1 . Last weekend, I said goodbye to another dear old friend. We had 12 fine years together, but our relationship was becoming dysfunctional(不正常的). Unwanted emissions and serious health problems were the final straw, leaving me with no choice but to make a trip to the knacker’s(收废汽车者的)yard.

I am now car-free for the first time in 20 years, and it feels strange. When I gave up meat, I did so mainly for environmental reasons, and I didn’t miss it at all. I would like to say the same about my car, but I can’t. It was first and foremost a financial decision: keeping the old car on the road was getting too expensive.

But doing the right thing for the wrong reasons is still doing the right thing — I now have a chance to rethink how I move myself and my family around, and can try to find a more environmentally friendly means of transport.

Going car-free is, I think, a lifestyle change that many of us are going to make over the next few years, as car ownership becomes increasingly unnecessary, expensive and socially unacceptable. However, it is easier said than done. Now my car is gone. I still need to get around. But how? I already cycle to work and use public transport when appropriate. But there are some occasions when a car seems to be the only way.

I won’t buy one: I have joined a car-share program and will use taxis more often. I will hire a car if I need to drive a long distance. But then I am still travelling in fossil-fuelled cars(燃油汽车), like when I quit meat and ended up eating more cheese. I fear I may have swapped one environmental problem for another.

I am also afraid to think about the ultimate fate of my car. I have just offloaded more than a ton of metal, plastic, rubber, fabric, electronics, oil and petrol that will end up in a landfill. There are millions of similar vehicles in the UK alone that will have to go somewhere.

Maybe I am overthinking it. According to Charlie Wilson, a climate scientist at the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, getting rid of a private car is no doubt a positive step to reduce CO₂ emissions.

He points to research by the OECD’s International Transport Forum. “They showed that moving from a private vehicle fleet(车队)to a shared vehicle fleet can greatly cut the number of vehicles you need to deliver the mobility that we need and want. If that vehicle fleet is electrified, you can also bring CO₂ emissions close to zero.”

So in other words, just get rid of your car.

2 . I have been the senior digital producer at News Corp since August 2018. At the completion of my Bachelor’s degree in Journalism at the University of Queensland, I joined the Sunshine Coast Daily as a journalist. After five years with the paper, I moved to Yahoo7 as a news producer. In 2017, I took up a new role at SBS as its evening news editor. Then I joined News Corp.

As a content producer at News Corp, not a day is the same, which is something I love about my job as it’s never boring. It’s certainly taught me to be flexible as it includes a constant mix of reporting and producing news stories. One minute I’ll be reporting on the national or world issue of the hour, and the next I’ll be focused on making our print stories sing online.

While working hard as a digital producer, I’m sad to see readers’ unwillingness to pay for quality journalism online. There are plenty of fantastic Australian journalists working hard to bring issues to the surface, and many put their reputations on the line to do so. It’s sad that the attitude now is that news should always be free.

Of course among all the resources there’s some fake news. Fake news keeps me on my toes! I always fact-check everything — for my own work and when doing others’ job for a short time. I always take the extra five minutes to do the proper research I need. It will save me time and trouble in the long run.

Finally, a great story must be easy to read and without errors from start to finish, and have the strongest possible headline and photo to sell it. If you’ve worked hard on a story and want to make sure it’s read, think smart and spend time building it properly for online publication. If you spend hours on a story and then rush the last step, you’re wasting your time as no one will see it.

3 . Alice Roosevelt Longworth was the daughter of one of America’s most beloved presidents, Theodore Roosevelt. She was also a writer who was famous for giving high-society parties and being one of Washington, DC’s biggest gossips (流言蜚语). On the sofa in her living room, there was an embroidered cushion (绣花靠垫) which read, “If you can’t say anything nice about someone, come sit next to me.”

If Alice were still alive today (she died in 1980 at the age of 96), she would feel right at home with modern social media... at least the worst parts of it. Platforms such as WeChat and Weibo have become places where Internet troll (网络喷子) and bullies hang around, spreading gossip and insults (侮辱), and causing real harm to people, especially young people. This phenomenon of social media bullying (cyberbullying) is a worldwide problem. In February, United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) declared a special day, Safer Internet Day, to raise awareness of the problem and to discuss ways to solve it. According to the organization, as many as 20 percent of young people say that they have been bullied online. And the effects of this bullying can be destructive, leading to lower grades, lower self-esteem, depression and even suicide. UNICEF’s Henrietta Fore says that the Internet has become “a kindness desert”.

Closer to home, a study of Chinese high school students found that 58 percent had been bullied, and 38 percent had bullied someone either at school or on the Internet. “They spread rumors about you or defame (诽谤) you in order to isolate or marginalize (排斥) you,” says psychologist Zhou Zhonghui. “It is hard for people that age to bear, and it makes them depressed.”

