1 . With fingers and wrists wrapped in medicated tape, Zhang Guimei, founder and principal of the first free high school for girls in China, was given the honor of the country’s “role model for teachers” and “outstanding woman”.

Zhang met her husband in Dali and worked as a teacher in a local school. Unfortunately, her husband died of cancer not long after their marriage. Sadly, Zhang decided to leave this place with which she was too familiar. After that, she volunteered to teach at a middle school in Huaping, a poverty-stricken county located in the mountains.

Over time, Zhang witnessed the gender gap in education up close in relatively poor rural areas. Urban and rural students already faced unequal chance to quality education, and the traditional belief of male superiority(优越) only worsened rural girls’ situation. She discovered that many female students would just disappear after studying for a while and some girls were even pulled out of class just before the college entrance exam. The reasons varied: to pay for the younger brother’s tuition(学费), the girl’s parents would have her quit and return home to earn money; the family received engagement gifts(订婚礼物)...

In 2002, Zhang came up with an idea which, to many, seemed crazy: to found a free high school for girls. Six years later, with help from the Party and the local government and personal donations, she founded the Huaping All-Girls High School. With the goal of never letting a girl fall behind in schooling, Zhang often works overtime despite suffering from several kinds of illnesses. She has walked to almost every household deep in the mountains, talking to the parents about the importance of education for girls.

The efforts paid off. Over the past 13 years, her school has sent 1,800 girls to universities. “To educate a girl is to change the destiny of three generations. A cultured, responsible mother won’t let her daughter drop out of school,” Zhang said.

2 . Picture a typical MBA lecture theatre twenty years ago. In it the majority of students will have conformed to (符合)the standard model of the time: male, middle class and Western. Walk into a class today, however, and you'll get a completely different impression. For a start, you will now see plenty more women-the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, for example, boasts that 40% of its new enrolment is female, you will also see a wide range of ethnic groups and nationals of practically every country.

It might be tempting, therefore, to think that the old barriers have been broken down and equal opportunity achieved. But, increasingly, this apparent diversity(多样化) is becoming a mask for a new type of conformity. Behind the differences in sex, skin tones and mother tongues, there are common attitudes, expectations and ambitions which risk creating a set clones among the business leaders of the future.

Diversity, it seems, has not helped to deal with basic weaknesses in business leadership. So, what can be done to create more effective managers of the commercial world? According to Valerie Gauthier, associate dean at HEC Paris, the key lies in the process by which MBA programs recruit(招募) their students. At the moment candidates are selected on a fairly narrow set of standards such as previous academic and career performance, and analytical and problem solving abilities.   This is then coupled to a school's mixture of what a diverse class should look like, with the result that passport, ethnic origin and sex can all become influencing factors. But schools rarely dig down to find out what really makes an applicant succeed, to create a class which also contains diversity of attitude and approach-arguably the only diversity that, in a business context, really matters.

Professor Gauthier believes schools should not just be selecting candidates from traditional sectors such as banking, consultancy and industry. They should also be seeking individuals who have backgrounds in areas such as political science, the creative arts, history or philosophy, which will allow them to put business decisions into a wider context.

Indeed, there does seem to be a demand for the more rounded leaders such diversity might create. A study by Mannaz, a leadership development company, suggests that, while the bully-boy chief executive of old may not have been removed completely, there is a definite shift in emphasis towards less tough styles of management-at least in America and Europe. Perhaps most significant, according to Mannaz, is the increasing interest large companies have in more collaborative management models, such as those popular in Scandinavia, which seek to combine the hard and soft aspects of leadership and encourage delegated responsibility.

5 . With the development of our society, cellphones have become a common part in our lives. Have you ever run into a careless cellphone user in the street? Maybe they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new "species" of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name—phubbers (低头族).

Recently a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cellphone while letting his patient die. A pretty woman takes a selfie (自拍) in front of a car accident site. And a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events will finally lead to the destruction(毁灭) of the world.

Although the ending of the film sounds unrealistic, the damage phubbing can bring is real. Your health is the first to bear the effect and the result of it. "Always bending your head to check your cellphone could damage your neck," Guangming Daily quoted doctors' words. "The neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching." Also, staring at cellphones for a long time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. When getting together with family or friends, many people prefer to play their cellphones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

It can also cost your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cellphones in broad daylight.

6 . You may be wondering what benefits students gain from cooperative learning. The answer is many! Other than giving students the opportunity to learn from each other, cooperative learning, of course, teaches a number of social and emotional skills.     1    

In order for a cooperative learning group to succeed, individuals within the group need to show leadership abilities.     2     Natural leaders become quickly obvious in small groups, but most students don’t naturally want to lead. Assign(分配) leadership roles of different importance to every member of a group to help all individuals practice leading.

