Hi. I am Jessica Jones. I am from California. I live in Hamamatsu City now.

I like animals very much. I have a dog and a turtle at home.

Nearly 90 percent of high schools have uniforms. In a survey, about 2,000 high school students were asked, “Did you care about school uniforms when you chose your high school?” 20% of high school boys and 60% of high school girls said, “Yes.”

Many schools in other countries also have school uniforms. In some, the native costume is adopted as the school uniform. But countries like Germany and the US don’t require school uniforms. In Japan, over 10% of high schools don’t have uniforms.

Uniforms make the students focus on studying. They also save time for students to choose what to wear to school every day. But some don’t like school uniforms because they don’t feel free. Others say it’s not easy to adjust a uniform based on the weather. What is your opinion?

A university scientist investigates how one thing can consume another while still serving other purposes. “We are all aware that plastic waste is a major issue in the environment, particularly in the marine environment,” the scientist said. “We discovered that mealworms, these tiny, innocuous insects found pretty much everywhere, can eat and degrade a variety of plastics.”

In 2015, the ability of these worms to consume polystyrene was discovered, sparking an entirely new field of study. The scientist’s initial discovery was that mealworms chomp down on polyethylene. The mealworms are chasing the energy produced by dissolving the polymer bonds in the plastic because it contains no nutrition. They achieve this by using a potent bacteria in their intestines that converts most plastic into only hydrogen and carbon. However, two ingredients used in the production of plastics, stabilizers and plasticizers, are difficult to degrade.

The scientist is currently attempting to understand how a mealworm accomplishes its tasks. “You can throw your plastic in, and hopefully it’ll all break down,” she says.

This is my friend, Matt. Matt is an active boy. He likes sports. He is good at soccer. He lives here with his parents. His brother and sister live in Australia. He misses playing soccer with his brother. He is good at soccer, too!

There are around 6,000 languages that are still spoken today, and at least half of them could go extinct. In fact, Professor Steve Sutherland of the University of East Anglia says that languages are more in danger of extinction than animals like birds and mammals.

According to Joseph Poth, head of UNESCO’s languages department, we should all speak our mother tongue, a “neighbor” language, and an international language. He also says that even teaching a language that is under serious threat in schools creates a rescue system.

For languages with few remaining speakers, it might already be too late. These speakers are typically elderly, rarely use their native tongue, and have lost many of the words they once knew. But at last, the importance of these languages is finally being recognized, and multilingualism may be one of the keys to their survival.