1 . Jane, a 40-year-old mental health professional from Ireland, never worried too much about how she looked. However, when her job went fully virtual, she found herself anxious about Microsoft Teams meetings. Her face looked rounder, her nose looked bigger, and her top lip looked thinner than she had ever noticed it while looking in the mirror.

As the COVID-19 forced a lot of people into video meetings throughout 2020, researchers noticed a phenomenon they called “Zoom dysmorphia”. After months of remote meetings and seeing their own faces on screen, more and more people became focused on their weaknesses on their faces. Shadi Kourosh, a Masachusetts doctor studying skin diseases, coined the name in the summer of 2020, when she noticed more and more people asking about how to improve facial appearance. It is clear that the age of video meetings has opened up a Pandora’s box of physical and mental insecurities (不安全).

Psychological studies have long connected time spent in front of the mirror with one’s increasing feelings of insecurity. However, Kourosh says that looking at yourself on a screen is not like looking into a real mirror. Front-facing cameras, with their close focus, can distort (使…失真/变形) people’s appearance, making eyes look smaller and noses seem bigger.

Doctors are familiar with how the phenomenon of “Zoom dysmorphia” has become increasingly worsened in recent years by beautified photos of film stars or by social media filters (滤镜). Most people are smart enough to know a social media filter is not real life. But as for Zoom dysmorphia, people simply were not aware that video calls could cause distortion. These types of insecurities also affect a much bigger part of society. Almost everybody who worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic used video meeting. The impact can be significant and lasting.

Jane has mixed feelings. Her job will be online for the coming future. Feeling less attractive on screen than in real life, she is considering cosmetic surgery (整容外科) to improve her confidence. “But it feels stupid as a 40-year-old woman to think too much about my appearance like a teenager. There are bigger problems in the world.”

From November 5th to 10th, 2021, the fourth China International Import Expo (CIIE)       1     (hold) in Shanghai with a large number of new products, technologies, and services featured at the expo. The       2    (successful) organized event not only showed fancy products but also avant-garde (前卫的) consumption     3    (concept) as well as innovative ideas. The     4    (significant) of CIIE continues to grow as it becomes an economic hotspot for countries and enterprises.

The display area for consumer goods occupied 90,000 square meters of exhibition space,       5     largest among all areas. The Food and Agricultural Products exhibition area accommodated ( 容 纳 ) the most exhibitors,     6    (attract) many enterprises from different countries.

The Online Country Exhibition enabled 58 countries and 3 international organizations       7                (show) their development achievements. Leaders of participating countries and organizations expressed high praise for the CIIE’s furtherance of     8    (globe) openness and cooperation.

Having experienced the benefits of the fourth CIIE, enterprises described it as an event       9     allows them to tap into China’s massive consumer population and a lot of opportunities. Registration for the fifth CIIE has already started, and it has seen a considerable increase     10     the sign-up rate compared to last year.

4 . With few trees left to slow the wind in southern Madagascar, sand blows continuously. It settles across fields, villages, roads and in the eyes of hungry children waiting for food aid.

Madagascar, the fourth-largest island on Earth, contains one of the planet’s most diverse ecosystems. It has thousands of species of colorful plants and wild animals. But it is not all a natural, green paradise, especially in the south, where the environmental reality has changed.

Four years of extremely dry weather and forest clearing to make farmland have turned the once fertile area into a dusty red emptiness. “There’s nothing to harvest. That’s why we’re starving,” said Tarira, the mother of seven waiting at the World Food Program(WFP)center near Anjeky Beanatara to get Plumpy, a dense peanut-based food provided to starving children. Like many others in the area, Tarira and her family have sometimes eaten a local plant called raketa. “The plant grows in the wild but provides few valuable nutrients,” she said, adding that eating it could cause stomach pain. The UN agency said more than a million people in southern Madagascar currently needed help from the WFP and the food crisis here grew over several years. At the height of it, the WFP warned the island was at risk of seeing “the world’s first climate change famine.”

Theodore Mbainaissem who runs WFP operations in southern Madagascar says there are no usual weather patterns any longer and villagers can no longer predict the best time to plant or harvest. However, he adds the WFP has made joint efforts with other aid organizations to resolve the food crisis — children with severe malnutrition have dropped from about 30 percent a few months before to about 5 percent now. “When you look in the villages, you see children running left and right. That wasn’t the case before,” he says.

