2 . “What will you do if a person you don’t know wants to give you a ride?” I asked my children. “What if he says Mom is hurt, and you have to come to the hospital with him?” I knew they pretended to listen to me, because I interrupted their TV time.

Here I also want to ask some parents, “Have you ever told your children how to protect themselves?” If you haven’t, I would like to give you four words to help you teach your children how to protect themselves.

No! If a stranger walks to the children, they should keep their distance from the stranger. If the stranger keeps walking to them in a terrible manner, they should run quickly and shout “No!” as loudly as possible.

Go! If the shout does not change the situation, they should run as quickly as possible to a safe place. It is helpful for children to know some safe places such as schools, restaurants and gas stations.

Yell! It means that the children should shout loudly. They can yell out, “Stranger!”

Call! Once they get to a safe place, they should call their parents, teachers or other persons they trust.

American teens are seen as “in a state of     1     disaster”. A report released last week paints a deeply disturbing     2     of the mental health of high students.

    3     more than 17, 000 teens conducted in a survey in 2021, 42 percent said they experienced the     4     of sadness or hopelessness. The issue is     5     more widespread than in a     6     survey in 2011, and girls are dramatically worse. A     7     of girls — 57 percent — reported persistent despair,     8     with 29 percent of boys.

Nearly 1     9     3 girls seriously considered suicide (up from 19 percent in 2011), and 13 percent say they attempted it in the     10    . “What caused this?” The CDC offered     11     definitive answers, but consider     12     has happened over the past decade. “Instagram was released in late 2010. TikTok in 2016.” Soon     13    , 90 percent of teen girls reported using social     14     every day. These apps, create more “social comparison, social pressure, and     15     peer interactions,” with teens measuring their self-worth — or lack of it — in likes and followers. Then in 2020 Covid-19     16     the picture.

    17     its root causes, this epidemic of hopelessness should     18     considered “a national crisis”. Did the reopening of schools and social spaces this year help     19     teens’ suffering? The CDC survey comes out only every other year, so we’ll have to wait to     20     out.

4 . The Covid-19 pandemic has forced millions of us to participate in one of the biggest social experiments of our time: what would happen if office workers largely abandoned their workplaces and began working from home?    1    

One thing seems clear: more people working remotely has brought some benefits for the environment. Wildlife has be enable to reclaim urban spaces while people have been tapping away at their home keyboards, with less commuter (通勤者) traffic.

    2    The major benefits of home working include people having more flexibility to do jobs around their family, and balance exercise and leisure time, thus being able to wear whatever they like, controlling their own heating and lighting and not having to commute.

Many people have also been able to get more done while working remotely.    3     “There used to be a lot of resistance to working from home because managers thought employees would just go of off and watch soap operas, but there’s a lot more trust now,” says Sue Williamson at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia.

    4    Many people forced to work from home have reported feeling isolated and finding it harder to switch off due to the unclear boundary between work and home life.    5    This is probably because it’s hard to get those accidental conversations between people that spark ideas when everyone is physically separated.

As vaccines help to control Covid-19, many organizations are hoping to reap the best of both worlds by letting employees work from home on some days and travel to the office on others.

5 . One Earth Award

About this award

Sponsored by the One Earth Fund, the One Earth Award offers $1,000 scholarships for four students whose works address the pressing issue of human-caused climate change.

Why should I create art or writing about climate change?

Some consequences of climate change include: sea-level rise, increase in air pollution, hurricane, droughts, extreme weather, and rising temperatures, among others. Your work can advance our thoughts about climate change and our understanding of solutions. It can also improve awareness of actions that we can take, in order to reduce the harm that human action has on our environment.

How do I apply?

Enter your work to any category in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. When selecting the category of your work, choose the One Earth Award. You will be required to include a personal statement on your work.

What should I write for the personal statement?

Your personal statement should be 50 words or more and answer the following questions:

What specific aspect of climate change does your work address?

What is your personal connection to this aspect of climate change, and why do you think talking about climate change is important?

Getting started on your work

These resources can help you learn about climate change and create your own art and writing about it.

Consider how poets talk about climate change with the Poetry Foundation.

Explore visual art activities and writing activities from the Teacher’s Climate Guide.

Try writing exercises developed by English Teachers Concerned about Climate Crisis.

6 . When drawing scientists. U. S. children now depict (描画) female scientists more often than ever, according to new Northwestern University research, which has analyzed five decades of “Draw-A-Scientist” studies conducted since the 1960s.

This change suggests that children’s stereotypes (刻板印象) linking science with men have weakened over time, said the researchers, consistent with more women becoming scientists and children’s media depicting more female scientists on television shows and other media.

