A smart home is a home with a communication network. This network connects devices(装置), such as lights and TV sets, and allows them to be controlled from far away through electrical wiring, mobile phone communication or WiFi over the internet.

    More and more people may start to consider owning a smart home, because it makes life much more convenient. It can help keep your room at a certain temperature. It can record what happens inside the home and send the video to your phone. When you are on vacation abroad, you can use a smart home controller to switch on or off the electricity when necessary. Some smart homes can receive a visitor, allowing him to come in and offering him a drink. They can even feed the cat and water the plants.

    Besides, smart homes are easy to fix. Most smart home technology and devices are wireless and can be set up with a minimum of tools,using only the guiding information. When a problem appears,you can deal with it yourself without paying a professional.

    However, for home-users,the smart home technology is far from perfect.It can be rather expensive to own the technology and the devices. Also, because the smart home system(系统) allow its owner to get home information from anywhere, it leaves the home easy to be attacked by hackers(黑客), who may secretly use or change the information in the system.

Now,many scientists are excited at the future of smart home technology. Imagine being able to get fashion advice from your mirror, or receive food shopping suggestions from your refrigerator. While there are others who worry that those smart devices will make people lazier and lonelier. Whatever it is, one thing is for sure—smart home technology will change the way we live and work.

    Artificial intelligence (AI, 人工智能) can help us make phone calls. It can guide us to where we want to go. It can play games. And now, AI can do even more things.

    Researchers from Microsoft have created the first machine translation system that can translate news articles from Chinese to English, Business Standard reported.

    According to Microsoft's official website, researchers tested the system by asking it to translate hundreds of sentences taken from news stories. Then, language experts compared the results to two translations that were done by humans. The experts concluded that the system's translations were as good as the human translations.

    Machine translation is always challenging. This is partly because different words can be used to express the same meaning. It can be hard to say which word is more “correct”.

    Experts used several methods to improve the system's translation abilities. “Much of our research is really inspired (得到启发) by how we humans do things,” lead researcher Liu Tieyan said.

    One method is called dual learning. In this method, the system translates every sentence from Chinese to English, as well as translates the sentences back from English into Chinese. This way, the system can improve itself and learn from its own mistakes. This is similar to what humans do to make sure their translations are accurate (准确的).

    Another method makes use of deliberation networks . The researchers taught the system to repeat the process of translating the same sentence over and over. Gradually, the system can improve the quality of its translations. This is similar to how people revise their own writing by going through it again and again.

    In northern China during spring, big sandstorms often make trouble for people. When the sky is dark with sand, buses and cars all move much more slowly. Sometimes, people can't even see for 20 metres.

    Sandstorms usually happen in spring. Big sandstorms happened in more than 10 provinces in northern China last year. More than 70 million people have had problems in those places because of the sandstorms.

    People in southern China don't have to worry about this kind of bad weather. Most of the sand comes from the north of China. In northern China, lots of places have few trees and don't get much rain. People there have been cutting down too many trees. When there aren't many trees, the ground can't keep enough water. Over the years, the ground dries up and turns to sand. When spring comes and the ice melts (融化), the ground becomes looser (更松散的). Strong winds take the loose sand into the sky.

    Sandstorms are bad for people's health. If people take in too much sand, they could cough or have asthma (哮喘).

    Sandstorms also give farmers lots of problems. Sometimes their sheep get lost in the storms and never get back home. The winds also tear down farmers' houses.

    What can you do to stop sandstorms? Here's an idea: Ask your parents to help you plant some trees this spring.

    If you see people cutting down too many trees, tell them about the dangers of sandstorms, and ask your government to stop them from cutting.

    In 1969, humans landed on the moon for the first time. Now, many other countries want to go there as well. Why?

    The moon has a lot of minerals (矿物质) and other useful things. We want to find out if we can use them. The moon is our closest neighbor in space. We can use it as a rest station. Then, we can learn more about other planets far away in space.

    The moon is 3,474 kilometers in diameter (直径). It is about one-fourth the size of Earth. If Earth is the size of a basketball, the moon is the size of a tennis ball.

    The moon has much less gravity than Earth. If you can jump 1.5 meters on Earth, you can jump 9 meters on the moon.

    The moon is very quiet. There is no sound there. There are a lot of grey rocks on it. The moon's sky is always black.

    Our moon is about 384,400 kilometers away from Earth. The total length of the Great Wall is about 21,200 kilometers. We would have to put about ____ Great Walls end to end to reach the moon!

    The tiger is the largest wild cat in the world. It is the king of animals. Tigers often eat 5kg of meat for a meal. Tigers can see very well in the dark. They often hunt at night. Sometimes they can eat 27kg of meat at one night. Most members of the cat family dislike water, but tigers enjoy water. They are good at swimming. Many animals live in groups, but tigers live alone（单独地）, except for（除了） mothers and their young babies. A mother tiger usually has two or three babies at one time. She takes care of them by herself.

    There were eight kinds of tigers in the world, but three of them died out（灭绝）. There are only about 3200wild tigers in the world now because people kill tigers and destroy the places where they live.