段落大意题 知识点题库

    Does Fame Drive You Crazy?

    Although being famous might sound like a dream come true, todays star, feeling like zoo animals, face pressures that few of us can imagine. They are at the center of much of the worlds attention. Paparazzi (狗仔队) camp outside their homes, cameras ready. Tabloids (小报) publish thrilling stories about their personal lives. Just imagine not being able to do anything without being photographed or interrupted for a signature.

    According to psychologist Christina Villareal, celebrities（famous people名人) worry constantly about their public appearance. Eventually, they start to lose track of who they really are, seeing themselves the way their fans imagine them, not as the people they were before everyone knew their names. “Over time,” Villareal says, “they feel separated and alone.”

    The phenomenon of tracking celebrities has been around for ages. In the 4th century B.C., painters followed Alexander the Great into battle, hoping to picture his victories for his admirers. When Charles Dickens visited America in the 19th century, his sold-out readings attracted thousands of fans, leading him to complain about his lack of privacy(隐私). Tabloids(小报) of the 1920s and 1930s ran articles about film-stars in much the same way that modern tabloids and websites do.

    Being a public figure today, however, is a lot more difficult than it used to be. Superstars cannot move about without worrying about photographers with modern cameras. When they say something silly or do something ridiculous, there is always the Internet to spread the news in minutes and keep their “story” alive forever.

    If fame is so troublesome, why arent all celebrities running away from it? The answer is there are still ways to deal with it. Some stars stay calm by surrounding themselves with trusted friends and family or by escaping to remote places away from big cities. They focus not on how famous they are but on what they love to do or whatever made them famous in the first place.

    Sometimes a few celebrities can get a little justice. Still, even stars who enjoy full justice often complain about how hard their lives are. They are tired of being famous already.

    In Western countries, bread is one of the most important foods. When they get up in the morning many people eat toast (烤面包). They spread butter and jam on their toast. People eat bread at other times of the day too. For example, at main meals, they often eat bread with soup.

    It's also very common to eat sandwiches. A sandwich is two pieces of bread with a filling inside - salad, cheese or fish. A hamburger is a kind of sandwich.

There are many different kinds of bread. Some are special to some countries. For example, the baguette (法国棍子面包) is a long, thin loaf that began in France.

    There is also white bread and whole-wheat (全麦面) bread. What's the difference? White bread is refined (精制的). It has things taken out of it to make it softer and easier to eat. The trouble is, white bread also has lots of goodness taken out. Although some people dislike the taste of whole-wheat bread, it is much healthier.

    Some kinds of bread have additives (添加剂). They are put into the bread for many reasons. Some additives are good for you - for example vitamin C. Others are there to make the bread last longer. Still others to make it taste better - but they do not necessarily make the bread healthier to eat!

    Lots of people buy books and products from Amazon, an online seller. They offer and pay over the Internet and the books are shipped through the mail or a delivery service like FedEx.

    One day, people could get their Amazon deliveries from an “unmanned aerial vehicle”—a timely vehicle that looks like a toy helicopter. And instead of waiting days to get the parcel, it could be at the buyer's home in half an hour or less. The company is working on a fleet of tiny vehicles they call “Prime Air”. The vehicles are also known as “octocopters”. On their website, Amazon says, “One day, Prime Air Vehicles will be as normal as seeing a mail trucks on the road today.”

    The U.S.'s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is working on safety regulations for unmanned flying vehicles like the Prime Air copters. Those regulations will make sure the copters are able to fly safely where they need to go. Once the FAA has put its rules in place, which could be as early as 2016, Amazon will be ready with its fleet of tiny flyers. The process could take as many as five years.

    The new delivery service would likely be available only in the United States, at first. The copters the company is testing now can handle packages up to five pounds (2.3kg) and they have a range of 10 miles (16 kilometers).

    Other companies are also looking at using unmanned flying vehicles to deliver their products. For instance, Domino's Pizza in the U.K. released a video showing a “DomiCopter”, delivering a pizza. That video may have been a publicity stunt（噱头）. In any case, just like Prime Air's octocopters, the DomiCopters don't have clearance（许可）to take off just yet.

