观点态度题 知识点题库

    Today, the world's diversity (多样性) of food crops is quickly decreasing. But scientists around the world are taking action. They are building seed banks. At seed banks, scientists store the seeds of many different crops.

    There are now 1,400 seed banks around the world. However, some banks are in warm countries. If the electricity fails, the seeds will get too hot and die. Other seed banks are in countries troubled by war. Sometimes people damage the seed banks. If this happens, valuable seeds can be lost forever!

    The organization Global Crop Diversity Trust decided they wanted to deal with this problem. So, they decided to build a global seed bank. This seed bank would contain a back-up, or extra copy, of all the world's seeds. Smaller seed banks would still collect and keep local seeds. But they would also send copies of their seeds to the global bank.

    Scientists from the Global Crop Diversity Trust chose the cold, snowy mountains of Svalbard, Norway to build the global seed bank — the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (斯瓦尔巴全球种子库). Organizations, farmers, or local seed banks store their extra seeds there. And the people who place their seeds in the vault are the only people who can take them out. They pay to ship their seeds to Norway, but it does not cost them any money to store their seeds. The Global Crop Diversity Trust pays for this.

    Cary Fowler is a scientist who heads the Global Crop Diversity Trust. He said, “If the Seed Vault simply supplies seed banks with copies of seeds that those banks lost by accident, the Seed Vault will be worth more than it cost.”

    We just love giving cards in Britain. If there's a special occasion coming up, there's no doubt that we'll be there, card in hand, to celebrate it. And this isn't just for birthdays; we also give cards when people are ill or when they have got a new job. And even if you forgot somebody's birthday, there are even "sorry it's late" cards. So you can pretty much find a card for any occasion.

    Before coming to Italy I had never even considered that our love for card giving might not be shared by other countries. In fact, my workmates told me that hardly anyone sends Christmas cards in Italy and that they actually don't really give birthday cards either! Unbelievable! In the UK, if a close friend or family member didn't get me a card I'd feel upset! However, the only place you can buy cards in Italy is in a shop which sells school things. In comparison, we have whole shops that sell them in the UK and we even have different types of card shops.

    Although cards can take up your time, from choosing the perfect one, to thinking up the personal message inside, I think it's a really nice gesture. And especially with Christmas cards, it adds to that festive feeling. When I sit down to write countless cards to friends and family, I get that little bit happier that it will be Christmas soon! Especially when I see my own Christmas cards, proudly sitting on my desk wishing me a very merry Christmas.

    Of course, the problem comes when they're no longer needed, when Christmas is over. It makes me sad just to throw them all away, so I try and hang on to my favorite ones.

    "Stop making excuses for him. Mom," I said. "But maybe he is feeling unwell..." Mom said. "Maybe nothing." I interrupted. I had been tending Mom since her health began to decline and this would be the first time in a year that my husband and I had a night out together. Jerry had promised to stay with Mom. But again he let us down. And more often than not, his drinking had a lot to do with it. His irresponsibility upset me.

    I remembered our happy growing-up years in a small town in West Virginia. With good family education. Jerry had been a kind kid. He was only 15 when Dad died. Unlike him, I got over the sorrow soon, but he started drinking. Soon he began hanging out with bad guys.

    Jerry and I didn't see each other often, but we talked on the phone. Usually, though, we ended up fighting. When Mom came to live with us, Jerry dropped in regularly at first, but after a while his visits became sporadic. He explained he couldn't handle seeing Mom in such a bad condition. Another excuse, I thought.

    One day I went to see the doctor about my back. It had been aching for months. "I can't find anything wrong with you physically," the doctor said. "But I can tell you're very tense. Is something bothering you?" I poured out my story about Jerry. "Do you think he's likely to change?" he asked. I shrugged."Probably not." "But, you can," he said gently.

    Me? Why did I have to change? He was the one who constantly let us down. But what had I done? Maybe the doctor was right. I couldn't love his behavior, but I could love him—the way 1 did when we were little. As I walked intothe house I sensed a relief.