In the first study, conducted between 1968 and 1979, less than one percent of 5,000 children drew an image resembling a woman when asked to draw a scientist. Almost all their artwork depicted men working with laboratory equipment, often with lab coats, glasses and facial hair.

But in later studies (1988 to 2019), 28 percent of children drew a female scientist, on average. In addition, both girls and boys drew female scientists more often over time, though girls overall drew female scientists much more often than boys.

“Our results suggest that children’s stereotypes change as women’s and men’s roles change in society.” said study lead author David Miller. “Children still draw more male than female scientists, but that is expected because women remain a minority in several science fields.”

The researchers also studied how children form stereotypes about scientists across child development. The results suggested children did not associate science with men until grade school; around age 5, they drew roughly equal percentages of male and female scientists. During elementary and middle school, the tendency to draw male scientists increased strongly with age. Older children were also more likely to draw scientists with lab coats and glasses, suggesting that children learn other stereotypes as they mature.

“These changes across children’s age likely reflect that children’s exposure to male scientists accumulates during development, even in recent years.” said Miller.

“To build on cultural changes, teachers and parents should present children with multiple examples of female scientists across many contexts such as science courses, television shows and informal conversations,” Miller said.

7 . Picture the scene: you’ve spent years working towards a very specific goal. You’ve put in countless hours of work and made many efforts along the way, but now that you’ve got there it doesn’t feel quite like you imagined. Instead of celebration, you feel emptiness, confusion and doubt.

Welcome to the anti-climax. The often-experienced but seldom-discussed downside of achieving life’s biggest milestones. Many of us work tirelessly towards our goals. We may spend our lives dreaming of the day we get married, publish our first hook or buy our first home. However, oftentimes, when we achieve these things it doesn’t feel quite as expected. In fact, the achievement of these goals feels a bit of a letdown.

So why do we often experience an anti-climax with big goals, even though we’re happy to achieve them? “An anti-climax can be an unexpected by-product of a milestone achievement. Usually, the more significant the milestone, the greater the anti-climax may be. The intensity（强度）of an anti-climax often relies on what we expect of this achievement.” says Rachel Vora. a psychotherapist（心理治疗师）.“The journey to achieving a milestone can he exciting and tiring in addition to giving us a sense of purpose and focus. Therefore, when this disappears overnight. we can often feel lost and confused, in spite of feeling proud of our achievement.

When this happens it can contribute to a mixture of emotions. We often falsely believe that we’ll feel completely different afterwards or that our feelings of low self-worth will disappear, but this is rarely the case. “Clients（客户）often present to me with an extremely great sense of ‘is this it?’ and ‘what now?’.” says Vora. “These feelings of confusion and disappointment, if let ignored, have the potential to cause clients to be in low spirits, or even worse.”

8 . Have you gotten price shock lately when you looked at the cost of a new car? It’s not your imagination .The average price of a new car is the highest ever for the first quarter, according to CNBC. At $33, 319, the price is about $1,000 more than in 2018. Because of that, new car sales dropped by as many as 2.5 million units compared to the same quarter last year.

You’d think the drop might concern car makers, but as it turns out, the increase of the price reflects a choice. Many carmakers are stopping producing less expensive cars in favor of SUVS and pickup trucks, which bring in bigger profits(利润).

“Carmakers always say they build what people want.” The Wall Street Journal reporter Dan Neil said. “But they never mention the fact that they spend billions telling people what they want. It wasn’t that consumers wanted to have a truck that was as big as a house. No, that was a gradual process. And it has been mainly pushed by carmakers because bigger equals more profits.”

In late 2018, Ford announced it was gradually stopping producing its Fiesta, Focus, and C-max models in the United States while continuing to make the Mustang and Focus Active. Other big carmakers did the same, with General Motors ending production of the Chevy Volt, Cruz, Impala, Buick Lacrosse. Cadillac XTS, and Cadillac CT6 in the United States. And Fiat Chrysler is putting the Dodge Dart and Chrysler 200 to an end. “I can tell you right now that both the Chrysler 200 and the Dodge Dart, as great products as they were, are the least financially rewarding business that we’ve carried out in the last eight years,” said Fiat Chrysler CEO.

So where does that leave consumers? Well, if you’re in the market for an SUV or a top-of-the-line pickup truck, you can expect better features. But if you’re looking for a smaller, less expensive car you might be squeezed (挤)out of the market. More and more buyers are likely to look to used cars instead. But before car shopping, make sure you know the secrets car dealers don’t want to tell you.