Have you ever heard of the flying car? Can you imagine a car with a pair of wings? Well, the flying car is not a dream. In fact, two different “flying cars” have already hit the roads and taken to the skies.

One of them is “Transition.” It looks like a small airplane with foldable (可折叠的) wings. You drive it as a car to the airport. At the airport, you unfold (展开) its wings, slide down (滑行) the runway, and you’re in the sky. However, if you are in a traffic jam, you can’t just push a button and fly into the sky.

Another company said they successfully (成功地) tested their flying car. This one’s called the PAL-V1. It’s from the Netherlands (荷兰) and it looks like a helicopter with wheels.

Flying cars have been popular in our mind for a long time. There’s the flying car in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the famous cartoon The Jetsons. And the cartoon actually inspired (启发) Transition’s maker.

People have been trying to make flying cars for about a hundred years. Maybe we can see a flying car on the market in the future.

Sometimes the easiest way to get somewhere is on the back of a bike.

More and more people are using cars in many places in Africa today. However,things are different in Malawi. Bikes are the most popular way in this African country.

Riding bikes is a way of life in Malawi. People use them to carry heavy things. They also use bikes to carry people, especially tourists. These years, taking a “bicycle taxi” to travel around Malawi has become quite popular among tourists from all over the world.

If you go to Malawi, you will find a lot of bike taxis waiting on both sides of the roads. The riders make the bikes comfortable for passengers to sit on. You can jump on a bike taxi and get around at a very low cost.

Alice is a 21-year-old student from Canada. She enjoys the special bike riding a lot.“ I really like the bike taxi,” she says. “It’s easy and cheap.” Alice usually pays just $1 for going shopping in town.

28-year-old Panjira Khombe began to ride a bike taxi two years ago. The young man enjoys this job. “I used to make boats for a living, but that’s a hard job. Being a bike taxi rider is easy for me and I don’t mind carrying heavy people,” he says.

There has been a lot of talk about Chinese bicycle-sharing recently. Shared bikes are nowadays becoming the center of attention in our Wechat friend circle. Many of our friends post photos of themselves riding bikes, especially during the weekend in natural parks, and we can see people logging in and out of shared bike apps. But are people really drawn to（被…所吸引）the idea of exercise and green transportation all of a studden?

Some people have tried Mobikes lately, and they didn’t particularly like Mobikes. They think the first generation Mobikes, the ones without baskets, are designed for athletes. They are vary hard to ride, and the seat is not adjustable（可调节的）. Then, they tried the yellow Ofo bikes. They are easier to ride than Mobikes, but they don’t usually have baskets, and you need to enter the password by hand, instead of scanning a QR code and having the lock open automatically like with Mobikes.

We appreciate that there are shared bikes on the roads. They have saved us a lot of time during emergency situations, and on beautiful, clear days. We do enjoy riding them outside the city. But from what we’ve seen in our friend circles, people have been giving them endless praises, while we still saw some obvious flaws（缺陷）.

In our experience, there has never been a unanimous（一致的）decision on anything in public opinion. It makes us wonder whether these people really like riding shared bikes or are just saying this to agree with others. When we asked them individually, a friend of us, Lisa, secretly told us she tried the bikes to fit in（融入朋友圈）. She doesn’t like bikes and finds city’s roads too harsh（拥堵）for bike riding. But the only way to hang out（出去闲逛）with her friends was riding out of town together. To join in social activities, she had to pick up bike riding again. Another young man, Simon admitted that he started talking about and forwarding information（转发信息）on thared bikes to appear cool and fashionable to friends. He started paying attention when Mobikes first launched（推出）. These views will give us something new to think about when we ride bikes again.