Memory, they say, is a matter of practice and exercise. If you have the wish and really made a conscious（自觉的）effort, then you can quite easily improve your ability to remember things. But even if you are successful, there are times when your memory seems to play tricks on you.

    Sometimes you remember things that really did not happen. One morning last week, for example, I got up and found that I had left the front door unlocked all night, yet I clearly remember locking it carefully the night before.

    Memory “trick” work the other way as well. Once in a while you remember not doing something, and then find out that you did. One day last month, for example, I was sitting in a barber（理发师）shop waiting for my turn to get a haircut, and suddenly I realized that I had got a haircut two days before at the barber shop across the street from my office.

    We always seem to find something funny and amusing（有趣的）in incidents caused by people's forgetfulness or absent-mindedness. Stories about absent-minded professors have been told for years, and we never got tired of hearing new ones. Unfortunately, however, absent-mindedness is not always funny. There are times when “trick” of our memory can cause us great trouble.

    Black Friday-the day after Thanksgiving Day in the United States-signals the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Although it's not an official holiday, millions of employers give their employees the day off, and many people use that day to get a jump start on their holiday shopping. A similar day in Canada and the Great Britain is called "Boxing Day".

    Black Friday has become a marketing sensation in recent years. Since 2005, it has been the busiest shopping day of the year. To lure shoppers, retailers（零售商）routinely open their doors as early as 4 am and offer special sales and promotions to the shoppers that arrive early. Some of the special deals offered by stores are only available in limited quantities. That is why some shoppers intend on getting the best deals often camp out in front of stores overnight so that they will be the first in line when the doors open.

    But why Black Friday? Historians believe the name started in Philadelphia in the mid 1960s. Bus drivers and police used "Black Friday" name. In the early 1980s, a more positive explanation of the name began to ciculate. According to this alternative explanation, Black Friday is the day when retailers finally begin to turn a profit for the year. In accounting terms, operating at a loss is called being "in the red" because accountants traditionally used red ink to show negative amounts. Positive amounts were usuallay shown "in black ink". Thus, being in the black is a good thing because it means stores are operating at a profit.

    Recently, for those who are too busy to stop on Black Friday, or who just don't want to fight the crowds, the Monday following Black Friday has become known as Cyber Monday for shoppers can take advantage of the comfort of getting many online deals from their homes.

    Picasso Blue and Rose' at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris

    Through Jan.6.2019

    In its first major partnership with the Musée National Picasso﹣Paris, the Mus6e d'Orsay presents a show about Pablo Picasso's "Blue and Rose periods. "Some iconic（标志性的）Picasso works from this period in 1900～1906 ﹣﹣which experts consider a key point in his career—will make their first appearance in France for this exhibit. The show features over 300 works, including 80 paintings, 150 drawings, sculptures and prints, alongside photographs and letters from this time in the artist's life.

    'Hodler Parallelism' at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland

    Through Jan. 13, 2019

    This year marks a century since the death of one of Switzerland's most famous painters: Ferdinand Hodler. To honor his great achievements, the Kunstmuseum Bem and Geneva's Museum of Art and History have joined forces for a show focused on his theory of parallelism. Hodler considered parallelism a key principle of his work and employed it through the use of repetition, patterns, symmetry（对称） and mirror images, The show features 99 of Holder' s works.

    Claude Monet' at the Albertina in Vienna

    Through Jan. 6, 2019

    For the first time in over 20 years, a large﹣scale Monet exhibit can be seen in Austria. The Alhertina has gathered 100 paintings from more than 40 international museums and private collections, including the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery in London, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.  Highlights include the works: "On the Boat," "Boulevard des Capucines," "Grainstack in Sunlight," and "The Japanese Bridge."

    Babies have an astonishing talent that adults entirely lose. By the age of one, they can recognise the significant noises around them and group them into a language. When we have lost this capacity as adults, it becomes enormously difficult to distinguish between sounds that are glaringly different to a native speaker. It all sounds Greek to us. This is because the range of possible sounds that humans use to convey meaning may be as high as 2,000, but few languages use more than 100 and even then the significant noises－the phonemes (音素) of a language－each cover a range of sounds and so vague distinctions which would change the meaning of a word in other languages.

    But where do these phonemes come from and why do they shift over time? New research suggests that the apparently arbitrary distribution of some sounds around the world may be partially explained by diet. This is unexpected. We'd rather think of language as product of our thought  rather than of the arrangement of our teeth. In reality, though, any given language must be both.

