As more and more people speak the global languages of English, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6，000～7，000 languages spoken around the world today will likely die out by the next century, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

    In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars from a number of organizations—UNESCO and National Geographic among them—have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect.

    Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Centre, Yale University, who specializes in the languages and  oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following in that tradition. His recently published book, AGrammarofThangmiwithanEthnolinguisticIntroductiontotheSpeakersandTheirCulture, grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.

    Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not content to simply record these voices before they disappear without record.

    At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials—including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes—which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection.

    Now, through the two organizations that he has founded —the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project—Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, found in libraries and stores around the world, available not just to scholars but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.

    Budget Hotels (经济型酒店) in Bloomsbury

    Bloomsbury is one of the most central areas in London. There are many traditional-style small hotels. The hotels listed below are our picks of the best budget hotels in the area.

    Arosfa Hotel

Arosfa Hotel lies on the corner of Torrington Place and Gower St. The Arosfa was once the home of the famous Pre-Raphaelite painter, Sir John Everett Millais. The hotel takes pride in the quality, cleanliness and value that they offer to their guests. For your comfort and safety, smoking inside the hotel is not allowed.

Address: 83 Gower St, London, WC1

    Breakfast: English breakfast

    Internet service: Free WiFi and two personal computers for guests

    George Hotel

The George is a friendly and comfortable smoke-free hotel on a quiet street in North Bloomsbury. All rooms have a work desk and tea/coffee facilities are provided. It's only a 10-minute walk from King's Cross, St Pancras railway station and Euston railway station.

Address: 58-60 Cartwright Gds, London, WC1

    Breakfast: English breakfast

    Internet service: Free WiFi

    Ridgemount Hotel

    The Ridgemount is one of the cheapest hotels in the area. A friendly place and the standard rooms with shared bathrooms are provided for guests. You can speak Welsh or English with the hotel workers. They will be happy to provide useful advice on the area.

Address: 65-67 Gower St, London, WC1

    Breakfast: English breakfast

    Internet service: Free WiFi

    Arran House Hotel

    The Arran House is a popular family-run hotel. It's a little more expensive than the other hotels in the area. Rooms with shared bathrooms are provided.

Address: 77-79 Gower St, London, WC1

    Breakfast: English breakfast

    Internet service: Free WiFi

    Your local grocery store is a psychological minefield (布雷区), where even the bananas are ripe with mystery.

    ⒈Southpaws (左撇子) have an invisible (看不见的) advantage

    You've probably seen that stores keep go-to items—produce, meats, dairy—on the outer edge. But did you notice that most of them are set up to make you run counterclockwise (逆时针)? Ninety percent of us are right-handed, so we buy more when it's counterclockwise. You'll also often find the dairy section in the back left corner：Because dairy is likely on your list, stores make sure you take the longest route to get there. In fairness, it's also a more convenient place to put a fridge.

    ⒉Everything is in its place

    It's safe to say that nothing you see on a shelf is there by chance. The cookies on sale at the end of a passage are likely the result of smart product placement. More expensive items are usually placed at an adult's eye level, while colorful treats and other products for kids are positioned lower—to catch the attention of children.

    ⒊Time goes by so slowly

    Stores rarely have windows or clocks. With no reference to the outside world, customers can easily lose track of how long they've been there so that they can buy more. Grocery stores may use another trick to control your sense of time: small floor tiles (瓷砖).

    Some people have a very poor sense of direction. Unluckily, I am one of them. I have visited a place many times but I may still get lost there the next time.

    When I was a little girl, I never dared to ask strangers the way. And so I used to walk around in circles and hope that by chance I would get to the place I was going to.

    Now, I am no longer too shy to ask people for directions, but I often receive helpless or even wrong information. So I try to avoid giving people wrong directions. If anyone ever asks me the way somewhere, I would say, "Sorry, I am a stranger here."

    Once on my way to work I was stopped by a man. He asked me if I could tell him the way to the Friendship Building. I gave him my usual reply. But just as I walked on only a few steps, I realized that he had asked the way to my office building. However, I had no time to turn back and look for him. I was rushing to meet with someone at my office and I didn't want to keep him waiting.

    When I just got to my office, the secretary(秘书) showed in the man who had asked me for directions. Imagine how embarrassed I was and how surprised he was when we saw each other at the first sight.

    In 2011, Nancy Ballard went for a routine checkup that turned into something extraordinary. In fact, she was carrying a painting of a plant she'd done when she arrived at her doctor's San Francisco office. "It would be great if we had artwork like that for our chemotherapy (化疗) rooms," the nurse said. Ballard asked to see one.

    She was shocked by what she found. The walls were dull and bare, and the paint was chipping (剥落). It was a depressing room for a depressing routine—patients restricted to chemo drips for perhaps several hours, often with nothing to look at other than those sad walls. Ballard didn't have cancer herself, but she could sympathize with the patients. "I couldn't imagine how anyone could even think about getting healthy in a room like that," she says. As it happens, Ballard's physician, Stephen Hufford, was ill with cancer himself, so finding time to decorate the rooms was low on his to-do list. So Ballard made it her mission to brighten up the place.

    She started by e-mailing 20 local designers. "I wrote, 'You don't know me. But my heart hurts after seeing these rooms," she remembers. She then asked whether they would donate their time and money to transform just one of Dr. Hufford's rooms each.

    As it happened, six of them wrote back almost immediately. Six rooms got new paint, light fixtures, artwork, and furniture. Dr. Hufford was delighted. "All the patients feel relieved of the pain because of it," he said. He even noted that his own tone of voice was different in the rooms and that he was better able to connect with his patients.

    Ballard was so encouraged by the patients' reactions that she created a nonprofit, Rooms That Rock 4 Chemo, to raise money and decorate more spaces. Since then, she has worked on 20 projects, including one in Pennsylvania. "We were in Philadelphia for a ribbon cutting, and a woman was there on her third battle with cancer," says Ballard. "When she saw what we'd done, she said, 'I'm gonna beat it this time. I thought I wasn't going to, but now I know I'm gonna beat it".

I remember that every year in lunar December in my hometown, Xinyang, each family begins to prepare bunches of bacon and sausage hanging from yard to yard {#blank#}1{#/blank#} (embrace) the upcoming New Year. Walking in such a street view and sniffing the smell of pickled bacon (腊肉), I always have a sense of {#blank#}2{#/blank#} (happy).

Xinyang, located on the boundary between the north and the south, is rich in rice, wheat and fertile land due to its unique {#blank#}3{#/blank#} (geography) position and climate. Therefore, it cultivates the characteristics of Xinyang people who have a good appetite {#blank#}4{#/blank#} delicacies. According to relevant records, the history of Xinyang's pickled bacon dates back to the Ming Dynasty, {#blank#}5{#/blank#} the locals learned to keep its special taste by preserving it in a special wooden bucket. People in Xinyang love their life so much that even during the toughest times, they still inherited the soul of taste and made delicious pickled bacon. Actually, Xinyang's pickled bacon is made in a {#blank#}6{#/blank#} seemingly simple way by drying the meat in the shade but it brings out the flavor of the food {#blank#}7{#/blank#} (it) and stays with our memory for long.

You'll never become fully conscious of how much you value it until you {#blank#}8{#/blank#} (tear) apart from it. Such is Xinyang's pickled bacon, one of my {#blank#}9{#/blank#} (forget) memories of my hometown despite time {#blank#}10{#/blank#} (tick) by.