1 . Each food product in the United States must show a “best before” date on its container. The goal is to tell the buyer when the food will be at its freshest. Most people believe it is unsafe to use the food product after that date. But some observers say “best before” labels have nothing to do with safety. They worry that the information will lead consumers to throw away food good to eat.

Some food sellers in Britain recently removed “best before” labels from prepackaged fruit and vegetables. The European Union may soon announce changes to its labeling laws. It may even end the requirement to include a date.In the US, there is no similar effort. Some big food store owners and food companies are pushing for the US Congress to pass new laws on the subject.

Studies have found as much as 35% of available food goes uneaten in the United States.That adds up to a lot of wasted energy. It also means more greenhouse gases coming from landfills. 7% of US food waste comes from people’s misunderstanding of “best before” labels. That percentage is equal to about 3. 6 million tons each year.

Richard Lipsit owns a store called Grocery Outlet in Pleasanton, California. He said we can safely eat canned goods and many other packaged foods for years after their “best before”date. People should look for changes in color, thickness, or feel to learn if foods are all right to eat. “Our bodies are very well equipped to recognize the signs of decay,” Lipsit said. “We’ve lost trust in those senses and we’ve replaced it with trust in these dates.”

If new laws are approved in Congress, food could be donated to food rescue organizations even after its quality date has passed. Food rescue is making efforts to find uses for outdated food. Currently, at least 20 states ban the sale or donation of food after its quality date has passed.

2 . Culdesac, which describes itself as “the first car-free neighborhood in the Us”, admitted its first 36 residents in Tempe, Arizona, US, earlier this year. The $170 million neighborhood, with its white buildings and narrow walkways, is expected to hold around 1, 000 people when the full 760 units are completed by 2025. Similar projects in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Houston, Texas, are also underway.

In a country as car-dependent as the US, Culdesac is no lack of foresight (远见). Although some densely populated (人口密集的) coastal Us cities like Boston and New York City are walkable and have ample public transportation options like taxis, buses and light rails, the majority of Americans are entirely dependent on cars to get around.

This dependence on cars doesn’t come cheap, unfortunately. In a 2023 study, the American Automobile Association said that it costs an average of about 89,000 yuan per year to own and maintain a car in the US.

So, what is stopping Americans from abandoning cars and accepting relatively cheaper choices like e-bikes? In a word, unsafe roads that prioritize cars over people. According to a 2018 report by WHO, the US traffic accident death rate is about 50 percent more than similar nations in Western Europe. At the same time, walkers and cyclists in the US are often blamed for being hit by drivers rather than the other way around.

Still, there’s hope. By choosing a new car-free way of living, US projects like Culdesac can provide another way of living that’s both healthier and more affordable and, in turn, influence others to live a better way as well. As Vanessa, a resident of Culdesac, said, “For some, cars equal freedom, but for me, it’s limitation, Freedom is being able to just simply walk out and access places. “

3 . China’s tea culture has undergone dramatic, changes in recent years. The appearance of new-style teas can be traced back to the cheap roadside milk tea stands of the 1990s. Most of these drinks were made from powdered mixes and contained neither fresh milk nor fresh tea. The base ingredients weren’t updated until the arrival of Taiwan-based brands like CoCo and A Little Tea in the 2000s, leading to innovations such as “cheese tea”. These businesses started the “Milk Tea 2.0” era, transforming the milk tea business from a mixture of small stands into a standardized and fast-moving industry.

But even as the Taiwan-centric “Milk Tea 2.0” revolution was sweeping the world, the seeds of its next evolution were already sprouting (发芽) on the Chinese mainland. In 2012, a 21-year-old man named Nie Yunchen opened a milk tea store in the small southern city of Jiangmen, where he sold milk tea. By 2020, Nie’s HeyTea had 695 stores worldwide; was worth an estimated, 16 billion yuan, and had attracted a large number of imitators.

The new brands made their mark, by offering a more diverse range of tea bases, often with extras like seasonal fruit sparkling water, cream cheese or nuts.

The viability (可行性) of this business model owes much to China’s widespread embrace of high-end consumerism. Jason Yu, general manager of the market research firm Kantar World panel China, told me that “mothers with refined tastes”, urban white-collar workers, and those born after 1990 are the main drivers of Chinas new-style tea market—and, more broadly, the consumer market as a whole. These groups tend to be defined by busywork and home lives, and they see upscale drinks like tea and coffee not only as a way to quench their thirst (解渴), but also as a source of comfort. In this sense, new-style teas are filling a psychological, rather than a physical need. Many tea brands are aware of this and they have sought to associate themselves with healthy and relaxed lifestyle through their marketing campaigns.

Another driver of new-style tea consumption, according to Yu, is the desire among young people to combine consumption with social activity. “The goal of consumption for this generation of consumers is socializing,” Yu, said “You rarely see a person drinking Hey Tea by himself.”

9 . On November 4th, 2020, the draft that math should be listed as a major national project during the 14th Five-Year Plan(2021—25)period was adopted at the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, reported China Daily.

Katherine Johnson (1918—2020), a former NASA mathematician who calculated and analyzed flight paths for many missions, once said: “Some things will drop out of the public eye and go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.” This may be one of the reasons why our country has listed math and its applications as a major national project into the next Five-Year Plan.

“The policy and financial support for the field of mathematics will be greatly improved between 2021 and 2025 compared with the past five years—it’s unprecedented,” said Yuan Yaxiang, a mathematician and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He also stressed that mathematical research matters because it can help overcome some current technology bottlenecks.

According to Science and Technology Minister Wang Zhigang, basic scientific research, including mathematics, will have a larger focus during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, with funding expected to reach over 8 percent of all research and development (R&D) expenses.

The math project is expected to receive 1.5 billion yuan in funding, according to Yuan. The funding will be used to build new institutions for scientific research and support the current ones with new experimental equipment. More training for young mathematicians has also been urged.

Thịs year, Tsinghua University carried out a leading talent training program in math. It recruits hundreds of outstanding middle and senior high school students from across the country to cultivate leading talents in mathematics and related fields. The “strengthening basic disciplines plan” was launched in 2020 at 36 top universities.

According to the German newspaper Die Welt, China leads the way as far as those with an aptitude for math. Of all those born in China between 2005 and 2009, 24 million have exhibited a talent for math. The number is 1.8 million and 940,000 in Japan and South Korea, respectively. That's why many international companies like Apple have set their research centers in China.

10 . By the time she turned 18, Khadijah Williams had attended twelve schools. She had lived in shelters, in parks, and in motels, never in a permanent residence for more than a few months. She had been laughed at and looked down upon by students at a dozen schools who thought of her as “different”.

Homeless since early childhood, Khadijah struggled all her life to hide her circumstances from teachers and fellow students. However, academic achievement proved to be a way for her to find confidence in herself again. For instance, at the age of 9, she placed in the 99th percentile on a state exam, and her teacher told her she was “gifted”. From that moment forward, Khadijah decided to do whatever it took to keep herself in that category. “I was so proud of being smart. I often heard my fellow students say, ‘You got the easy way out because you're homeless,’” she told The LA Times. “But I never saw it as an excuse about living a less successful life.”

By the second year of high school, she realized that she could not succeed in getting the education she dreamed of without getting help to go beyond what her current school could offer. She talked to teachers and advisers who helped her apply for summer community college classes, scholarships, and enrichment programs. And in the 11th grade, when she enrolled at Jefferson High School, she decided to complete the rest of her school career there—a decision that meant taking a bus each morning at 4 a.m. and not getting home until 11 p.m.

Here's the end of the story—when Khadijah poured the story of her life into her Harvard University college application, she was accepted.