Wealth starts with a goal saving a dollar at a time. Call it the piggy bank strategy(策略). There are lessons in that time-honored coin-saving container.

    Any huge task seems easier when reduced to baby steps. I f you wished to climb a 12,000-foot mountain, and could do it a day at a time, you would only have to climb 33 feet daily to reach the top in a year. If you want to take a really nice trip in 10 years for a special occasion, to collect the $15,000 cost, you have to save $3.93 a day. If you drop that into a piggy bank and then once a year put $1,434 in a savings account at 1% interest rate after-tax, you will have your trip money.

    When I was a child, my parents gave me a piggy bank to teach me that, if I wanted something, I should save money to buy it. We associate piggy banks with children, but in many countries, the little containers are also popular with adults. Europeans see a piggy bank as a sign of good fortune and wealth. Around the world, many believe a gift of a piggy bank on New Year's Day brings good luck and financial success. Ah, but you have to putsomethingin it.

    Why is a pig used as a symbol of saving? Why not an elephant bank, which is bigger and holds more coins? In the Middle Ages, before modern banking and credit instruments, people saved money at home, a few coins at a time dropped into a jar or dish. Potters(制陶工) made these inexpensive containers from an orange-colored clay(黏土) called “pygg,” and folks saved coins in pygg jars.The Middle English word

    for pig was “pigge”. While the Saxons pronounced pygg, referring to the clay, as “pug”, eventually the two words changed into the same pronunciation, sounding the “i” as in pig or piggy. As the word became less associated with the orange clay and more with the animal, a clever potter fashioned a pygg jar in the shape of a pig, delighting children and adults. The piggy bank was born.

Originally you had to break the bank to get to the money, bringing in a sense of seriousness into savings. While piggy banks teach children the wisdom of saving, adults often need to relearn childhood lessons. Think about the things in life that require large amounts of money— college education, weddings, cars, medical care, starting a business, buying a home, and fun stuff like great trips. So when you have money, take off the top 10%, put it aside, save and invest wisely.

    April 23 marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death. Organizations in Britain have planned numerous events to honor him.

    In Stratford-upon-Avon, his birthplace, the tourism organization has a great number of free events, including performances of Shakespeare's plays, and a dazzling fireworks display. And the BBC is broadcasting a live show from Stratfore-upon-Avon, celebrating Shakespeare's widespread influence on the world. In England's capital, the London Shakespeare Centre and King's College London are holding a series of public performances, exhibitions and activities. It isn't just England that honors the anniversary of the death of this extraordinary writer. In Washington, D. C., the Folger Shakespeare Library, which houses the world's largest collection of documents relating to William Shakespeare, is displaying a series of exhibitions.

    Shakespeare is probably the most famous author who ever lived and is considered a genius by most. He wrote around 37 plays and 154 sonnets(十四行诗), and his work has been translated into over one hundred languages! He penned beautiful metaphors(暗喻), serious dramas and amusing tales.

    Shakespeare also invented many new terms and phrases. If someone's behavior suggested they were not being honest and should not be trusted, Shakespeare called their actions suspicious. If someone was being silly and perhaps looking like a fool, Shakespeare found their actions laughable. And Shakespeare called people who offered their opinions on the quality of something critics. Today, for instance, food critics and film critics give audiences their opinions of food and film. The familiar phrase “break the ice” comes from Shakespeare's play The Taming of the Shrew. The “ice is broken” when a difficult conversation or meeting is calmed by some basic introduction, such as a simple game. More common words coined by Shakespeare include road, gossip, lonely, bump and hurry.

    Four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare surely lives on, in everyday speech, as the most famous writer of all time!

    One of the most firmly established idea of manliness is that a real man doesn't cry. Although he might shed a tear at a funeral, he is expected to quickly regain control. Sobbing openly is for girls. One study found that women cry significantly more than men do—five times as often, on average, and almost twice as long per period.

    Historically, however, men routinely wept, and no one saw it as shameful. For example, in the Middle Ages, knights cried purely because they missed their girlfriends. In The Knight of the Cart, no less a hero than Lancelot weeps at a brief separation from Guinevere. There's no mention of the men in these stories trying to restrain or hide their tears. They cry in a crowded hall with their heads held high. Nor do their companions make fun of this public crying; it's universally regarded as an admirable expression of feeling.