    LUKLA, Nepal(Xinhua) – Qomolangma, known as Mount Everest in the West, once negatively recognized as the “world's highest junkyard”, is set to become cleaner as 30,000 porters（搬运工）have been mobilized（动员）for waste collection and disposal from the mountain's southern side. The cleanup drive was launched recently near Lukla airport, one of the world's most dangerous airports yet a vital gateway to the world's highest peak.

    “Our major task is to keep Everest, which is the pride of the world, clean. This campaign aims to transport 100 tons of nonburnable garbage from the Everest region to Kathmandu in 2018,”Ang Dorje Sherpa, chairman of the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee said.

    The SPCC, an environmental conversation organization, has made it mandatory（强制性）since 2013 that every climber should carry down 8 kilograms of trash, but for trekkers（旅行者）there is no such regulation. Due to this, more than 100 tons of waste gets collected in the region annually.

    According to Nepalese government statistics, nearly 50,000 domestic and foreign trekkers visit the Qomolangma region annually, while more than 400 mountaineers attempt to scale the peak. The collected waste mostly includes empty beer bottles and cans, oxygen bottles, torn tents and sleeping bags, food bins, and discarded mountaineering and trekking equipment. The trash was collected by local groups in more than a dozen villages while the waste was transported down the mountain in sacks（麻布袋）by porters and yak-hybrid animals as zopkyos. The cleanup covered settlements from up to 5,000 meters near the base camp, to Lukla airport located at an altitude of 2,805 meters.

    On the first day of the campaign, several tons of waste was sent off to Kathmando from Lulka on planes belonging to Tara Airlines, one of the leading private airlines in Nepal. The airlines have set an ambitious target of flying out 100 tons of waste from the region in 2018, as a part of its commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals against climate change. The company's CEO Umesh Chandra Rai said: “We hope that this campaign will help the local people to maintain a pristine（原始的）, natural and unspoiled environment so that more trekkers will come from everywhere, making the trekking industry here more sustainable.”

    My friend Susan has a huge-hearted husband. He is once again on the front lines of fighting the fires in Northern CA. As a Chief Battalion leader, his job is very dangerous and his time away from his family is often for weeks at a time during "fire season".

Every time before he leaves, Ethan, Susan and each of the three teens hold one another and thoughtfully each shares the best of their traditions — each promises to do the tasks that will keep the family a well-oiled machine while Ethan is away.

    Ethan has brought back animals that lost their homes in the fires. By now, a gray rabbit, two parrots and a small group of Nubian goats have been added into the family.

    When Ethan is on duty, Susan keeps checking her cell phone for Ethan's text messages. His substantial (大量的) white facial hair is often mistaken for that of Father Christmas by children who are carried out of their burning homes by him.

    For each rescued child, a toy bear is waiting to be matched with him/her. For each adult, Ethan provides clean clothes. He finds pleasure in doing his job well. He is grateful to be often on the front line with frightened people and their poor pets.

    I am mentioning Ethan because by now the big fire has been spreading widely for a week. It has caused 55 deaths and left 500,000 people homeless. Now I am here at my school site, and the smoky air is keeping our students inside, waiting for rescue.

    The smallest kids on Earth are much smaller than you or your baby brother or sister. They're even smaller than the hairs on your head. We call them “NanoPutians”(纳米小人). Also known as NanoKids, the NanoPutians aren't real people. They are actually tiny molecules (分子) made to look a little bit like people.

    James Tour invented the NanoPutians as a way to teach kids about nanoscience, which refers to the study of things that are smaller than about 100 or 200 nanometers. “The exact size is less important than the possible applications of working with such tiny things,” Tour says, “Nanoscience is the study and development of the small so that it will affect the large.”

One of the goals of the research is to control individual atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and other types of atoms are the building blocks of the universe. They make up planets, rocks, people, trees, CDs — all the stuff out there. “Most things that people build come together in a top-down way”, Tour says. If you want to make a table, for instance, you cut down a big tree, make wooden boards, and hammer them together. Nature, on the other hand, builds things from the bottom up. When atoms join together they make molecules. Each molecule has a certain shape, and a molecule's structure determines what it can do. Molecules can make them come together to make a cell — or a tree.