    Jerry died young due to drinking. I miss him. But Pm grateful I was given the opportunity to show him I lovedhim—as he was, not as I wanted him to be.

    Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls, UK.

    A hundred years ago, women had very few opportunities. Their role was to marry and raise children. Sally Nicholls, new novel is set in that time. Her main characters are three young London women. Evelyn is from a wealthy family, May is from a religious background, and Nell is a woman from a much poorer community. Though they are from, different backgrounds, they all become involved in the women's suffrage(选举权)movement during World War 1(1914-1918).

    Far From the Tree by Robin Benway, US

    The New York Times reviewer called the book a “brilliant exercise in empathy (感同身受) It's an unusual novel. It begins with a troubling event for the main character, Grace, a 16-year-old who loves chemistry and cross-country running. But when she finds that she has become pregnant, she chooses to give up her baby for adoption and has to deal with the pain that this causes her.

    The situation is __________for her because Grace was once an orphan(孤儿)herself. She feels that she cannot turn to her adoptive parents for comfort and advice. Instead, she turns to her blood siblings (兄弟姐妹). But Grace soon finds that they are as troubled as she is, and that they are also keeping things to themselves that hurt too much to speak about.

    Readers can expect to be moved by the characters and their situations, but also gain insight (理解)into modem family life in America.

    Turtles All the Way Down by John Green, US

    This novel has two principal teenage characters. Aza Holmes has a mental illness, which is a condition where a person does the same thing over and over, without being able to stop. Aza narrates (叙述)the novel, so we learn all about her from the inside out.

    The second main character is Daisy, Aza's friend. The two start an adventure to find a billionaire who has gone missing.

    “This is my first attempt to write directly about the kind of mental illness that has affected my life since childhood, so while the story is fictional (虚构的)，it is also quite personal, ” said Green in a statement.

    If you analyze people's actions, you will come to the conclusion that they all seek happiness. Every act is in fact a search for it, even if on the surface it doesn't look so. Happiness is always the main target.

    Going to the movies, eating in a restaurant and going to a party are all motivated by the desire to be happy. Who does not dream of a vacation in some fascinating locations, a new car, a new house, or the ideal match? All people daydream, and some even try to make their dream a reality. And why is that? In order to be happy!

    Many people endanger themselves by climbing steep mountains, entering unexplored caves, or diving into the deep of the ocean in order to enjoy the few moments of happiness. A thief may steal because he loves the thrill of danger, or because he desires to have quick money to spend. He is actually looking for happiness, though in a perverted way.

    Of course not all actions end in happiness. The motive is happiness, but the results do not always bring the desire. According to some spiritual traditions, we are spiritual beings in physical bodies. The spiritual part is always happy. Rather, it is happiness itself. But the physical body covers this happiness essence(本质). There is a constant desire to find out this happiness. This is the reason why happiness is constantly sought.

    However, there is no need to search for happiness or to create it, or to have all kinds of outer experiences and actions in order to feel it. On the contrary, everything has to be dropped in order to experience it. Every technique, which helps to relax the mind and calm the rush of thoughts will lead to happiness.

    Opened in September 2005, Hong Kong Disneyland is the second Disney Park in Asia. It experienced a difficult time upon its opening. The Park, as well as two themed hotels, was built on Lantau Island.

    The Park opened to strong competition in the form of Ocean Park. Hong Kong Disneyland is one of only two parks in Hong Kong, which has become one of the world's leading cities in recent years. It kept Chinese cultural traditions in mind when they built the Park to avoid a cultural backlash (抵制). Designers added to the custom of Feng Shui.

    Disney and Hong Kong announced the Park in 1999, and construction (建设) began in 2003. The Park had one of the shortest construction periods in Disney history. Disney actually announced that the opening of the Park would be brought forward, from 2006 to September 2005.

    The Park attracted 5.2 million visitors in its first year, below the expected 5.6 million. There was a lack of attractions, with Fantasyland opening with just one dark ride. Summer Passes were announced to increase the number of tourists. Autopia, Stitch Encounter and it's a Small World opened between 2006 and 2008 to offer more attractions at the Park.

