Sometimes it's necessary to take a break, relax and forget the routine (日常工作), so I know of an excellent place to do it outside the city. It's a beautiful place and I really enjoy going there.

    The name is Tepoztlán, 71 km south of Mexico City. Here you can find a lot of different meals, beautiful landscapes, historical buildings, local souvenirs, and so on.

    The weather most of the time is very hot, and I have to give you some advice if you go.

    I give you this advice because I ended up with sunstroke. I'm going to tell you how my trip started. When we got there we were really starving, so we decided to have breakfast and when we go to Tepoztlan we usually enjoy "quesadillas" in the market.

    In Mexico, it's very common to eat in the market, but these kinds of markets not only sell food but also you can buy clothes, flowers, everything you can imagine.

    Tepoztlan has a lot of tourist sites, but the main attraction is Tepozteco hill, and it's more attractive for the visitors during "Spring Equinox". To be honest, I've never climbed it, I'm too lazy to walk a lot and even more in the sun.

    In my trip we didn't have time to do all that because one day is not enough, but if you have the opportunity to stay for more than one day it's an excellent idea.

    Cliffside Manor Apartments are conveniently located (位于) just 15 minutes from Downtown Pittsburgh, Cranberry Township, Greater Pittsburgh International Airport and Robinson Township shopping district. This community (社区) has 1 and 2 bedroom apartments for rent. Pet-free community.

    Castle Ridge Luxury Apartment Homes are located in the suburban south hills of Pittsburgh, convenient to I-279 interstate highway, Pittsburgh International Airport, and the public transit (运输) system. 1, 2 & 3 bedroom apartment homes for rent. Pets are accepted with pet fee.

    Alvern Garden Apartments are pleasantly situated in a quiet residential (住宅的) neighborhood in the suburban south hills of Pittsburgh. Close to Keystone Oaks School District and nearby restaurants and minutes to South Hills Village shopping mall. 1, 2 & 3 bedroom apartments for rent. Cats only with a $250.00 security deposit.

    The Pointe at Adams Ridge is located north of Pittsburgh with convenience to I-79 interstate highway, shopping, restaurants & entertainment. 1, 2 & 3 bedroom apartments for rent. Pets are welcome.

    My motivation for starting our family tradition of reading in the car was purely selfish: I could not bear listening to A Sesame Street Christmas for another 10 hours. My three children had been addicted to this cassette on our previous summer's road trip.

    As I began to prepare for our next 500-mile car trip,I came across a book Jim Trelease's The Read Aloud Handbook. This could be the answer to my problem, I thought. So I put Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach into my bag. When I began to read aloud the tale of the boy who escapes the bad guys by hiding inside a giant peach, my three kids argued and wrestled in their seats. But after several lines, they were attracted into the rhythm of the words and began to listen.

    We soon learned that the simple pleasure of listening to a well-written book makes the long miles pass more quickly. Sometimes the books we read became highlights of the trip. I read Wilson Rawls's Summer of the Monkeys as we spent two days driving to the beach. We arrived just behind the power crews restoring(恢复)electricity after a tropical storm. The rain continued most of the week, and the beach was covered with oil washed up by the storm. When we returned home, I asked my son what he liked about the trip. He answered without hesitation, “The book you read in the car. ”

    Road trips still offer challenges, even though my children now are teenagers. But we continue to read as we roll across the country. And I'm beginning to see that reading aloud has done more than help pass the time. For at least a little while, we are not shut in our own electronic worlds. And maybe we've started something that will pass on to the next generation.

    A couple from Miami, Bill and Simone Butler, spent sixty-six days in a life raft (救生艇)in the seas of Central America after their boat sank.

    Twenty-one days after they left Panama in their boat, in Simony, they met some whales (鲸). "They started to hit the side of the boat," said Bill, "and then suddenly we heard water." Two minutes later, the boat was sinking. They jumped into the life raft and watched the boat go under the water.

