5 . Due to the heavy academic pressure and safety issues, our children’s movements are limited by a lack of extra-curricular activities, which usually ensure that they meet the daily recommended level of physical activity.

For those children attending a high school, my own included, the morning and afternoon walk could be the only chance that they get to spend time outside. This is a golden opportunity to add sports into their day, without taking part in group sports or going to a closed indoor gym(健身房).

For walking to school, there are also many other benefits, such as improving school performance, reducing anxiety, improving spirits, better sleep, a sense of independence,opportunities to meet friends or think alone, paying attention to small details and being amazed by the surrounding environment.

However, parents still have fears. Parents fear cars, injury, extreme weather and even wild animals. These fears, many of which are almost impossible to happen, prevent parents from allowing their children to do something that’s actually beneficial to them. “Removing an opportunity to be active leads to an increase in childhood obesity(肥胖), which can have a greater negative impact on a child’s life than the risk of being injured due to being active,” saidDr. Mariana Brussoni, a professor who researches children’s outdoor and risky play.

When it comes to changing the culture around parents driving children to school, much work still needs to be done. Therefore, parents should try to let go slowly and give up the idea that driving their children to school is convenient. Brussoni said, “We hope to shift parents from focusing on protecting their children to trusting their independent abilities.Schools can also play a role in encouraging children to walk to school.”

6 . Some immigrants (外来移民) in the northeastern part of the US, Maine, are learning to lose their accents. They speak English fluently but have a difficult time being understood because they have heavy accents.

Nyirabahizi said she left her home and job in Rwanda two years ago, coming to America in hopes of a brighter future. She has a master’s degree in computer science and speaks English fluently. She said all of her classes in Rwanda were taught in English, but here she had to learn again because of her accent.

She attended a free class to reduce her accent with seven other students. The city of Portland conducted the class and Greenlaw was the teacher. She said immigrants who had reduced their accents had greater success at work. And they could communicate more easily with store workers, teachers, doctors and neighbors. “It’s a basic need to be understood,” Greenlaw told the newspaper, “It affects every part of their lives.”

Greenlaw began the class by telling students the 44 sounds of the English language. She told the students how the lips and jaws worked to form the sound. She told the students that some American English pronunciation rules didn’t make a lot of sense. But she said it was important to learn them if immigrants wanted to be understood by Americans.

Losing one’s accent is especially important for immigrants who live in Maine. More than 90 percent of the population of Maine are whites. Many people who live in Maine have not heard foreign accents except in movies or on televisions.

Greenlaw said some Mainers were impatient with people who spoke English with heavy accents. Her students said some Mainers ignored them or were unfriendly toward them because of their accents. They said this made them less likely to speak.

7 . Plenty, an agricultural technology company in San Francisco, is reinventing farms and farming. Nater Storye, the company’s chief science officer says the future of the farms will be vertical (垂直的) and indoors, so food can be grown anywhere in the world all year round, and farms will employ robots and artificial intelligence (AI) to improve the quality of growth for fruits and vegetables. Plenty does all those things but uses 95% less water and 99% less land.

As AI is on the rise, farmers on flat farms have been using new tools to make farming better or easier. In recent years, they have been using drones (无人机) and robots to improve efficiency. However, flat farms still use a lot of water and land, while a Plenty’s vertical farm can produce the same quantity of fruits and vegetables as a 720-acre flat farm, but on only 2 acres.

Plenty’s climate-controlled indoor farm has rows of plants growing vertically. There are LED lights shining on them, robots moving them around, and AI managing all the variables of water, temperature, and light. The conditions are so good that the production per acre is 400 times higher than that of an outdoor farm.

Another advantage of vertical farming is that the fruits and vegetables are grown at a warehouse nearby instead of 1,000 miles away or more from a city. That means many transportation miles are saved, which can reduce millions of tons of greenhouse gases every year and the price of fruits and vegetables will also go down. Imported (进口的) fruits and vegetables are more expensive, so poor people in society are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could cope with this problem.

Also, Plenty’s farms grow organic food without using herbicides (除草剂) or pesticides. They recycle all the water used, even catching the water in the air. The best farm in San Francisco is using 100% renewable energy.

Moreover, all the packaging is 100% recyclable, made of recycled plastic and specially designed to keep the food fresh longer to reduce food waste. Ideally, the company will branch out, opening farms across the country and beyond.

8 . “My goal is that the City of Atlanta becomes the best place in the United States to raise a family,” says Mayor (市长) Andre Dickens about the capital of Georgia.

Dickens grew up in Atlanta. Recently, he was asked about his main goals for this city of nearly 500,000 people. His focus, he said, is on the youth. For that reason, he told the public officially 2023 is the Year of the Youth.

“Whatever we do, we have to think about young people,” Dickens said. “Atlanta’s young people are our future. Continuing to invest (投资) in future generations puts them on pathways to success that will help us move Atlanta forward together.”

Dickens said that after he put forward the idea of the Year of the Youth, businesses, nonprofits, and other community members all said, “I want to be in on that.”

Businesses offer summer internship (实习) programs. They allow students in Atlanta to get valuable experience in the workplace. Dickens explained that several businesses in the city even made their working environments suitable for young people to join in internships.

Improving education is another key goal. Schools and city leaders have been working together to make their partnership in the service of young people stronger. Toward this end, the city is working to improve educational opportunities, create safe ways to school, and offer after-school activities for free or at little cost.

Dickens also believes that it’s important to invest in early education. Investing in early education, he explained, means that more young people will be able to develop basic skills, stopping them from falling behind later in life.

Dickens is looking forward to positive results. “Everyone’s getting ready to serve the young people over the summer,” he said.

On Xiaohongshu, a lifestyle-focused social media platform in China, a search for “new Chinese style” could produce over 4 million results,     1     (most) user posts. That number becomes important when you find out it is double     2     number of results for a similar search for European and US styles that     3     (be) popular in China once upon a time. For the younger generation, at a time when traditional culture is becoming popular, the “new Chinese style” is similar to a national symbol — worth     4     (discover), worn proudly, and encouraged.

Whether it is fashion, home furniture, architecture, coffee     5     weddings, every possible field is now being enriched by “Chinese style” — a reflection of growing     6     (confident) in local culture. The origin of the “new Chinese style” is the younger generation’s fascination and love for     7     (tradition) culture. Because of young people’s unique understanding and brave imagination of Chinese culture, “China-Chic” (中国时尚) is now a trend that has gone global. The new wave of Oriental aesthetics (东方美学)     8     (sweep) the world nowadays.

    9     addition, the ability of the increasingly mature younger generation in China     10     (use) online media has helped more people hear their views and understand the stories of the new era represented by the new Chinese style.