Swimmers enjoy cold swims

Many people enjoy swimming in icy cold water. An open-air swimming pool,     1     (know) as a lido, in Bedfordshire, England, proved very popular this winter. The Woburn Lido is usually open from May to September,     2     this year it stayed open to swimmers throughout the autumn and winter months too.

Until the lockdown for England was announced on 4 January, outdoor pools were allowed to remain open. “Demand has taken us by surprise,” said Murray Heining, a volunteer at the Woburn Lido. Over Christmas and New Year, the lido had to offer extra openings to keep up with the demand from     3     (swimmer).

Cold-water swimming has grown in popularity in the UK over the past few years. A survey found that 7.5 million people in England had swum in outdoor pools, as well as lakes, rivers and the sea, in 2018. In some areas, such as the river Wharfe in Yorkshire, this new trend has made environmental groups think more about     4     the water is cleared of pollution and clean enough for bathers.

Some people make it a regular practice;     5     just enjoy a refreshing dip on Christmas Day, Boxing Day or New Year’s Day. Every year around the UK, people     6     (photograph) plunging into icy water, often in fancy dress, and the recent festive period was no exception,     7     freezing temperatures.

The Outdoor Swimming Society classifies temperatures below 6℃ as “Baltic” and from 6-11℃ as “freezing”. They advise people     8     (get) in the water gradually, so as not to shock the body. Likewise, they recommend warming up gradually, and not     9     (rush) the process by leaping into a hot bath when you get out. Instead, they suggest layering up and drinking something warm.

It wasn’t just the water that was cold—many people experienced a white Christmas; snow fell in several counties including Yorkshire and Suffolk. Paul Davies, the UK Met Office’s chief meteorologist (气象学家), a scientist     10     job is to study the weather, said the forecast indicates “the likelihood of the cold conditions experienced recently continuing through January”.

2 . Every festival has its own meaning. Labor Day, for example, celebrates the value of hard work. Thanksgiving is about showing thanks to people around you. And Valentines’ Day is a time when you express love to your loved ones. But somehow it now seems that all festivals we just care about one thing — shopping. And that can be a big problem.

“In a way, over-consumption (过度消费) is the mother of all our environmental problems,” Kalle Lasn once told CNN. Lasn is the organizer of Buy Nothing Day, a day set up in Canada in 1992 to fight against unhealthy spending habits, and has now become an international event. It’s held on the day, which is known as Black Friday — a famous shopping day in the US and Canada.

You can see the irony (讽刺) here.

Even though the idea of Buy Nothing Day was brought up 26 years ago, we seem to need it now more than ever. It’s just as Lasn said, all the different kinds of pollution in our lives today — bad air quality, the reduction of forest area, endangered animal species, and plastic bags found in the ocean — seem to be the same cause: over-consumption.

The latest example is the Singles’ Day shopping craze of Nov 11, which saw a new sales record. But as Nie Li, a campaigner at Greenpeace, told Reuters, “Record-setting over-consumption means record-setting waste.” And it was reported that last year the Singles’ Day packages left more than 160,000 tons of waste, including plastic and cardboard. The Collins Dictionary has also just named “single-use” its Word of the Year, pointing out the problem that there’re too many things we tow out after only using them once.

So, Buy Nothing Day might only be here for one day a year, but it’s not just to remind us to the a break from shopping on that day, but to change our lifestyle completely, focusing on fun “with people we care about” rather than wasting money on useless things.

3 . From self-driving cars to carebots (care+ robots) for elderly people, rapid development in technology has long represented a possible threat to many jobs normally performed by people. But experts now believe that almost 50 percent of occupations existing today will be completely unnecessary by 2035 as artificial intelligence (AI) continues to change businesses.

“The next fifteen years will see a revolution in how we work, and a revolution will necessarily take place in how we plan and think about workplaces,” said Peter Andrew, Director of Workplace Strategy for CBRE Asia-Pacific. A growing number of jobs in the future will require creative intelligence, social skills and the ability to use artificial intelligence.

