2 . People who cross the street while looking at their phones may be fined in the city of Xiamen, Fujian province, as traffic police officers are enforcing (施行) a local regulation that was put into effect on August 1st.

A pedestrian who was crossing the street on Tuesday while looking at their phone was given a warning, becoming the city’s first to receive a reprimand (训斥) for the behavior.

The Traffic Safety Regulation on Zebra Lines in Xiamen Special Economic Zone, made into a law on Tuesday, states pedestrians should not browse their electronic devices or engage in other activities that may end anger traffic safety while using crossing lanes. Those who violate this rule and delay or stop the progress of the normal passage of vehicles are supposed to be given a warning or a fine of 50 yuan($7).

The regulation was made in response to motions by legislators (立法委员) to the Xiamen people’s congress. “Through putting uncivilized behavior right via legal means, we hope to create a better environment for drivers and pedestrians to better understand and interact with each other,” said Wu Tao, an official at the local congress.

Su Guoqiang, a deputy to the congress among those who raised the motion, said more than 20 percent of traffic accidents in Xiamen happened on crosswalks. “We hope to use the punishment of the ‘small’ act of browsing phones as something to prevent people from doing such a thing,” he told China Central Television.

Peng Chong, a traffic police officer in Xiamen, told CCTV for the time being they will mostly educate and warn violators and make everyone involved in traffic aware of the rules.

3 . Am I the only one, or do other parents also wish there could be a period between high school and college when our kids could think what they want to be when they grow up? You know, that’s the time when they could be exposed to a variety of professions.

So why do teens need to take a sabbatical(休假) after high school? As a teenager with limited knowledge and experience, it’s really hard to decide what career path he/she wants to follow as an adult. After the period, they could be certain about it.

Some kids know what they want to do from an early age and they follow that track in college and end up in that field as adults. And that’s fantastic for them. But they’re the minority, because I found a statistic from an article that confirms that 80% of college-bound students have to choose a major. But they are also expected to pick out schools and apply to and start degree programs without clearly knowing where they want to end up. And that is shocking.

That’s why I’ve often thought it makes more sense to design a sabbatical, a time when high school graduates can go to sample a handful of careers before they head off to college. The time can give them a chance to examine different fields before they commit to one discipline for the next four years of their life and beyond.

What I’m talking about is different from the gap year, which is designed to let our kids take a step back between high school and college, so they can maturely consider the benefits of higher education. It’s a different kind of option altogether. I’m suggesting something more like a series of internships (实习期), for lack of a better word, in their potential fields of study, so they can really see first-hand what a career in education or law or nursing is like from the inside and not just from a lecture hall.

5 . Artificial intelligence (AI) tools designed to operate at human levels have greatly expanded in popularity over the past year. These include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s AI-powered search engine Bing. Such tools, also known as chatbots or generative AI, are computer-powered systems. They are designed to interact smoothly with humans and perform high-level writing and creative work.

In recent months, these tools have demonstrated an ability to produce high-quality work. This has led some technology experts to warn that generative AI systems could end up replacing workers in many industries.

This year, researchers at Harvard Business School and other organizations carried out an experiment. It aimed to test how well AI tools could help workers perform their usual duties or tasks. It involved more than 700 business advisors, called consultants, from Massachusetts-based Boston Consulting Group.

Harvard Business School recently published the results from the experiment in a working paper. The main findings suggest that AI tools like ChatGPT can greatly improve worker performance. For example, researchers found that, on average, workers who used OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT 4 tool completed 12 percent more tasks than non-ChatGPT users. Tasks carried out with help from the AI technology were completed 25 percent faster. And the team found the quality of work performed by consultants using ChatGPT 4 increased by about 40 percent.

However, the paper also noted areas where the performance of consultants using ChatGPT 4 dropped. The researchers said this was especially true with tasks the AI tool was not good at completing. “Of tasks the AI was good at, the experiment showed it significantly improved human performance,” the paper said. “But for tasks ChatGPT 4 was not right for, humans relied too much on the AI and were more likely to make mistakes.”

The team suggests one of the biggest barriers to companies effectively using AI is not knowing which tasks can be completed best with the technology. Finding this out will require businesses to carry out thoughtful research and training efforts in order to find the right mix of AI and human-level work.

6 . A major emergency can create hundreds of thousands of refugees (难民) overnight. The most immediate way in which organizations like UNHCR and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) can help these refugees is by setting up refugee camps. Refugee camps are designed to be temporary, but they often remain in place for decades. In some parts of the world, children have grown up and had children of their own without ever leaving their camp.

