Zebra crossings－the alternating dark and light stripes on the road surface－are meant to remind drivers that pedestrians may be trying to get across. Unfortunately, they are not very effective. A 1998 study done by the Department of Traffic Planning and Engineering at Sweden's Lund University revealed that three out of four drivers maintained the same speed or even speeded up as they were approaching a crossing. Even worse, only 5% stopped even when they saw someone trying to get across.

    Now a mother-daughter team in Ahmedabad, India has come up with a clever way to get drivers to pay more attention－a 3-D zebra crossing with an optical illusion (视错觉).

    Artists Saumya Pandya Thakkar and Shakuntala Pandya were asked to paint the crosswalks by IL&FS, an Indian company that manages the highways in Ahmedabad. The corporation was looking for a creative solution to help the city's residents to cross the busy accident-prone  (易出事故的) roads safely. Thakkar and Pandya, who had previously seen images of 3-D zebra crossings that gave drivers the illusion of logs(原木)of wood on the streets in Taizhou, China, decided to test if a similar way would work in India.

    Sure enough, in the six months that the 3-D crosswalks have been painted across four of the city's most dangerous highways, there have been no accidents reported! The artists say that while it may appear that the zebra crossing could cause the drivers to brake suddenly and endanger the vehicles behind, such is not the case. Because of the way the human eye works, the illusion is only visible from a distance. As they get closer, the painting looks just like any other ordinary zebra crossing. The creators hope that their smart design will become increasingly common throughout India and perhaps even the world. So let's look forward to it.

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       Although I started learning English during my college years, when I entered the States, I only understood two English words “Yes” and “No”. We learned many grammar rules but we could not make the language connections to the real English world. Language frustration worries almost all first generation immigrants. For example, I got a letter from a Chinese-American who has lived in the States for a long time and has a good IT job saying “My 11-year-old girl writes quite well, but as her parents, we could not even read her article.”In addition, my Chinese-American professor friend has difficulty reading a novel. Improving our English skills has become a long journey for all of us. Honestly, if I have a chance, I really want to reach out to everyone in the world who has had a similar experience: learning a second language in adulthood. I wish I could encourage them to speak out about the culture shock, frustration they felt about the differences between West and East.

     I have mainly focused on my English writing since 2008 after I found “Literacy Volunteers”, an organization that specially focuses on helping immigrants improve their English. I decided to challenge myself, writing a story like an American. I saw many wonderful Americans there. As soon as I met my teacher Alice, I asked her to be my private language tutor and have taken Tims English class. Every week Alice and I have worked on my English essays sentence by sentence.

     To observe the culture differences between West and East, occasionally, I posted a few of my English essays online. I mentioned previously about American culture; when people read the same article or even face the same situation, American and Chinese act very differently. In my viewpoint, these differences make America the strongest country in the world. I know you have the right to express your own opinions, but accusing others without proof is not acceptable.

    We all love bank holidays. In the UK, we only get eight bank holidays in one year, and at least five of those occur around Christmas time and Easter time! A bank holiday is a British English term. This is an official day that is decided by the government, when banks, shops and offices close for the day even though it's a weekday—usually a Monday, and a lot of people have a day off work.

    Bank holidays are different in Colombia—firstly, they are called “festivos”. There are twenty festivos for the whole country in one year! In Britain ，people get more holiday allowance(津贴)than Colombians but fewer bank holidays. There can be even more festivos in Colombia, depending on which region of Colombia you live in. This is because different regions have their own holidays. For example, some regions have a patron saint(守护神) in their region, so they have an extra festivo to celebrate that saint.

    However, there are some days that are national holidays for historical reasons. There is an Independence Day celebration on July 20 every year. This is just like Bastille Day in France on July 14, or Independence Day in the United States on July 4. Other important festivos in Colombia are :Labour Day, on May 1, and Columbus Day on October 12. Columbus Day is a historical bank holiday that almost every county on the continent of America celebrates. This includes Colombia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Mexico and the United States. It is a memorialization of the day that the Italian sailor, Christopher Columbus, first reached land on the continent in the year 1492. Many people criticize this day and say it is not something to celebrate because of the way Columbus and his teams treated the people that were already living there.

