Thinking about the future isn't special skill. Actually, everyone does it all the time. We schedule future activities and appointments on our calendars. We make to-do lists, a promise to ourselves of how we will spend our future time and energy. We look up the weekend's weather. We make predictions about the results of sporting events. We practice, study and train for upcoming events that matter to us. We daydream about events we're eagerly looking forward to. We worry about others.

    Most of this common future thinking is about the near future: the next few minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or maybe even the next few years of our lives. Little time is spent thinking about what our lives will be like or what actions we should prepare to take in the far future: ten years, twenty years, or even fifty years from now. This kind of far-future thinking is the domain of professional futurists.

    Futurists are trained to imagine distant realities that seem impossible to others: technologies that don't exist yet, great changes to laws, strange diseases most likely to infect us in the year 2031. Why indeed think about such distant futures? Are there psychological and social benefits to imagining the world, and our lives, decades in advance? And if so, what does it take to become good at imagining the far future?

    These were the fascinating questions that we recently explored with other futurists. I was personally inspired by the discussions, and learned a lot about how futurists imagine the future of life. They specifically wanted to use their imaginations to make the world a better place. Another big benefit for me was that this way of thinking is a skill that can be taught. Society would benefit greatly if we all learned the valuable skills that enable us to think about what things would be like in the future.

    Getting rid of dirt, in the opinion of most people, is a good thing. However, there is nothing fixed about attitudes to dirt.

    In the early 16th century, people thought that dirt on the skin was a way to block out disease, as medical opinion had it that washing off dirt with hot water could open up the skin and let illnesses in. A particular danger was thought to lie in public baths. By 1538, the French king had closed the bath houses in his kingdom. So did the king of England in 1546. Thus it began a long time when the rich and the poor in Europe lived with dirt in a friendly way. Henry IV, King of France, was famously dirty. Upon learning that a nobleman had taken bath, the king ordered that, to avoid the attack of disease, the nobleman should not go out.

    Though the belief in the merit of dirt was long-lived, dirt has no longer been regarded as a nice neighbor ever since the 18th century. Scientifically speaking, cleaning away dirt is good to health. Clean water supply and hand washing are practical means of preventing disease. Yet, it seems that standards of cleanliness have moved beyond science since World War Ⅱ. Advertisements repeatedly sell the idea: clothes need to be whiter than white, cloths ever softer, surfaces to shine. Has the hate for dirt, however, gone too far?

    Attitudes to dirt still differ hugely nowadays. Many first-time parents nervously try to warn their children of touching dirt, which might be responsible for the spread of disease. On the contrary, Mary Ruebush, an American immunologist(免疫学家), encourages children to play in the dirt to build up a strong immune system. And the latter position is gaining some ground.

    Even now, almost a year after their astonishing act of group heroism, the dozens of people who risked their lives to save two boys from drowning in Panama City Beach, are still remembered.

    The story began on July 8, 2017. Members of the Ursrey family, eight in total, were enjoying an evening together at the beach. As the sun sank lower on the horizon（地平线）, the two boys—Noah, 11, and Stephen, 8—took their skateboards and walked into the waves without the grown-ups noticing. When the boys were about 70 yards from shore, they realized that the ocean pulled them out to sea. After trying and failing to paddle（涉水）back, they started waving and screaming for help. But the lifeguards had clocked out for the evening.

    The boys had been struggling for several minutes when Brittany and Tabatha Monroe, a married couple from Georgia, wandered by. They didn't see the boys at first, but they heard them.

    They jumped into the water and easily reached the brothers, who were still in fairly shallow water. The woman reassured the frightened boys and seized their skateboards, telling them they would be safe and then discovered that they, too, were now in a world of trouble. They couldn't get back to shore and could barely and only occasionally hit the sandy bottom with their feet. After a few minutes, it was clear to the woman that they were all trapped in a terrible whirlpool.

    Then scores of tourists were walking to them, hand in hand, forming a line. Soon the first person held the woman's hand. In turn, her husband and the two boys joined her. The long line moved slowly until they were back to the safety of the beach.

    The rescuers call it the Human Chain. But it was the deeply “human” aspect of the rescuers' cooperation（合作）that made it so astonishing and successful.

    Argument for awards

    It's always exciting every year in October when the Nobel Prizes are announced. We get to witness the acknowledgement (表彰) of some of humankind's greatest minds in six fields – literature (文学), medicine, physics, chemistry, economics and activism for peace.

