Good writing starts with good ideas.If you write about things that you care about,you will write better.If you write about things that you don't care about,you'll be bored and your paper will not have many good ideas.

    Once you have a good idea,the next step is organization（组织）.Think through your paper before you start.Write an outline.You need to know what your main points are before you start your first paragraph.Use 2-4 main points, one paragraph each.

    In your central paragraphs,be concise and specific（简洁具体）.Give examples with details,not just general ideas. If you can say the same thing with fewer words,do it!Don't use big words.

    When you finish writing,look at your outline again.Did you really follow it or did it change as you wrote?Many times you find different ideas as you write.Look at your central paragraphs.What are their main ideas now?Are theses ideas in the introduction?I often write the introduction again to fit the paper after I finish writing.

    In the rush to get to school, you drop a piece of toast on the floor. Do you throw it away or decide it's still OK to eat? If you're like most people, you eat it. Maybe you follow the “5-second rule”, which says foods are safe to eat if you pick them up within 5 seconds after dropping them. But you might want to think again. Scientists now say that 5 seconds is all it takes for foods to become polluted with enough bacteria to make you sick.

    Bacteria can cause many kinds of illnesses. Some kinds of bacteria can grow on food. If you eat foods on which these bacteria are growing, you can become sick.

    One of these food-borne bacteria is Salmonella. It makes 1.4 million people sick every year. Salmonella is often found in raw eggs and chicken. Cooking kills these bacteria, which is why it is so important to cook eggs, chicken, and other foods thoroughly.

    But how long does it take these bacteria to pollute food? A team of scientists in South Carolina did an experiment. First, they placed an amount of Salmonella on three surfaces: wood, tile, and carpet. They placed a piece of bread and a piece of sausage on each surface for 5, 30, or 60 seconds. After just 5 seconds, both the bread and the sausage picked up enough bacteria to make you sick.

    So, forget the 5-second rule. If your toast drops on the floor, throw it away and get another piece of clean toast. And next time, be careful not to drop it!

    Health experts are calling for action to increase cancer care and control in the developing world. A medical research paper says cancer was once thought of as a problem mostly in the developed world. But now cancer is a leading cause of death and disability in poor countries as well. Experts from Harvard University and other organizations urge the international community to fight cancer actively, saying it should be fought in the way HIV/AIDS has been fought in Africa.

    Cancer kills more than 7.5 million people a year worldwide. Almost two thirds are in low-income and middle-income countries.

They discover cancer kills more people in developing countries than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. But the world spends only 5% of its cancer resources in those countries.

    Felicia Knaul from Harvard Medical School was one of the writers of the paper. She was in Mexico when she was found to have breast cancer. She received treatment there and her experience showed her the sharp difference between the rich and the poor in treating breast cancer.

    Felicia Knaul says, “And we are seeing how this is attacking young women. It's the number two cause of death in Mexico of women thirty to fifty-four. All over the developing world, it's the number one cancer-related death among young women. I think we have to again say that there is much more we could do about it than we are doing about it. ”

    Professor Knaul met community health workers during her work in developing countries. They were an important part of efforts to reduce deaths from the cancer. They were able to persuade people to get tested to prevent the illness. The experts say cancer care does not have to be costly. For example, patients can be treated with lower-cost drugs.

    The number of snow geese arriving in the Arctic each spring to breed has risen over the past few decades. At first, wildlife biologists saw this as an environmental crisis, pointing to marshes（湿地） where plants were eaten by the hungry birds. In response, the federal government loosened restrictions on snow goose hunting.

    But how do the Inuit, in whose backyard this is taking place, view the situation? A recent plan is giving Inuit wildlife experts the opportunity to lend their knowledge to managing the species. The snow goose study, which is supported in part by Polar Knowledge Canada and led by the Kivalliq Wildlife Board (an Inuit organization that manages hunting, trapping and fishing in central Nunavut), asked the experts to share their generations of knowledge about snow geese and their views on what should be done.

    “The community had concerns about controlling the population,” says Ron, a community officer of the Kivalliq Inuit Association, “and Inuit snow goose knowledge had never been recorded. People wanted to pass on what they knew.” Inuit experts disagreed with that, considering it wasteful and unnecessary. They felt hunting more snow geese in an organized way, such as paying local hunters a minimal amount of money and distributing the birds to disadvantaged families or operating a limited commercial hunt by employing local people, would be appropriate.

    Inuit wildlife experts will plan to call on scientists this fall. They say they hope to search for a common way forward and that while there may be too many snow geese in some areas, it's not a crisis. Biologists now generally agree that there seem to be plenty of undamaged marshes available and newer research shows that some damaged areas can recover.

    “Now that we have recorded and documented Inuit knowledge of snow geese,” says Ron, “when facing the crisis other people will be able to use the information to help manage the species, which is fundamental to dealing with it effectively.”

Pick up any packaged processed food, and there's a decent chance that one of its listed ingredients will be "natural flavour". The ingredient sounds good, particularly in contrast to "artificial flavours" since there is a common belief that ingredients from nature are necessarily safer than something artificially made. But it's not true. Then what exactly does the natural flavour mean? It refers to extracts (提取物) got from natural sources like plants, meat or seafood. When consumers see the "natural flavour" on a label, they are unlikely to assume that someone is squeezing the juice from oranges into their bottles. They know even though natural flavour must come from natural sources, it needn't all come from the plant or meat. For example, orange flavours might contain not only orange extracts, but also extracts from bark and grass.

So if flavours like orange are needed, why not just use oranges? The answer comes down to "availability, cost, and sustainability", according to flavour chemist Gary Reineccius of the University of Minnesota. "If you're going to use all your grapes on grape soda," Reineccius says, "you don't have any grapes for wine making; the products are going to be exorbitant; besides, what do you do with the by-products you create after you've squeezed all the juice out of the grapes?"

Actually, while chemists make natural flavours by extracting chemicals from natural ingredients, artificial flavours are made by creating the same chemicals artificially. The reason why companies bother to use natural flavours rather than artificial flavours is simple: marketing. "Many of these products have health titles," says Platkin, professor from Hunter College. "Consumers may be talked to believe products with natural flavours are healthier, though they are nutritionally no different from those with artificial flavours. Natural flavours may involve more forest clear-cutting and carbon emissions from transport than flavours created in the lab."

Platkin suggests getting more transparent (易懂的) labeling on packaging that describes exactly what the natural or artificial flavours are, so consumers are-not misled into buying one product over another because of "natural flavours". Reineccius also offers simple guidance: "Don't buy anything because it says ‘natural flavours'. Buy it because you like it."