    3    All members of a cooperative learning group have to learn to speak productively with one another to stay on track. By teaching students to share confidently, listen carefully, and speak clearly, they learn to value the input of their teammates and the quality of their work improves greatly.

There are many decisions to be made in a cooperative environment. Encourage students to think as a team to make joint decisions by first having them come up with a team name.       5     Make sure that each student has their own responsibilities in cooperative learning groups. Much like leadership skills, decision-making skills cannot be developed if students are not regularly practicing them.

7 . Today, getting information is as easy as opening a browser on your computer/phone, typing in a question and waiting a second for a long list of links to load. These websites will promise to answer your question. But actually, they may not be all that trustworthy. Figuring out which site is believable and which is false takes work. It isn’t impossible, though. Actually, it is what every good journalist (新闻记者) does daily. And students and other non-journalists also can do it.

To check a new claim (声明), good reporters contact experts on the topic. In journalism, such experts are known as “sources”. This may be a scientist who discovered something new in the lab. Or it could be the witness to a crime.

However, not everything is easy. For instance, if there’s a forest fire, how do you know where it started, when and how? You can ask government officials, but they may not know. You can talk to people near the fire shortly after it started. But unless someone spotted the fire as it happened, people may never know for sure. They may simply offer speculation. Saying something “might have” or even “probably” started that fire isn’t a fact. So you’d have to qualify any statement about the fire’s origins.

I describe such words as “weasel words”. These words and phrases include “might” “could have” “was likely to have been”, etc. Whenever something isn’t known for sure, journalists will highlight their uncertainty by using weasel words. They never over-blow claims to the readers.

A good reporter should be paid for the work he does. Some blogs and even news sites are authored by unpaid writers. Many of these writers are untrained in reporting, and their reports may not provide the depth. Thus, if the news you’re reading is free to the world online, consider what that may mean. Overall, you should be skeptical (怀疑的). That’s acting like a journalist.

8 . The word addiction usually makes you think of alcohol(酒精) or drugs.     1     Some people are compulsive (难以自制的) shoppers. Others find it impossible to pull themselves away from their work. Still others spend countless hours watching TV or playing computer games.

    2     Many people enjoy going to malls or stores more and more every day, but it’s more than a common hobby for some of them. They have turned into shopaholics. They are people who simply enjoy shopping and walking around spending money without being able to stop doing it. They are hooked on shopping and usually buy things that they don’t need. Even though they don’t have enough money, they buy everything they want.

The question is: why do they have this addiction? There isn’t a specific answer. Some people go shopping when they are sad, worried, upset or lonely and they want to feel better. They use this activity as a way to forget their problems. Shopaholics say that they feel more important and better after they buy something.     3    

Shopaholism seems to be a harmless addiction, but it can bring out problems. Some of them can be psychological(心理的). If this is the case, people addicted to shopping should go to a support group to help them break this habit. However, the process, like for most addictions, is long, and they suffer a lot.     4     They just think about satisfying their feelings, so they spend money they don’t have.     5    

10 . Singapore uses about two billion liters of water every day-a number it expects could double in the next four decades.

That kind of consumption is adding pressure to the Asian city state to address growing concerns about global water shortage. So it's building new technology to prepare itself for a future where obtaining clean water will be even more difficult. "Singapore truly has become a global water center,"said Shane Snyder,executive director of the Nanyang Environment & Water Research Institute at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University. “But as it stands, it imports approximately 40% of its water today. And with climate change,that water has become far less dependable.”

Singapore, meanwhile, is home to more than five million people and is covered in fountains,reservoirs and other water features-including the world's tallest indoor waterfall, The Rain Vortex that pumps about 45,000 liters of water per minute. But it has no natural water sources of its own,instead relying heavily on recycled water and imports from its neighbors.

Snyder's research facility is one of several places developing solutions for Singapore's water dependency. The hope is to create projects that could be used across the city. "What we have become used to as reliable water may quickly change-so we have to be prepared,and we have to be thinking about the basic facilities in advance. " Snyder said. " There's a big drive to become water independent-to control our own future -and that is largely dependent on the technologies we're developing. "

Another company,Wateroam, is already taking innovation from Singapore to the rest of the region. Founded in 2014,Wateroam says it has developed a lightweight,portable filtration（过滤）device that has already provided clean drinking water to more than 75,000 people across Southeast Asia. Wateroam CEO David Pong said one of the most innovative aspects of the product is its simplicity. The water filtration device is no bigger than a bicycle pump,yet it can provide clean water to villages of 100 people for up to two years.

"We've been very blessed to have access to clean drinking water," Pong said. It's necessary to bring the privilege to the rest of the region, and advocate that clean water is an essential aspect for life on Earth,according to him.