Critics argue that they force refugees to be entirely dependent on donations. One journalist who visited the Nyadeou camp in the south of the Republic of Guinea A (Africa) in 2001, described how normally peaceful people were reduced to fighting with each other when the food truck arrived.

Refugees camps can easily become dirty, overcrowded and are overrun with disease or crime. In many camps, drug dealers hide themselves among the majority of innocent refugees.

One alternative for refugees is to settle in a town or village, making them become part of the local population. This is known as the “self-settlement”. Several aid agencies argue that the self-settlement is a better option in many cases than refugee camps. They say that self-settled refugees can start to rebuild their lives straight away, and are freer and safer than refugees in camps. Oxfam, the ICRC and many other international aid agencies support programs in which refugees are helped to self-settle.

Representatives of UNHCR argue that refugee camps are the best way of saving the greatest possible numbers of lives. They point out that it is much easier to help people if they are all gathered in one place. This is certainly true of emergency relief, for example the distribution of food, water, shelters and medical supplies. It is also true that long-term aid programs, such as family tracing, orphan support and, perhaps most importantly, education, can all be carried out much more easily when refugees are all living together in one place.

8 . Modern museums are trying everything they can to shore up declining attendance. Somehow, there always seems to be some crisis that they are struggling against — a severe funding cut, for example. What’s worse, the unappreciative public is going farther and farther away. So museums do what they can to attract people, and the results are occasionally wonderful and occasionally laughable.

The worst of such results occurs when some curator, someone who is in charge of a museum, decides that the reason the audience isn’t pouring through the doors is that the content is over their heads — the history presented is too complex and political, the art too abstract, or the scientific explanations too in-depth. What occurs then is a uniform simplifying of the exhibits. Text is minimized, and historically significant pieces are passed over in favor of those more pretty and pleasing. The museum becomes a place where people go to look at pretty things instead of a place for learning, understanding and appreciating different cultures, art, and science.

All these efforts have given rise to the concept of “edutainment”— a mixture in which learning is supposed to be accomplished without any effort at all on the part of the visitor. Displays are constructed with an eye toward their entertainment value, with relevant facts slipped secretly in, as though learning were a bitter pill that must be sugarcoated before the average museum visitors can be induced (劝诱) to swallow it. But true education is an active pursuit, not something one receives like a piece of candy. The museum’s job should be to inspire visitors to look deeper, not to force-feed them predigested facts.

If a museum becomes indistinguishable from a theme park, it has failed. Nonprofit institutions exist because, if they did not, no for-profit institutions would serve their function. If active scholarship is missing, then by all means, supply it, instead of shaping the museum to resemble successful entertainment enterprises.

9 . Fragile. Oversensitive. Glued to their phones.     1     While there may be some truth to these stereotypical (刻板印象的) features, there might be more to this generation of teens than what is generally observed.

Never before have the lives of any generation of teens been as flooded with mobile technology and social media as the teens of this generation.     2     This is in contrast to the more village spirit or community-oriented attitude of their parents’ and grandparents’ days. We have teens who may not know about who lives in the unit next to theirs, much less offer a friendly nod or wave when they happen to cross paths with a neighbour.

    3     Arguably, the very connectedness that social media brings about has led to an opening of minds and a flourishing (繁盛) of dialogue among people of diverse cultures and backgrounds. Logging onto platforms where people of all walks of life meet means that one is exposed to those people and their distinctive ways of life. In comparison, the parents or grandparents of this generation of teens probably did not have the same opportunity to get to know people outside of their social circles at their age, and are thus more likely to have fixed, stereotypical opinions of people different from them. This generation of teens, on the other hand, has the chance to use this technology to learn more about and attempt to understand the variety and diversity out there.     4    

To conclude, the teens of this generation differ in many ways from their predecessors (前辈), in some ways more positive than others.     5     Therefore, this generation of teens differs from past generations, with the changes around them.

10 . Experts say that students usually need eight to ten hours’ sleep at night, but most Chinese students do not get enough sleep. Some Chinese parents are usually glad to see their children studying late. They will think their children work very hard, but not all parents are happy about this. Once a mother told us that every morning her 10-year-old boy put up one finger with his eyes still closed, begging (请求) for one more minute to sleep. Like thousands of students “early birds”  in China, he has to get up before six every morning.

A report shows that without a good night sleep, students seem to be weaker (虚弱) than they should be. Many students have fallen asleep during class at one time or another. Too much homework is not the only reason why students stay up late. Some watch TV or play the computer games late into the night.

Experts have ever said that the students should develop good study habits. So some clever students never study late, and they are able to work well in class.