The report is based on interviews with 200 experts, business leaders and young people from Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America. It shows that in the US technology already destroys more jobs than it creates. But the report states, “Losing occupations does not necessarily mean losing jobs—just changing what people do.” Growth in new jobs could occur as much, according to the research. “The growth of 20- to 40-person companies that have the speed and technological know-how will directly challenge big companies,” it states.

Another study by Pew Research Centre found 52 percent of experts in artificial intelligence and robotics were optimistic about the future and believed there would still be enough jobs in the next few years. The optimists pictured “a future in which robots do not take the place of more jobs than they create.”

“Technology will continue to affect jobs, but more jobs seem likely to be created. Although there have always been unemployed people, when we reached a few billion people, there were billions of jobs. There is no shortage of things that need to be done and that will not change,” Microsoft’s Jonathan Grudin told researchers.

4 . The artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT can offer everything from answers to basic general knowledge questions, to writing essays and poems. Ask ChatGPT to write about the history of the French Revolution or Battles of Hastings, and it will provide a perfect essay in less than a second. It's such a powerful tool openly accessible to any student for free. However, AI-based plagiarism (抄 袭) or so called “AIgiarism” is fast taking off across student populations internationally, ringing alarm bells in schools and universities around the world

The developers OpenAI have since decided to prevent the misuse of its technology. The company is developing a system, water marks, for identifying those who cheat by submitting essays written by ChatGPT. By using the system which changes certain works into a recognizable pattern, the machine written text could be identified by anyone looking for the signs. These changes would not be noticeable to the reader. The researchers say that by setting up this kind of security system, it could prevent the technology from being misused for whatever reason. Such measures will also prevent an overdependence on the tool, which still has a long way to go before improving its accuracy, due to the fact that it collects the information from all over the internet. The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, said in a statement that it would be a mistake to depend on it for anything important at this stage.

Schools also in turn have tried to take matters into their own hands, with many across Europe and the US updating their policies to warn of punishments for those who are caught using the program improperly.

Other schools have limited internet network access to ChatGPT on campus. Examiners have the sense to identify essays written by ChatGPT by a lack of emotion or personal experiences in them. This ability is a human advantage—AI will struggle to copy.

9 . Raegan Byrd tries to complete her homework every night. But the high school student in Hartford. Connecticut, has to use her mobile phone to search for the necessary information because she does not have internet connection at home.

In May, the US Department of Education (DOE) published its findings that the number of homes without access (接入) to internet has been getting smaller, but 14 percent of homes in city areas and 18percent of homes in the countryside still do not have internet connections.

In some states, the problem is much more serious. For example, in the countryside of northern Mississippi, a third of the 294 homes in Maben do not have computers. And close to half have no access to internet whether they can pay for it or not.

Sharon Stidham, a mother in Maben, has to take her four boys to the school library at East Webster High School. Her husband works there, so the children can use the internet for their schoolwork. A signal tower can be seen through the trees from their home, but they could not put aside any money for the internet. Research results from the National Center for Education (NCE) have shown that students with internet at home get much better scores in reading, math and science than the ones who do not. Some teachers call this problem “the homework divide”. Jessica Rosenworcel, an NCE member, said, “The so-called homework divide is the cruelest part of the digital age and it is hurting the poor students and creating a big barrier to their dreams.”

Local communities (社区) have started to help. They made lists of restaurants and other businesses with Wi-Fi places where children are welcome to come and do their homework. And many public libraries have also planned to provide free access to the students next year.

The Moments section of WeChat has become the popular part of the social networking platform. We can share everything about your life on it with our friend. Many teenagers, however, chose to keep their parents out their Moments. They argue that if their parents get involved, and they will feel upset. As far as I am concerning, I feel happily when my parents comment on my posts in my Moments. It shows their love and care for me. What’s more, shut them off may make the generation gap bigger and bigger, while inviting them in would helping us communicate better and feel closer to each other than before.