For families on vacation, a playground provides a welcome break. It can also provide a glimpse into the local culture，from the setup of the park to the ways families interact．Here are the designs that live up to that challenge．

Fruit and Scent Playground, Stockholm

    Is there a picky eater on a steady diet of chicken fingers and cheese? Perhaps a trip to Sweden's Fruit and Scent Playground will change his or her culinary(烹饪的)tune. This playground features a banana slide，an orange seesaw，pear huts，a watermelon jungle gym and a pair of cherry swings，all designed by public artist Johan Ferner Strom. Now, who can say you can't play with your food?

Nishi Rokugo Park, Tokyo

    Located between central Tokyo and the city of Kawasaki, Nishi Rokugo combines recycled rubber tires(橡胶轮胎)with traditional playground equipment. In total, more than 3,000 tires of different sizes are used to create tunnels, bridges, tall sculptures for climbing and, of course, tire swings. There's little shade, so you can visit here in the early morning or late afternoon for the most comfortable weather, and be sure to wear your play clothes.

    Bicentennial Children's Park, Santiago, Chile

    Bicentennial Children's playground in Metropolitan Park was built to celebrate 200 years of Chilean independence and improve the lives of Santiago citizens. Dozens of slides are built into the slope, creating a design completely complementary(互为补充的)of the surrounding landscape. Fountains offer some relief from the sun, and ample seating gives parents a place to relax.

How to Win a Debate Competition

    Debating doesn't mean that you can end up arguing with your opponents(对手). {#blank#}1{#/blank#}．The following tips on how to win a debate will further help you out.

    1 ){#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    This is very important. If you already know the debate topic that you are going to debate on, learn as much about it as you can. Research on it and then form opinions about it. Only if you know something in and out, will you be able to talk convincingly on it.

    2 ) Be confident.

    When you are putting your point in front of your opponents as well as the audience, be sure of yourself. Along with the words, your body language, voice modulation (语调) and eye contact, will play a major part in your success in debating. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    3 ) Give real life examples.

    While debating, make use of very simple language, which your audience can understand very easily. Give as many real examples as you can when making a point. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}．Thus, the judges and audience will find you much more convincing.

    4 ) Be descriptive.

    To win any debate, there is something about the human mind that you should be aware of. The thing with us humans is that if we see something, we believe and remember it much more than something we merely hear! {#blank#}5{#/blank#}．Tell you point of view in such a way that they can actually "see" what you are saying. If you are somehow able to pull this off, there is no doubt that you will be the winner of the debate competition!

    Follow the tips mentioned above, and with time, you will see yourself winning over your judges and audience.

    Dogs can tell how other dogs are feeling from the way their tails are wagging(摇摆)，according to researchers who monitored the animals' heart rate as they watched dogs' movies. The Italian team found that dogs had higher heart rates and became more anxious when they saw others wag their tails more to the left，but not when they wagged more to the right, or failed to wag at all.

    The curious form of communication is probably not intentional, or consciously understood, but is instead an automatic behavior that arises from the structure of the brain, said Giorgio. “It's not something they clearly and exactly understand,” Giorgio told The Guardian. “It's just something that happens to them.”

    Giorgio traces the effect back to the way the two halves of the brain process different experiences. In a previous study, his team showed that when a dog had a positive experience, activity rose in the left side of the brain, bringing about more tail wagging to the right. Or else more tail wagging to the left. The effect is barely visible to the human eye because dogs tend to wag their tails too fast, but it can be seen with slow motion video, or in some larger types.

    In the latest study, the researchers wanted to find out whether the direction of tail wagging had any effect on other dogs. To get an answer, they fitted dogs with vests that recorded their heart rates, and played them movies of other dogs wagging their tails one way and then the other. To ensure the dogs reacted only to tail wagging, and not appearance? They repeated the experiment with dogs that appeared only as shadows.

    “When dogs saw other dogs wagging their tails to the right, there was quite a relaxed reaction and no evidence of an increased heart rate. But when the wagging was to the left we saw an increase in heart rate and a series of behaviors typically associated with stress, anxiety and being more watchful, “Giorgio said. The anxious animals held their ears up, breathed, and kept their eyes wide open. The study appears in the latest issue of Current Biology.

    Two friends have an argument that breaks up their friendship forever, even though neither one can remember how the whole thing got started. Such sad events happen over and over in high schools across the country. In fact, according to an official report on youth violence, “In our country today, the greatest threat to the lives of children and adolescents is not disease or starvation or abandonment, but the terrible reality of violence”. Given that this is the case, why aren't students taught to manage conflict the way they are taught to solve math problems, drive cars, or stay physically fit?

    First of all, students need to realize that conflict is unavoidable. A report on violence among middle school and high school students indicates that most violent incidents between students begin with a relatively minor insult (侮辱). For example, a fight could start over the fact that one student eats a peanut butter sandwich each lunchtime. Laughter over the sandwich can lead to insults, which in turn can lead to violence. The problem isn't in the sandwich, but in the way students deal with the conflict.

    Once students recognize that conflict is unavoidable, they can practice the golden rule of conflict resolution ( 解决): stay calm. Once the student feels calmer, he or she should choose words that will calm the other person down as well. Rude words, name-calling, and accusations only add fuel to the emotional fire. On the other hand, soft words spoken at a normal sound level can put out the fire before it explodes out of control.

    After both sides have calmed down, they can use another key strategy ( 策略) for conflict resolution: listening. Listening allows the two sides to understand each other. One person should describe his or her side, and the other person should listen without interrupting. Afterward, the listener can ask non-threatening questions to clarify the speaker's position. Then the two people should change roles.