    So where did all the male tears go? The most obvious possibility is that this shift is the result of changes as we moved from an agricultural society to one that was urban(城市的) and industrial. In the Middle Ages, most people spent their lives among those they had known since birth. If men cried, they did so with people who would sympathize. But from the 18th to 20th centuries, the population became increasingly urbanize, and people were living in the midst of thousands of strangers. Furthermore, changes in the economy required men to work together in factories and offices where emotional expressions and even private conversations were discouraged as time wasting.

    Yet human beings weren't designed to swallow their emotions, and there's reason to believe that holding back tears can be harmful to your well-being. Research from the 1980s has suggested a relationship between stress-related illnesses and inadequate crying. Weeping is also, somewhat related with happiness and wealth. Countries where people cry the most tend to be richer and more confident.

    The ocean bottom, a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the earth, is even today largely unexplored. Until about a century ago, the deep ocean floor was completely inaccessible and hidden beneath waters averaging over 3,600 meters deep. Totally without light and in the case of intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom is a strange environment to humans, in some way, as fighting and remote as the outer space.

Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks for over a century, the first detailed global study of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1969, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project(DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill very deep waters, taking samples of rocks from the ocean floor.

    The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983. During this time, it sailed 600,000 kilometers and took almost 20,000 samples of rocks around the world. Those samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to make out what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics (构造学) and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes.

    The sample of rocks drilled by the Glomar Challenger has also provided a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years. The information of past climatic change can be used to predict the future climate.

    The latest data from the Office for National Statistics shows that one in every 12 kids is living in homes where no one has worked for at least a year. That may be due to unemployment or issues such as sickness or disability that mean they can't work, and aren't required to. This is known as being in a "long term workless" family.

    The issues faced by children in workless families have very bad influence on their development and education, limiting their future employment prospects, and reducing their opportunities to succeed throughout their lives.

    Not only does worklessness reduce family income, it can also damage families' health and stability, and thus destroy children's development. This is because many workless families are held back by disadvantages such as debt, drug and alcohol dependency, and by homelessness. Suffering from the family problems, many children face a greater and greater possibility of repeating the poor outcomes of their parents. Government research has shown that children in workless families are almost twice as likely not to reach the expected level at all stages of their education. For example, three-quarters of children from families where no one works failed to reach the expected level at General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), compared to around half of children in lower-income working families.

    So attention should be paid to children in out-of-work homes. Having working parents means a child is more likely to do better at school, to have better health, education and development, and also means they are less likely to fall into crime.

    But for some families, worklessness, or not employment, is the norm. They just choose not to work. These families often face huge barriers to getting on with their lives but they take the opportunities offered by the society. Parents' ability to work is frustrated by issues like low skills or poor mental or physical health, or drug and alcohol dependency, leaving children without the stability they need.

    We all want to help workless families with complex problems so that their children can take advantage of the opportunities in Britain. We all want parents to have the chance to go out to earn a living and to enjoy the pleasure of work, so that their children can benefit from the good examples of working parents. In doing so, we should know the need to understand the complex issues that some families face and to develop a new approach to deal with poverty. Because the root causes are not financial. It is about helping families overcome the problems they face so that they can go as far as their talents and hard work will take them. We shouldn't retreat from acting to deal with disadvantages, because we know the costs of inaction to individuals, communities and society.

    Alexa is a form of artificial intelligence, or Al for short. Many people start their mornings by asking Alexa for the weather forecast or the latest news. A device (设备)that houses Alexa can also play music from your favorite playlists, keep a shopping list, order takeout food, answer questions, send voice messages and even run "smart" home controls.

    Training AI systems to respond to problems with human-like intelligence—and learn from their mistakes —can take months, or even years. Consider Alexa and similar software, such as Apples Siri. To do the tasks its human owners ask, these systems must make sense of and then respond to sentences such as, "Alexa, play my Ed Sheeran playlist" or "Siri , what is the capital of India?"

    Computers can't understand language as it is spoken by people. So AI researchers must find a way to help humans communicate with computers. The technology used to get computers to "understand" human speech or text is known as natural language processing. By natural language, computer scientists refer to the way people naturally talk or write. To teach an AI system a task like comprehending a sentence or responding to a person's last move in a board game, scientists need to feed it lots of examples.

    AlphaGO is an AI system designed by Google that has beaten a human champion, Lee Sedol, at the strategy(策略)board game Go. To train AlphaGo, Google had to show it 30 million Go moves that people had made while playing the game. Then AlphaGo used what it learned to analyze those plays as it played against different versions (版本)of itself. During this practice, the program came up with new moves —ones never seen in games between people.

    Computers, software and devices that are powered by AI can do much more, however, than just play board games and music. And one day they could make our life much easier and much more interesting.