I log onto a computer at the doctor's office to say I have arrived and then wait until a voice calls me into the examination room.

    There, a robotic nurse directs me onto a device and then takes my blood pressure. Some time later, in steps the doctor, who is also a robot. He notes down my symptoms and gives me a prescription (处方). I pay for my visit using a credit card machine and return home without having met another human being.

    When I call my dentist's office and actually get a human being on the line, I am thrilled. And when I see the introduction of yet more self-service checkout stations at the grocery store, I feel like shouting, “When it comes to cashiers, make mine human, please!”

    After all, human cashiers sometimes give you a store coupon (优惠券) for items you are buying. Even more than that, real-life cashiers often take an interest in particularly cute children, which can brighten a young mother's day. A cashier may also show compassion (同情) for an elderly person struggling to get that last penny out of her purse.

    What technological device would do any of this? I don't want to go back to the Stone Age, but I'm also worried about a world run by machines. Sometimes when you're chatting with someone, you discover things you need to know. Maybe a receptionist needs prayers said for a sick child. Maybe a salesperson can offer a bit of encouragement to a customer who is feeling tired.

Machines can be efficient and cost-effective and they often get the job done just fine. But they lack an element so important to everyday life.

    Call it the spirit, the soul or the heart. It is something no machine will ever have. It is being human that prompts us to smile at others, which may be what they need at that moment.

    If you want to become a fluent English speaker you should take some advice. There are four skills in learning English. They are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The most important thing you must remember is that if you want to improve your speaking and writing skills, you should first master the skills of reading and listening.

    Read as much as you can. But your reading must be active. It means that you must think about the meaning of the sentence, the meaning of the unfamiliar（不熟悉） words, etc. There is no need for you to pay much attention to grammars or try to understand all the unfamiliar words you come across, but the fact that you see them for the first time and recognize them whenever you see them, for example, in other passages or books, is enough. It would be better to prepare yourself a notebook so you can write down the important words or sentences in it.

    As for listening, there are two choices: besides reading, you can listen every day for about 30 minutes. You can only pay attention to your reading and become skillful at your reading, then you can catch up on your listening. Since you have lots of inputs in your mind, you can easily guess what the speaker is going to say. This never means that you should not practice listening.

    For listening you can listen to cartoons or some movies that are specially made for children. Their languages are easy. Or if you are good at listening you can listen to VOA or BBC programs every day. Again the thing to remember is being active in listening and preferably taking some notes.

    If you follow these pieces of advice, your speaking and writing will improve quickly, and you can be a fluent English speaker one day.

    Have you ever been to a music festival? Well if you live in the UK, the answer is probably yes. The number of festivals has grown greatly over the last few years and now there are around 200 every summer. So let's look at the history of four famous festivals.

    The Glastonbury Festival is a five-day festival of contemporary (当代的) performing arts held most years in Somerset, in the south-west of England. There are a rock and pop stage, a jazz stage, the Avalon stage, a theatre comedy stage, a cinema tent, a dance tent and a circus (马戏团). The festival started in1970and about 120, 000 people go to it every summer.

    The Reading Festival is truly world-class with rock and pop bands (乐队) appearing from all over the world, particularly (尤其) the USA. About 80, 000 music fans go to Reading every August Bank Holiday. The festival first came to its present site on the banks of the River Thames in Reading in 1971, when it moved from Plumpton in Sussex. It is still on the same site over 47 years later!

    WOMAD stands for World of Music, Arts and Dance and was the idea of rock musician Peter Gabriel to promote (宣传) world music. The WOMAD Festival started in 1982 and takes place in July at Charlton Park, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, and you can see different bands and musicians from all over the world. The festival welcomes over 26, 000 visitors each year.

    The one-day Monsters of Rock Festival at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes was first held in 1980 and gave visitors the chance to hear the very best of hard rock and heavy metal. There were no festivals between 1996 and 2003 as a result of changing musical fashions, but now it has returned and grown into a two-day festival with a campsite for the 30, 000 people who go there in summer days.

    Facebook is an American online social media and social networking service. The Facebook website was launched on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates.

