Traveling to every part of the world gets easier, but how well do we know and understand each other. Here's a simple test. Imagine you are planning to hold a meeting at four o'clock. What time should you expect your foreign business friends to arrive? If they are Germans, they'll arrive on time. If they are Americans, they'll probably be 15 minutes early. If they are Englishmen, they'll be 15 minutes late, and you should allow up to an hour for the Italians.

    The British seemed to think since the English language was widely used in the world, people would always understand what they do. However, they found they were completely wrong. For example, the British are happy to have a business lunch and discuss business matters and have a drink during the meal. The Japanese prefer not to work while eating. Lunch is a time for them to relax and get to know each other and they don't drink at lunchtime. The Germans like to talk business before dinner. The French like to eat first and talk afterwards. They have to be well fed and watered before they discuss anything.

    When you write a text message or an email, you might put a smiling face or other pictures at the end to make the message more fun. These pictures are emojis. The first emojis were on Japanese mobile phones in the 1990s. Later, they were used on Apple's iPhone and Android phones. Now they are everywhere!

Before emojis, there were emoticons. The word is a mixture(混合) of emotion(感情) and icon(图标). Emoticons are made of the signs you can find on your keyboard, for example:) for a smiley or @};—for a rose. The first use of :-)was in 1982 and it was called "joke marker". Emoji is a Japanese word which means pictograph: e(picture) +moji (character). Emojis are real pictures, for example ，or . There are 1851emojis that can be used on mobile phones and other devices. There are all kinds of emojis, from faces and weather to things in the kitchen and animal.

    In England, we have a saying: A picture paints a thousand words. For many people, an emoji is like a punctuation mark(标点). It's like the tone of voice when we speak on the phone, or hand movements(gestures) used in conversation. Emojis are also changing the way we write. The more we use emojis, the less we use slang(俚语), such as LOL or OMG.

    When someone speaks and looks serious, we try to look serious, too, and when someone smiles, we smile as well. This is how we show empathy(同感) and make friends(and enemies!). But when we're online, we can't see the person's face and there's no emotion. The invention of emojis changed that! Scientists in Australia have discovered that when we look at a smiley face online, the same parts of the brain start working as when we look at a real smiley face. Our mood changes, and we try to change our face to match the emoji. This is something we learn as we get older. Our brains have developed this ability over the last two or three years. This means that emojis have created a new brain pattern(模式)in us!

    Comics use drawings and words to tell stories that can be funny or serious, or a little of both. Comic books grew out of comic strips in newspapers.

    One of the most successful early comic characters in America was Mickey Dugan, better-known as "the Yellow Kid". He wore a yellow coat that was too big for him. He was a character in a comic strip which provided opinions on the problems of cities. The Yellow Kid first appeared in 1895. The character became so popular that it was also used to sell products and to create plays.

    Adventure stories in comic books were very popular during the 1930s- the time known as the Golden Age of Comics. Famous characters created during that time include the science fiction hero Flash Gordon and the detective Dick Tracy.

    The 1930s also gave us a superhero who came to Earth from another planet. Superman was a newspaper reporter for Daily Planet in the big city when he lived on the Earth. Superman became a hero of comic fans as he used his ability to fly to fight for "truth and jus tice(正义)". Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were seventeen when they created Superman in 1933. They sold the rights(版权) of the character to the DC Comics Company for one hundred and thirty dollars. That might be a lot of money to them at the time. But it was nothing compared to all the money made since then from Superman comics, radio and TV shows, movies and toys. Finally, in 1975, they wanted to get more for their creation. DC Comics agreed to pay each of them twenty thousand dollars a year for life. And it agreed to put their names as the creators of Superman in all future printed materials and films.