    Tour and his co-workers turned these molecular structures into cartoon figures and made an animated(动画的) science video about the little people, set it to music and started showing it to kids in school while talking about how exciting research on small things can be.

    “Learning about the NanoKids has opened up a world of possibility for real kids who ordinarily would rather not study biology, chemistry or physics.” Tour says. When you look closely enough, the really small can be really cool.

    Children are starting on digital devices at ever younger ages, and opinions on the effects of children's digital-media habits are deeply polarised.(两极分化的).

    Jean Twenge, a psychology professor, thinks excessive use of the internet and social media makes children lonely and depressed and poses serious risks to their physical and particularly their mental health, sometimes to the point of driving them to suicide.

    However, Daniel Kardefelt-Winther of the Innocenti research office of Unicef examined various evidence and found less cause for alarm than is often suggested. Most of the studies he examined seem to show that the technology helps children stay in touch with their friends and make new ones.

    The relationship between the use of digital technology and children's mental health, broadly speaking, appears to be u-shaped. Researchers have found that moderate use is beneficial, whereas either no use at all or extreme use could be harmful.

    What worries some experts more is that screens are becoming part of the middle-class armoury(武器) for perpetuating(巩固) social advantage. Children from well-off homes are enrolled in private classes to learn skills like "How to be a YouTuber", which poorer parents cannot afford.

    Your next car could have two seats, three wheels two in front and one in the back and a top speed of more than 100 miles per hour. Elio Motors plans to make such a tiny car named the Elio. Its two seats sit front and back instead of side by side. The driver is positioned in (he center with the passenger directly behind.

    The starting price for the car is just ＄6.800. It has only one door, on the left side, which cuts a few hundred dollars off the manufacturing costs. Having three wheels also makes it cheaper. It has air conditioning, power windows and door locks and an AM/FM radio. More features can be ordered through Elio's long list of suppliers. Elio will also sell the cars directly through its own stores and not through franchised dealers (特约经销商).

    Paul Elio dreamed as a kid that he would one day own a car company called Elio Motora. In 2008, tired of high gas prices, he started working on a car that burns gas in a more effective way. Equally important to him was creating US manufacturing jobs and making the car inexpensive enough to attract buyers who might otherwise be stuck in their old, unreliable cars. "Whatever matters to you, this can move the needle on," he said.

    Already, more than 27,000 people have reserved one. Paul hopes to make 250,000 cars a year by 2020. So far, reservation holders are those who will use the Elio as a second or third car for work. Paul Elio believes the car will interest college students as well as used-car drivers who want something newer and more reliable, though.

    Ask any group of teenagers in the UK what they most like to eat, and foods like pizzas, curries, pasta, burgers and chips are bound to get mentioned and many young people would probably also list hanging out at the local fast food restaurant as one of their favorite pastimes (消遣).

    But what teenagers like to eat is not necessarily what they should be eating. According to the National and Nutrition Survey, far too many young people in the UK between the ages of 14 and 18 consume too much fat sugar and salt in their diet and take in too many calories. Meanwhile their intake of starchy carbohydrates (含大淀粉的碳水化合物), fibre, iron, vitamins and calcium is too low.

    For a growing body, eating foods containing plenty of calcium, such as milk, yoghurt and cheese, is particularly important as calcium is essential for the development of healthy, strong bones. Similarly, foods that are rich in iron are good for young, rapidly developing bodies, so red meat. bread, green vegetables, dried fruit and tonified(使增强体质的) breakfast cereals are also recommended.

    It is during our teenage years that habits of lifestyle can become entrenched (根深蒂固的),so it is crucial (全关重要的)that young people are educated about what foods arc good for them. In 2005, in an attempt 10 change eating habits and open teenagers' minds to new flavours and new tastes, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver launched a "Feed Me Better" campaign. As part of a television series Jamel School drivers, he worked with teachers and cooks in a number of schools across the UK to provide more healthy, nutritious school meal opt ions. Although there was initial resistance from sonic teenagers and parents. the campaign was generally hailed (把...... 誉为)as a huge success and helped to influence governmental policy on nutritional standards for school meals.

