Reading can be a social activity. Think of the people who belong to book groups. They choose books to read and then meet to discuss them. Now, the website BookCrossing.com turns the page on the traditional idea of a book group.

    Members go on the site and register the books they own and would like to share. BookCrossing provides an identification number to stick inside the book. Then the person leaves it in a public place, hoping that the book will have an adventure, traveling far and wide with each new reader who finds it.

    Bruce Pederson, the managing director of BookCrossing, says, “The two things that change your life are the people you meet and books you read. BookCrossing combines both.”

    Members leave books on park benches and buses, in train stations and coffee shops. Whoever finds their book will go to the site and record where they have found it.

    People who find a book can also leave a journal entry describing what they thought of it. E-mails are then sent to the BookCrossing to keep them updated about where their books have been found. Bruce Peterson says the idea is for people not to be selfish by keeping a book to gather dust on a shelf at home.

    BookCrossing is part of a trend among people who want to get back to the “real” and not the virtual(虚拟). The site now has more than one million members in more than one hundred thirty-five countries.

    Spending money on a vacation may seem like a luxury（奢侈品）—but occasionally, you have to relax yourself. Here's where to go for a good time at an unbelievable value.

    Captiva Island, Florida

    Keep it simple by looking for seashells, or bicycling, jet skiing; you can even hit the tennis courts. The Summer Getaway package offers a fourth night free and rates from $209 a night, making the average for a four-night stay $157.Kids 12 and under eat breakfast free. You'll get a coupon（优惠券）book with more than $250 in savings on resort outlets（经销店）, from watersports, island cruises and more.

    Reyjavik, Iceland

    STA Travel Beats specializes in taking travelers to music festivals around the globe. It has an eight-day tour, Icelandic Beats, that takes you to the Icelandic Geothermal spas（水疗）, UNESCO world heritage sites, and black sand beaches. End your vacation at the Secret Solstice Festival on June 18. The tour is $1,218,not including airfare.

    Malpais, Costa Rica

    You get daily surfing instruction, sunset surf session, and yoga in the outdoor, oceanfront yoga studio in a week-long tour. As you get mind, body, and spirit together, keep it going with healthy meals at the beachfront restaurant. Prices are $2,895 for shared accommodations, $3,095 for private accommodations with shared bath, and $3,595 for private accommodations.

    Waterville Valley, New Hampshire

    Waterville Valley Resort is surrounded by 100 miles of trails in the White Mountain National Forest. If you get a Freedom Pass, you can save about $100 a day during a six-day tour; the pass enables you daily to have a two-hour mountain bike rental, unlimited tennis, a round of golf, and a kayak, canoe, or paddleboard rental. Rates start at $139 a night.

    You probably know you should say” please” and “thank you ” at restaurants. You probably know the rules of a library. You know you should respect and be nice to your classmates. But do you have music manners?

    Keep It Down! You have to notice the volume of your music. You should not play your music so loud that everyone around you can hear it. Some people might even get angry. Usually, when you play the music loud on an MP3 player, other people can't hear the words of the song. They just hear a loud sound. Not one wants to listen to this. Very loud music can also be bad for your ears, so even if you are alone when listening to our MP3 player, you shouldn't have it turned up too high.

    Take Them Off! You need to know when to turn your MP3 player off and put it away. Libraries and schools don't allow MP3 players. There are other places, like museums, that don't have rules, but it would be rude to have your MP3 player on. Sometimes, it just doesn't make sense（没意义） to listen your MP3 player at event. Why would you listen to music at a play, a movie or a sporting event? You would miss what is going on and others would wonder why you even came.

    Take One Out! Once in a while it's okay just to take out one earphone and not the other. Imagine you are listening to your MP3 player when someone asks you the way. It would not be rude to take out one earphone, tell him the way, and put back the earphone and continue listening. You can also do this when you order food at a fast-food restaurant.

