It encouraged us to visit Quora. com, the online question and answer community, to find out how users get the most out of every tank of gas.

    Light makes right

    Alex Elderfield noted that excess weight prevents an engine from burning fuel efficiently. "Only carry what is essential in your car, clean out any junk or necessary items otherwise you are paying for the fuel to cart these from place to place," he wrote.

    Driving smoothly — that is, not mashing the gas and then slamming the brakes later down the road — was a fixture of many responses. Quora user Clint Law agreed on that advice, who wrote, "Every little bit of kinetic energy that your brakes lose, your engine burned in fuel to build up." Overbraking should consequently be viewed as wasted acceleration. "That's really what kills your fuel economy," he argued.

    Keep the pressure up

    Keeping the recommended tire pressure for your car was another mantra among Quora users. Marlyn Rosent said she checked her tire pressure every time she filled up her SUV. Quora user Doug Dingus checks his tire pressure every weekend. “Less tire contact means reduced rubbing, requiring less fuel,” he said.

    Air conditioning or windows

    Though the summer heat get many drivers to roll up the windows and turn on the air conditioning, some people argued that running the A/C wastes too much gas. In between were many shades of grey.

    Achilleas Vortselas said it would depend largely on a car's speed. He wrote that as a general rule, people should drive with the windows down around the city and turn the air conditioning on when hitting the highway, where a car's aerodynamic(空气动力的) characteristics would be influenced by opened windows.

    More seriously minded people, however, said to travel as much as possible with windows up and the A/C off. Eddie Xue gets by with just a wisp of outside air. “Use the fan and open your windows every now and then at lower speeds," he wrote.

根据短文内容，选择最佳答案，并将选定答案的字母标号填在题前括号内。

    Games have already become a good companion for people. Whether kids or adults, they prefer to spend their spare time in playing games. Why are games so popular? Firstly, they can attract people easily and secondly, they are east to upgrade(升级). Each day, thousands of games come out. And no matter which kind of game you like, there is always a game that suits you. Now when people meet, they would like to talk about the newest games.

    Here are the hottest new games for girls. They are Didi games. 80 percent of girls like dressing-up games. There are varieties of dressing-up games in Didi. The leading roles of them also vary from common girls to princesses. If you are lucky enough, you can be dressed up as the famous stars you admire. At the same time, wedding dressing-up games can also be found. Whether you admit it or not, all girls like things related to wedding, so most girls like to be dressed up as brides.

    In order to attract kids' attention, many games choose fairies(精灵) as the leading roles, for fairies are really alluring to girls. Maybe the magic wands(魔杖) of the fairies really have supernatural powers(超自然力量). There are various kinds of Didi fairy games, such as Fairy of Water, Catching Flowers Contest, Winter Garden Fairy, etc.

    Cooking games are also girls' favorite games. Making a cake, soup or other delicious food is a category of simple games. There are also complicated ones, for example, preparing a dinner. It is more challenging but most girls like challenges. Another category of games which attracts people must be the games related to farms. Why are they so popular? Because the games can let people enjoy the fun as farmers. There are also farm animals that kids like very much. Here you can build your own farms. Also you can experience the life of farmers.

    In 1947 a group of famous people from the art world headed by an Austrian conductor decided to hold an international festival of music, dance and theatre in Edinburgh. The idea was to reunite Europe after the Second World War.

    At the same time, the Fringe appeared as a challenge to the official festival. Eight theatre groups turned up uninvited in 1947, in the belief that everyone should have the right to perform, and they did so in a public house disused for years.

    Soon, groups of students firstly from Edinburgh University, and later from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, Durham and Birmingham were making the journey to the Scottish capital each summer to perform theatre by little-known writers of plays in small church halls to the people of Edinburgh.

    Today the Fringe, once less recognized, has far out grown the festival with around 1,500 performances of theatre, music and dance on every one of the 21 days it lasts. And yet as early as 1959, with only 19theatre groups performing, some said it was getting too big.