    No one expects to end the teenage love affair with fast and junk food but. hopefully, if projects "Feed Me Better" and the government's own "Change for Life" campaign continue to give out the right messages, more young people will understand the importance of balancing occasional treats with healthier food options.

    If someone asked you to quantify (衡量) the time you spend online, how would you answer? If you're like one-fifth of Americans, you'd likely say "almost constantly." New research shows that 21 percent of Americans report that they're online more or less constantly.

    Andrew Perrin, a research assistant at Pew, did a survey about Internet use. During the survey, adults were asked how much they go online. 13 percent said they don't go online and 13 percent said they go online several times a week or less. Only 10 percent said they go online once a day and much larger quantities said they go online several times a day (42 percent) or "almost constantly" (21 percent).

    Interestingly, there wasn't a gender split (性别分化) when it came to near constant Internet use. Age seems to be the great divider: Only six percent of people over 65 said they were online that much. Those who reported that they were online all the time included 12 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds, 28 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds and 36 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds.

    Don't suppose that teenagers are online more than adults, however. In another survey, Pew found that while they did have a slight edge on adults in general when it came to "almost constant" Internet use, 24 percent said they were online pretty much all the time. They still fell greatly behind the 36 percent of adults between 18 and 29 years of age who were always online.

    Given that the United Nations considers unrestricted (无限制的) Internet access (接入) to be a human right, the number of Americans who report being online "almost constantly" could rise along with availability and affordability. But it remains to be seen whether being online all the time is actually something to long for, or how constant connectivity will affect American culture in the long term.

    A study published in the journal Science reveals that since 1970, bird populations in the United States and Canada have declined by 29 percent, or almost 3 billion birds. The results show tremendous losses across diverse groups of birds and habitats - from iconic songsters such as meadowlarks to long-distance migrants such as swallows.

    "These data are consistent with what we're seeing elsewhere," said coauthor Peter Marra, former head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. It's urgent to address ongoing threats, both because the domino effects (多米诺效应)can lead to the decay of ecosystems that humans depend on for our own health and livelihoods and because people all over the world cherish birds in their own right. Can you imagine a world without birdsong?"

    Evidence for the declines emerged from detection of migratory birds in the air from 143 NEXRAD weather radar stations across the continent in a period spanning over 10 years as well as from nearly 50 years of data collected through multiple monitoring efforts on the ground. Citizen-science participants also contributed a lot, for the analysis included citizen-science data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey coordinated by the Canadian Wildlife Service- the main sources of long-term, large-scale population data for North American birds.

    The study noted that the largest factor driving these declines is likely the widespread loss and degradation of habitat, especially due to agricultural intensification and urbanization. Other studies have documented death from predation (捕食)by domestic cats; collisions with glass, buildings, and other structures; and pervasive (普遍的)use of pesticides associated with widespread declines in insects, an essential food source for birds. Climate change is expected to compound these challenges by altering habitats and threatening plant communities that birds need to survive.

    "It's a wake-up call that we've lost more than a quarter of our birds in the U.S. and Canada," said coauthor Adam Smith from Environment and Climate Change Canada. But the crisis reaches far beyond our individual borders. Many of the birds that breed in Canadian backyards migrate through or spend the winter in the U.S. and places farther south - from Mexico and the Caribbean to Central and South America. What our birds need now is an historic, hemispheric effort that unites people and organizations with one common goal: bringing our birds back.

    I first began experiencing depression (抑郁) at the age of 14 .At first depression would come and go, but later it became a continual part of my life.

    I was so strongly determined to find the way to overcome my depression that I tried everything from when I was in college, special teas, yoga (瑜伽), and advice given by doctors. However, I still felt I hadn't even come close to managing the problem.

    But one afternoon, I saw an article in a magazine that talked about how dogs were able to help people with depression. The next day, I decided to get a dog—a corgi (柯基犬).