    It's Your Choice! There are times when you need to decide what is best. For example, some people can listen to music on their MP3 Players when read books, while others think it is disturbing. In cases like this, you need to do what seems right for you.

    One advantage of the Internet is shopping conveniently online for clothes; one disadvantage of the Internet is also shopping conveniently online for clothes.

    "Nothing fits," said Lam Yuk Wong, a senior in electrical and computer engineering at Rice University. "Everyone says this. They order clothes and they don't fit. People get very unhappy."

    Wong and her design partner, Xuaner "Cecilia" Zhang, are Team White Mirror, creators of what they call a "virtual (虚拟)fitting room". Their goal is simple and consumer-friendly: to let online clothing shoppers have a perfect fit and a perfect look when shopping every time. Both women are from China, Wong from Hong Kong and Zhang from Beijing. They both order most of their clothing online. They got the idea from their own experience as consumers and from listening to the complaints of friends and relatives. "They say, 'The color is wrong' or 'I got the right size but it still does not fit.' We want to make it like you're in the store trying on the clothes," Zhang said.

    Using a Kinect developed by Microsoft for use with its Xbox 360 video game player, Zhang scans Wong and turns her image into, in effect, a virtual model, keeping Wong's dimensions (尺寸), and even her skin and hair color. "We put the clothes on the shopper's 3-D body models and show how they look when they are dressed," Wong said. So far, Wong and Zhang have adapted the software to show dresses and shirts, and they are now working on shorts.

    Asked if she thought men as well as women might be interested in using their virtual fitting room, Wong said, "I think their wives will care about this, so it will also be important to men."

    Many people go to school for an education. They learn languages, history, geography, physics, chemistry and mathematics. Others go to school to learn a skill so that they can make a living. School education is very important and useful. Yet no one can learn everything from school. A teacher, no matter how much he knows, cannot teach his students everything they want to know. The teacher's job is to show his students how to learn. He teaches them how to read and how to think. So, much more is to be learned outside school by the students themselves.

    It is always more important to know how to study by oneself than to memorize some facts or a formula （公式）. It is usually quite easy to learn a certain fact in history or a formula in mathematics. But it is very difficult to use a formula in working out a maths problem. Great scientists, such as Einstein, Newton and Galileo didn't get everything from school. But they were all so successful. They invented so many things for mankind.

Above all, they knew how to use their brains.

    Ride-hailing apps and robot cars promise to change how we get around and the effects are already being felt. Traffic in New York is slowing down. Jams are common in Manhattan, especially in its business districts. Daytime traffic in the busiest areas now moves almost 20% more slowly than it did five years ago.

    It seems a place ripe for wide use of ride-hailing apps that, you might think, would reduce some of the jams. However, those apps appear to be making things worse as traffic has slowed in line with the growing popularity of apps such as Uber and Lyft, a study by transport expert Bruce Schaller suggests.

    Over the four years of the study, the number of cars in Manhattan seeking ride-hailing fares increased by 81%. There are now about 68, 000 ride-sharing drivers across New York. That's about five times the number of the yellow cabs licensed to operate there, he found. There are so many drivers, his work suggests, who spend about 45% of their spare time just touring for fares. That is a lot of unused cars blocking a lot of busy streets.

    Simple physics explains why ride-sharing vehicles are causing, not curing jams, said Jarrett Walker, a public transport policy expert who has advised hundreds of cities about moving people.

    "Lots of people are deciding that, 'Oh, public transport is just too much trouble this morning,' or whenever, which causes a shift from it," he told the BBC. "That means moving people from larger vehicles into smaller ones, which means more vehicles to move the same people. Therefore, more traffic."

    Data gathered about ride-sharing drivers illustrates how they contribute to congestion (塞车), said Prof. Christo Wilson, a computer scientist at Northeastern University who has studied the services. "You can look at the traffic pattern for the Uber vehicles and it perfectly matches the peaks for the rush hour and the peak time of a day," he said. They are out there in force at the worst possible times.