    A paid administrator was first employed only in 1971, and today there are eight administrators working all year round and the number rises to 150 during August itself. In2004 there were 200 places housing 1,695 shows by over 600 different groups from 50 different countries. More than 1.25 million tickets were sold.

    If you want to become a fluent English speaker you should take some advice. There are four skills in learning English. They are reading, listening, speaking, and writing. The most important thing you must remember is that if you want to improve your speaking and writing skills, you should first master the skills of reading and listening.

    Read as much as you can. But your reading must be active. It means that you must think about the meaning of the sentence, the meaning of the unfamiliar(不熟悉) words, etc. There is no need for you to pay much attention to grammars or try to understand all the unfamiliar words you come across, but the fact that you see them for the first time and recognize them whenever you see them, for example, in other passages or books, is enough. It would be better to prepare yourself a notebook so you can write down the important words or sentences in it.

    As for listening, there are two choices: besides reading, you can listen every day for about 30 minutes. You can only pay attention to your reading and become skillful at your reading, then you can catch up on your listening. Since you have lots of inputs in your mind, you can easily guess what the speaker is going to say. This never means that you should not practice listening.

    For listening you can listen to cartoons or some movies that are specially made for children. Their languages are easy. Or if you are good at listening you can listen to VOA or BBC programs every day. Again the thing to remember is being active in listening and preferably taking some notes.

    If you follow these pieces of advice, your speaking and writing will improve quickly, and you can be a fluent English speaker one day.

    Two of the hardest things to accomplish in this world are to acquire wealth by honest effort and, having gained it, to learn how to use it properly. Recently I walked into the locker room of a rather well­known golf club after finishing a round. It was in the late afternoon and most of the members had left for their homes. But a half­dozen or so men past middle age were still seated at tables talking aimlessly and drinking more than was good for them. These same men can be found there day after day, and, strangely enough, each one of these men had been a man of affairs and wealth, successful in business and respected in the community. If material prosperity were the chief necessity for happiness, then each one should have been happy. Yet, it seemed to me, something very important was missing, else­there would not have been the constant effort to escape the realities of life through scotch and soda. They knew, each one of them, that their productivity had ceased (停止). When a fruit tree ceases to bear its fruit, it is dying. And it is even so with man.

    What is the answer to a long and happy existence in this world of ours? I think I found it long ago in a passage from the book of Genesis which caught my eye while I was looking through my Bible. The words were few, but they became memorably impressed on my mind. "In the sweat of the face shall you eat the bread."

    To me, that has been a challenge from my earliest recollections (memories). In fact, the battle of life, of existence, is a challenge to everyone. The immortal words of St. Paul, too, have been and always will be a great inspiration to me. At the end of the road I want to be able to feel that I have fought a good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith.

    A few weeks ago, I sat with a California farmer named Dave Ribeiro. I asked him what he wished to know about farmers. He smiled and said, "That we walk among you. We look like you and talk like you. We have advanced degrees and hobbies, just like you."

    Take Dave for example: He's a young man with a music degree. And if you walked past him on the street, you'd never think, "There goes a farmer."

    Is someone like Dave who you picture when you think of a farmer? Probably not. I think that most people would picture a man in his overalls(工作服). I can tell you, that does not represent Dave or any of the many other farmers I have gotten to know.

    Not only do we have to throw out our previous impression of farmers, but farming as a whole doesn't look much like it used to either. We recently sent a team out to see what modern farming looks like, and they found farmers to be completely different from our usual ideas about them and also came across them in some unexpected places.

    In a parking lot in a neighborhood of Brooklyn, they met a new crop of young farmers who were trying to bring fresh greens closer to eaters in the city by growing them in high-tech indoor vertical(垂直的) farms. In a Florida field under the fight path of an airport, they discovered farmers with university degrees growing plants that might someday fuel our cars. And in a modern farm in California, they observed how farmers were using technology to take the best possible care of their animals.

    These farmers all spend their days in very different ways—none of them looks like the previous farmer we have in our mind—but they're all working on new ways to feed our planet. Not only do we need to change our idea of what farming looks like, but we also need to change our view of where solutions can come from. Feeding all of us is going to take all of us working together.