①Facial-recognition（人脸识别）cameras are, everywhere—even in your smartphone. Many people use this technology to unlock（解锁） their phones, open doors, or make quick payments. But during the pandemic（疫情）, can it still work when people put on masks?   

② The answer is no. Scientists are trying to solve this problem. For example, Engineering & Technology（E&T）magazine reports that Hanwang, a tech company in Beijing, has made a new system（系统）. It can recognize 95 percent of people when they wear masks（口罩）.

③ What’s the secret? It’s all about your eyes.

④ Marios Savides from Carnegie Mellon University, US, studies facial recognition. As we get older, he says our faces change shape. But the area around our eyes doesn’t. It stays the same—even if we put on weight. As long as there are enough data（数据）from the area of our eyes, the cameras can recognize us.

⑤ Tech 5 is another facial-recognition company. The Swiss company’s product scans（扫描）the shape of your face. It also scans your iris（虹膜）, which is the colored part of your eyes. Tech 5 hopes to leave out all of the face below the nose.

⑥ This kind of software（软件） is more important than just unlocking your phone. “It can search for criminals（罪犯） and terrorists even when they wear masks, “said Huang Lei from Hanwang. Hanwang’s technology is used by Chinese police in places like subway stations and airports. Similar technology is used by the United States Air Force.

⑦ Huang pointed out one big weakness: it fails when people wear both a mask and sunglasses. “In this situation, all of the key facial information is lost,” Lei said to E&T.

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With the rapid development in science and industry, our world has changed a lot. Many new things have appeared in our daily life. These make our life more convenient and make our communication easier.

Computers are very important to our modern life. For example, some people hardly go to the shop in their spare time but they buy things on the Internet instead. They think the prices of different kinds of clothes or living things are lower than those in shopping centers and huge markets. What’s more, their qualities are the same. At the same time, people can watch movies by the Internet instead of going to the cinema. People living or working in different places can see and talk with each other by computers, too. Some people are glad about these new ways of shopping and communicating.

Another example, computers can help us improve our reading a lot. Some people needn’t read books made paper. Instead. they read them on small pocket computers because the computers can keep many different books in them at the same time. They don’t need to turn lots of pages and paper is saved as well. More and more electronic books are being used.

In August, a tragedy (悲剧) happened in Guangzhou on a day of heavy rainfall. A family of seven people, including two children, died inside a car in a culvert(涵洞) as the water in the culvert became so deep that they couldn’t get out. Many people felt sorry for that. After hearing the story, 16-year-old Wang Haoyu made a decision—he would do what he could to stop it from happening again.

Four months later, the student from Guangdong’s Futian High School kept his word. He invented a culvert water level alarm system. It includes a transparent (透明的) column that can show the water level, a barrier gate (道闸), and an electric screen. When the water goes above a certain level shown on the column, the gate immediately closes and the screen shows the warning: “No Passing.” The system also has a loud alarm to keep passengers and cars away. When the water level goes down, the system returns to normal.

The invention won first prize at the Shenzhen Adolescents Science and Technology Innovation Contest. It has received the national patent (专利). “Invention is bringing your creative ideas to reality. You must keep your feet on the ground,” Wang said, sharing the secret to his success. Before he started his design, Wang spent about two months doing fieldwork at the culverts in Shenzhen and Guangzhou at weekends. He took photos of the culverts, observed their problems, and asked local people and traffic policemen’s opinions. It is his first-hand investigation (调查) that has made Wang’s invention so practical. “I think my invention is definitely connected with life. If not, there would have been no point making it,” Wang said.