1 . Marian Bechtel sits at West Palm Beach’s Bar Louie counter by herself, quietly reading her e-book as she waits for her salad. What is she reading? None of your business! Lunch is Bechtel’s “me” time. And like more Americans, she’s not alone.

A new report found 46 percent of meals are eaten alone in America. More than half (53 percent) have breakfast alone and nearly half (46 percent) have lunch by themselves. Only at dinnertime are we eating together anymore, 74 percent, according to statistics from the report.

“I prefer to go out and be out. Alone, but together, you know?” Bechtel said, looking up from her book. Bechtel, who works in downtown West Palm Beach, has lunch with coworkers sometimes, but like many of us, too often works through lunch at her desk. A lunchtime escape allows her to keep a boss from tapping her on the shoulder. She returns to work feeling energized. “Today, I just wanted some time to myself,” she said.

Just two seats over, Andrew Mazoleny, a local videographer, is finishing his lunch at the bar. He likes that he can sit and check his phone in peace or chat up the barkeeper with whom he’s on a first-name basis if he wants to have a little interaction (交流). “I reflect on how my day’s gone and think about the rest of the week,” he said. “It’s a chance for self-reflection. You return to work recharged and with a plan.”

That freedom to choose is one reason more people like to eat alone. There was a time when people may have felt awkward about asking for a table for one, but those days are over. Now, we have our smartphones to keep us company at the table. “It doesn’t feel as alone as it may have before all the advances in technology,” said Laurie Demeritt, whose company provided the statistics for the report.

2 . At 11:50, the bell rings. We students rush to the canteen at an amazing speed to enjoy our lunch. Have we ever stopped to see what happens after the meal?    1    . Sadly, this is not a common sight. We will find, instead, a mountain of leftovers in the waste bins.    2    .

This irresponsible food waste deed can never be tolerated. It reflects poorly on our hygiene practice (食品良好卫生规范).    3    .

Let’s learn from a Michelin-star chef who says that he will always respect the fish he cooks. Why?     4     .He can fully understand the dangers which the fisherman constantly faces in order to supply the fish to him. Therefore, by not wasting any part of the fish, and by cooking excellently every time, the chef is appreciating the fisherman’s efforts.

    5    . Just think of the poor and homeless who have not eaten for days due to a war or a natural disaster that may have wiped out homes and families. Think: “wouldn’t it be good if we shared our food instead of throwing away what we can’t finish?”

Let’s respect our food and share the joy of living well through giving food to those in need.

3 . “I was not exceptional at all,” Claudia Goldin once told me of her time as an economics PhD student at the University of Chicago. But as the course progressed, she said, “I felt like lightbulbs were going on in my head.” On October 9 the brightness of those lights was confirmed, as she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”.

Goldin found men relatively dull, at least as a topic of study. Their labour was uniform compared to that of women, who might switch between caring for children, toiling (辛苦工作) in the family businesses or sweating somewhere else. But this complexity was harder to measure. According to America’s historical statistics, for example, their occupation was often unhelpfully listed as “wife”. So Goldin set out to measure their work properly.

The standard pattern of development was once that as countries got richer, women were pulled into the labour market. But by painstakingly stitching together different data sets, Goldin established that America’s path was more complicated, and that growth in the 1800s coincided with women moving away from work other than domestic labour.

Why? For a start, factory jobs were harder to combine with childcare than, say, sewing at home. And richer families could afford to spare women the indignity of toil. Goldin argued that stigma (污名) reinforced this, or the idea that “only a husband who is lazy and neglectful of his family would allow his wife to do such labour.” Later the stigma faded — the office clerk job of the 20th century was easier, and consistent with the impression of a supportive spouse. With the arrival of tight labour markets in the 1950s, discriminatory policies against hiring married women were virtually abandoned.

Today, women still work and earn less than men. As social norms have shifted and real barriers have fallen, Goldin says that most of the remaining gender gaps facing college-educated women are due to something else. So-called “greedy jobs” reward round-the-clock work and are conflicting with being on call for children. Perhaps men should also share the family burden and allow their partners to be more professionally involved instead.

4 . 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.

6 . Street Art is a very popular form of art that is spreading quickly all over the world. You can find it on buildings, sidewalks, street signs and trash cans. Even art museums and galleries are collecting the work of street artists.     1    

Art experts claim that the movement began in New York in the 1960s.    2    This colorful, energetic style of writing became known as graf-fiti (涂鸦). It showed that young people didn’t want to accept rules and traveled around cities to create paintings that everyone could see.

One well-known New York street artist is Swoon. She cuts out paper images of people and puts them on walls or sets them up on sidewalks.    3    She enjoyed studying art, but as time went on, she got bored with the work she saw in museums and galleries. Swoon started to create strong and imaginative style, which attracted a lot of fans.

    4    Some of them dislike artists who make so much money in galleries and museums. They choose street art because it is closer to people. Some artists try to express their opinions in their work. They often want to protest against something. Advertising companies also use street art in their ads because it gives people the impression of youth and energy.