    I remember the first time I got on a horse. When I was a little boy aged two, my mom agreed to let me take a short ride and that was it! From then on, I drove my parents crazy begging for a horse.

    When I was four, I had mutism, in which children stop speaking in certain social situations. I went days, weeks, months without a sound at school. At most, I might quietly whisper to a friend. I suffered silently through school until I was ten when a psychologist (心理学家) had an idea. He asked me what I wanted more than anything else in the world. He explained I was going to be given a chance to work for that. And I was permitted to whisper the answer in my mother's ear, "A horse."

    I was to get a pony, but I had to live up to my end of the bargain (讲价). I had a list of weekly tasks I had to finish. I had to answer the phone five times per week, something I had never done before. I had to say one word to my teacher at school and the list went on. For a child with mutism, saying one word to someone can be like climbing Mount Qomolangma. I did everything that was asked of me and the day came. His name was Sequoia, whom I fell in love with immediately. When I was in Sequoia's presence, I forgot all about my problems and felt strong and secure.

    I am a fully participating member of society these days. My horse and I made it through a master's degree. I may have made it otherwise, but I'm not sure. I feel I owe my life to the horse and I try to give it back to him. He has given me the best gift I could ever imagine, my life.

    As the temperature rises, sweaty humans are making a response that is further worsening the problem of climate change. At present, the world just has 1.6 billion air conditioning units, but these units use a surprising total of ten percent of all global electricity supply. While less than a third of families globally are so equipped, the most AC-addicted countries are Japan (in 91 percent of families), the US (90 percent) and South Korea(86 percent).

    New research by the International Energy Agency (IEA) guesses that the total number of AC units is likely to increase to over 5.6 billion by 2050－equal to ten new units being sold every second for more than 30 years－with sales driven particularly by India, China and Indonesia. This will make the use of air conditioning one of the world's largest demands for energy.

    "Growing electricity demand for air conditioning is one of the most critical blind spots in today's energy debate," argues Faith Birol, executive director of the IEA. "With rising incomes, air conditioner ownership will skyrocket, especially in the developing world. While this will improve daily lives, it is quite necessary that efficiency performance be prioritized."

    Birol and the IEA stress the need for new efficiency standards to ensure that consumers are at least buying units that require significantly less power to function, therefore decreasing the total energy demand. Variations on the traditional "vapor compression" technology, which has formed the basis for AC units for more than a century, may appear really important. A water-based system was recently developed by researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS), which uses 40 percent less electricity and produces only one by-product: drinkable water.

    "Our cooling system can be tailored for all types of weather conditions, from wet climate in the tropics to dry climate in the deserts," says associate professor Ernest Chua at NUS. "While it can be used for indoor living and commercial spaces, it can also be easily used to provide air conditioning for blocks of buildings in an energy-efficient manner."

Back in April 1939 and armed with $5,000 provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, professor Frank Cyr at Teachers College, Columbia University took a tour of ten states to make the research about school transportation problems. What he found was that many students had no dependable way to get to school and the ones who did often travelled in unsafe buses in the over 100,000 school areas.

Seeing a need to fix this problem, Cyr organised a meeting—one that would change the future of school buses forever. School officials and transportation experts met to set much-needed standards for buses, including those for colour, height and width as well as safety rules that hadn't been set before or that were different in every state.

There were many different bus colours in the US before this meeting; several areas even planned to have red, white and blue buses as a way of encouraging students to love their country. Cyr presented his new choice to education officials, a reported "50 shades( 色度) changing from lemon yellow to deep orange red". The matter was settled quickly. Yellow, or "National School Bus Glossy Yellow", was chosen because it was quite striking, making the school bus easy to be seen. Besides, it made the bold(黑体的), black writing on the side of each bus clear. (The bold, black writing gives information about each school area, telling students which school bus they could take during early morning and late afternoon hours.) Thirty-five states made the changes quickly, and every state took them on

board by 1974.

Being recognised as the "father of the yellow school bus", Frank Cyr has surely influenced your life if you ever rode a school bus or saw that noticeable colour pulling up to your stop on a dusky morning.