1 . China has set new rules limiting the amount of time children can play online games. The rules limit children to just three hours of online game playing a week. That is one hour between 8 p. m. and 9 p. m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday most weeks.

Li Zhanguo has two children aged 4 and 8. Even though they do not have smartphones, they enjoy playing online games. Like many other parents. Li is happy with new government rules. But experts say it is unclear if such policies can help prevent addiction to online games. Children might just get addicted to social media instead. In the end, experts say, parents should be the ones to set limits and support good practice.

There has been a growing concern in China about gaming addiction among children. Government reports in 2018 found that about one in ten Chinese children were addicted to the Internet. The new rules are part of an effort to prevent young people from spending too much time on unhealthy entertainment. That includes what officials call the “irrational fan culture”

Under the new rules, the responsibility for making sure children play only three hours a day as largely on Chinese gaming companies like Net Ease and Ten cent. Companies have set up real-name registration systems to prevent young users from going past game time limits. They have used facial recognition technology to check their identities. And they have also set up a program that permits people to report what is against the law. It is unclear what punishments gaming companies may face if they do not carry out the policies. And even if such policies are performed, it is also unclear whether they can prevent online addiction.

A specialist treating Internet addiction expects about 20 percent of children will find ways to break the rules by borrowing accounts of their older relatives and find a way around facial recognition. In his opinion, short-video alps such as Douyin and Kuaishou are also very popular in China. They are not under the same restrictions as games.

These days more and more genetically modified crops have been appearing on supermarket shelves, which are favored by many consumers.

4 . Mark Bertram lost the tips of two fingers at work in 2018 when his hand became trapped in a fan belt. “It’s life-changing but it’s not life-ending,” he says. “Doing work is harder now. Everything is just a little different.”

After two surgeries and occupational therapy, Bertram decided to make light of his condition by asking Eric Catalano, a tattoo (纹身) artist, to create fingernail (手指甲) tattoos. The idea made everyone in the studio laugh — until they saw the final result. “The mood changed,” Catalano recalls from his Eternal Ink Tattoo Studio in Hecker, Illinois. “Everything turned from ridiculous to wow.”

When Catalano posted a photo of the tattoos, a pair of fingernails looking so real that no one could believe their eyes, he had no idea the image would eventually be viewed by millions of people around the world.

The photo pushed Catalano, 40, further into the world of paramedical tattooing. Now people with life-altering scars come from as far away as Ireland to visit his shop. Using flesh-toned inks and a needle, Catalano transforms his clients’ view of themselves.

Leslie Pollan, 32, a dog breeder in Oxford, Mississippi, was bitten on the face by a puppy in 2014. After undergoing countless surgeries to correct a scar on her lip but in vain, she ultimately turned to Catalano, who covered her lip scar, giving her back a piece of her confidence. Pollan says, “It made me have a different outlook on life.”

“Every time I see that emotion from my customers, I’m 100 percent sure this is something that I can’t stop doing.”

6 . Search online “work too much” and you’ll get screenfuls of information about the harmful medical, mental and social consequences of spending too much time on the job. However, under current circumstances, the old saying “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” should be “makes Jack a dead boy.”

A latest study by W.H.O. says that working 55 or more hours a week is a “serious health risk”. It estimates that long working hours led to 745,000 deaths worldwide in 2016, a 29 percent increase over 2000. Men accounted for 72 percent of the deaths; the worst concentrations were in the Western Pacific and Southeast Asia, and particularly among 60 to 79-year-olds who had worked long hours after the age of 45.

These figures make long working hours the biggest work-related health risk of all. Risk of a stroke rises by 35 percent and of deadly heart disease by 17 percent for those who can’t or won’t stop working, compared with people who work 35 to 40 hours a week. The pandemic, and especially remote work, has created new opportunities to work too hard.

The W.H.O. director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, noted that teleworking has blurred the line between work and home and that people who have survived layoffs (裁员) at struggling businesses have ended up working longer hours. One survey found an overwhelming majority of American employees have shortened, postponed or canceled vacations during the pandemic.

The red flags about overwork have been waving for years all around the world. Exhaustion has been identified as a factor in industrial disasters like the BP oil refinery explosion in Texas City in 2005 and the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. In Japan, long working hours are so common that “karoshi,” translated as “death by overwork”, is a legally recognized cause of death.

So, working less is a matter of life and death, isn’t it?

7 . 阅读下面短文，在空白处填入1个适当的单词或括号内单词的正确形式。

Every day many teens wake up frightened of     1     (go) to school. School bullying (校园欺凌) is a problem     2     affects millions of students, and it makes everyone     3     (worry), not just the kids. Yet because parents, teachers and other adults don’t always see it, they may not understand how bad bullying can be.

School bullying can threaten students’ physical and mental     4     (safe) at school and can influence their ability to learn. There     5     (be) a number of things you can do to make schools safe and prevent bullying.

For younger kids, the best way of solving the bullying problem is to tell     6     trusted adult. For teens, the tell-an-adult way depends on the bullying situation. If you see or hear someone being beaten, you should step in     7     (stop) the bullying right away. If you cannot stop it by     8     (you), then find someone who can. It is important to keep the bully away from the person he or she is bullying. Do not force the two parties to be in the same room together.

Bullying is a problem that can cause serious damage unless the problem     9     (solve) in time. Take any bullying that you hear about very     10     (serious). You might even need to call the police in some situations.

9 . Young children are significantly more likely than adults to have their opinions influenced by robots, according to a new research. The study, conducted at the University of Plymouth, compared how adults and children respond to an identical task when in the presence of both their peers (同龄人) and robots.

It showed that while adults regularly have their opinions influenced by peers, something also demonstrated in previous studies, they are largely able to resist(抵制) being persuaded by robots. However, children aged between seven and nine were more likely to give the same responses as the robots, even if they were obviously incorrect.

The study asks people to look at a screen showing four lines and say which two match in length. When alone, people almost never make a mistake but when doing the experiment with others, they tend to follow what others are saying.

When children were alone in the room in this research, they scored 87% on the test, but when the robots join in their score drops to 75%. And of the wrong answers, 74% matched those of the robot.

Professor Belpaeme said, “People often follow the opinions of others and we’ve known for a long time that it is hard to resist taking over views and opinions of people around us. But as robots will soon be found in the home and the workplace, we were wondering if people would follow robots.”

“What our results show is that adults do not follow what the robots are saying. But when we did the experiment with children, they did. It shows children can perhaps have more of an affinity (亲和力) with robots than adults, which does pose the question: What if robots were to suggest, for example, what products to buy or what to think?”