    The number of tourists dropped in 2007 to just over 4 million, so Disney planned a big expansion (扩大) project to attract more tourists and bring the Park back to its normal level. In July 2009, the Legislative Council of Hong Kong passed a three-land expansion of Hong Kong Disneyland, and in 2010, Toy Story Land opened.

    These new attractions have certainly paid off, with the Park earning record profit (盈利) in 2013. In that year, over 7 million guests entered the Park.

    With enough room for a second Park and the promise of more attractions to come, it seems that there is indeed a great beautiful tomorrow for Hong Kong Disneyland.

    Only about 30 percent of people in the US know how to perform CPR (心肺复苏术). Recently, a 9-year-old boy showed a Georgia woman how to perform CPR on her newborn baby.

    Susanna Rohm said she had experienced a parent's worst nightmare (噩梦) — her 2-month-old son, Isiah, was not breathing. "I noticed he looked pale. I looked at his arms and his legs and they were limp (无力的)," Rohm told a local newspaper. "Then I noticed that he looked like he wasn't alive." Indismay, she dropped and broke her cellphone. Rohm had to run into the street, screaming for help.

    "I had him in my arms and screamed over and over. Then I ran outside. I saw two boys playing across the street, and I yelled, 'Go and ask your parents to call 911,'" Rohm said. But the two boys were able to do more than that. Nine-year-old Ethan Wilson took action, showing Rohm how to perform CPR on little Isiah while ten-year-old Rocky Hurt helped as well.

    Rocky said he had learned the CPR technique from a poster in a health class at their school, Sedalia Park Elementary. "I was thinking we'd better give her a helping hand instead of getting scared," Ethan said. "I told her to push on the baby's chest five to ten times a minute with only two fingers, tilt back the baby's head, plug the baby's nose and breathe into the baby's mouth," Ethan said in an interview.

    At last, Isiah began crying and was breathing again. He spent two nights in a local hospital. "If the little boy hadn't shown me what to do right there, my baby would probably not be alive right now," Rohm said.

    Rapid advances in a new technology will soon transform science fiction into reality—meaning people will have driverless cars, small robots at their command and the ability to experience being in another place without leaving home, predicted Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the planet's largest cellphone trade show.

Introduction of books available online, Internet translation of languages and voice recognition for computers all happened much faster than anyone could foresee and that technological research into even more previously unheard of advances is progressing at a fast speed.

    "People who predict that holograms(全息图) and self-driving cars will become reality soon are absolutely right," Schmidt told thousands of attendees. Research underway will lead to situations where people can put themselves at events like a rock concert so that they can see, hear and even feel the event. And turn down the volume, if it's too loud.

    One attendee said she was scared that the possibility could be dehumanizing, but Schmidt replied by holding up his cellphone into the air. "It has an off button and it is here on the right," Schmidt said. "My point is that it is all about your control. If you don't like my version of a rock concert, I'm not forcing you to go. In the future, small robots could be used, so busy people can send them to events for video and voice transmissions when their presence isn't required," Schmidt said.

    Technology in the near future will redefine the relationship among people in the world. "Smarter resourceful citizens are going to demand a better deal for their new life," Schmidt said.

    While the start of a new school year is always exciting, this year was even more so for some elementary school students in Auckland, New Zealand. They became the world's first kids to be "taught" by a digital teacher. Before you start imagining a human-like robot walking around the classroom, Will is just an avatar that appears on the student's desktop, or smartphone screen, when ordered to come.

    The autonomous animation platform has been modeled after the human brain and nervous system, allowing it to show human-like behavior. The digital teacher is assigned to teach Vector's "Be sustainable with energy" — a free program for Auckland elementary schools.

