More over smart phone, the intelligent watch is about to take your spot as the latest hi­tech current, allowing wearers to glance at messages and even take calls without touching their phones. The i'm Watch, available since 2011, is the flagship product of an Italian company—i'm. This smart watch is an assist to the smart phone, with which it can communicate by Bluetooth wireless technology. It means you can leave your phone in your pocket as you answer or reject a call, review e­mails or read updates from friends on Twitter or Facebook.

    The i'm Watch also has its own applications, such as i'm Sport, which links with a heart rate detector (检测器) to allow a runner to check his pulse. Such functions already exist in specialized sports watches but not on watches that are linked to smart phones.

    With a square shape, a 3.8­centimeter touch screen and various colors, the i'm Watch sells for a minimum of 300 Euros ($390) for the basic model and prices climb to 16 000 Euros for a luxury model in silver or decorated with diamonds.

    So far, the watch has already found 30 000 buyers, 80 percent of whom are men aged 25 to 50. “Seventy percent are iPhone users, 25 percent Samsung and the rest are other telephones using Google's Android operating system，” said Massimiliano Bertolini, a manager of the company, which aims to sell more than 200 000 watches this year. The company's target market is the person who is always glued to his smart phone, even in meetings or at the movies, or people who wish to keep an eye on their heartbeat during exercise. They will especially target women with advertisements emphasizing its design rather than its technology.

    Do you want to have a nice place to spend your weekend？Here are some places for you ,which are probably a mere walk away from your college.

King's Art Centre

    A day at the Centre could mean a visit to an exhibition of the work of one of the most interesting contemporary artists on show anywhere. This weekend sees the opening of an exhibition of four local artists.

    You could attend a class teaching you how to 'learn from the masters' or get more creative with paint—free of charge.

    The Centre also runs two life drawing classes for which there is a small fee.

The Botanic Garden

    The Garden has over 8,000 plant species；it holds the research and teaching collection of living plants for Cambridge University.

    The multi­branched Torch Aloe here is impressive. The African plant produces red flowers above blue­green leaves，and is not one to miss.

    Get to the display house to see Dionaea muscipula，a plant more commonly known as the Venus Flytrap that feeds on insects and other small animals.

    The Garden is also a place for wildlife ­enthusiasts. Look for grass snakes in the lake. A snake called 'Hissing Sid' is regularly seen lying in the heat of the warm sun.

Byron's Pool

    Many stories surround Lord Byron's time as a student of Cambridge University. Arriving in 1805，he wrote a letter complaining that it was a place of “mess and drunkenness”．However，it seems as though Byron did manage to pass the time pleasantly enough. I'm not just talking about the pet bear he kept in his rooms.He spent a great deal of time walking in the village.

    It is also said that on occasion Byron swam naked by moonlight in the lake，which is now known as Byron's Pool. A couple of miles past Grantchester in the south Cambridgeshire countryside，the pool is surrounded by beautiful circular paths around the fields. The cries of invisible birds make the trip a lovely experience and on the way home you can drop into the village for afternoon tea. If you don't trust me，then perhaps you'll take it from Virginia Woolf—over a century after Byron，she reportedly took a trip to swim in the same pool.

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    In 1978, I was 18 and was working as a nurse in a small town about 270 km away from Sydney, Australia. I was looking forward to having five days off from duty. Unfortunately, the only one train a day back to my home in Sydney had already left. So I thought I'd hitch a ride (搭便车).

    I waited by the side of the highway for three hours but no one stopped for me. Finally, a man walked over and introduced himself as Gordon. He said that although he couldn't give me a lift, I should come back to his house for lunch. He noticed me standing for hours in the November heat and thought I must be hungry. I was doubtful as a young girl but he assured (使……放心) me I was safe, and he also offered to help me find a lift home afterwards. When we arrived at his house, he made us sandwiches. After lunch, he helped me find a lift home.

Twenty-five years later, in 2003, while I was driving to a nearby town one day, I saw an elderly man standing in the glaring heat, trying to hitch a ride. I thought it was another chance to repay someone for the favor I'd been given decades earlier. I pulled over and picked him up. I made him comfortable on the back seat and offered him some water.

    After a few moments of small talk, the man said to me, “You haven't changed a bit, even your red hair is still the same.”

    I couldn't remember where I'd met him. He then told me he was the man who had given me lunch and helped me find a lift all those years ago. It was Gordon.