    When I bought my little corgi, Buddy, home, I didn't realize how much he would change my life. One morning, I woke up with those familiar feelings again. I didn't want to get out of bed. I turned to pull the covers back over my head and give up. That's when I saw Buddy. He started jumping all over me, licking (舔) my face, letting me know that it was time to go outside. It was as if he were saying, "There's no time to be sad. The world is amazing!" And for the first time in my life, on a day when my depression were strong, I got out of bed. I put on my winter clothes and went for a walk in the snow with my new friend. I realized at that moment, walking down the street in winter, my life was changing. I really was a new person. This was my new beginning.

    It's been more than a year since that day, and I've never spent another morning unable to get out of bed. I've not cried myself to sleep or spent my days filled with fear and regret. Sure, I still have days when I feel sad or anxious. But with Buddy by my side, I've finally learned how to manage these feelings.

    UK physicist Isaac Newton once said, "Nature is pleased with simplicity and nature is no dummy (傻子)." Indeed, Mother Nature can provide almost everything human beings need if we follow her rules. But if we break the rules, she is likely to be cruel and lash out at us.

    The outbreak of the novel coronavirus pneumonia (新型冠状病毒肺炎, NCP) in China and some other countries at the beginning of this year is an example. According to Xinhua News Agency, the new coronavirus is similar to a virus found in a bat in 2017 and probably has an intermediate host (中间宿主). It's believed that the virus originated from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, Hubei province, where live wild animals were sold.

    The Wall Street Journal reported that Dr Peter Daszak, president of the US-based health organization EcoHealth Alliance, said, "This outbreak is a lesson for us. On a global scale (规模), human population density (密度), wildlife diversity, and land use change are what drive new pandemics (流行病)."

    In ancient times, people needed to rely on nature to survive so they held it in awe (敬畏). For example, the American Indians believed that humans are a part of nature and nature is a part of humans. Chinese ancients always pursued the harmony between nature and human beings.

    However, as human beings master more knowledge and make more advanced tools, people try to change and even conquer nature. They use more land to make buildings, genetically modify (改变) plants, capture some wild and rare animals to suit their own needs. In this process, humans gradually lose contact with nature and even throw it out of balance. For example, cutting a large number of forests means carbon dioxide must build up in the atmosphere and it contributes to global warming.

    Although we don't know for sure what first caused the NCP outbreak, Brian Lamacraft at Medium said it's time for people to "reflect on our relationship with our planet" and "reconnect with this world and everything that we've been given". After all, according to US poet Gary Snyder, "Nature is not the place to visit. It's our home."

Some people don't know whether to learn American English or British English. Here is my answer to it.

It's really, really hard to pick up a native-sounding accent if you learn English as an adult. Children pick up accents very quickly, but adults don't. Even after speaking English every day for twenty or thirty years, you'll probably keep a bit of a foreign accent. I've met many English learners who've lived abroad for several years in an English-speaking country. For the most part, I can't tell what country they've lived in unless they tell me.

Since it's so hard to learn an accent, you probably shouldn't spend a lot of time trying to guide yours to one accent or the other. There are better ways to use your time, like learning new vocabulary or phrases.

Even if you are able to get an American or British accent, it won't make much difference. That's because English speakers are used to hearing different accents. Americans hear British accents on TV and movies. And we all hear accents from other countries: Russian accents, Korean accents, French accents, and so on. Usually, British people like the way that Americans sound, and Americans like the way that British people sound. So you're OK either way.

So just pick whatever language is most convenient for you. If you have friends or teachers from America, you should probably learn American English. If you have British friends or coworkers, maybe it's better to learn British English.

It's probably easiest to stick with just one kind. However, there's nothing wrong with mixing a bit of British and American English together. It won't hurt you!

TikTok has pushed a new safety update in November to its app that allows parents to take more control of their teenager's accounts, as social media companies come under increasing pressure to make their platforms safer for children.

The company said Tuesday that its "Family Pairing" feature now enables parents to turn off comments on their children's videos entirely or to limit them to friends only. Parents whose accounts are linked to their kids will also be able to set their accounts to private, turn off the search function for content, users or sounds, and limit who can see which videos their children have liked.