    Just like the humans it replaced, Will is able to instantly react to the students' responses to the topic. Thanks to a webcam and microphone, the avatar not only responds to questions the kids may have, but also picks up non-verbal cues. For instance, if a student smiles at Will, he responds by smiling back. This two-way interaction not only helps attract the students' attention, but also allows the program's developers to monitor their engagement, and make changes if needed.

    Nikhil Ravishankar believes that Will-like avatars could be a novel way to catch the attention of the next generation. He says," I have a lot of hope in this technology as a means to deliver cost-effective, rich, educational experience in the future."

    The program, in place since August 2018, has been a great success thus far. Ravishankar says, "What was fascinating to me was the reaction of the children to Will. The way they look at the world is so creative and different, and Will really captured their attention." However, regardless of how popular it becomes, Will is unlikely to replace human educators any time soon.

    Facebook lets friends connect. They can give each other updates, share photos and post comments. But that's not all. Facebook might also stress users out.

    In a new study, 88 volunteers how much time they spent on Facebook and the types of Facebook posts and comments that they made. In addition, they answered questions about their feelings and state of mind. They also offered saliva. Researchers tested it for cortisol. This chemical is a stress hormone. Levels of it vary throughout the day.

    In this study, people with the most Facebook friends, more than 300, had somewhat higher cortisol levels. Additionally, the more Facebook friends that users had, the more likely they were to feel anxious. On the other hand, youths who gave lots of "likes" and supportive comments on Facebook had lower cortisol levels. "The more social support you give to others, the lower your stress hormone levels will be," says Lupien.

    "This research decidedly combines the social science approach and the medical science approach on an important question in our social-media age," says Wenhong Chen, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. "It's ready pleasantly new to see Lupien's team study cortisol levels-along with questionnaire data."

    One finding from Lupien's work surprised Chen. Teens who felt they got a lot of support from others also had higher cortisol levels. Usually, she says, those feelings should protect people from stress. "There are many potential dangers of social media use among young people," Chen notes. So, she says, enjoy Facebook, but be aware of the risks.

    Lupien suggests that teen Facebook users share information with and support their friends on the site. They shouldn't just stay silent. "if anyone is more stressed, it's the watchers, not the sharers," she says. Also, she recommends that people who use social media heavily should find time to take active walks, to run or to do other activities. Cortisol increases a person's energy. "The best way to reduce stress hormones is to use the energy," she says.

    In the United States, a company is working on a project that could change the way we think about public transportation. Its planned system would move people around in steel tubes. Those passengers would be traveling at speeds of up to 1, 200 kilometers per hour.

    The futuristic transportation system is called Hyperloop. Workers plan to test the system next year in a specially built community called Quay Valley. The town will be powered entirely by energy from the sun.

    The Hyperloop transport system is the idea of businessman Elon Musk. Dirk Ahlborn is head of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. He says his company has taken Mr Musk's idea and is developing a system that will be safe, environmentally friendly and fast.

    "It's 100 percent solar-powered...we're not going to get up to 760 miles per hour, but we believe we can actually break the records that are existing right now.”

    This means that a four-hour drive from Los Angeles, California to Las Vegas, Nevada, could someday take only 30 minutes by Hyperloop.

    The system involves a series of capsules (密封舱) that float inside a long tube. These containers wouldn't need to travel along a pathway or track. The system has been designed to operate above or below ground.

    Inside the tube there is a low pressure environment very similar to an airplane that's high in the sky. So now the capsule travelling inside the tube doesn't meet with as much resistance(阻力), and therefore can travel really fast with very little energy.

    Dick Ahlborn and his company will use an eight-kilometer track in Quay Valley to find the best way to set up passenger traffic and repair capsules. A larger system will cost an estimated(估算的) 6-10 billion dollars to build.

    If Mr Ahlborn and his company succeed, we may one day see these very fast Hyperloo capsules speeding through tubes around the world.

Workers are returning to their careers, or starting new ones after age 65.