There are laws in China against cyberbullying, and offenders can be fined and have their accounts shut down. In fact, everyone can take steps to stop the bullying. First, don’t be silent. If you are being bullied, don’t hesitate to tell your parents and teachers. Second, think before you post. Is your comment kind or hurtful? Would you like someone to say the same thing about you? Would you like your mother to read your comment? Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s cushion was a humorous re-working of an old piece of wisdom: If you can’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything at all. By following that wisdom, you can make flowers bloom in the “kindness desert”.

4 . Humans, by nature, have always lived in groups and social interaction is fundamental for every part of our health. Lack of it can lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness. A strong support network and solid community bonds promote our emotional and physical health, and are critical components of a balanced adult life. However, just as with many other aspects of our lives, there seems to be a limit to how large our personal networks can grow.

Back in 1992, a British scholar named Robin Dunbar came up with a hypothetical (假设的) number defining the maximum sum of meaningful human relationships a person can have. The number, which was later named after him, was discovered accidentally while he was studying the cleaning and brushing tendencies — a social behavior —of non-human primates (灵长类动物). Around that time, researchers had discovered that the large brain of these primates was a result of their socially complex societies. The relevance was that the larger the brain, the larger the animal's social group was likely to be. Scientists could then theoretically use an animal's brain size to calculate how many members could make up this group. Dunbar applied this theory to humans, and the resulting number was roughly 150.

Dunbar's Number, however, only refers to the limit of meaningful contacts within our social network. It does not account for other relationships. Human social relationships tend to have numerous layers, and extend outward from the individual in circles with the same centre. The innermost circle contains five people: our loved ones. The next circle holds of our good friends. The third circle is reserved for people we consider friends, and the fourth is where the limit of 150 can be found. Nowadays, with various forms of electronic communication, such as websites for social networking and microblogging people find it very convenient to create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other contents. Consequently, it is possible for a human to get into the fifth (500acquainitances) circle, an impressive breakthrough that was difficult to achieve in the past.

A．	B．
C．	D．

5 . “A novel, like a letter should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of morality and decay,” Saul Bellow once wrote. Like many novelists, in his spare time the author of The Adventures of Augie March was also an enthusiastic letter writer.

A selection of Bellow’s huge correspondence, reproduced in a recent issue of the New Yorker, provides a fascinating insight into the writer’s character. Witty, often brief and almost always entertaining, Bellow’s letters are a reminder of why writers’ letters often prove so popular with readers. At their best, literary letters have something for everyone: general readers get a glimpse of how authors write when freed from the expectation to produce a work of conventional literary worth, and scholars get enough scholarly writings.

All this is well and good—except for one small problem: nobody writes letters anymore, at least not the kind of intellectual, humorous letters that distinguish great correspondence. As we are so often told, we live in the digital age. Like the rest of us, authors now largely correspond with their agents, friends, and occasionally, fans through email, not “snail mail”.   

As literary vehicles, emails are severely lacking. Digital messages tend to alternate between the deathly dull and formal and the casually daring complete with BTW, LOLs and unclear text—speak with little middle ground. Letters can be revealing, friendly, humorous; emails, even at their best, tend to exhibit only one of these characteristics of good writing.

Future literary archivists (档案管理员) will need to be digital experts, hacking through hard drives and email accounts, mobile phones, in their attempts to fully document the lives and thoughts of their subjects. But who among us has all their email correspondence from the past five years, let alone a lifetime? Hardware is disposed (废弃) of and forgotten about; mobile phones are replaced every few years. The idea that we can construct a complete record of a writer has always been unrealistic, but technological advances have made it physically impossible, too. With so much material digitalized, and often wiped, writers will no longer leave behind boxes suffered with letters, ripe for investigation and possible publication.

Back in 1898, the New York Times named the long-dead Lord Byron the greatest letter writer in the English language, celebrating his letters’ humor, the force and spirit of their substance, the grace and purity of their style. Saul Bellow’s letters might not be remembered quite so fondly 70 years from now, but chances are that, by then, the entire genre of collected writers’ letters will have disappeared completely—leaving readers significantly poorer for their loss.

6 . The use of electronic devices ns entertainment has increased drastically, especially among children 12 and under. In fact, recent research has thrown that most children between 8 and 12 spend 3 to 5 hour per day watching videos or playing games online.     1    . In the past, children need to spend much more time outdoors engaging in spontaneous play with other children. It was common for children from the same neighborhood to gather in the street after school;    2     However, today neighborhood streets remain quiet and empty ns children stay inside in front of a screen of some sort.

    3    . After all, it's parents who are allowing their children to stay indoor instead of saying. "Go outside and play "News stories about various danger to children from speeding traffic, to bullying peers to creepy stranger, are constantly fueling parents' worst fears.     4    . But are children really safer indoors? Not really. Research has shown that while the nature of the possible dangers may have changed since the past, children aren't really at any more risk today than 50 years ago. Actually, the negative health effects of a lack of exercise and outdoor play may be fr more dangerous.     5    .