Launched (发布) in March, the Family Pairing tool lets parents see how long their children are spending on TikTok each day and limit the content they can see.

TikTok allows children to register and create an account if they're over the age of 13. All they need to do is provide their date of birth. However, because TikTok doesn't require registers to prove their identities, some children under 13 have registered by lying about their age，according to U. K. regulator Ofcom (英国通讯管理局).

Alexandra Evans, head of child safety public policy for TikTok in Europe, told CNBC that Family Pairing has "put itself in parents' shoes" since it was launched.

"If we're thinking about it as a toolbox, we wanted to offer more tools," she said on a video call ahead of the announcement.

Parents, teachers and caregivers have long believed in the magic of storytelling to calm and comfort kids. Researchers working in pediatric (儿科) have now quantified the physiological and emotional benefits of a well- told tale.

"We know that narrative has the power to transport us to another world," says Brockington, who studies emotions and learning at Brazil's Federal University. He adds, "Earlier research suggested that stories help children process and regulate their emotions- but this was mostly conducted in a lab, with subjects answering questions while lying inside functional MRI machines. There's little research on physiological and psychological effects of storytelling in a more commonplace hospital setting."

So the investigators working in several Brazilian hospitals split a total of 81 patients aged 4 to 11 into two groups, matching them with storytellers who had a decade of hospital experience. In one group, the storyteller led each child in playing a riddle game. In the other, youngsters chose books and listened as the storyteller read them aloud. Before and after these sessions, the researchers took saliva (唾液) samples from each child, then asked them to report their pain levels and conducted a free association word quiz and analyzed samples.

Children in both groups benefited measurably from the interactions.

Those who heard stories also reported pain levels dropping almost twice as much as those in the riddle group, and they used more positive and light words to describe their hospital stay. The study demonstrates that playing games or simply interacting with someone can relax kids and improve their outlook but that hearing stories has an especially dramatic effect. "The researchers really tried to control the social interaction component of the storyteller, which I think was key," says Mar, a psychologist at York University.

I believe in the power of science fiction, not just for its capacity to turn dreams into reality, but also for its power to bond together those who share a common view of the future. For me, that's true for my relationship with my dad. Some fathers and sons bond over sports, fishing or hunting, but my dad and I bond over Star Trek. We tried a trip to Disney World, but one of my earliest memories wasn't Mickey, but a Klingon battle cruiser (巡洋舰) on the screen.

Over the years, nearly every setting and situation has become far away for my dad and me. When it's warm at night, we're not driving along some dark streets in Indiana, but going at a slow speed with stars dimly shining. Both of us are thinking of them, without needing to say a word. All these imaginations of other universes have together created a private universe for my dad and me.

Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, once said, "Science fiction is a way of thinking, a way of logic that bypasses (绕过) a lot of nonsense. It allows people to look directly at important subjects. " A lifetime of science fiction has influenced more than just my relationship with my dad, but has also helped me shape my own hopes for the future. I'm now a science writer.

Yes, science fiction has made me into a "nerd" (书呆子) and it also has been a source of joy for my family, making me an optimist while enabling me to think critically about the danger of technology. Thank those authors who have shared their visions: the world and my family are better for it. Thank my dad, who is both the best storyteller and the best man I have ever known because he helped me realize the truth of Tennyson's words, "For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, saw the vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be. "

Each year more than 6 million dogs and cats end up in animal shelters, according to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. National Adopt a Shelter Pet Day was designed to raise awareness about organizations' work with homeless animals.

Their main mission is to find homes for pets and reunite lost ones with their human families, but they need a lot of volunteer help.

"Not everyone has to have an animal in order to care about animals," said Debra Duel of the Humane Rescue Alliance in Washington. One way to help is to become a short-term foster (收养) family. Fostering frees up space in busy shelters. Adoptable pets get more personal attention once fostered in a loving home than in crowded shelter environments. "Fostering is great for people who can't have a permanent pet," Duel said.

Fostering also helps people learn more about pet care before offering a forever home.