More than ever, work is where many of us get our sense of purpose. That doesn't end at age 65. After being retired for only three months, Sue Ellen King returned to work at the University of Florida Health in Jacksonville, Florida, where she had been a care nurse and nursing educator for 38 years. She is now working part-time in a position created just for her. "It's perfect," she told The New York Times. "I get the satisfaction of having people appreciate what I do." With the average lifespan for those who reach age 64 now getting all the way to 84 years old, those who reach retirement age still have many potential years of work to go.

Job sites connected toward part-timers, temporary positions, and some can also turn up opportunities that may lead to longer-term work. Fred Dodd tried a part-time job after his unemployment as a clerk for large banks at age 63. He'd thought about retiring then. "But part of me just wanted to keep working partly for the money, but more just because I felt I wanted to do more in my career, " he said.

The retired have the advantage of not needing to focus on the earnings potential of whatever jobs they take on, so these older workers are attracted to more meaningful work. And since they are voluntarily putting their skills and experience to good use, they may well have more flexibility than mid-career people. Two-thirds of retirees who'd come back to the work world were doing meaningful work they enjoyed. Legal work and community service were popular choices, as was teaching—all areas in which older workers might have an opportunity to make their own schedules.

Earning more money rarely seems like a bad idea, but it can cause issues for retirees, including effects when they claim Social Security (申请社会保障) benefits early.

There is more of a connection between food and culture than you may think. On an individual level, we grow up eating the food of our culture. It becomes a part of who we are. Many associate food from our childhood with warm feelings and good memories and it ties us to our families, holding a special and personal value for us. Food from our family often becomes the comfort food we seek as adults in times of frustration and stress.

On a large scale, traditional food is an important part of culture. It also operates as an expression of culture identity. Immigrants bring it wherever they go, and it is a symbol of pride for their culture and means of coping with homesickness.

Many immigrants open their own restaurants and serve traditional dishes. However, the food does not remain exactly the same. Some materials needed to make traditional dishes may not be readily available, so the taste and flavour can be different from what they would prepare in their home countries. Additionally, immigrants do not only sell dishes to people from the same countries as them, but to people from different countries. Therefore, they have to make small changes about the original dishes to cater to a wider range of customers. Those changes can create new flavours that still keep the cultural significance of the dishes.

We should embrace our heritage through our culture's food but also become more informed about other cultures by trying their food. It is important to remember that each dish has a special place in the culture to which it belongs, and is special to those who prepare it. Food is a window into culture, and it should be treated as such.

I Found You by Lisa Jewell

Lisa Jewell is one of Britain's best-selling writers — and reading her new novel, it's not hard to see why. I Found You is a high-class combination of popular women's fiction and interesting psychological thriller.

In the classic manner, the central character Alice is slightly disorganized but good-hearted — and in this case living on the Yorkshire coast with her three children. By the third page, the plot is already under way, when she spots a handsome fortysomething man sitting on the beach. His name is… well, he doesn't know, because he's suffering from severe amnesia (健忘症) that also means he doesn't know why he's there or where he has come from. Meanwhile in Surrey, a wife is reporting the disappearance of her handsome fortysomething husband to the police.

At this stage, people who haven't read Jewell before may think they realise what's going on. In fact, the truth— uncovered with enormous teasing skill — is packed with more twists (转折), and real sadness, than anybody could possibly expect. Admittedly, the book does have moments of contrivance (矫揉造作) — but they're exceptionally well-contrived.

The Allegations by Mark Lawson

In 2014, Lawson left BBC Radio 4's arts programme Front Row amid accusations of bullying. Now, Tom Pimm, one of the main characters here, is a history professor accused of the same thing — even though all he has done is standing up for intellectual rigour (缜密) and common sense.

Worse, his friend and colleague Ned Marriott is arrested for "historic" violence — despite not being guilty either. But what both men come to understand is that at a time when offence-taking has become a national pastime and all accusers are described as "victims", innocence is largely irrelevant.

The result is a book that, although highly readable, is essentially a cry of middle-aged male anger at what Ned calls "the Bonfire(篝火) of the Vanities (虚荣心)" in the age of critical social media. And for my money, Lawson hits most of his targets bang-on.