    For twenty days they had tins of food, biscuits, and bottles of water. They also had a fishing line and a machine to make salt water into drinking water—two things which saved their lives. They caught eight to ten fish a day and ate them raw(生的).Then the line broke. "So we had no more fish until something very strange happened. Some sharks(鲨鱼) came to feed, and the fish under the raft were afraid and came to the surface. I caught them with my hands."

    About twenty ships passed them, but no one saw them. After fifty days at sea their life raft was beginning to break up. Then suddenly it was all over. A fishing boat saw them and picked them up. They couldn't stand up. So the captain carried them onto his boat and took them to Costa Rica. Their two months at sea was over.

    In many aspects, nowadays business environment has changed greatly since the late 1980s. The end of the cold war completely altered the very nature of the world's politics and economics. In just a few short years, globalization has started a variety of trends with profound consequences: the opening of markets, true global competition, widespread deregulation (解除政府对……的控制) of industry, and an abundance of accessible capital. we have experienced both the benefits and risks of a truly global economy, with both wall street and main street (平民百姓) feeling the pains of economic disorder half a world away.

    At the same time, we have fully entered the information age, starting breakthroughs in information technology, which have irreversibly altered the ability to conduct business unconstrained by the traditional limitations of time or space. Today, it's almost impossible to imagine a world without intranets, e-mail, and portable computers. With amazing speed, the internet is profoundly changing the way we work, shop, do business, and communicate.

    As a consequence, we have truly entered the post-industrial economy. We are rapidly shifting from an economy based on manufacturing and commodities to one that places the greatest value on information, services, support, and distribution. That shift, in turn, attaches great importance to "knowledge workers," a new class of wealthy, educated, and mobile people who view themselves as free agents in a seller's market.

Beyond the field of information technology, the increasing pace of technological change in virtually every industry has created entirely new business, wiped out others, and produced a great demand for continuous innovation (创新).New product, process, and distribution technologies provide powerful levers for creating competitive value. More companies are learning the importance of destructive technologies—innovations that hold the potential to make a product line, or even an entire business segment, virtually outdated.

    Another major trend has been the consumer and business markets. There's a growing appreciation that superficially similar groups of customers may have very different preferences in terms of what they want to buy and how they want to buy it. Now, new technology makes it easier, faster, and cheaper to identify and serve targeted micro-markets in ways that were physically impossible or prohibitively expensive in the past. Moreover, the trend feeds on itself, a business's ability to serve sub-markets fuels customers' appetites for more and more specialized offerings.

Richard Holmes, a British author and academic, is something of a Romantic, famous for biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his last book, "The Age of Wonder", he wrote about science and Romanticism and their common commitment to discovery. In his new book, "Falling Upwards", he combines the two again to tell the stories of Europe's early balloonists (气球飞行者).

Mr Holmes's love of balloons was aroused at a village festival and his enthusiasm is one of the book's many pleasures. He refers to the cheerful tone used in many first-hand ballooning stories, and applies it in this second-hand account. He describes men and women wrapped up in fur coats under their hydrogen-filled balloons, enjoying cold chicken and champagne and looking back to earth to see mankind "for what it really is."

Mr Holmes makes much of the strange side of ballooning, but the book is at its best when examining its more serious applications. In the American civil war, for example, both North and South put observers in balloons to spy on enemy movements. And during the Prussian attack on Paris in 1870-71， balloonists managed to fly out of the city to communicate with the French government in exile (流亡) in Tours.

"Falling Upwards" contains much of the historian's writing characteristics, such as footnotes and bibliography (文献书目), but its epilogue (后记) refers modestly to what has gone before as "a series of true balloon stories". It does touch on the more technical aspects of ballooning, and says little about the French Montgolfier brothers who are credited as its inventors. That though seems a small price to pay for such a spirited work. Mr Holmes's tale ends at the start of the 20th century when the business of flight was being handed over to the airship and the airplane.