Victoria, now 12, has taken care of 49 animals since 2018. "Every animal is an individual, "Victoria said. "Each requires different work. Puppies or kittens require more time and training than older dogs and cats, "she said. "Even small animals like guinea pigs are more work than people think. "

If you really can't foster, consider donating time, money and supplies to a shelter. Kindergartners at Browne Academy in Fairfax County did just that. They, in a partnership with the Animal Welfare League of Alexandria, raised several hundred dollars by drawing pictures of family pets that sold for $1 each. They also made cat toys and pillows. Their efforts helped improve the animals' stay at the shelter, and they helped reduce adoption fees for people who can't afford them.

Hopefully all those efforts will lead to fewer animals waiting for their forever homes.

Back in the 1980 s when monkeypox（猴痘）was still an extremely rare disease, scientists kept warning: Over time, the monkeypox outbreaks will increase. At that time, there were only about 50 monkeypox cases a year in West and Central Africa where people caught the disease mainly from direct contact with wild animals. Infection between humans was very limited. But in 2022, the world is facing the first international outbreak, with more than 5,000 cases reported in 44 countries within six months.

So how could the scientists know in the 1980s that monkeypox would grow in size and spread internationally?

Their warnings were based on the successful campaign against smallpox（天花）, one of the deadliest diseases in human history, which killed up to 30% of the people infected. Thanks to a worldwide campaign, smallpox disappeared in the late 1970s. However, the end of smallpox opened the door for monkeypox to emerge.

Monkeypox, whose present version kills less than 1% of people infected, is closely related to smallpox. Having a smallpox infection-or a smallpox vaccine（疫苗）-offers really good protection against smallpox as well as monkeypox. Perhaps about 85% protection. But in the late 1970s, the world stopped vaccining people for smallpox. So over the past decades, human resistance to smallpox and monkeypox-has dropped sharply.

"We're actually at a point where our immunity against monkeypox is the lowest in thousands of years," says Jo Walker of the Yale School of Public Health. "Without some resistance against the disease, people are more likely to catch monkeypox from animals and spread it to someone else. So it is time that people who might come into contact with infected people were vaccined for monkeypox. Otherwise, it could become a permanent presence in the world, since every time there's an outbreak the virus has a chance to figure out how to spread more quickly among people.

Indeed, this new outbreak in Europe may be a sign that the virus has changed-even if just a bit-and may be increasing its ability to spread among people.

Covid-19 vaccines (疫苗) began saving lives in clinical trials. But a new study, based in part on The Economist's estimate of the pandemic's true death toll (伤亡人数), attempts to model just how many lives have been spared since vaccines became widely available to the public.

The study— published on June 23rd in Lancet Infectious Diseases— found that in the first year of vaccines that were invented and introduced to the public , jabs (注射疫苗) saved the lives of people between 19.1 million and 20.4 million. Without vaccines, the study estimates, roughly three times as many people would have died from Covid-19 in 2021 alone. And 6.8 million — 7.7millon of the prevented deaths were in countries covered by COVAX ( Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access), an initiative created to ensure vaccines were sent to poorer countries. Still, a lack of vaccines in some parts of the world still led to avoidable deaths. Around 100 countries failed to reach the World Health Organization's (WHO) goal of vaccinating 40% of their qualified populations by the end of 2021. The researchers estimate that this cost around 600,000 lives.

To arrive at these estimates, the researchers, Oliver J. Watson, Gregory Barnsley and their colleagues at Imperial College London, began with an existing transmission model used to track the spread of Covid-19 infections. They then combined this model with The Economist's estimate of the pandemic's true death toll to estimate how deadly the pandemic would have been without vaccines.

As for the study, every coin has two sides. It relies on assumptions about the share of estimated infections that led to death, for instance. Some small countries, which have limited reliable data, were not included in the analysis. That means the total number of actual avoided deaths will be even higher. On the other hand, the researchers did not attempt to model how people or governments might have changed their behavior to limit infections in the absence of vaccines. For all that, it is the most definitive answer yet to how many people owe their lives to the jabs.