The audience and viewership for this year’s Spring Festival TV gala, which was aired on Feb 9, Lunar New Year’s Eve or Chinese Lunar New Year, both reached record     1    (high), according to ratings statistics.

    2    (support) by ultra-high-definition production, the gala was telecast on TV screens, public large screens, and mobile devices. A total of 250 million people watched the live streaming of the show via     3    (they) mobile phones with the total views reaching 420 million, up by 37.97 percent and 57.58 percent,     4     (respective), compared with 2023. The China Global Television Network (CGTN) worked with over 2,100 media organizations in about 200 countries and regions to live broadcast or report the show in 68 languages,     5    (result) in over 1.5 billion instances of viewing,    6     increase of 12.69 percent year on year.

This year, the gala, in addition     7    Beijing, had four branch venues. Audience enjoyed a diversity of local cultural elements from those places, such as folk     8     (music) instruments and folk dances.

Since its broadcast in 1983, the annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala     9     (become) an essential part of celebrations in the country to greet the Chinese New Year. As a major entertainment during Lunar New Year’s Eve, the gala marks the joyous moment     10     families gather together to celebrate.

5 . Dutch researchers have discovered that birds living in cities are using metal spikes (尖刺) to build their nests. People put these spikes on buildings in order to keep birds off their balconies, benches, and chimneys, but birds seem to be stealing them and using them to keep people away from their eggs.

The research began when, in the courtyard of a hospital in Antwerp, Belgium, biologist AukeFlorian Hiemstra found a large nest that had been built by a magpie (喜鹊). The nest was made from about 1,500 metal spikes. They were pointing outward to create a protective system around the nest.

“I just stared at it, this strange, beautiful, weird nest,” Hiemstra told BBC News. When he investigated further, he found that magpies had moved away nearly 165 feet of metal spikes that had been glued to the hospital’s roof.

After Hiemstra made this discovery, his team heard about a similar nest created by crows in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and another magpie nest in Glasgow, Scotland. The crows had positioned the spikes in a different way, perhaps using the metal to support the nest’s structure.

In their report, the researchers mention many kinds of birds moving spikes off buildings, but they chose to focus their study on corvids(birds from the crow family). The researchers pointed out that there have been previous studies on how corvids use everything from telephone wires to clothes hangers to build their nests. They said the use of anti-bird spikes “hints at a functional use”—meaning the birds seem to know exactly what they’re doing.

Magpies have often been seen nesting in thorny (多刺的) places, where the thorns can prevent people from attacking the small eggs and chicks inside the nest. Thorny hedges aren’t common in cities, however, so the theory is that magpies use the human-made version instead. Hiemstra calls this the birds’ “revenge”. “We’re trying to get rid of birds, but the birds are collecting our metal spikes and actually making more birds in these nests,” he said.

In this day and age, we need a password for everything — to access our computer, our phone, our bank account, all of our favorite websites and email... the list goes on. Sometimes, it can be troublesome just to remember them all or keep track of them securely.

Luckily, there’s LastPass! As the name implies, LastPass is the last password manager app you will ever need. Through the app, all you need is one password to have secure access to all of your passwords and private information. By using the LastPass Authenticator, you can use biometrics (生物识别技术) to log on with your face or fingerprint. It’s that easy!

Calm is packed with dozens of features and hundreds of recordings designed to improve your mindfulness, reduce stress and improve sleep. The free version includes select features such as daily meditations (冥想), breathing exercises, a mood tracker, as well as demo sleep stories, relaxation music tracks and guided meditations. Through a paid subscription, the app tailors itself to your needs.

When browsing the web, we often come across interesting articles that we’d love to read through more, but just don’t have the time right there and then. But later when we have free time, we completely forget about the articles we wanted to read!

This is where Pocket can help. The main appeal of Pocket is to add a handy save function to your favorite browser ready to click whenever you want to save something for later.

With digital payment methods, it is easy to get overwhelmed (不堪重负的) when one keeps financial records due to how fast and convenient it is to make purchases on a variety of platforms.