    Finally, students need to consider what they are bearing. This doesn't mean trying to figure out what's wrong with the other person. It means understanding what the real issue is and what both sides are trying to accomplish. For example, a shouting match over a peanut butter sandwich might happen because one person thinks the other person is unwilling to try new things. Students need to ask themselves questions such as these：How did this start? What do I really want? What am I afraid of? As the issue becomes clearer, the conflict often simply becomes smaller. Even if it doesn't, careful thought helps both sides figure out a mutual（彼此共同的） solution.

    There will always be conflict in schools, but that doesn't mean there needs to be violence. After students in Atlanta started a conflict resolution program, according to Educators for Social Responsibility, “64 percent of the teachers reported less physical violence in the classroom; 75 percent of the teachers reported an increase in student cooperation; and 92 percent of the students felt better about themselves”. Learning to resolve conflicts can help students deal with friends, teachers, parents, bosses, and coworkers. In that way, conflict resolution is a basic life skill that should be taught in schools across the country.

    Even by the standards of poor countries, India is alarmingly — and unnecessarily — dirty. It needs to clean up. Most time of year, its capital, Delhi，smells as if something is burning. That is because of many things: the carcinogenic diesel（柴油）that supplies three quarters of the city's motor fuel, the dirty coal that supplies most of its power, the rice stalks that nearby farmers want to clear after the harvest and so on. All these make Delhi's air the most poisonous of any big city.

    This does not just make life unpleasant for a lot of Indians. It kills them. Recent estimates put the annual death toll from breathing PM 2.5 alone at 1.2—2.2 million a year. The lifespan of Delhi residents is shortened by more than ten years, says the University of Chicago-Consumption of dirty water directly causes 200,000 deaths a year, a government think-tank estimates, without measuring its contribution to slower killers such as kidney disease. Some 600 million Indians, nearly half the country, live in areas where clean water is in short supply. As pollutants taint groundwater, and global warming makes the vital monsoon（季风）rains more abnormal, the country is poisoning its own future.

    Indian pollution is a danger to the rest of the world, too. Widespread dumping of antibiotics（抗生素）in rivers has made the country a hotspot for anti-microbial（抗微生物）resistance. Emissions of carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, grew by 6% a year between 2000 and 2016, compared with 1.3% a year for the world as a whole.

    In the past India has explained its failure to clean up its act by pleading poverty, noting that richer countries were once just as dirty and that its output of waste per person still lags far behind theirs. But India is notably grubby（肮脏的）not just in absolute terms, but also relative to its level of development And it is becoming grubbier.

    It is true that some ways of cutting pollution are expensive. But there are also cheap solutions，such as undoing mistakes that Indian bureaucrats（官僚）have themselves made. By funding rice farmers, for instance, the government has in effect cheered on the overusing of groundwater and the burning of stalks. Rules that encourage the use of coal have not made India more self-reliant, as intended, but instead have led to big imports of foreign coal while blackening India's skies. Much cleaner gas-fired power plants, meanwhile, sit idle.

    Reliant on big business for funding and on the poor for votes, politicians have long ignored middle-class complaints about pollution, failing to give officials the backing to enforce rules. That is a pity, because when India does apply itself to ambitious goals, it often achieves them

    Next year it will send its second rocket to the Moon.

    Narendra Modi, the prime minister, promised with admirable frankness when he took over to rid the country of open defecation（缺陷）. Four and a half years and some $9 billion later, his Clean India campaign claims to have sponsored the building of an astonishing 90 million toilets. This is impressive, but India is still not clean. Its skies, its streets, its rivers and coasts will remain dangerously dirty until they receive similar attention.

In the past decade ocean oxygen levels have taken a dive — an alarming trend that is linked to climate change, says Andreas Oschlies, an oceanographer at the Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research in Germany, whose team tracks ocean oxygen levels worldwide. "We were surprised by the intensity of the changes we saw, how rapidly oxygen is going down in the ocean and how large the effects on marine ecosystems are," he says. It is no surprise to scientists that warming oceans are losing oxygen, but the scale of the drop calls for urgent attention. Oxygen levels in some tropical regions have dropped by an astonishing 40 percent in the last 50 years, some recent studies reveal. Levels have dropped less significantly elsewhere, with an average loss of 2 percent globally.

A warming ocean loses oxygen for two reasons; First, the warmer a liquid becomes, the less gas it can hold. That is why carbonated drinks(碳酸饮料) go flat faster when left in the sun. Second, as polar sea ice melts, it forms a layer of water above colder, more salty sea waters. This process creates a sort of lid that can keep currents from mixing surface water down to deeper depths. And because all oxygen enters the surface, less mixing means less of it at depth.

Ocean animals large and small, however, respond to even slight changes in oxygen by seeking refuge(避难所) in higher oxygen zones or by adjusting behavior, Oschlies and others in his field have found. These adjustments can expose animals to new predators or force them into food-scarce regions. Climate change already poses serious problems for marine life, such as ocean acidification, but deoxygenation is the most pressing issue facing sea animals today, Oschlies says. After all, he says, "they all have to breathe."

Aside from food web problems, animals face various other physiological challenges as their bodies adjust to lower oxygen levels. Chinese shrimp(虾) move their tails less vigorously to preserve energy in lower oxygen environments. Some creatures, such as jellyfishes, are more tolerant of low oxygen than others are. But all animals will feel the impact of deoxygenation because they all have evolved their oxygen capacity for a reason, says Oschlies. "Any drop in oxygen is going to damage survivability and performance," he says.