When you are travelling in Thailand, which means of transport is the best choice?

    You can rent a variety of motorbikes or bikes in Thailand. It seems to be very popular in most of the beaches and islands along the places in the north. The most popular bikes are the little 125 cc Honda Dream which you can get for about 150 baht (铢) a day or as little as 3,000 baht per month, making it the cheapest way to tour Thailand for the people from other countries.

    Sometimes you will have to go somewhere by taxi. When you are in cities in Thailand, especially in Bangkok, always remember to get a taxi that is traveling on the roads. Some drivers outside hotels refuse to use the meter(计程表). They will ask a price which is several times the price when they use the meter!

    The quality of the roads in Thailand is generally pretty good, so renting cars is another way to get around. The big car rental companies may offer you slightly older cars at a very reasonable(合理的) price. It is a little surprising considering that the cost of buying a car in Thailand is more than that in the West. Petrol is also reasonably priced in Thailand, more expensive than American prices, but much cheaper than what is paid in Europe. In the past, Bangkok could be a difficult place to drive in—signs were generally in Thai only, making it a hard job to find exactly where you were by looking around. But now, the situation is improved. In a lot of places, even the farthest corners of the country, street signs are in both Thai and English.

    Computer programmer David Jones earns $35.000 a year designing new computer games, yet he cannot find a bank ready to let him have a credit card. Instead he has been told to wait another two years until he is 18. The 16-year-old works for a small firm in Liverpool where the problem of most young people of his age is finding a job. David's firm releases two new games for the fast growing computer market each month.

    But David's biggest headache is what to do with his money. Even though he earns a lot he cannot drive a car, take out a mortgage（抵押贷款）, or get credit cards. David got his job with the Liverpool-based company four months ago, a year after leaving school with six O-levels and working for a time in a computer shop. “I got the job because the people who run the firm knew I had already written some programs”, he said. David spends some of his money on records and clothes and gives his mother 50 pounds a week. But most of his spare time is spent working.

    “Unfortunately, computing was not part of our studies at school”, he said “But I had been studying it in books and magazines for four years in my spare time. I knew what I wanted to do and never considered staying on at school. Most people in this business are fairly young, anyway.” David added, “I would like to earn a million and I suppose early retirement is a possibility. You never know when the market might disappear.”

    Researchers at Brigham found about one in five teenagers now have some degree of hearing damage. The researchers did not say why hearing loss has risen, but other experts have strong suspicions. One likely culprit, they say, is MP3 players.

    An MP3 player can be dangerous to hearing when its decibel level is turned up too high. High-decibel sounds can damage nerve endings, called hair cells. If a sound is loud enough, the damage can be permanent. A loud sound can shake the membrane (薄膜) on which the hair cells sit- “like an earthquake”. That shake can break or even uproot hair cells. When that happens, the hair cells are finished. Human ears cannot regrow hair cells. Therefore, when listening to an MP3 player, set a volume limit and avoid exposure to loud sounds.

    On the other hand, the loudness of today's music may not be totally under your control. Music companies have been purposely turning up the volume. It's a trend called the fight for loudness.

    Play a CD from the 1990s. Then play a newly released tune. Don't touch the volume control. You'll probably notice that the new CD sounds louder than the old one. Why? Sound engineers who create CDs are using dynamic range compression (压缩), a technology that makes the quiet parts of a song louder and the loud parts quieter. The overall effect of compression is a louder recording.

    Many musicians and sound engineers aren't pleased. They say that compression is driving down the quality of today, s music, making it sound flat and blaring. Gray Hobish, a sound engineer, explains that music should be a combination of loudness and softness. But music companies want to make music louder so it will stand out. That's important in the competition among recording companies.

    What about listeners? Many teenagers listen to music on the go in noisy places and through headphones, all of which reduce sound quality. So young listeners may not notice the poorer quality of modem recordings. “To their ears,” says Hobish, “the music sounds fine. And they are not aware of the hidden threat of the music they are enjoying.”

