1 . When Americans think of the lunch menu at their childhood school dining halls, they probably imagine the shapeless, tasteless meat — plus some brown mush (糊状物) to match. But for children in Japan, school lunches are a rich experience where the students learn about culture and nutrition (营养) of foods.

“Japan’s opinion is that school lunches are a part of education, not a break from it,” Masahiro Oji, a government director of school health education in Japan said. The food offered at schools in Japan is affordable, fresh, and made by the students themselves. And Japanese children don’t just eat the food they prepare; they learn about the nutrition and culture of their meals, too. The food is grown locally and includes a balanced menu of rice, vegetables, fish, and soups. Even better, each meal only costs just $2.50.

“Parents hear their kids talking about what they had for lunch,” Tatsuji Shino, the headmaster at Umejima Elementary School in Tokyo said, “and kids ask them to re-create the meals at home.” Japanese students also learn cooperation (合作) and etiquette skills as they serve and clean up after each other.

Considering the fact that Japan has one of the world’s lowest childhood obesity rates (肥胖), the US probably has a lot to learn from this country’s school lunches. A recent study found that American students who regularly ate the school lunch — where choices include pizza, chicken, and French fries — were 29 percent more likely to be obese than those who brought lunch from home.

For American parents who want to be a little more like the Japanese, try sending your children to school with these great school lunches for kids who hate sandwiches.

4 . Digital technology -email and smart phones especially - have vastly improved workers’ ability to be productive outside of a traditional office. Even so, most white-collar work still happens in an office. One reason is that, according to findings of a new survey of office workers conducted by Wakefield Research for the IT company Citrix, most bosses are doubtful about remote working. Half of the workers say their boss doesn’t accept it and only 35 percent say it’s tolerated.

Skeptical bosses will likely have their doubts reinforced by the same survey, which shows that 43 percent of workers say they’ve watched TV or a movie while “working” remotely, while 35 percent have done housework, and 28 percent have cooked dinner.

It is true, however, that working at home makes people much more efficient(高效的), because it allows workers to take care of annoying housework while still getting their jobs done. It’s much faster, for example, to shop for groceries at a quarter to three than to stand in line during the after-work rush.

The fact that such practices remain officially unaccepted reflects how far we haven’t come as a society from the days when we expected every full-time worker to be supported by a full-time homemaker.

More broadly the Wakefield survey suggests that employers may be missing a low-cost way to give workers something of value. Sixty-four percent of those survey participants who haven’t worked remotely would rather give up some bonus in order to get even one day a week working from home. Under such circumstances, smart firms need to find ways to let their employees have enough flexibility to manage their time efficiently.

Moderator(主持人)

Today marks the last day of the Social Media Detox, Brenton High’s fundraising campaign for new sports equipment. At the start of the detox, over 100 students had been persuaded to stop using social media, in ANY form, for seven days. This meant no messaging friends, no posting photos, no blogging - nothing. They had been promised money by family and friends for each day spent without using social media. They were excited. They were nervous. But could they do it?

With the detox finished, they’ve switched on their devices and they’re back online. I bet you’re as eager as I am to find out just how many have been motivated enough to last the full seven days! And what, if anything, have been learnt from the experience?

Anna 17

I lasted two days. The detox was more difficult to tolerate than I had expected. I felt like I had lost an arm! Not eating for two days would have been easier! But on reflection, I can see how much of my time had been occupied with checking my phone. I’m now trying to spend less time online and more time picking up my hobbies.

Devon 16

I lasted four days. On Monday, our classmate and I spoke about what we did at the weekend — it felt strange not to already know what he had done. We would have posted pictures and updated our profiles. Doing the detox meant we had to talk and explain what we were doing and thinking! It made me realise the value of real contact that I had forgotten.

Cindy 18

I managed the whole week! At first, I really felt I was missing out. Then, instead of messaging my friend, I went around to her house. Without our phones, we had a proper conversation for over two hours. Without being distracted by messages from other people, it felt so good! Then I decided to visit a different friend every day. By the fifth day, I wondered – was I really missing out by not constantly checking my phone to see what everyone else was up to?

George 16

I did all seven days, too! To be honest, I didn’t find the detox too difficult, but I did give my phone to my father to avoid giving in! My brother thought I should make full use of the time without my phone; so he took me to check out our local sports centre. An hour’s sport each day left me tired out and sent me early to bed. The detox made me healthier!

Max 17

I’m embarrassed to say that I threw in the towel on the first day! I knew there was a party happening that evening, but I without access to social media I couldn’t remember where it was! In the end, I turn on my phone to check, but couldn’t resist having a quick look at my social media accounts. What’s worse, I then spent so much time catching up on news, I almost missed the party.

Moderator(主持人)

The detox raised a total of $1,632.82 for. new school sports equipment! Well done, everyone who took part! After, reading the posts on this forum, it seems that something rather than money has also been raised through the detox. Awareness of just how much we rely on social media can help us step away from it and communicate with each other better.