7 . 17-year-old Arul Mathur has developed a new fire extinguisher（灭火器）to help put out wildfires near houses. The fire extinguisher is called the Fire Activated Canister Extinguisher（FACE）.

Over the past three years, there have been almost 7,500,000 acres of wildfires in California alone, which demolish nearly 50,000 buildings. This has caused many local people to become homeless. Arul grew up in New Jersey where wildfires were hardly heard of. After moving to California in 2012, he began to hear about wildfires. In the summer of 2019, a wildfire threatened his family to leave their home. Upon questioning himself on the reason behind the spread of wildfires, Arul realized the fact. By the time firefighters get the notice of a wildfire, the wildfire has already grown out of control.

FACE can help stop wildfires before they burn houses. It puts out wildfires by itself after sensing extreme heat without humans. It can stand the extreme condition which is a high-temperature environment. Moreover, it has a bracket（支架）that allows it to be placed in a variety of high-risk areas. Unlike traditional fire extinguishers, FACE has a mixture of water and an environmentally-friendly fire retardant（阻燃剂）within it.

Arul said, "I think that by owning FACE, people no longer have to rely on the fire department to save their houses." Firefighters could focus on controlling the fire, while people could protect their homes. He is now running a pilot test with some of his friends from the media platform Kickstarter. He said, "In general, FACE has been very well-received through the media platform."

Arul has great interest in fire safety and prevention and actively searches for ways to spread awareness. He loves to explore advances in technology and he is happy to give communities some advice on fire prevention. Arul is now planning to develop larger units for specific use in forest applications. He said, "Humans have seen great progress in technology. Now, we need to use present technology to develop more environmentally-friendly solutions for fire prevention.”

8 . Lonely? You’re hardly alone. That’s the finding of a new study. And that appears throughout industrial nations across the globe. The study linked rising loneliness to a greater use of smartphones and the internet over the same years.

Jean Twenge, a psychologist, took part in the study. Her team has found that since 2012, US teens have been spending less time together face-to-face.

“Smartphones can help keep us connected with friends,” says Twenge. “But they can also make people feel excluded (隔离).” Girls, especially, may feel this way. One reason may be that they like to post more photos and selfies (自拍) than boys. Studies have shown that if those images don’t get a lot of “likes”, it can affect a teen’s mental health.

And there’s “phubbing” a mixture of “phone” and “snubbing (冷落)”. It’s that moment in which a friend or family member takes out a phone and keeps looking at it, paying no attention to everybody else, including you. Phubbing is one way technology can affect you, even when you’re not the one using it.

The new study pulled its data from a survey. Some 1 million 15- and 16-year-old students from 37 countries took this survey in 2000, 2003, 2012, 2015 and 2018. Its questions mostly dealt with education. But they also included six statements about loneliness, such as “I feel awkward and out of place in my school”. Students could strongly disagree, disagree, agree or strongly agree with each statement.

If technology causes loneliness, should we stop using it? “No, not at all,” argues Twenge. “Everybody of all ages is trying to figure out how we can best use these technologies and stay mentally healthy.” Her advice is to “use your smartphone for what it’s good for. Then put it away.” That includes putting it away overnight—ideally in another room.

9 . With smart phones and e-readers becoming more common, some worry that the days of paper books are numbered. But as a recent survey showed, traditional books are still popular among readers.

Industry research company Nielsen found that 7 percent more paper books were sold in the UK in 2020 compared to the previous year, while sales of their digital rivals declined(下降)by 4 percent. It was the sixth year in a row that e-book sales had fallen.

Nielsen’s survey, surprisingly, found that it is young people who preferred physical books to e-reader versions.

In another study conducted in 2016 by the youth research agency Voxburner in the UK, more than 60 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds said they preferred print books to e-books. The most popular reason given was: “I like to hold the product.”

Steve Bohme, research director at Nielsen Book Research UK, explained that young people were using books as a break from their daily connections to electronic devices(设备)and social media. “We are seeing that books are a respite(缓解), particularly for young people who are so busy digitally,” he said.

And it is not just young people in the UK who prefer print books. The story is the same in other countries.

According to a study, 92 percent of college students prefer paper books to e-books, of more than 420 university students from the United States, Slovakia, Japan and Germany.

The main reasons were that when reading e-books, students are easily distracted. Some also ended up with headaches or painful eyes.

In addition, print books can bring a very different reading experience-a sense of accomplishment when finishing reading.