    The founders had limited the website's membership to Harvard students at first; however, later they expanded it to various other universities, and eventually to high school students as well. Since 2006, anyone who claims to be at least 13 years old has been allowed to become a registered (注册了的) user of Facebook, though differences exist in the youngest age requirement, depending on local laws. Facebook has more than 2 billion monthly active users as of June 2017. As of April 2016, Facebook was the most popular social networking site in the world, based on the number of active user accounts.

    Facebook may be accessed by a large range of desktops, smartphones over the Internet and mobile networks. After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile (简介) showing their names and so on. Users can add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post photos and so on.

    Facebook makes most of its income from advertisements which appear on screen, marketing access for its customers to its users.

Below is a web page from http: //www.parents.com/.

Kid of the Year Photo Contest

Enter your kid's photo today and win! We're giving away 52 weekly $250 prizes from Readers' Choice votes. PLUS our editor s will select one entry(参赛作品) to win our grand prize of S7,

000.

Official Contest Rules

No purchase necessary to enter or win. The Kid of the Year Photo Contest entry period begins at 12:00 a. m. March 23, 2023, and ends on January 21, 2024 (the "Entry Period"). Entries must be received by 9:00 p. m. on January 21, 2024 ("Entry Deadline"). Entries will not be acknowledged or returned.

SPONSOR: Meredith Corporation, 1716 Locust Street, Des Moines, Iowa.

ENTRY: There will be two methods of entry.

Share My Entry:

Visit http: //www. parents. com/photos/photo-contests-1/kid-of-the-year/ and click the button to enter. Then complete the registration form and follow the instructions to upload one album of up to six photos of your child aged three months to eight years. Photos must be taken by entrant(参赛者). non-professional, unpublished and may not have won any prize or award. Photos must be . jpeg or . bmp image formats and cannot exceed 3 MB.

Faccbook Entry:

Visit Facebook. com/ParentsMagazine and click the Kid of 2019 tab. Fill out the registration form and upload one album of up to six photos of your child aged three months to eight years. You may provide one description and one album title that will be applied to all photos. Photos must be taken by entrant, non-professional, unpublished and may not have won any prize or award. Photos must be jpeg or.bmp image formats and cannot exceed 3 MB.

This promotion is in no way sponsored, supported or run by, or associated with Faccbook. You are providing your information to Parents Magazine and not to Facebook. The information you provide will only be used to run the promotion and register for Parents. com .

Photos must not contain material that infringesthe rights of another, including but not limited to privacy. publicity or intellectual property rights, or that constitutes copyright violation. Photos must not contain brand names or trademarks.

LIMIT:

One entry per household, per cligible(有资格的) child, per week. One weekly prize per child. For entries of more than one cligible child in the household, the entry process must be completed separately for each child. No group entries.

There has been tremendous concern recently over misinformation on social media. This concern is quite justifiable, as the consequences of believing false information are greatly affecting the individual and collective health.

Many people tend to fall for misinformation they encounter online. There is one influential explanation for this phenomenon. As the thinking goes, someone, who possesses very limited skills in finding and consuming digital content, creating digital content, and communicating it, is likely to have difficulty recognizing false information and thus is more vulnerable to believing false information. As a result, these less digitally literate people may play a significant part in the spread of misinformation.

This argument sounds perfectly plausible. Yet very little research has actually investigated the link between digital literacy and the vulnerability to believing false information. There's even less understanding of the potential link between digital literacy and what people share on social media. A group of MIT researchers explored these potential associations by surveying 1,341 Americans.

In the experiment, the researchers first showed the participants two dozen news headlines about politics, half of which were accurate, and half of which were false. In the second phase, they included a series of tests: having the participants report their familiarity with various Internet-related terms and answer questions about how social media platforms decide what to show in their newsfeeds. At last, the participants were required to assess the accuracy of a set of headlines and point out their likelihood of sharing each headline on social media.

The researchers found "clear evidence" that digital literacy was a strong predictor of accuracy discernment (识别能力). However, the results were "strikingly different" regarding sharing discernment. Digitally literate subjects were just as likely to share inaccurate information. Most surprisingly, even people with high digital literacy were not immune from clicking "share" for false news.

This sounds odd. Although most people don't want to spread misinformation, social media is distracting: people are scrolling quickly, and their attention is drawn to social validation (社会认知度), such as how many likes their posts will get. So make sure a certain post is accurate before you click the "share" button.