1 . I’m Jack. I live on Renmin Road in Shanghai.There are six pay phone booths in my neighborhood. Many people like to visit the booths.They don’t make phone calls.They go there to read books.The booths are now small libraries.

There are three kinds of booth libraries.One is Library Booth. People can take the books in the booth.When they finish reading,they need to bring the books back.One is Celebrity (名流) Exhibition Hall. In the booth, people can learn about some great people, like Ba Jin and Ke Ling. The last one is One Book Booth. There is always a new book in it.

Now there are over 200 booth libraries in Shanghai. People love them very much. “They are fantastic places to enjoy reading and have a rest,” they say. Can people use the phones in the booths？Sure! And they can make emergency (紧急的) calls, like 110 and 120 for free.

2 . We’ll finally grow up someday, leaving our parents and facing the challenges in life. Parents may not be able to solve every problem for us. Instead, we should have enough life skills to deal with the problems that come our way.

This is what our country tries to do now: Helping more students gain working spirit.To stress the importance of hardworking spirit education among students of different ages, the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council released a guideline recently.The guideline calls for students to respect work.Students should learn basic life skills and form good working habits through such education.

The government has been trying to stress the importance of hardworking spirit education. But this has been overlooked in recent years.Many teens do not value the importance of working hard and are uninterested in doing so. According to a study of nearly 3,000 students that was done by Ningbo Evening News in March, only 22 percent of primary and middle school students help with everyday chores around the house.

Schools and families play an important role in teaching students about the value of working hard, the guideline says. Primary and middle schools should provide students with hardworking spirit classes every week, according to the guideline. Schools can also hold activities to give students real- world work experiences.For example , schools can teach children how to plant trees on Tree-Planting Day.

As children’s first teachers, parents should also encourage children to learn how to do chores at home. Students should master one or two life skills every year.

3 . 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.

4 . A group of farmers in Nigeria is using a technology-based method to grow crops from small drops of water in the air. The method, known as aeroponics, does not involve soil. Instead, plant roots hang in the air.

Aeroponics is not well-known in Nigeria, but farmers there are working to make the technique more popular. The technique could make a big difference in places like the city of Abeokuta. Violent conflicts and desertification--the process by which rich land becomes deserts--have made huge amounts of land unsuitable for farming.

Biochemist Samson Ogbole is popularly known as Nigeria's smart farmer. He and his team are growing crops without soil at the technology-based farm they started three years ago in Abeokuta. “We are putting an end to seasonal food shortage in Nigeria,” said Ogbole. “Because we are the ones controlling everything that the plant requires--we are not depending on seasons. So it's no longer seasonal farming. It is just farming any time of the year, meaning you can plant any time of the year. We can harvest any time of the year,” said Ogbole.

But setting up the aeroponic farm was not easy. “It required more than $180,000,” Ogbole said. And, some people in Abeokuta were very much against this non-traditional method of farming. “It took a lot of effort to change people's minds about aeroponics,” said Ogbole.

In Nigeria, about 30 million hectares（公顷）of farmland is being used, instead of the 78.5 million hectares required for food security. Violent conflicts and desertification are the top reasons why the farmland is being lost. And only 49 percent of the land is rich. Besides, most farmers do not have the technical knowledge to increase productivity. They are also in need of high-quality seeds to guarantee better harvests.

For now, technologically skilled farmers like Samson Ogbole are offering a new way forward.

5 . The latest diet trend in America is also an ancient human activity. The activity is fasting, or not eating food for a set amount of time. Like other diets, intermittent fasting helps you lose weight by setting limits on eating. But instead of limiting what you eat, it limits when you eat.   

One of the more popular approaches to intermittent fasting is called “time-restricted feeding”. It is not as difficult as some of the other approaches, since the fasting period can include the time you are sleeping. The basic idea of time-restricted feeding is to limit eating to an eight-hour period. You then fast during the day’s other 16 hours.

Many people make the eating period shorter or longer. Some eat just one meal a day. In other approaches, people fast several days during a week. On fasting days, some people may permit themselves around 600 calories. Whatever the approach, people are not supposed to overeat when they stop fasting.

Studies on the potential health benefits of intermittent fasting are still limited, including for its effectiveness with weight loss. For now, limited research suggests it may not be any better for weight loss than reducing calorie intake over the long term.

They point to a study of 100 people where those placed in a fasting group lost about the same amount of weight as those on diets that restricted calories. The fasting group had a dropout rate of 38 percent, compared with 29 percent for the caloric-restriction diet group.

People interested in intermittent fasting should talk to their doctor before trying it. Health experts do not recommend intermittent fasting for children, people on some medications and people with a history of eating disorders.

The worst thing about plastic straws (吸管) is that most of the time, they’re not a     1     (choose). Like much of the single-use plastic that     2     (come) our way, they just appear, placed in take-out bags or     3     (provide) with iced tea. And if you pick up plastic on beaches, you know that one of the most common pieces of plastic waste you’ll find is plastic straws. They’re everywhere. And once they make     4     (they) way to the sea, they’re eaten by fish or birds that mistake them for food. Straws are used once and then they are immediately thrown away and become waste, staying in the environment     5     years.

    6     (fortune) , we can do something to help. If you like to use a straw at home     7     you want to provide them at your business, there are two options. The first one is trying a reusable straw, which can     8     (wash) along with dishes. They come in stainless steel or glass. And they come in all kinds of sizes and some have fun decorations.

Another option is paper straws,     9     also come in all kinds of pretty decorative colors and patterns. You can even find them     10     (make) from recycled paper!

With so many options available, there’s no reason to add to the plastic straw waste problem.