Xiao long bao (soup dumplings), those amazing constructions of delicate dumpling wrappers, encasing hot,     1     (taste) soup and sweet, fresh meat, are far and away my favorite Chinese street food. The dumplings arrive steaming and dangerously hot. To eat one, you have to decide whether     2     (bite) a small hole in it first, releasing the stream and risking a spill (溢出),     3     to put the whole dumpling in your mouth, letting the hot soup explode on your tongue. Shanghai may be the     4     (recognize) home of the soup dumplings but food historians will actually point you to the neighboring canal town of Nanxiang as Xiao long Bao’s birthplace. There you will find them prepared differently — more dumpling and less soup, and the wrappers are pressed     5     hand rather than rolled. Nanxiang aside, the best Xiao long bao have a fine skin, allowing them     6     (lift) out of the steamer basket without tearing or spilling any of     7     (they) contents. The meat should be fresh with     8     touch of sweetness and the soup hot, clear and delicious.

No matter where I buy them, one steamer is     9     (rare) enough, yet two seems greedy, so I am always left     10     (want) more next time.

2 . Bike Rental & Guided Tours

Welcome to Amsterdam, welcome to MacBike. You see much more from the seat of a bike! Cycling is the most economical, sustainable and fun way to explore the city, with its beautiful canals, parks, squares and countless lights. You can also bike along lovely landscapes outside of Amsterdam.

Why MacBike

MacBike has been around for almost 30 years and is the biggest bicycle rental company in Amsterdam. With over 2,500 bikes stored in our five rental shops at strategic locations, we make sure there is always a bike available for you. We offer the newest bicycles in a wide variety, including basic bikes with foot brake (刹车), bikes with hand brake and gears (排挡), bikes with child seats, and children’s bikes.

Prices

Guided City Tours

The 2.5-hour tour covers the Gooyer Windmill, the Skinny Bridge, the Rijksmuseum, Heineken Brewery and much more. The tour departs from Dam Square every hour on the hour, starting at 1:00 pm every day. You can buy your ticket in a MacBike shop or book online.

3 . When John Todd was a child, he loved to explore the woods around his house, observing how nature solved problems. A dirty stream, for example, often became clear after flowing through plants and along rocks where tiny creatures lived. When he got older, John started to wonder if this process could be used to clean up the messes people were making.

After studying agriculture, medicine, and fisheries in college, John went back to observing nature and asking questions. Why can certain plants trap harmful bacteria (细菌)? Which kinds of fish can eat cancer-causing chemicals? With the right combination of animals and plants, he figured, maybe he could clean up waste the way nature did. He decided to build what he would later call an eco-machine.

The task John set for himself was to remove harmful substances from some sludge (污泥). First, he constructed a series of clear fiberglass tanks connected to each other. Then he went around to local ponds and streams and brought back some plants and animals. He placed them in the tanks and waited. Little by little, these different kinds of life got used to one another and formed their own ecosystem. After a few weeks, John added the sludge.

He was amazed at the results. The plants and animals in the eco-machine took the sludge as food and began to eat it! Within weeks, it had all been digested, and all that was left was pure water.

Over the years, John has taken on many big jobs. He developed a greenhouse — like facility that treated sewage (污水) from 1,600 homes in South Burlington. He also designed an eco-machine to clean canal water in Fuzhou, a city in southeast China.

“Ecological design” is the name John gives to what he does. “Life on Earth is kind of a box of spare parts for the inventor,” he says. “You put organisms in new relationships and observe what’s happening. Then you let these new systems develop their own ways to self-repair.”

5 . According to the Solar Energy Industry Association, the number of solar panels installed(安装)has grown rapidly in the past decade, and it has to grow even faster to meet climate goals. But all of that growth will take up a lot of space, and though more and more people accept the concept of solar energy, few like large solar panels to be installed near them.

Solar developers want to put up panels as quickly and cheaply as possible, so they haven’t given much thought to what they put under them. Often, they’ll end up filling the area with small stones and using chemicals to control weeds. The result is that many communities, especially in farming regions, see solar farms as destroyers of the soil.

“Solar projects need to be good neighbors,” says Jordan Macknick, the head of the Innovative Site Preparation and Impact Reductions on the Environment(InSPIRE)project. “They need to be protectors of the land and contribute to the agricultural economy.” InSPIRE is investigating practical approaches to “low-impact” solar development, which focuses on establishing and operating solar farms in a way that is kinder to the land. One of the easiest low-impact solar strategies is providing habitat for pollinators(传粉昆虫).

Habitat loss, pesticide use, and climate change have caused dramatic declines in pollinator populations over the past couple of decades, which has damaged the U.S. agricultural economy. Over 28 states have passed laws related to pollinator habitat protection and pesticide use. Conservation organizations put out pollinator-friendliness guidelines for home gardens, businesses, schools, cities—and now there are guidelines for solar farms.

Over the past few years, many solar farm developers have transformed the space under their solar panels into a shelter for various kinds of pollinators, resulting in soil improvement and carbon reduction. “These pollinator-friendly solar farms can have a valuable impact on everything that’s going on in the landscape,” says Macknick.

During China’s dynastic period, emperors planned the city of Beijing     1     arranged the residential areas according to social classes. The term “hutong”,     2     (original)meaning “water well” in Mongolian, appeared first during the Yuan Dynasty.

In the Ming Dynasty, the center was the Forbidden City,     3     (surround)in concentric(同心的)circles by the Inner City and Outer City. Citizens of higher social classes     4     (permit)to live closer to the center of the circles. The large siheyuan of these high-ranking officials and wealthy businessmen often     5     (feature)beautifully carved and painted roof beams and pillars(柱子). The hutongs they formed were orderly, lined by     6     (space)homes and walled gardens. Farther from the center lived the commoners and laborers. Their siheyuan were far smaller in scale and     7     (simple)in design and decoration, and the hutongs were narrower.

Hutongs represent an important cultural element of the city of Beijing. Thanks to Beijing’s long history     8     capital of China, almost every hutong has its stories, and some are even associated with historic     9     (event). In contrast to the court life and upper-class culture represented by the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and the Temple of Heaven, the hutongs reflect     10     culture of grassroots Beijingers.

8 . A machine can now not only beat you at chess, it can also outperform you in debate. Last week, in a public debate in San Francisco, a software program called Project Debater beat its human opponents, including Noa Ovadia, Israel’s former national debating champion.

Brilliant though it is, Project Debater has some weaknesses. It takes sentences from its library of documents and prebuilt arguments and strings them together. This can lead to the kinds of errors no human would make. Such wrinkles will no doubt be ironed out, yet they also point to a fundamental problem. As Kristian Hammond, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, put it: “There’s never a stage at which the system knows what it’s talking about.”

What Hammond is referring to is the question of meaning, and meaning is central to what distinguishes the least intelligent of humans from the most intelligent of machines. A computer works with symbols. Its program specifies a set of rules to transform one string of symbols into another. But it does not specify what those symbols mean. Indeed, to a computer, meaning is irrelevant. Humans, in thinking, talking, reading and writing, also work with symbols. But for humans, meaning is everything. When we communicate, we communicate meaning. What matters is not just the outside of a string of symbols, but the inside too, not just how they are arranged but what they mean.

Meaning emerges through a process of social interaction, not of computation, interaction that shapes the content of the symbols in our heads. The rules that assign meaning lie not just inside our heads, but also outside, in society, in social memory, social conventions and social relations. It is this that distinguishes humans from machines. And that’s why, however astonishing Project Debater may seem, the tradition that began with Socrates and Confucius will not end with artificial intelligence.