Everyone knows that fish is good for health. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}  But it seems that many people don't cook fish at home. Americans eat only about fifteen pounds of fish per person per year, but we eat twice as much fish in restaurants as at home. Buying, storing, and cooking fish isn't difficult. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}  This text is about how to buy and cook fish in an easy way.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Fresh fish should smell sweet: you should feel that you're standing at the ocean's edge. Any fishy or strong smell means the fish isn't fresh.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}  When you have bought a fish and arrive home, you'd better store the fish in the refrigerator if you don't cook it immediately, but fresh fish should be stored in your fridge for only a day or two. Frozen fish isn't as tasty as the fresh one.

     There are many common methods used to cook fish. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} First, clean it and season it with your choice of spices(调料). Put the whole fish on a plate and steam it in a steam pot for 8 to 10 minutes if it weighs about one pound. (A larger one will take more time.) Then, it's ready to serve.

A. Do not buy it.

B. The easiest is to steam it.

C. This is how you can do it.

D. It just requires a little knowledge.

E. The fish will go bad within hours.

F. When buying fish, you should first smell it.

G. The fats in fish are thought to help prevent heart disease.

    With the development of science and technology, new inventions, especially new electronic products, have made people's lives easy and convenient. But as the saying puts: A coin has two sides.

    One day, I was walking in the park with a friend and his cell phone rang, interrupting our conversation. There we were, walking and talking on a beautiful sunny day and…I became invisible, absent from the conversation.

    The telephone used to connect you to the absent. Now it makes people sitting next to you feel absent. Why is it that the more connected we get, the more disconnected I feel? Every advance in communications technology is a tragedy to the closeness of human interaction. With email and instant messaging over the Internet, we can now communicate without seeing or talking to one another. With voice mail, you can conduct entire conversations without ever reaching anyone. If my mom has a question, I just leave the answer on her machine.

    As almost every contact we can imagine between human beings gets automated, the alienation(疏远) index goes up. You can't even call a person to get the phone number of another person any more. Directory assistance is almost always fully automated.

    Pumping petrol at the station? Why say good morning to the attendant when you can swipe(刷)your credit card at the pump and save yourself the bother of human contact?

    Making a deposit at the bank? Why talk to a teller who might live in the neighborhood when you can just insert your card into ATM?

    Pretty soon you won't have the burden of making eye contact at the grocery shop. Some supermarket chains are using a self-scanner so you can check yourself out, avoiding those check-out people who look at you and ask how you are doing.

    I am not against modern technology. I own a cell phone, an ATM card, a voice mail system, and an email account. Giving them up isn't wise…they're a great help to us. It's some of their possible consequences that make me feel uneasy.

    More and more, I find myself hiding behind e-mail to do a job meant for conversation. Or being relieved that voice mail picked up a call because I didn't really have time to talk. The communications industry devoted to helping me keep in touch is making me lonelier.

    So I've put myself on technology restriction: no instant messaging, with people who live near me，no cell phoning in the presence of friends, no letting the voice mail pick up when I'm at home.

    In 1921, long before the Walt Disney Company turned Pooh (维尼熊) into an international star of TV and films, Christopher Robin Milne was given a toy bear on his first birthday from his father, A.A. Milne, who bought the stuffed (填充的) animal from a store. The stuffed animal was named Edward Bear. Years later, Edward was named Winnie. From the time Christopher Robin Milne was a baby until he was about 8 years old, he would receive different stuffed animals.

    A.A. Milne was a famous English author. As he watched his son interact (互动) with Winnie and friends, A.A. Milne thought his child's interaction with the collection of animals would make a great bedtime story. So Milne worked with artist Ernest H. Shepard and wrote the first Winnie the Pooh poem, where Edward Bear was known as “Teddy Bear”. The writings appeared in Punch magazine and in the book they wrote together, When We Were Very Young, which was published in 1924. In a four-year period, three more books that centered on the bear and his team followed: 1926's Winnie-the-Pooh; 1927's Now We Are Six; and 1928's The House at Pooh Corner.

    The books and poems about Pooh brought great success to the author, and the characters became favorites with young children and their families around the world. Their popularity led Disney to get the rights to make films about the characters in 1961. Five years later, Pooh, Tigger, Piglet and the rest of the team appeared on screen for the first time in Winnie-the-Pooh and the Honey Tree. The characters later appeared in TV shows, movies, video games and short films. Pooh's most recent appearance came last year in the popular children's program, Doc McStuffins, where he was a special guest.

    In China, Major Cold (大寒) is the last solar term in winter and also the last solar term in the annual lunar(阴历的) calendar. In this period, snow, rain and icy cold weather have a big influence on people's lives.

    Here are several things you should know about Major Cold.