Japan's biggest airline is betting that the future of travel isn't traveling at all. For the last month, a married couple has been interacting with a robot—called an Avatar—that's controlled by their daughter hundreds of miles away. Made by ANA Holdings Inc, it looks like a cleaner with an iPad attached, but the screen displays the daughter's face as they chat, and its wheels let her move slowly about the house as though she's really there.

"Virtual travel" is nothing new, of course. Storytellers, travel writers and artists have stimulating(刺激)the sense of armchair tourists for centuries. It's only in recent decades that frequent, safe travel has become available to the non-wealthy.

Yet even as the world's middle classes climb out of the armchair and into economy-class seats, there are signs of a post-travel society coming into being. Concerns about sustainability(可持续发展) are having an negative influence on carbon-intensive airlines. And the aging of wealthy societies is both slowing down physical travel and creating demand for various ways to experience the world. For the travel industry, virtual (虚拟的) reality offers an attractive response to these trend.

Of course, far-out technologies encourage far-out claims. ANA doesn't plan to start selling Avatars until next year. Profits, too, will probably be difficult to achieve: according to one investigation, the global market for this kind of technology will be worth only about $300 million by 2023. By contrast, ANA's traditional travel business brought in more than $19 billion last year.

But if the business case for virtual vacations is still weak, the market for technologies that bridge physical distances between families and coworkers seems likely to only expand. ANA's robots may not replace its airplanes any time soon, but they'll almost certainly be a part of travel's high-tech future.

Do you have a toy animal as your comfort object from your childhood? Is it still in your apartment? I8o, you are not alone. 60% of small children have Teddies and other comfort objects, and up to 35% of adults!

Conventional wisdom from the 1970s suggested kids depending on comfort objects somehow lacked secure attachment to their mothers，and that this dependence would threaten their proper development into well-adjusted adults.

However, not too long ago，studies began to show that comfort objects don't threaten children' mental health, and may indeed be developmentally advantageous. Children with comfort objects are les shy and more focused than those without them. This is probably because with their presence, children feel braver and less stressed in unfamiliar situations.

Even newer research shows only when a toy is his or her comfort object do children anthropomorphize(人格化)it. That s, having an emotional attachment to the comfort object causes children to think of it as a human-like friend, who they can practice telling stories to and share joy and sorrow with. Sometimes they even think from the perspective of this unnatural friend.

Comfort objects are not just soft things for children to grab when they feel sad or lonely. They mean something special to them. So, far from being "wacky toddler (学步儿童) behavior", choosing a comfort object and treating it as a sacred part of daily life is actually extremely popular behavior on the part of small children. If you have a comfort animal, or meet a kid who has one, let the hugs begin.

I don't post recognizable pictures of my children on social media. I don't use their names. I don't put anything out there that will be really embarrassing for them in later life.

The reason for not posting pictures is that I feel a person's pictures should be his or her own. It's not good for me to push my kids out into the wilds of the Web before they're ready, and understand what it all means.

When the time comes, they're more than welcome to use social media. But for now, I'm happy to give them a degree of separation until they can make a choice for themselves.

This has meant extra efforts on our part when it comes to making sure that kids don't get accidentally caught up in the Internet, because the schools where they learn, like so many others up and down the country, post their pictures to social media.

However, my husband thought I was overanxious and asked me a question about its advantages. And having thought about it for a while, I'm not 100 percent sure if there are any.

But I could list the disadvantages: the time it takes to manage an account, often by a teacher, meaning extra work; the unavoidable difficulties in safeguarding

It's great to see the kids doing their things in schools, but my worry is about the use of social media that doesn't give anything back to the kids, and in many ways, just turns them into another way to gain clicks. I want more than that for them.

In November 2019, a scientist was sitting in the jungle of Gabon, watching a chimpanzee inspect her son's wounded foot. Suddenly, she quickly caught an insect out of the air, squeezed it in her mouth, and then put it carefully in the cut. In the months that followed, the scientists followed chimpanzees with a wound. Repeatedly, they saw them put insects into it-- applying, removing and reapplying them to the injury as If squeezing out the goodness.