    Drive through any suburb in the U.S. Today, and it's hard to miss the recycling bins that have become companions to America's trash cans. Recycling has become common, as people recognize the need to care for the environment. Yet most people's recycling consciousness extends only as far as paper, bottles, and cans. People seldom find themselves facing the growing problem of e-waste.

    E-waste rapidly increases as the techno- fashionable frequently upgrade to the most advanced devices, and the majority of them end up in landfills (垃圾填埋地). Some people who track such waste say that users throw away nearly 2 million tons of TVs, VCRs, computers, cell phones, and other electronics every year. Unless we can find a safe replacement, this e-waste may get into the ground and poison the water with dangerous toxins (毒素), such as lead, mercury, and arsenic. Burning the waste also dangerously contaminates the air.

     However, e-waste often contains reusable silver, gold, and other electrical materials. Recycling these materials reduces environmental problems by reducing both landfill waste and the need to look for such metals, which can destroy ecosystems.

    A growing number of states have adopted laws to ban dumping e-waste. Still, less than a quarter of this waste will reach lawful recycling programs. Some companies advertising safe disposal in fact merely ship the waste to some developing countries, where it still ends up in landfills. These organizations prevent progress by unsafely disposing of waste in an out- of- sight, out- of- mind location.

    However, the small but growing number of cities and corporations that do handle e- waste responsibly represents progress toward making the world a cleaner, better place for us all.

China's Tianwen 1 Mars probe (探测器) conducted its fourth orbital correction on Friday evening, as the spacecraft makes ready for its arrival in orbit around Feb. 10, according to the China National Space Administration.

The name comes from the long poem Tianwen, meaning Heavenly Questions or Questions to Heaven, written by Qu Yuan, one of the greatest poets of ancient China. In Tianwen, this name conveys the Chinese nation's steady effort in pursuing truth and culture of exploring nature and the universe. CNSA also unveiled (发布) the logo of China's planetary exploration missions, featuring the letter C, signifying China, international cooperation and capacity of entering space.

Tianwen I has flown for 197 days and more than 465 million kilometers on its journey to the planet. It is now around 184 million km from Earth and I. I million km from Mars. Depending on the two planets' orbits, Mars is between 55 and 400 million km from Earth. Mars probe Tianwen I is seen in its first selfies in space on Oct. 1, 2020. The administration also published a black-and-white picture of Mars taken by Tianwen I, the first snapshot (抓拍的照片) from the Chinese craft.

Tianwen I, the country's first independent Mars mission, was launched by a Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket on July 23 from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, kicking off the nation's planetary exploration program.

A successful landing would make China only the second nation to place a spacecraft on the Martian planet. China would also be the first to successfully orbit, land and deploy (部署) a vehicle in the same mission. According to experts, searching for signs of life on Mars will be the first and foremost scientific goal. China is open and inclusive in the development of its space technology not least because it believes that the exploration of outer space should help build a community with a shared future for mankind.

D

With the completion of the Human Genome（基因组）Project more than 20 years ago, and the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA enjoying its 70th birthday last year, you might assume that we know how life works. Think again!

Evolution has a 4bn-year head start on us. However, several aspects of the standard picture of how life works-the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular（分子）machines and more-have wildly reduced the complexity of life. 

In the excellent book How Life Works, Philip Ball explorers the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more delicate affair than we have understood. Ball explains that life is a system of many levels-genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules-each with its own rules and principles, so there is no unique place to look for an answer to it. 

Also, How Life Works is a much more appealing title than the overused question of "What is life?". We should be less concerned with what a thing is, and rather more focused on what a thing does. Defining a living thing implies an unchangeable ideal type, but this will run counter to the Darwinian principle that living things are four-dimensional, ever changing in time as well as space.

But it's an idea that is deeply rooted within our culture. Ball points out that we rely on metaphors（比喻）to explain and explore the complexities of life, but none suffice. We are taught that cells are machines, though no machine we have invented behaves like the simplest cell; that DNA is a code or a blueprint, though it is neither; that the brain is a computer, though no computer behaves like a brain at all.

Ball is a terrific writer, pumping out books on incredibly diverse subjects. There's a wealth of well-researched information in here, and some details that are a bit chewy for the lay reader. But the book serves as an essential introduction on our never-ending quest to understand life.