In England, people often talk about the weather because they can experience (经历) four seasons in one day. In the morning the weather is warm just like in spring. An hour later black clouds come and then it rains hard. The weather gets a little cold. In the late afternoon the sky will be sunny, the sun will begin to shine, and it will be summer at this time of a day.

    In England, people can also have summer in winter, or have winter in summer. So in winter they can swim sometimes, and in summer sometimes they should take warm clothes.

    When you go to England, you will see that some English people usually take an umbrella (伞)or a raincoat with them in the sunny morning, but you should not laugh at them.

    If you don't take an umbrella or a raincoat, you will regret (后悔) later in the day.

    The digital revolution is both launching us into a no-handwriting future, and also sending us backwards in time to when the spoken words ruled. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

    "I don't think kids should be assessed on their ability to master cursive(草书). It's not something that they are going to use much in their lives as they grow older. It's not something most of us adults use in our lives today. " Anne Trubek, an author, suggests that schools offer handwriting or cursive as an elective or art class in the future.

    "Focus on how to teach kids to express their ideas, how to organize their thoughts, how to make arguments" she says. "The forming of the letters are less important. And there are certainly many ways to individualize what you write beyond the way you've circled the 'I' or crossed your 'T'."

    "This myth that handwriting is just a motor skill (运动技能) is just plain wrong," Virginia Berninger said. "We use motor parts of our brain, motor planning, motor control, but what's very critical is a region of our brain where the visual and language come together and actually become letters and written words."

    "A lot of people are very stubborn about the importance of handwriting, but at the same time will admit they never write themselves," Trubek says.

    Trubek suggests, however, that handwriting keeps some value – for now. " For us today, in the 21st century America, handwriting represents something individual and unique about a person. It doesn't always mean that in previous times in history, and it won't always mean that in the future, but right now for us we relate our sense of self to our handwriting."

    German engineers Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz built the first successful gasoline engines in 1885.After 1900, however, the United States became a leader in automobile production.

    The first cars were handmade and very expensive. Only people in rich cities could afford them. The first company to make gasoline cars in the U.S. was the Duryea Motor Wagon Company. Then, in 1901, Ransom E. Olds Began mass-producing his car, the Oldsmobile. In 1913Henry Ford made great strides in the mass production of cars by using an assembly line in his factory. Mass production meant that each car was less expensive to make. Now car ownership was affordable for the average person. By 1916there were more than one million cars in the United States.

    The automobile gave people the freedom to travel anywhere there were passable roads. Families that lived great distance apart could travel by automobile to visit each other. People could visit places they had never seen before.

    Before the mass production of cars, people lived close to work. Their means of transportation included walking, riding a bicycle, using a horse and carriage, or taking a train. The automobile gave people the ability to live farther away from work. The result was that gradually people moved out of the cities to the less crowded suburbs.

    The automobile industry created millions of jobs. The jobs were not just in the auto factories, where the cars were assembled. Workers were needed to make auto parts, run gas stations and repair shops, and work at new motels and restaurants that served people who traveled by car. Jobs became available at car rental companies. People were needed to build roads. These jobs and many others still exist because of the automobile.

    In 2012 my wife and I decided to open our bookstore in spite of unfavorable situations. The challenges facing small bookstores were-and remain-significant. Apart from the obvious rise in online selling, the increase in the popularity of e-books has negatively affected independent providers.

    The question is why a new, small-scale（小规模的）provide would voluntarily enter such a challenging market? From a personal view, our reasoning was sound: we wanted to share our love of great books and reading for pleasure with as many like-minded people as possible.

    Having done our homework, one thing became clear. In order for us to succeed, we would have to offer something that none of our larger competitors already provided. And so we started the Willoughby Book Club. We set up our website in the summer of 2012, and we haven't looked back.

    The idea of service is simple. We offer a range of book subscription gift packages, available in three-month, six-month and 12-month options. Our customers choose a package, tell us a little about the person they're buying it for, and we use this information to send the receiver a hand-picked, gift-wrapped book once a month. We also recently decided to give one new book to Book Aid International for every gift subscription sold. These books are sent out to sub-Saharan Africa, supporting the educational work there. Within four months of starting out, we won the Young Bookseller of the Year Award at the 2013 Bookseller awards.

    Our brief journey from new booksellers to award receivers has been challenging and rewarding. The biggest thing we've learned is that, despite the pressures facing independent providers, there is a place for them in the UK market. It's just a question of finding it.

    Slowly, so slowly that we never even noticed how it happened, our family stopped talking to each other. Our own worlds opened up to us through the computer or the cell phone or the CD player.

    Family Night was born when Mom called us for dinner. Jessica and I came and sat down. Dad loaded his plate and started to rise from the table.

    “Where are you going?” Mom questioned.

    “To the living room. I have some work,” Dad replied as he hurried away. Mom's face got tight, but she said nothing. About two minutes later, my cell phone buzzed. Jessica kept her earphones on during most of the meal. Mom was clearly upset.

    Family Night started the next week. Mom established three rules: no phones, no music, and no leaving the table. Everyone would eat together and play a game together “like a real family.”

    All seemed to be going according to Mom's plan until the first buzz of a cell phone. After dinner, we had been playing the board game for only ten minutes when another cell phone let out a shrill scream. This time the phone belonged to my father.

    “Work's calling. I have to answer,” he whispered as he hurried out of the room.

    Mom sighed, but she forced a smile and encouraged us to continue with the game. We kept playing through every interruption afterwards: the beeping of Jessica's phone, the buzz of another text message from Darnell, the soothing voice announcing the arrival of an e-mail on Dad's computer. When the game was over, Mom released us to our rooms.

    That first Family Night was not a success, but Mom soldiered on. Every Monday evening we silenced our electronics and gathered around the table; and each time, setting aside our technological toys became a little easier. The next two months my father would be taking business trips. We wouldn't be able to have Family Night every Monday.

    To my surprise I realized that I would miss those few hours each week when the house was filled with my family's laughter and conversation. I was also glad to know that when we really wanted to, we could silence the electronic buzz and just be a family again.

    Dr. John Wilkins was a natural philosopher who lived from 1614 until 1672. He was crazy about getting to the moon and meeting the people who surely lived there. Wilkins believed that anything as Earth-like as the moon must have been created by God for living beings, and he was determined to meet them — despite the fact that he was three centuries ahead of his time.

    In the 1600s, the scientific understanding of gravity and outer space was limited. Wilkins believed, like many 17th-century scientists, that there was no difference between the atmosphere of Earth and the conditions in space, and that Earth's pull was due to magnetism (磁力). It was only reasonable, then, that Wilkins believed a two-wheeled horse-drawn battle car with wings with enough speed could lift high enough off the ground to break free of Earth's magnetic pull and reach the moon.

    Then Wilkins moved on to more pressing issues with his remarkable ability to think of new ideas: How would travelers feed themselves during the journey? He theorized that the main cause of hunger was simply the act of working against gravity, so getting to the moon without being burdened by it would be able to be realized. There was some knowledge at that time about the fact that air gets thinner and colder the higher up you go, but he had a fix for that too, "moistened sponges (湿润的海绵) might help us against its thinness".

    By studying the way in which birds fly, which also happened to be part of the studies that led to planes and rockets centuries later, Wilkins put his theory to the test with the help of a colleague, Robert Hooke. Neither of the two ever recorded their attempts, but it's somewhat safe to say that it didn't work out. Hooke himself may have been the reason he gave up hope, in fact, since he was part of the team that discovered space was a place without oxygen.