One day, a boy transferred to my class. He walked to the front of the class and introduced himself. “I am Brady, from California. I like basketball and dance.” “Dance!?” Steven yelled. “That’s for girls.” The whole class laughed. Brady’s face turned bright red. At lunch, Brady walked to an empty seat at my table. He was about to sit down when Steven put his foot on the chair. “This seat is taken,” he said. “Sit with the girls.” The others laughed loudly. Brady lowered his head and walked away.

After school, Brady sat alone on the school bus. I felt sorry for him. I thought about sitting with him, but I didn’t want to be made fun of. I remembered how everyone laughed at me when I, a boy, knitted a scarf for my favourite teacher. I didn’t like being laughed at, so I gave up knitting.

But what would have happened if I’d stood up for myself? An overwhelming sense of regret and guilt was lingering in my mind all night. So, I was determined to stand by Brady.

The next day, we had gym class. The coach announced that we would have a basketball game and Steven and I were the captains of the two sides. When I picked teammates, I looked around and noticed Brady. I had butterflies in my stomach. I didn’t want to get laughed at again. But soon I knew what I should do.

4 . Ramirez Castañeda, a Colombian biologist, spends her time in the Amazon studying how snakes eat poisonous frogs without getting ill. Although her findings come in many shapes and sizes, she and her colleagues have struggled to get their biological discoveries out to the wider scientific community. With Spanish as her mother tongue, her research had to be translated into English to be published. That wasn’t always possible because of budget or time-and it means that some of her findings were never published.

“It’s not that I’m a bad scientist,” she says. “It’s just because of the language.”

Castañeda is not alone. There is plenty of research in non-English-language papers that gets lost in translation, or is never translated. A research looked through more than 400, 000 peer-reviewed papers in 16 different languages and found 1, 234 studies providing evidence on biodiversity conservation which, because they weren’t in English, may have been overlooked. These included Japanese-language findings on the effectiveness of relocating the endangered Blakiston’s fish owl, the largest owl species.

Some experts argue that for the sake of the bigger picture, scientific knowledge should converge (转换) into one common language. Science is very globalised and becoming more so, so the use of a global language is enormous for that.

Of course, scientists can work with an English partner, or use a translator-but this ultimately strengthens the cycle of dependency on the global north, leading to inequality in international influence. The specific meanings of words can also pose a problem in translation. For example, it is difficult to find in English one single word to describe forest snakes and frogs in the work Castafieda does with indigenous (土著的) communities in the Amazon.

“So we’re losing observations for science, too, ” says Castañeda. “For me, it’s not possible to just have everything translated into English. We need multilingual (多语种的) science, and we need people that feel comfortable doing science in their own languages. It could be possible to switch to a world where, say, Chinese, English and Spanish are the three languages of science, just as English, French and German were the languages of science in the 19th century.”

A child was standing on a street-corner. He leaned with one shoulder against a high board-fence and swayed the other to and fro, while kicking carelessly at the gravel.

Sunshine beat upon the cobbles (鹅卵石), and a lazy summer wind raised yellow dust which trailed in clouds down the avenue. Clattering trucks moved with indistinctness through it. The child stood dreamily gazing.

After a time, a little dark-brown dog came trotting with an intent air down the sidewalk. A short rope was dragging from his neck. Occasionally he trod upon the end of it and stumbled.

He stopped opposite the child, and the two regarded each other. The dog hesitated for a moment, but presently he made some little advances with his tail. The child put out his hand and called him. In an apologetic manner, the dog came close, and the two had an interchange of friendly pattings and waggles. The dog became more enthusiastic with each moment of the interview, until with his gleeful caperings he threatened to overturn the child. Whereupon the child lifted his hand and struck the dog with a blow upon the head.

This thing seemed to overpower and astonish the little dark-brown dog, and wounded him to the heart. He sank down in despair at the child’s feet. When the blow was repeated, together with an admonition (警告) in childish sentences, he turned over upon his back, and held his paws in a peculiar (奇怪的) manner. At the same time, with his ears and his eyes, he offered a small prayer to the child.

He looked so comical on his back, and holding his paws peculiarly, that the child was greatly amused and gave him little taps repeatedly, to keep him so. But the little dark-brown dog took this chastisement (惩罚) in the most serious way, and no doubt considered that he had committed some grave crime, for he wriggled contritely and showed his repentance in every way that was in his power. He pleaded with the child and petitioned him, and offered more prayers.

At last the child grew weary of this amusement and turned toward home. The dog was praying at the time. He lay on his back and turned his eyes upon the retreating form.

Presently he struggled to his feet and started after the child. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The child beat his pursuer with a small stick he had found. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

6 . A shortage of semiconductors (半导体) has helped firms such as Nvidia, whose chips (芯片) power everything from video gaming to machine learning and data centres. But boom time for sellers means misery for buyers. Carmakers, whose products have become computers on wheels, are among the victims. Analysts say the industry might build around 5 million fewer cars this year, all for want of the chips. Apple and Microsoft have also warned that they will be affected.

The shortage is the result of a sudden rise in demand. Chipmaking has been enjoying strong growth for decades as computers have stepped into every corner of society. But there was a strong upward trend during the pandemic. Locked-down consumers shopped online, had meetings remotely, and killed time with video-streaming and videogaming.

The crisis has had three consequences, two encouraging and one less so.

The first is an investment boom. Big producers such as Intel, Samsung and TSMC are planning to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on extra capacity (产能) over the next few years. As in many markets, high prices are the best cure for high prices.

The second is that the chip industry’s customers are adapting. too. When demand fell early in the pandemic, carmakers cut their orders with chipmakers. Following Tesla, Volkswagen has announced plans to develop driver-assistance chips in-house.

Unwelcome effect has been a sudden rise of techno-nationalism. America is planning to hand out billions of dollars to attract chipmakers back from East Asia. Europe wants to double its share of global production, to 20%，by 2030. Even Britain has declared the fate of a small chip factory in Wales to be a matter of national security.

Chips have come to occupy what used to be called the “commanding heights” of an economy, in the way that car factories did in the 20th century. But as last century’s governments discovered, subsidies (补贴) lend 10 oversupply. Personally, the chip shortage is mostly a self-solving problem. Governments should resist the temptation to scc themselves as saviours (救星).