2 . People have mainly used cars or taxis to travel from one place to another. These forms of land transportation have their constraints. Time has been wasted simply because of the traffic on the road. Well, this issue may be solved soon because a company has made a taxi that can actually fly and avoid the crowded streets.

XPeng, a Chinese carmaker, has created this wonderful innovation and conducted the first global public flight of its electric flying car, the XPeng X2, in Dubai. XPeng Motors’ X2 is a two-seater vehicle featuring a teardrop-shaped design with a complete carbon fiber structure to reduce weight. It can travel as high as 1,000 meters and at a speed of 81 miles per hour. At this point, the built-in battery can store electricity for a 35 -minute flight.

The XPeng X2 used during the demo flight (试飞) is a fifth-generation model, but the company is currently working on the sixth generation that will bring significant upgrades.The future model will be equipped with both manned and unmanned flight driving modes, and will be able to drive in the air and on roads — the fifth-generation vehicle is only capable of flying, not driving.

This first ever public flight came with full support of Dubai’s government. They have been deeply involved in the process. An official called Hashemi said, “The first global public flight of the X2 flying car will change the game of future mobility. The flying car is the combination of ambition, innovation and future-oriented vision that has always inspired Dubai and its leadership. Today, we witnessed a historic moment that will define the next 50 years.”

3 . On average, cars sit, doing nothing, 96 percent of the time. That makes them ideal candidates for the sharing economy. The potential to reduce traffic jams is enormous. A handful of car-sharing systems are already having a major impact on the total number of vehicles in our cities. Scholars have estimated that every shared vehicle removes nine to 13 privately owned cars from the streets.

The benefits will grow greatly as autonomous vehicles, that is, self-driving cars, currently available in experimental forms, gain a notable portion of the market. “Your” car could give you a lift to work in the morning and then, rather than sitting in a parking lot, give a lift to someone else in your family—or to anyone else in your neighborhood or social media community.

As a result, a single vehicle could go from one to 24 hours of use a day. A recent paper by our colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology report s that, under such conditions, the mobility demand of a city like Singapore could be met with only 30 percent of its existing vehicles. In addition to vehicle sharing, autonomy could open up a new wave of ride sharing. Already applications such as Via, uberPOOL and Lyft Line allow different people to share the same ride, cutting operating costs and individual fares. Autonomy could boost ride sharing even more because all trips could be managed online. In cities, the potential for ride sharing is significant, based on analyses by our Sense able City Lab at M. IT.

New York City, for example, is obviously shareable. Our lab’s HubCab project gathered data from 170 million taxi trips involving 13,500 taxis in the city—specifically, the GPS coordinates (协调) for all pickup and drop-off points and corresponding times between the two. We then developed a mathematical model to determine the potential effect of ride sharing applied to those journeys. The project introduced the concept quantitative results revealed how taxi sharing could reduce the number of cars by 40 percent with only rainimal delays for passengers.

Combine car sharing and ride sharing, and a city might get by with just 20 percent the number of cars now in use, with its residents traveling on-demand. Of course, such reductions are theoretical. In real life, they would depend on how willing people are to share rides and adopt self-driving technology. But any drop in the number of vehicles could lower the costs and energy associated with building and maintaining our mobility infrastructure (基础建设). Fewer cars might also mean shorter travel times, fewer traffic jams and a smaller environmental impact.

4 . If you frequent any kind of public transportation, then you’re well aware of certain types of passengers and passenger habits that are annoying. But it’s not just other passengers that get angry, there are certain things that drive the train attendant crazy.     1    . Maybe next time you’ll be able to spot the people doing some of these on the train.

We’ve all been there in that moment when someone boards a train trying to take several huge items with them to wherever they’re trying to go. They wind up taking up way too much space and blocking seats.    2    . Train attendants are the ones who bear the brunt of it (首当其冲) because they have to figure out how to deal with this person’s stuff without upsetting all the other passengers. It adds unnecessary conflict and makes the attendant’s job much harder.

    3    . It’s a totally different thing to be eating a big meal consisting of last night’s dinner leftovers. Not only is it typically unsettling for other passengers who then have to smell leftover chicken and whatever else you’re eating, but it’s bound to make a mess that attendants will then have to clean up after they depart the train.

For some reason, people have a bad habit of talking very loudly to one another to a point where you can hear them from opposite sides of the train cart (车厢). This goes for playing music as well. Some people like to play music through their phone. This really bothers fellow passengers on the train.     5    ? The train attendant.

High-speed rail     1       (develop) rapidly in China since the mid-2000s. China's high-speed rail accounts     2     two-thirds of the world's total high-speed railway networks. China's rail     3       (ambitious) just keep growing. The latest addition to the country's railway network is a high-speed train line, connecting the cities of Zhangzhou, Xiamen and Fuzhou, all three of     4     are in Fujian Province.

The first train on this line started operating on September 28, 2023,     5     (depart) from Fuzhou, the province's capital. Travel time between Fuzhou and Xiamen,     6     popular tourist destination, will be under an hour. The new railway currently has 84 bridges, 29 tunnels,     7     a section of the track that goes over the sea, making it the     8       (country) first over-water bullet train. Official state news agency Xinhua notes that ground transportation in Fujian Province has been     9     (challenge) due to it mountainous terrain (地形) .     10     (make) the operation of this new line is a significant milestone for the province. China's continuous investments in its railway network will contribute to the country's overall economic growth and development.