At 18, you say goodbye to your childhood and become an adult. You are legally allowed to do a lot of things from voting to driving a car. 【小题1】

On March 10, California lawmakers voted to change the legal age for buying cigarettes from 18 to 21. It meant that the US state in which the most people live was about to become the second after Hawaii to ban teenagers from smoking. 【小题2】 Up to now, over 100 cities in the US, including New York and San Francisco, have passed similar laws of their own.

“We can save billions of dollars in direct health care costs and, most importantly, save lives,” senator Ed Hernandez, who wrote the bill, told the Associated Press.

【小题3】 Last year the Institute of Medicine(IOM) in the US predicted that if the legal age were raised to 21, by the time today’s teenagers became adults, the smoking rate would be cut by 12 percent. 【小题4】For example, Vending machines (自动售货机) would go away and less than 10 percent of stores would sell cigarettes illegally to teenagers.

【小题5】 An article in USA Today pointed out that taking in nicotine(尼古丁) during your teenage years is likely to badly affect brain function and development. Teenagers get addicted to smoking more easily than adults because the parts of the brain that control most decision making and self-control are still developing. As for the health effects, the risks of smoking-related illness rise with the number of years a person smokes.

Recycling is a great way of doing your bit for the environment and helping to protect the earth’s precious resources. However, a new study has revealed that our desire to be sustainable maybe doing more harm than good. According to waste company Biffa, this is because of “wish-cycling” — assuming that items such as disposable coffee cup sand pizza boxes will be recycled if put in the recycling bin. In fact, pollution from those items or other non-recyclables can result in recyclable items that have been put in the correct bin going to landfill. David Heaton, a business director at Biffa, said: “Pollution happens when items are disposed of in the wrong bins or haven’t been cleaned before being recycled.”

Experts at Biffa analyzed the amounts of non-target and non-recyclable materials that entered UK material recycling facilities between 2016 and 2020. It was found that, in 2016, the average pollution rate of recycling waste was 13.4 percent, rising over four years to 17 percent by the end of 2020. This shows that, even as people are becoming more eco-conscious, wish-cycling is increasing both in households and businesses.

The Biffa experts say that one of the best ways to prevent pollution of recycling is to clean recyclable waste before putting it in the bin. They suggest cutting off the top of old pizza boxes and only recycling that part to avoid pollution from the grease (油脂). Check the on-packaging recycling label to check it can actually be recycled When it comes to plastics, Biffa recommends checking the resin code, the number in the plastic triangle, to know whether it should go in the recycling bin. In general, resin codes 1, 2, 4 and 5 are recyclable, while 3, 6 and 7 are not. Larger items, like electronics, furniture and batteries, can also be recycled but often can not go in household recycling bins as they need specialist separating. These will need to be taken to recycling centers or sustainable waste management companies.

“It’s vital as a nation that we get better at effective ‘pre-cycling’— sorting waste correctly before collection to reduce pollution rates,” added Mr. Heaton.

I’ve become increasingly concerned about the linguistic sloppiness of the average worker, and not those who have learned English as a second language but native English speakers, regardless of income level, schooling or other determining factors.

The number of people who read seems to be decreasing. The digital world has become the preferred baby sitter for children and the most effective way for adults to comfort themselves after a day’s work. Teachers, overworked and underpaid, seem to be fighting a losing battle – or are some prolonging it?

These days I see glaring grammatical errors on résumés and cover letters, websites, signs, emails regardless of management skills or income level. Job hunters write asking me for “advise”. People who are in the job market, hoping to be invited in for an interview, write some of these, and the paperwork is full of punctuation and grammatical mistakes. Were they careless? Or do they not know? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the hiring authority doesn’t know the difference either.

The other day I saw the back of a company shirt that said: “providing quality service since 10 years.” A company shirt? How many were printed and are worn by employees who walk around advertising that their company has someone in an upper-level management position who didn’t catch the error or, worse yet, didn’t know the difference?

Last week a senior level manager emailed me. He confused “its” and “it’s” in three different places. Here’s another example: I do product testing for a research panel. The product came with a slip of paper that said: “This commitment covers not discussing this product or it’s usage with others outside your home.”

Here’s what really bugs me: a rule that seems to have come into effect – if in doubt, add an apostrophe. So what has happened is that people all over America have lost the understanding of the difference between plural and possessive.

Your résumés and your cover letter are not just a summary of your background. They are not just an introduction of you when you hope to be considered for an interview. First and foremost, it is a brochure, and it is selling a product, and the product is you. If you wouldn’t go to an interview in blue jeans, don’t send your cover letter and résumés with mistakes to a prospective employer.

Don’t rely on Microsoft Word’s ABC/grammar checker. It isn’t able to detect if a word is spelled correctly but used out of context. The grammar checker won’t help you unless you have a fundamental understanding of grammar to begin with. In fact, if you defer to the grammar checker’s advice, you’ll probably increase your number of mistakes.

An excellent reference book to keep on hand is The Elements of Grammar by Margaret Shertzer. In “Words Often Confused”, it clarifies the differences between pairs of words such as “well/good” and “less/fewer”.

Don’t tell yourself it doesn’t matter. Above all, don’t tell yourself that everyone speaks poorly these days, and the hiring authority won’t know or care. The ability to communicate, written and spoken, is of utmost importance – certainly in business. And it only becomes more valuable as fewer people are able to demonstrate it.