Thankfully, Mint is here to help! This free app can automatically track and organize all of the purchases you make, whether it is through digital payment, cash, credit or debit cards. You can also link and keep track of your debit and savings accounts, investments and properties, and even your digital subscriptions so you’ll know if there’s been a cost increase.

8 . The rate of childhood obesity in the U. S. has tripled over the past 50 years. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) made waves this year by recommending that doctors put obese kids as young as two years old on intensive, family-oriented lifestyle and behavior plans. It also suggested prescribing weight-loss drugs to children l2 and older and surgery to teens 13 and older. This advice reflects the organization’s adoption of a more active position on childhood obesity.

Yet the lifestyle programs the AAP recommends are expensive, inaccessible to most children and hard to maintain. Few weight-loss drugs have been approved for children. And surgery has potential risks and few long-term safety data. Furthermore, it’s not clear whether interventions in youngsters help to improve health or merely add to the psychological burden overweight kids face from the society.

Rather than paying close attention to numbers on a scale, the U. S. and countries with similar trends should focus on an underlying truth: we need to invest in more and safer places for children to play where they can move and run around, climb and jump, ride and skate.

Why is it so hard to get kids moving? Experts blame the problem on the privatization of sports — as public investment in school-based athletics dwindles, expensive private leagues have grown, leaving many kids out. In addition to fewer opportunities at school, researchers cite increased screen time and a lack of safe places for them to play outside the home. New York City, for example, had 2,067 public playgrounds as of 2019 — a very small amount for its large population. In Los Angeles in 2015, only 33 percent of youths lived within walking distance of a park.

Kids everywhere need more places to play. Public funding to build and keep up these areas is crucial, but other options such as shared-use agreements can make unused spaces available to the public. These opportunities aren’t primarily about changing children’s waistlines — they’re how we keep childhood healthy and fun.

9 . Discover the Huge Health Benefits of Strength Training

One of the best ways to stay fit and healthy as you age is to do strength and power training exercises. It is known that when you are in your thirties, you will begin to lose muscle mass. This loss actually contributes to achy joints, the increased risk of injury, and the “middle-age spread” we all fear. What’s more, the older you get, the faster muscle mass loses. It means that eventually, simple tasks like getting out of a chair and climbing stairs can become more difficult.

Strength training can help you build muscles, make you strong, increase your staying power and make everyday activities easier. By combining strength and power training exercises, you’ll not only get stronger, but also improve your reaction speed. As you grow older, that’s critical because it can help prevent falls. Here is a book, Strength and Power Training for All Ages, for your reference.

·The key muscles to work for an injury-free body

·How to tell how much weight is suitable for you

·How to strengthen the bones most likely to break

·How to take pressure off your knees when walking or running

·Why you’ll want to apply heat to sore joints before you exercise

·Build bones

·Fight diseases

·Improve balance

·Strengthen muscles &Increase muscle power

Get a copy, start training, and then you’ll discover a whole new self.

Actress Jia Ling topped the social media topics on the second consecutive day of the Chinese Lunar New Year as her great weight     1     (lose) of 50 kilograms during the shooting of her movie Yolo triggered heated discussions over healthy lifestyle and allowed some viewers     2     (draw) aspirations from her arduous weight-loss journey.

The     3     (high) anticipated comedy Yolo hit theaters across China on Feb 10, the first day of the Lunar New Year. It is now leading the domestic movie box office. According to Douban, “YOLO”     4     (adapt) from the 2014 Japanese movie “100 Yen Love”. This movie is comedian-actress-director Jia Ling’s sophomore feature, three years after her 2021 directorial debut box-office blockbuster “Hi, Mom” for which she holds the record as the world’s highest grossing female movie director.

Topics related     5     Jia’s stunning weight loss were dominating Weibo such as “full record of Jia’s losing weight journey” and “Jia Ling totally shocked me,” as netizens discuss     6     it is time to develop a more balanced habit starting from the Spring Festival.

“Her achievement is quite     7     (inspire) and     8     deserves a movie ticket,” moviegoer Li Qiaoya,     9       regularly visits the gym to lose weight, told the Global Times on Sunday. “I feel     10     (guilt) for eating too much during the Spring Festival already.”