    Eating "dispelling cold cake" (吃"消寒糕")

    During Major Cold, people in Beijing have a habit of eating "dispelling cold cake", a kind of rice cake. Sticky rice, the cake's main ingredient, contains more sugar than rice, which can make people feel warm all over their bodies. In Chinese the word "rice cake" has the same pronunciation with the word "higher in a new year", which symbolizes good luck and continual promotion.

    Eating fried spring roll（吃春卷）

    In Anqing of Anhui province, people traditionally eat fried spring rolls during Major

    Cold. They use a round, cooked, thin pancake to wrap stuffing（馅料）in a thin roll. Then it is fried in a pan with oil until it turns yellow and floats to the top. The stuffing inside the spring roll contains meat or vegetables and the flavor can be salty or sweet.

    Drinking stewed soup

    People in Nanjing of Jiangsu province like to drink stewed soup during Major Cold, which can make people feel warm from head to foot. They always stew the aged hen soup with ginseng(人参), matrimony vine(枸杞) and black fungus(黑木耳).

    Doing winter sports

    There is a saying that goes, "Dripping water freezes during Minor and Major Cold." In various regions of China, Major Cold is the perfect time for winter sports such as skiing, ice skating and sledding.

I'm a standup comic. One day, a woman from The Daily News called and said she wanted to do an article on me. When she had finished interviewing me for the article, she asked, "What are you planning to do next?" Well, at the time, there was absolutely nothing I was planning on doing next, so I asked her what she meant, pausing for a moment. She told me she was interested in me! So I thought I'd better tell her something. What came out was, "I'm thinking about breaking the Guinness Book of World Records for Fastest-Talking Female."

The newspaper article came out the next day, and the writer had included my parting remarks about trying to break the world's Fastest-Talking Female record. At about 5: 00 p.m. that afternoon I got a call from Larry King Live, which I had never heard of, asking me to go on the show. They wanted me to try to break the record, and they told me they would pick me up at 8: 00—because they wanted me to do it that night!

Then I sat down to figure out what on earth I was going to do on the show. I called Guinness to find out how to break a fast-talking record. They told me I would have to recite something either Shakespeare or the Bible. Shakespeare and I had never really gotten along, so 1 figured the Bible was my only hope. I began practicing and practicing, over and over again. I was both nervous and excited at the same time.

Then I decided just to give it my best shot, and I did. I broke the record, becoming the World's Fastest-talking Female by speaking 585 words in one minute in front of a national television audience. I broke it again two years later, with 603 words in a minute. My career took off.

People often ask me how I did that. I tell them I live my life by this simple philosophy: I always say yes first; then I ask, "Now, what do I have to do to accomplish that?" Then I ask myself, "What is the worst thing that can happen if I don't succeed? The answer is, I simply don't succeed! And what's the best thing that can happen? I succeed!

What more can life ask of you? Be yourself, and have a good time!

Britain appears to be in a mental-health crisis. In the past decade no European country has seen a greater increase in the use of antidepressants(抗抑郁药); now only the Portuguese and Icelanders are popping more of the {#blank#}1{#/blank#}. Around 4.5m Britons were in contact with mental-health services in 2021-22, a rise of almost l m in five years.

There are a few reasons why Britons might be unhappier than their {#blank#}2{#/blank#}. One global poll found that teenagers in Britain were some of the loneliest in the world, with few supportive relationships and a low sense of purpose and meaning: all risk factors for poor mental health. Britain's poorest households are also {#blank#}3{#/blank#} off than their equivalents in France and Germany, for example, which makes them more vulnerable to conditions such as anxiety and depression. And Britain's health system can seem more {#blank#}4{#/blank#} than those in most other rich countries. In England alone, some 3.8 m are waiting for mental-health treatment.

Those factors might explain why more people are {#blank#}5{#/blank#} to medication. Another reason is increased awareness. Campaigns around depression and anxiety have been particularly successful in Britain. That is {#blank#}6{#/blank#} a good thing. A reduction in humiliation (蒙羞) has encouraged more people to seek help. Taking antidepressants – or using mental-health services — has become much more acceptable.

But there is a {#blank#}7{#/blank#} to this, as The Economist recently reported. Surveys suggest that Britons are increasingly {#blank#}8{#/blank#} common human emotions, such as stress and grief, as mental illnesses. "You're going to lose any sense of what mental illness is if you start to {#blank#}9{#/blank#} it to 30%, 50% of the population," says Adrian Massey, author of a book called "Sick-Note Britain".

For all the focus on anxiety and depression in campaigns, severe mental illnesses still receive too little attention. This is a problem: according to the GBD, Britain has the highest rates of severe mental illness in Europe. The causes of such conditions are unclear, but seem to involve a {#blank#}10{#/blank#} interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Illegal drug misuse, for which Britain has among the highest rates in the region, also plays a role.