    This year, however, part of the excitement will be taken away, since there won't be a Nobel Prize in literature due to the fact that the Swedish Academy – the institution (机构) that awards the prize – was involved in a sexual harassment scandal.

People worry that a scandal like this will affect the reputation of the Nobel Prizes. But at the same time, we have to ask ourselves whether we really need these awards after all.

    According to Jana Gallus, an economist from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, one of the reasons that people give out awards is to establish a legacy (遗产). In the case of the Nobel Prizes, they encourage people to achieve more by acknowledging the hard work of top figures in different fields.

    Awards may also help establish standards of what's considered high quality. For example, if you're having a hard time deciding which movie to watch, one of them having an Oscar under its belt will probably help you to make your mind up. And by reading the books that have won The Man Booker Prize or listening to songs that have been awarded a Grammy, you get an idea about what “great” literature and music look and sound like – at least in the eyes of judging panels (评审团).

    Sure, awards can backfire. There was the OscarsSoWhite movement in 2015 and 2016, when it turned out that all 20 actors nominated (提名) for two years in a row were white. There was also the GrammysSoMale movement in January, when Alessia Cara was the only woman to win a solo Grammy this year. But still, it was these incidents that brought the problems of racism (种族歧视) and gender (性别) inequality into the public eye once more. And with influential voices – like that of black actor Will Smith, who refused to attend the Oscars ceremony – the problems became more likely to be noticed and dealt with instead of being buried silently, again.

    Maybe these awards do matter, and we do need them – just not while they are under the shadow of a sexual harassment scandal.

    So when it comes to this year's Nobel Prize in Literature, I'm going to have to say: "No, thanks."

    BY CHEN XUE, 21ST CENTURY TEENS STAFF

    Over the past 40 years, China has helped more than 700 million rural residents out of being poor, and the poverty rate -- the proportion of people living below the Chinese poverty line -- had fallen among the rural population from 97.5 percent in 1978 to 3.1 percent at the end of 2017, official figures shows. China's achievements in poverty alleviation (扶贫) made the world look at China with admiration.

    "For me, it is unbelievable that over 40 years, that is, over the course of one working lifetime, China has gone from one of the poorest countries in the world to one that is about to eliminate(消除) absolute poverty," said Craig Allen, president of the US-China Business Council.

    Varaprasad Sekhar Dolla, a professor of Chinese studies at India's Jawaharlal Nehru University, also spoke highly of China's achievements in poverty reduction. "If global poverty came down greatly in the last three or four decades, it's partly because of the Chinese contribution to reducing poverty within its own national boundaries," said the Indian scholar.

    In the eyes of Khairy Tourk, a professor of economics with the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, "many countries look up to China to learn from its experience." "The Chinese experience is based on building a modern infrastructure (基础设施) and then on setting up special economic zones that would help underdeveloped countries to become more industrial," he added.

    In the government work report delivered at the opening of the annual NPC session (全国人大会议) on March 5, China promises to reduce its population of rural poor by over 10 million this year.

Whether in the home or the workplace, social robots are going to become a lot more common in the next few years. Social robots are about to bring technology to the everyday world in a more humanized way, said Cynthia Breazeal, chief scientist at the robot company Jibo.

While household robots today do the normal housework, social robots will be much more like companions than mere tools. For example, these robots will be able to distinguish when someone is happy or sad. This allows them to respond more appropriately to the user.

The Jibo robot, arranged to ship later this year, is designed to be a personalized assistant. You can talk to the robot, ask it questions, and make requests for it to perform different tasks. The robot doesn't just deliver general answers to questions; it responds based on what it learns about each individual in the household. It can do things such as reminding an elderly family member to take medicine or taking family photos.

Social robots are not just finding their way into the home. They have potential applications in everything from education to health care and are already finding their way into some of these spaces.

Fellow Robots is one company bringing social robots to the market. The company's "Oshbot" robot is built to assist customers in a store, which can help the customers find items and help guide them to the product's location in the store. It can also speak different languages and make recommendations for different items based on what the customer is shopping for.

The more interaction the robot has with humans, the more it learns. But Oshbot, like other social robots, is not intended to replace workers, but to work alongside other employees." We have technologies to train social robots to do things not for us, but with us," said Breazeal.