste(糊状物) and applied it to plastic films. 14 hours later the films had lost 13% of their mass — apparently broken down by enzymes (酶) from the worms’ stomachs. Their findings were published in Current Biology in 2017.

Federica Bertocchini, co-author of the study, says the worms’ ability to break down their everyday food — beeswax — also allows them to break down plastic. ＂Wax is a complex mixture, but the basic bond in polyethylene, the carbon-carbon bond, is there as well, ＂she explains, ＂The wax worm evolved a method or system to break this bond. ＂

Jennifer DeBruyn, a microbiologist at the University of Tennessee, who was not involved in the study, says it is not surprising that such worms can break down polyethylene. But compared with previous studies, she finds the speed of breaking down in this one exciting. The next step, DeBruyn says, will be to identify the cause of the breakdown. Is it an enzyme produced by the worm itself or by its gut microbes(肠道微生物)?

Bertocchini agrees and hopes her team’s findings might one day help employ the enzyme to break down plastics in landfills. But she expects using the chemical in some kind of industrial process — not simply ＂millions of worms thrown on top of the plastic.＂

8 . Parents, teachers and caregivers have long suspected the magic of storytelling to calm kids. Researchers have now quantified the biological and emotional benefits of a well-told tale.

“We know that narrative has the power to transport us to another world,” says Guilherme Brockington from Brazil’s Federal University. “Earlier research suggested that stories help children process and regulate their emotions — but this was mostly conducted in a laboratory, with subjects answering questions while lying inside functional MRI machines. There are few studies on biological and psychological effects of storytelling in a more commonplace hospital setting.”

So investigators working in several Brazilian hospitals split a total of 81 patients aged 4 to 11 into two groups, matching them with storytellers who had a decade of hospital experience. In one group, the storyteller led each child in playing a riddle game. In the other, youngsters chose books and listened as the storyteller read them aloud. Before and after these sessions, the researchers took spit samples from each child, then asked them to report their pain levels and conducted a free-association word quiz.

Children in both groups benefited measurably from the interactions; they showed lower levels of cortisol — the stress-related hormone and higher levels of oxytocin, which is often described as a feel-good hormone. Yet kids in the storytelling group benefited significantly more: their cortisol levels were a quarter of those in the riddle group, and their oxytocin levels were nearly twice as high. Those who heard stories also reported pain levels dropping almost twice as much as those in the riddle group, and they used more positive words to describe their hospital stay.

The study demonstrates that playing games or simply interacting with someone can relax kids and improve their outlook but that hearing stories has an especially dramatic effect. The researchers “really tried to control the social interaction component of the storyteller, which I think was the key,” says Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University who was not involved in the new research.

Next, the investigators plan to study how long these effects last, along with storytelling’s potential benefits to kids with particular illnesses such as cancer. For now Brockington says the results indicate storytelling is a low-cost and extremely efficient way to help improve health outcomes in a variety of settings. Mar agrees. “It’s very promising and scalable,” he says, “and possibly generalizable.”

9 . Inconvenient Truths

If doctors lie, it is surely inexcusable. One of the basic_________ the public have of doctors is honesty. But what would you think if I told you that research has shown that 70 per cent of doctors   _________ to lying to their patients? If I am honest, I have told lies to my patients.

Mrs Walton was in her eighties and _________ to see her husband. She would try to get up to find him, despite being at risk of falling. “He’s on his way, don’t worry,” the nurses would say this to calm her down. I said the same thing to her. But it was a lie. He died two years ago. The truth, if I can use that word, is that it is a _________ to lie sometimes.

Mrs Walton is one of the dementia (痴呆) sufferers, who lose their short-term memory and the memory of_________ events, but hold memories from the distant past. Sufferers are trapped forever in a confusing past that many realize bears little   _________ to the present, but are at a loss to explain. Those with dementia often feel upset, scared and confused that they are in a strange place, _________ by strange people, even when they are in their own homes with their family, because they have gone back to decades ago.

They look at their adult children   _________ and wonder who they could be because they think their children are still little kids. I have had countless families break down in tears, not knowing how to react as their loved one moves further away from them back into their distant past and they are   _________ in the present. And how, as the doctor or nurse caring for these patients, does one manage the anger and outbursts of distress that comes with having no   __________ of your life for the past ten or 20 years? The lies that doctors, nurses and families tell these patients are not big, elaborate lies — they are   __________ comforts intended to calm and allow the subject to be swiftly changed.

__________ with them about this false reality is not heartless or unprofessional — it is actually kind. That’s not to say that lying to patients with dementia__________ is right or defensible. But what kind-hearted person would put another human being through the unimaginable pain of learning, ________ again and again, that they have lost their beloved ones. It would be an unthinkable cruelness.

Sometimes honesty is __________ not the best policy.