1 . Most college students think that there are only two choices after graduation—finding a job or entering graduate school. An opportunity that is often missed is volunteering with an organized volunteer program.

Volunteering provides a year of intention (计划) in a community where recent graduates can learn about the world they are entering, about themselves as individuals (个体) and about their role in this world. It provides intentional time to understand the purpose that drives one as an individual in life. Taking a year off after graduation to volunteer allows students to slow down and really understand where they want their future to lie. Not only this, but students will also be helping others, getting work experience, living in a community and giving back to society.

Volunteering often leads to a job opportunity. A volunteer might stay and work with the organization, shifting from a volunteer position to a paid position. For example, an individual doing volunteer teaching with an organization might be offered a teaching position at their school. Even if the volunteer position does not lead to a paid position, the volunteer should keep in touch with their organization. One reason is that the organization can write letters of recommendation (推荐) for the volunteer’s job applications. What’s more, volunteer experience on a resume could catch the attention of schoolmates from the organization or program who work at a place of employment (雇用). A shared volunteer experience with the manager might help one find a job!

Volunteers have fun together and like helping others a lot. They share a common mission and vision (使命和愿景), continue personal and professional development, and get new ideas about the world around them. They get to know the community, practice their social responsibility, and build their skill set and network with others. Even if volunteers are not paid, they receive these and many other benefits through their service.

3 . GE Money has recently done a study. It shows that women spend over 8 years of their life shopping. According to the study, women spend about 400 hours each year shopping. Almost a quarter of that time is spent doing some shopping for food.

Luckily, Million Looks magazine says that shopping can be a good thing, and they give some interesting facts about women and shopping. The magazine says that women who shop for more than 17 hours a week are thinner and healthier than those who spend less time shopping. The magazine also says that women who shop more often look and feel much younger than those who dislike shopping. Finally, they say that most women who enjoy shopping are more confident and happier.

We cannot be sure if these things are true, but one thing that is really true is that shopping is big business. There are now about 50,000 shopping malls in the United States alone, and each person spends $ 75 each time they visit a mall.

The shopping malls also try their best to encourage people to spend as much as possible, and stay in the mall as long as possible. Escalators are placed in so that people can use them to pass many different stores. You may have also noticed that places to sit are hard to find in malls. This is because people can’t spend money when they are sitting!

5 . The concept of showing movies outdoors isn’t novel. However, it let an auto-parts salesman such as Hollingshead find a way to give a car-loving society one more activity they could do in their cars.

He first imagined the drive-in as the answer to a problem. “His mother was rather fat for indoor theater seats,” says Jim Kopp of the United Drive-in Theatre Owners Association. “So he seated her in a car and put a 1928 projector (放映机) on top of the car, and tied two bed sheets to trees in his yard.”

Hollingshead experimented for a few years before he created a ramp (坡道) system for cars to park at different heights so everyone could see the screen. He opened the gates to his theater in 1933. A few others followed.

“Drive-ins started to take off in the 1950s,” Kopp says. “They offered family entertainment. People could sit in their cars and bring their babies... Drive-ins offered more comfort than indoor theaters.” The indoor theaters were easier about scheduling, and could show one film five or six times a day instead of only at night.

D. Vogel, owner of the Benjies Drive-In near Baltimore, Md, says the price of land is the real reason many drive-ins disappeared. “People would build on the outer areas of town, and the town would grow,” he says. “Many drive-ins were mom-and-pop businesses that few sons and daughers chose to continue running. The results were a decreasing (减少的) number of drive-ins throughout the country.” Today about 400 drive-ins remain in the United States and another 100 drive-ins exist mainly in Canada and Australia.

“The digital cinema will be both a threat and an opportunity for drive-in owners,” says Patrick Corcoran, the association’s director of media and research. “Digital will allow them to get new movies sooner than they do. But the digital cinemas will be expensive to manage, and some people may not be able to do it.”

Kopp of course bets on the drive-ins’ survival. He and his wife bought an outdoor theatre. He says they have invested about $300,000 to modernize the technology. Today the theatre can hold 265 cars and show movies on a 60-foot-by-80-foot screen.

6 . In the early 1970s American women gave birth, on average, to 2.12 children each. By 2018 that number had fallen to 1.73. Jordan Nickerson and David Solomon, professors at MIT, think they have found an interesting factor which help explain this change: America’s increasingly protective child car-seat laws.

Their study examines the effect that car-seat policies may have had on American birth rates. During the 1980s, only the children aged under three had to be secured in child-safety seats. But since then, the requirements have been slowly increased. Today, most places in America make children sit in safety seats until their eighth birthdays. That concern for youngsters’ safety has had the unexpected consequence of fewer three-child families.

In drawing this conclusion they have connected population data with changes in state laws on safety seats. They discovered that stricter laws had no noticeable effects on the rates of births of first and second children, but with a drop, on average, of 0.73 percentage points in the number of women giving birth to a third while the first two were young enough to need safety seats.

The professors also made two other related observations. The reduction they saw was limited to families that did actually have access to a car. And space in the vehicle is the important factor. In pre-safety-seat days, putting three young children into the back of a family car was a perfectly practical advice. Most such cars, though, can comfortably accommodate only two safety seats. So, as the child car-seat laws change, a family must wait longer time for a third child to fit in the car. Sometimes, that wait will mean no third child is ever born.

Unless, of course, the family concerned buys a bigger car. But average families have the obvious reasons not to do so — big cars cost more, and are more costly to run. Interestingly, Dr Nickerson and Dr Solomon found that the third-child deterrent (遏制作用) appears even stronger among wealthier families. As they observe, “large cars may reflect their real status and taste, which may make people unwilling to switch even when they can afford to.”

10 . Sharing is a good thing, right? We are told that it is good for the environment by cutting waste and needless consumption. We encourage it in our children for their moral growth, and when we think of it as a neighborhood activity, we get a glow of warmth (无比温暖的感觉). But how many people actually go and ask a neighbor for a cup of sugar?

A report, Social Cities, outlines worrying signs about the increase in social isolation (孤立) and loneliness in Australian cities. As one of ideas for social connection in cities, sharing house or car resources is listed in the report. Environmentalist Ted suggests we share more things in his professional writing The Simpler Way, and his call is supported by environmental groups. The Australian Conservation Foundation encourages organized sharing through popular articles such as Give a Little, Take a Little and Join the Free Cycling Sharehood. In these articles, online sharing networks like “The Sharehood” and “Friends with Things” are promoted. These websites make the exchange of goods and services easier.

The idea of The Sharehood has been warmly received by citizens with many people signing up as members, yet very few go on to take advantage of the network. The media has also actively advertised the concept, yet not much actually gets shared. It is interesting that giving the idea of sharing as “the right thing to do” was common among those involved in The Sharehood, as well as those who were not. And most interesting of all, neither group shared more or less than the other.

So why are neighborhood sharing networks failing? With so many people willing to share items, generously posting offers to fix computers or lend wheelchairs, what could possibly be going wrong? The problem is in our definition (定义) of “sharing”. In practice, sharing is considered to be an act of generosity, rather than the common use or ownership of goods, time, or experience. We are taught as children that sharing is about being generous — no more than that.