They were, the scientists guessed, using the insects to medicate. "What we think Is that maybe they're mixing it with their saliva (唾液) and pressing something out of the insect", said Simone Pika, from the University of Osnabruck, in Germany. There are some substances that might have anti-inflammatory (消炎的)or pan-killing functions. "

The findings have been published in the journal Current Biology. It is the first time that such behavior has been documented in chimpanzees, although other apes have been known-to "self-medicate" using plants.

So far the researchers haven't found out how chimpanzees formed such behavior. Pika thinks it is possible that the behavior developed by chance, perhaps because a chimpanzee rubbed an insect into a wound for fun but accidentally found T helped relieve the pain, or seemed to make it heal faster. Afterwards, others may have copied it.

Now Pika and her colleagues want to try to identify the insect and work out what it does. Another option, she admits, is that the insect makes no difference at all, and it is simply a cultural practice that has become fashionable. While it might seem odd that chimpanzees would rub insects into their wounds, we fail to judge whether it is helpful in healing the injuries.

Part drama, part dark comedy, the film To the Bone talks about a young woman's struggle with anorexia(厌食症). Though the film has already got generally positive reviews at the Sundance Film Festival, it has caused a hot debate about whether it could be harmful to those with eating disorders.

Critics of the film have focused on the leading role Lily: a thin, young, white woman with anorexia. They think there're some plots that have made eating disorders look like trends instead of life-threatening illnesses. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, anorexia has the highest mortality rate (死亡率) of any mental illness. Thirty million Americans struggle with eating disorders at some point in their life.

Director Marti Noxon based the film on her own battle against anorexia. She was aware of the film's potential to have harmful effects and then tried to be really careful in the way she showed how Lily looked. "You want to help other people understand something that they've never experienced, but you also want people who have experienced it to feel understood and seen," she added. "We are balancing a lot. I want to avoid the idea that the perfectionism of anorexics is their most obvious character. "The film caught the attention of Liana Rosenman, who founded Project HEAL, an organization that helps eating disorder sufferers afford treatment. "I think it is very powerful," Rosenman said. "There is a sense of humor and wisdom in it as well as just understanding what it's like to have an eating disorder. " Project HEAL recently played To the Bone in New York and Los Angeles, but it has faced sharp criticism from members of their community on social media.

It's no secret that the world's coral reefs are in bad shape due to climate change and overfishing. What's worse is that a new study highlights the seriousness of another threat to coral reefs: Plastics.

As part of the study, researchers analyzed more than 124,000 corals from 159 reefs in Myanmar, Thailand ,Indonesia and Australia. And nearly everywhere they looked, they saw bits of plastic. The research team estimates that at least 11 billion plastic items are ensnared (使入陷阱) in coral reefs in the Asia-Pacific- and they believe that number will increase by 40 percent by 2025. This could bring disaster to the world's reefs; the team found that when corals come into contact with plastics, the likelihood of the corals developing a disease jumps from 4 to 89 percent.

Further investigations are needed to determine precisely how and why plastics make coral infected with different diseases. "Plastic pieces can cause physical injury to coral tissues by exhausting resources for immune system function during wound-healing processes," the authors of the study write. Drew Harvell, a co-author of the study, says that plastics also "shade the light coral needs and cut off water flow"

It is vital to preserve the health of coral reefs for a number of reasons. For one, many marine (海洋的) creatures make their homes within the reefs, which support more species per unit area than any other marine environment. Reefs also protect coastlines from waves and tropical storms, support both local and international fishing industries and bring billions of dollars for the worldwide tourism industry every year.

Throughout the course of their research, scientists involved in the new study noticed that the plastics problem was not evenly (均均地) distributed. Reefs near Indonesia had the highest concentration of plastic trash, while reefs near Australia had the lowest. This could be because Australia boasts the best waste removal system- and suggests that there is a relatively easy fix to the issue.