    The quick action of Nick helped five people escape a fire on Hope Road. Nick said he usually left his house about 5:30 a.m. to do morning exercises, but that day he decided to stay at home to get his daughter ready for school. As he looked at his neighbor's house, he realized that it was on fire. “I saw smoke and flames and ran over and started beating on the side of the house shouting, 'Your house is on fire! Your house is on fire!'” Nick remembered it was at about 9 a.m. that the firefighters put out the fire.

    Beverly Penny and her husband, Clark, along with their younger daughters, were sleeping in the living room, next to the kitchen, when they heard Nick beating on the walls. She opened the bedroom door and black smoke came in. She managed to get her kids out. Her dog tried to hide under the bed, but Penny caught it by the leg and threw it out of the door. However, chickens in one of the rooms weren't so lucky.

    Firefighters got the call at about 7:05 a.m. “When we arrived with our fire trucks, there were heavy flames outside on the house,” Jerry said. He called Nick a hero, saying that without his quick responses(回应) the result could have been much worse. “The firefighters were fast,” Nick said. “They arrived here within about three minutes.”

    “They did a great job, and I can't thank them enough,” Penny said, then looked at what remained in the house and shook her head as tears rolled down in her eyes. “Everything I have is gone. Luckily nobody was hurt in the fire.” She said the fire could have been caused by an electrical problem. “We've been having problems with mice, so that we could have had something to do with it,” she added.

    Climate change, pollution, overuse of water and development are killing some of the world's most famous rivers including China's Yangtze. India's Ganges and Africa's Nile. WWF said on Tuesday. At the global launch of its report "World's Top 10 Rivers at Risk", the group said many rivers could dry out. affecting hundreds of millions of people and killing unique aquatic (水生的) life.

    "If these rivers die, millions will lose their livelihoods, biodiversity (生物多样性) will be destroyed on a massive scale, there will be less fresh water and agriculture, resulting in less food security, "said. Rayi Singh, secretary—general of WWF—India. The report, launched ahead of "World Water Day" today, also cited the Rio Grande in. the United States, the Mekong and Indus in Asia, Europe's Danube, La Plata in South America and Australia's Murray—Darling as in need of greater protection.

    Rivers are the world's main source of fresh water and WWF says about half of the available supply is already being used up. Dams have destroyed habitats and cut rivers off from their flood plains, while climate change could affect the seasonal water flows that feed them, the report said. Fish populations, the top source of protein and overall life support for hundreds of thousands of communities worldwide, are also being threatened, it found. The Yangtze basin is one of the most polluted rivers in the world because of decades of heavy industrialization, damming and huge influxes (流入) of sediment (积淀) from land conversion.

    Climate change, including higher temperatures, also means serious consequences for fishery productivity, water supply and political security in Africa's arid Nile basin. Tributaries (支流) flowing into the Ganges are drying up because of irrigation, WWF said.

Mrs. Black was having a lot of trouble with her skin, so she went to her doctor about it. He could not find anything wrong with her, however. So he sent her to the local hospital for some tests. The hospital, of course, sent the results of the tests direct to Mrs. Black's doctor, and the next morning he telephoned her to give her a list of the things that he thought she could not eat, as any of them might be the cause of her skin trouble. Mrs. Black carefully wrote all the things down on a piece of paper, which she then left beside the telephone while she went out to a ladies' meeting.

When she got back home two hours later, she found her husband waiting for her. He had a big basket full of packages beside him, and when he saw her, he said, "Hello, dear. I have done all your shopping for you." "Done all my shopping?" She asked in surprise. "But how did you know what I wanted?" "Well, when I got home, I found your shopping list beside the telephone," answered her husband. "So I went down to the shops and bought everything you had written down."

Of course, Mrs. Black had to tell him that what he had thought were all the things the doctor did not allow her to eat.