    Hunter gatherer languages very seldom use the sounds known as labiodentals (唇齿音)－those such as f and v－that are made by touching the lower lip with the upper teeth. Only two of the hundreds of Australian aboriginal languages use them, for example. But in cultures that have discovered farming, these consonants (辅音) are much more common. The argument goes that farmers eat more cooked food and more dairy than hunter gatherers. Either way, they need to chew mush less, and to bite less with their front teeth. So farmers grew up with smaller lower jaws and more of an overbite than their ancestors who had to bite through harder foods. It became easier for them to make the labiodental consonants instead of purely labial (唇音) ones: one example is that f come to take the place of p. Romans said "pater" but English speakers (unless they're Rees－Moggs) say "father".

    Beyond these particular changes, the story highlights the way in which everything distinctively human is both material and spiritual: speech must combine sound and meaning, and the meaning can't exist or be transmitted without a real object. But neither can it be reduced to the purely physical, as our inability to understand or even to recognise foreign languages makes clear. The food we eat shapes our jaws, and our jaws in turn shape the sounds of our language. The ease with which we eat probably shapes our thought too, as anyone who has suffered toothache could testify. What we eat may have shaped the sounds of our language, but how we eat changes how we feel and what we use language to express. A family meal is very different from a sandwich at the office desk, even if the calorie is the same. Food has purposes and meanings far beyond keeping us alive and pleasing the Palate (味觉).

    People traveling long distances frequently have to decide whether they would prefer to go by land, sea, or air. Hardly can anyone positively enjoy sitting in a train for more than a few hours. Train carriages soon get crowded. Reading is only a partial solution, for the monotonous(单调的) rhythm of the wheels clicking on the rails soon makes you sleep. During the day, sleep comes in snatches. While at night you rarely manage to sleep. Inevitably you arrive at your destination almost exhausted.

    Long car journey are even less pleasant, for it is quite impossible even to read. On motorways you can, at least, travel fairly safely at high speed, but more often than not, the greater span of the journey is spent on narrow, uneven roads which are crowded with traffic.

    By comparison, trips by sea offer a great variety of civilized comforts. You can stretch your legs on the broad decks, play games, swim, meet interesting people and enjoy good food-always assuming, of course, that the sea is calm. If it is not and you are likely to get seasick, no form of transport could be worse. Even if you travel in ideal weather, sea journeys take a long time. Relatively few people are prepared to sacrifice up to a third of their holidays for the pleasure of traveling on a ship.

    Airplanes have the reputation of being dangerous and a little expensive. But nothing can match them for speed and comfort. Traveling at a height of 30,000 feet and at over 500 miles an hour is a pleasant experience. For a few hours, you settle back in a deep armchair to enjoy the flight. The real relaxation can be a free film show and some other services. An airplane also offers you an unusual and breathtaking view of the world. You really see the shape of the land. If the landscape is hidden from the view, you can enjoy the extraordinary sight of unbroken cloud plains that stretch on for miles before you, while the sun shines brilliantly in a clear sky. The journey is so smooth that there is nothing to prevent you from reading or sleeping. However you decide to spend your time, one thing is certain: you will arrive at your destination fresh and untired.

Liu Yexi has taken Douyin by storm. As of Nov 17, the virtual idol, who performed on the social media platform on Oct 31, had only released two short videos but attracted over 5 million followers. 

Different from other virtual idols, Liu is defined as a "virtual beauty vlogger". In her first video, Liu is doing makeup with an eye brush while dressed in a traditional Chinese costume. 

When she turns around, the onlookers are terrified, except one boy. Then Liu slightly brushes the boy's eyes, allowing him to see the fantasy world in her own eyes. The internet users marveled(使...惊叹) at its storyline, science-fiction elements and special visual effects with cyberpunk style. Liang Zikang, the CEO of the production team, told China Newsweek that the team spent two months making the video. 

Liu's instant popularity online further reflects that the virtual idol industry in China has been booming. There are over 32,400 virtual idols that have opened accounts on video-sharing platform Bilibili in the past year, seeing a year-on-year rise of 40 percent, Chen Rui, the CEO of Bilibili, said in a speech. 

"Compared with real idols and stars, the virtual ones seem to be more approachable for fans," Shine News noted. Additionally, these virtual web celebrities(名人) won't have scandals(丑闻). 

As more young people are fascinated by these virtual figures, their commercial(商业的) value has been on the rise. Generally, they earn money by online concerts, livestreaming and related products. For example, Luo Tianyi, a well-known virtual singer, cooperated with livestreamer Li Jiaqi to promote goods in 2020. 

Therefore, some people are wondering whether they will replace real humans. "These socalled virtual idols have real human teams to back them up and control them. They are not really virtual." Ding Daoshi, an independent analyst in the internet sector, told the Global Times. The real virtual idol will come when artificial intelligence achieves a new level of selflearning and self-training and then interacts with others, he added.