In today’s world, the Internet has a big influence on street art.    5    Many city residents, however, say that seeing a picture on the Internet is never as good as seeing it live. The street art movement lives with the energy and life of a big city. There it will continue to change and grow.

7 . Schools need to give students all the tools they need to navigate the world when they graduate. Besides teaching the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, teaching about mindfulness, and mental health are important life skills for young people to have. The state of Florida agrees.

Now, public schools in Florida have been required to teach five or more hours about mental health for students in grades 6 — 12. This new directive was approved by the Florida Board of Education in July and is being carried out as a potential lifesaver.

The new curriculum requires students to learn about the symptoms of mental illness and where to find help if they are feeling depressed or have other issues and even teaches the adolescents how to help their friends and classmates if they see them struggling.

“We know that 50 percent of all mental illness cases begin by age 14, so we are being active in our commitment to provide our kids with the necessary tools to see them through their successes and challenges. Providing mental health instruction is another important step forward in supporting our families,” Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran said.

Florida is the third state, following New York and Virginia in 2020, to pass laws that require mental health education in schools. According to CNN, the New York law updated the health curriculum to include mental health for elementary, middle and high school students. The Virginia law required that mental health education be provided for 9th and 10th graders.

These three states in the US are taking bold steps to help youth deal with the intricacy of life as they grow from adolescents into adults. It is a confusing world they face and giving them the tools to navigate it safely is essential. Mental health is something that should be taught in schools in all the US and across the globe.

8 . Many parents worry that showing negative emotions in front of their children will cause them to suffer. For example, children may end up thinking it’s their fault or simply “catch” the emotion. Indeed, this worry has a sound basis — the phenomenon of “emotional contagion” (情绪感染) is real, and one recent study found that parents can transfer their fear of going to the dentist, for example, to their children.

On the other hand, there is the natural idea that we should “be real”   with our children, and that they will benefit from watching a parent who struggles and eventually deals with their negative emotions like any other human being.

There are three concepts to consider when it comes to emotional display in front of children: suppression (压抑)，“uncontained” expression, and talking about emotions. Suppression of emotion is when you hide the outward signs of an emotion. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well — the act of suppressing your emotion actually increases your blood pressure. Observers can pick up on your distress despite your efforts to hide it, making them feel stressed. The recent research has also found that when parents feel negative emotions and keep them from their children, they experience lower relationship quality and decreased responsiveness to their child’s needs.

On the other hand, “uncontained” expression of anger and sadness by the parent is also not salutary for the child. Uncontained means high intensity emotion, with no attempts to regulate or take ownership of it. Shouting, smashing (摔) things and blaming someone else for “making you angry” are all example of this .

So, what is the middle ground? That would be talking about emotion taking ownership of them and showing your child that you are trying to deal with them. Classic research found that six-year-old kids had better emotional understanding and perspective-taking skills if their mothers had talked to them about their emotions at the age of three. In fact, the more the mothers had talked, the better the outcome would be.

So next time you feel sad, angry or frustrated and your child is watching you expressing emotion, do explain what’s going on in terms they can understand.

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9 . There is a famous story about British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was writing a poem when he was interrupted by a knock at the door.

This was an age before the telephone. Someone was delivering a message. When Coleridge got back to his poem, he had lost his inspiration. His poetic mood had been broken by the knock on his door. His unfinished poem, which could otherwise have been a masterpiece, would now never be more than a fragment (片段).

This story tells how unexpected communication can destroy an important thought. That brings us to the invention of the cellphone.

The most common complaint about cellphones is that people talk on them to the annoyance of people around them. But more damaging may be the cellphone’s disruption (中断) of our thoughts.

We have already entered a golden age of little white lies about our cellphones, and this is by and large a healthy, protective development. “I didn’t hear it ring” or “I didn’t realize my phone had shut off” are among the lies we tell to give ourselves space where we’re beyond reach.

The notion of being unreachable is not a new concept — we have “Do Not Disturb” signs on the doors of hotel rooms. So why must we feel guilty when it comes to cellphones? Why must we apologize if we decide to shut off the cellphone for a while?

The problem is that we come from a long-established tradition of difficulty with distance communication. Until the recent mass use of cellphones, it was easy to communicate with someone next to us or a few feet away, but difficult with someone across town, the country or the globe. We came to take it for granted.

But cellphones make long-distance communication common, and endanger our time by ourselves. Now time alone, or a conversation with someone next to us which cannot be interrupted by a phone, is something to be cherished (珍惜). Even cellphone devotees, myself usually included, can’t help at times wanting to throw their phones away, or curse the day they were invented.

But we don’t and won’t, and there really is no need. All that’s required to take back our private time is a general social recognition that we have the right to it.

In other words, we have to develop a healthy contempt (轻视) for the rings of our own phones. Given the ease of making and receiving cellphone calls, if we don’t talk to the caller right now, we surely will shortly later.

A cellphone call deserves no greater priority than a random word from the person next to us. Though the call on my cellphone may be the one-in-a-million from Steven Spielberg — who has finally read my novel and wants to make it his next movie. But most likely it is not, and I’m better off thinking about the idea I just had for a new story, or the slice of pizza I’ll eat for lunch.