7 . In our information-driven society, shaping our worldview through the media is similar to forcing an opinion about someone solely based on a picture of their foot. While the media might not deliberately deceive us, it often fails to provide a comprehensive view of reality.

Consequently, the question arises: Where, then, shall we get our information from if not from the media? Who can we trust? How about experts-people who devote their working lives to understanding their chosen slice of the world? However, even experts can fall prey to the allure of oversimplification, leading to the “single perspective instinct” that hampers (阻碍) our ability to grasp the intricacies (错综复杂) of the world.

Simple ideas can be appealing because they offer a sense of understanding and certainty. And it is easy to take off down a slippery slope, from one attention-grabbing simple idea to a feeling that this idea beautifully explains, or is the beautiful solution for, lots of other things.The world becomes simple that way.

Yet, when we embrace a singular cause or solution for all problems, we risk oversimplifying complex issues. For instance, championing the concept of equality may lead us to view all problems through the lens of inequality and see resource distribution as the sole panacea. However, such rigidity prevents us from seeing the multidimensional nature of challenges and hinders true comprehension of reality. This “single perspective instinct” ultimately clouds our judgment and restricts our capacity to tackle complex issues effectively. Being always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn’t fit your perspective. This is usually a bad approach if you would like to understand reality.

Instead, constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, consult people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world. If this means you don’t have time to form so may opinions, so what?

Wouldn’t you rather have few opinions that are right than many that are wrong?

8 . Give the Senate (参议院) some credit in shaping the current immigration reform bill, it has come up with one idea that almost everyone hates. That’s the plan to create a new class of “guest workers”— immigrants who would be allowed to work in the U.S. for three two-year stretches, at most, provided that they return home to say for a year after each visit. Conservatives dislike the plan because they believe that the guest workers won’t return home after their visas expire. Liberals dislike it because they believe the program will depress American wages and trap guest workers. The only supporters of the bill are businesses that rely heavily on immigrant labor, and they’re probably just looking out for themselves.

With the broader concern about the effect of illegal immigration, the hostility to the new plan is understandable. However imperfect, the guest-worker program is better than any politically feasible alternative. Opponents of immigration sometimes imply that adding workers to a work-force automatically brings wages down. But immigrants tend to work in different industries than native workers, and have different skills, and so they often end up complementing (补充) native workers rather than competing with them. That can make native workers more productive and therefore better off.

According to a recent study by the economists Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, immigration actually boosted the wages of most American workers; its only negative effect was a small one, on the wages of workers without a high-school diploma And if by increasing the number of legal guest workers we reduced the number of undocumented workers, the economy would benefit even more.

Guest workers are also, paradoxically, less likely than illegal immigrants to become permanent residents. The U.S. already has a number of smaller and less plans routinely overstay their visas. One remarkable study found that after border enforcement was stepped up in 1993, the chance of an illegal immigrant returning to his homeland to stay fell by a third.

In fact, whatever benefits the guest-worker program brought to the U.S. economy or to particular businesses, the biggest winners would be the workers themselves. There are fear, if any, foreign-aid programs that do as much for people in developing countries as simply allowing them to work in U.S. legally. This program’s costs to American workers are insignificant, the gains for the guest workers are enormous, and the U.S. economy will benefit. This is that rare option which is both sensible and politically possible.

9 . In the summer of 2016, I gave a talk st a small conference in northern Virginia. I began by admitting that I’d never had a social-media account; I then outlined arguments for why other people should consider removing social media from their lives.The event organizers uploaded the video of my talk to YouTube.Then it was shared repeatedly on Facebook and Instagram and, eventually, viewed more than five million times. I was both pleased and annoyed by the fact that my anti-social- media talk had found such a large audience on social media.

I think of this event as typical of the love-hate relationships many of us have with Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platform. On the one hand, we’ve grown cautious about the so- called attention economy, which, in the name of corporate profits, destroys social life gradually and offends privacy. But we also benefit from social media and hesitate to break away from it completely. Not long ago, I met a partner at a large law firm in Washington,D.C, who told me that she keeps Instagram on her phone because the misses her kids when she travels, looking through pictures of them makes her feel better.

In recent years, some of the biggest social-media companies, Facebook and Twitter, in particular, have promised various reforms. In March, Mark Zuckerberg announced a plan to move his platform toward private communication protected by end-to-end encryption (端对端加密) later that month he put forward the establishment of a third-party group to set standards for acceptable content.

All of these approaches assume that the reformation of social media will be a complex, lengthy, and gradual process. But not everyone sees it that way. Alongside these official responses, a loose collective of developers that calls itself the Indie Web has been creating another alternative. They are developing their own social media platform, which they say will preserve what’s good about social media while getting rid of what’s bad. They hope to build social media according to principles that are less corporate and more humane (人道的).