6 . When almost everyone has a mobile phone, why are more than half of Australian homes still paying for a landline (座机)?

These days you’d be hard pressed to find anyone in Australia over the age of 15 who doesn’t own a mobile phone. In fact plenty of younger kids have one in their pocket. Practically everyone can make and receive calls anywhere, anytime.

Still, 55 percent of Australians have a landline phone at home and only just over a quarter (29%) rely only on their smartphones according to a survey (调查). Of those Australians who still have a landline, a third concede that it’s not really necessary and they’re keeping it as a security blanket — 19 percent say they never use it while a further 13 percent keep it in case of emergencies. I think my home falls into that category.

More than half of Australian homes are still choosing to stick with their home phone. Age is naturally a factor (因素)— only 58 percent of Generation Ys still use landlines now and then, compared to 84 percent of Baby Boomers who’ve perhaps had the same home number for 50 years. Age isn’t the only factor; I’d say it’s also to do with the makeup of your household.

Generation Xers with young families, like my wife and I, can still find it convenient to have a home phone rather than providing a mobile phone for every family member. That said, to be honest the only people who ever ring our home phone are our Baby Boomers parents, to the point where we play a game and guess who is calling before we pick up the phone (using Caller ID would take the fun out of it).

How attached are you to your landline? How long until they go the way of gas street lamps and morning milk deliveries?

7 . At the start of the 20th century, an American engineer named John Elfreth Watkins made predictions about life today. His predictions about slowing population growth, mobile phones and increasing height were close to the mark. But he was wrong in one prediction: that everybody would walk 10 miles a day.

Today, in Australia, most children on average fall 2, 000 steps short of the physical activity they need to avoid being overweight. In the early 1970s, 40 per cent of children walked to school, while in 2010, it was as low as 15 percent.

The decline is not because we have all become lazy. Families are pressed for time, many with both parents working to pay for their house, often working hours not of their choosing, living in car-dependent neighborhoods with limited public transport.

The other side of the coin is equally a deprivation: for health and well-being, as well as lost opportunities (机会) for children to get to know their local surroundings. And for parents there are lost opportunities to walk and talk with their young scholar about their day.

Most parents will have eagerly asked their child about their day, only to meet with a “good”, quickly followed by “I’m hungry”. This is also my experience as a mother. But somewhere over the daily walk more about my son’s day comes out. I hear him making sense of friendship and its limits. This is the unexpected and rare parental opportunity to hear more.

Many primary schools support walking school-bus routes (路线), with days of regular,   parent-accompanied walks. Doing just one of these a few times a week is better than nothing. It can be tough to begin and takes a little planning-running shoes by the front door, lunches made the night before, umbrellas on rainy days and hats on hot ones-but it's certainly worth trying.

8 . At the start of the 20th century, an American engineer named John Elfreth Watkins made predictions about life today. His predictions about slowing population growth, mobile phones and increasing height were close to the mark. But he was wrong in one prediction: that everybody would walk 10 miles a day.

Today, in Australia, most children on average fall 2, 000 steps short of the physical activity they need to avoid being overweight. In the early 1970s, 40 per cent of children walked to school, while in 2010, it was as low as 15 percent.

The decline is not because we have all become lazy. Families are pressed for time, many with both parents working to pay for their house, often working hours not of their choosing, living in car-dependent neighborhoods with limited public transport.

The other side of the coin is equally a deprivation: for health and well-being, as well as lost opportunities (机会) for children to get to know their local surroundings. And for parents there are lost opportunities to walk and talk with their young scholar about their day.

Most parents will have eagerly asked their child about their day, only to meet with a “good”, quickly followed by “I’m hungry”. This is also my experience as a mother. But somewhere over the daily walk more about my son’s day comes out. I hear him making sense of friendship and its limits. This is the unexpected and rare parental opportunity to hear more.

Many primary schools support walking school-bus routes (路线), with days of regular,   parent-accompanied walks. Doing just one of these a few times a week is better than nothing. It can be tough to begin and takes a little planning-running shoes by the front door, lunches made the night before, umbrellas on rainy days and hats on hot ones-but it's certainly worth trying.

10 . Like most of us, I try to be mindful of food that goes to waste. The arugula (芝麻菜)was to make a nice green salad, rounding out a roast chicken dinner. But I ended up working late. Then friends called with a dinner invitation. I stuck the chicken in the freezer. But as days passed, the arugula went bad. Even worse, I had unthinkingly bought way too much; I could have made six salads with what I threw out.

In a world where nearly 800 million people a year go hungry, “food waste goes against the moral grain,” as Elizabeth Royte writes in this month’s cover story. It’s jaw-dropping how much perfectly good food is thrown away — from “ugly” (but quite eatable) vegetables rejected by grocers to large amounts of uneaten dishes thrown into restaurant garbage cans.

Producing food that no one eats wastes the water, fuel, and other resources used to grow it. That makes food waste an environmental problem. In fact, Royte writes, “if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world.”

If that’s hard to understand, let’s keep it as simple as the arugula at the back of my refrigerator. Mike Curtin sees my arugula story all the time — but for him, it’s more like 12 bones of donated strawberries nearing their last days. Curtin is CEO of DC Central Kitchen in Washington, D.C., which recovers food and turns it into healthy meals. Last year it recovered more than 807,500 pounds of food by taking donations and collecting blemished (有瑕疵的) produce that otherwise would have rotted in fields. And the strawberries? Volunteers will wash, cut, and freeze or dry them for use in meals down the road.

Such methods seem obvious, yet so often we just don’t think. “Everyone can play a part in reducing waste, whether by not purchasing more food than necessary in your weekly shopping or by asking restaurants to not include the side dish you won’t eat,” Curtin says.