This is the VOA Special English Economics Report

The season for buying Christmas gifts is the busiest time for most stores and online retailers in the United States. Final numbers for the holiday season including after-Christmas sales will not be known for a while. But a report this week on retail sales in November suggested that economic growth may be gaining speed.

The Commerce Department said sales increased for the fifth month in a row. They grew by eight-tenths of one percent over October.

But Tuesday's report came the same day the central bank said the economy is not growing fast enough to reduce unemployment.

So, policy makers at the Federal Reserve voted to continue a program of buying government bonds. That program, launched in November, could inject six hundred billion dollars into the economy.

The aim is to increase economic growth by lowering long-term interest rates. That would reduce borrowing costs for businesses and individuals.

But long-term rates have risen since the Fed launched its latest program of so-called quantitative easing, known as \"QE2.\"

The rates are up in part because investors are concerned about government policies. But experts say investors may also be more hopeful about the economy and looking for investments with higher returns than Treasury securities. One way to get a sense of how Americans feel about the economy is through retail sales. Consumer demand drives about seventy percent of the nation's economic activity.

The National Retail Federation says its members employ twenty-five million people in the retail and services industry. Those businesses reported almost two and a half trillion dollars in sales last year.

Terry Lundgren is chief executive of Macy's, the company that owns Macy's and Bloomingdales department stores.

TERRY LUNDGREN: \"Retail and restaurants represent one in five jobs in America. So if we do well, we grow, than we're going to be the ones that will start to lead us into a recovery and out of the difficulty that we've had in terms of job hiring, unemployment and all of those challenging issues that relate to that.\"

The kinds of stores where sales are up also says something about the economy. Stores with the lowest prices do well in hard economic times. But the retail federation said at the end of November that discounters had fewer shoppers this year. Stores that sell jewelry and other higher-priced items have seen sales grow.

Another change: Americans are less willing to buy on credit. Over forty percent of holiday shoppers said they planned to mainly use debit cards instead of credit cards. Instead of borrowing money, debit cards take money directly from a bank account.

And that's the VOA Special English Economics Report, written by Mario Ritter and Mil Arcega. I'm Steve Ember.

疫苗接种和疾病预防都应该在幼儿时期进行，因为这样会更加有效，并且可以有理缩减人们得许多疾病的几率，如脑膜炎，细菌是无处不在，我们无法保证我们的孩子远离细菌，我们只能采取最有效的措施让我们的孩子远离疾病，健康厂长。 This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

When parents go to work, their young children often spend the day in child care. That contact with other children can make it easier to get sick. But new research suggests that this might have a protective effect a few years later when children start school.

A research team looked at data from a large study. That study followed the health of a group of Canadian children for almost their first ten years of life. Sylvana Cote at the University of Montreal led the research team. She says some of the children were more likely to get sick from the kinds of infections commonly passed around a day care center. But she says these children were also more likely to avoid infections when they entered elementary school a few years later.

SYLVANA COTE: \"Children who started child care early -- that is, before two and a half years -- and who attended child care where there were a large group of children, they have lower rates of infections than children who either never went to day care or children who went to small-group day care.\"

Sylvana Cote says her study was not really designed to explain why children who started day care early with many other children had fewer infections later. But she says there is a non-medical reason why getting sick early might be better: it reduces the risk of having to stay home from school.

SYLVANA COTE: \"We argue in the paper that missing school when you're starting to learn to read or when you learn to write may be more problematic for the future academic trajectory than missing day care days.\"

The research appears in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association.

Some diseases can be prevented by vaccines. This month, the World Health Organization launched the first vaccine ever developed for Africa.

The vaccine is designed to provide ten years of low-cost protection against meningococcal A. This bacterial form of meningitis can cause brain damage and death. Major epidemics strike Africa every seven to fourteen years. Children and young adults are the hardest hit.

Last year, an outbreak across sub-Saharan Africa killed more than five thousand people. The WHO says as many as four hundred fifty million people across Africa are at risk from meningitis.

The new vaccine is called MenAfriVac. It can be given to children as young as one, which is earlier than vaccines currently used to fight meningitis epidemics in Africa.

Health workers launched the new vaccine in Burkina Faso in West Africa. There are twenty-five countries along Africa's so-called meningitis belt from Senegal to Ethiopia. The hope is that people in all twenty-five countries will be protected against the disease by twenty-fifteen.

And that's the VOA Special English Health Report. I'm Steve Ember.

由于中国现在社会竞争力的急剧加重，不仅仅是成年人面临着巨大的就业压力和生活压力，孩子们也为了更高的学历承受了许多来自学业的压力，这也使得现在的孩子的智力水平直线上升。

This is the VOA Special English Education ReportThe Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, is a two-hour test that compares the performance of fifteen-year-olds. In the latest test, the countries with the best readers were South Korea and Finland. But students in Shanghai, China, scored the highest of all in reading, mathematics and science.

The next strongest results were in , Singapore, Canada, New Zealand and Japan.

In all, around half a million students in more than seventy economies took the test last year. The test has been given every three years since two thousand. Last year was the first time Shanghai took part.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development just released the results. Andreas Schleicher is director of the Education Indicators and Analysis Division at the OECD.

ANDREAS SCHLEICHER: \"Asian countries value education more than other countries. They have given education a priority. Every child, every teacher, every parent knows that education is the gateway to success.\"

Mr. Schleicher says other education systems can learn from Shanghai. For example, he says education spending in the province has increased, including teacher pay and training. And administrators are putting teachers into challenging classroom situations to make them better at their jobs.

ANDREAS SCHLEICHER: \"They are pairing great with poorer schools in a way that is very systematic and very much focused on improving results.\" In the PISA scoring system, Shanghai scored six hundred in math. By comparison, the United States scored four hundred eighty-seven. Shanghai's reading average was five hundred fifty-six. American

fifteen-year-olds scored five hundred, the same as in Iceland and Poland. In science, Finland was second behind Shanghai. The United States was twenty-third.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan says the results show an urgent need for Americans to do more to remain competitive in the world economy. He points out that the United States has fallen from first to ninth place in college graduation rates because of gains by other countries.

Mr. Schleicher says international testing experts have investigated and confirmed the Shanghai scores. He says the PISA results are not representative of all of China. But he also says theydispute the common belief that Chinese education is centered on repetition and memorization.

Twenty-five percent of the Shanghai students showed advanced thinking skills to solve difficult math problems. The OECD average was three percent. And that's the VOA Special English Education Report, by Lawan Davis and Ira Mellman. For a link to the results, go to www.unsv.com. I'm Steve Ember.