阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项 （A 、B 、C  和 D ）中，选出最佳选项。

When I lived in Spain, some Spanish friends of mine decided to visit England by car. Before they left, they asked me for advice about how to find accommodation. I suggested that they should stay at "bed and breakfast" houses, because this kind of accommodation gives a foreign visitor a good chance to speak English with the family. My friends listened to my advice, but they came back with some funny stories.

"We didn't stay at bed and breakfast houses," they said, "because we found that most families were on holiday." I thought this was strange. Finally I understood what had happened. My friends spoke little English, and they thought "VACANCIES" meant "holidays", because the Spanish word for "holidays" is said "vacaciones". So they did not go to house where the sign outside said "VACANCIES", which in English means there are free rooms. Then my friends went to houses where the sign said "NO VACANCIES", because they thought this meant people who owned the house were not away on holiday. But they found that these houses were all full. As a result, they stayed at hotels.

We laughed about this and about mistakes my friends made in reading other signs. In Spanish, the word "DIVERSION" means "fun". In English, it means that workmen are repairing the road, and that you must take a different road. When my friends saw the word "DIVERSION" on a road sign, they thought they were going to have fun. Instead, the road ended in a large hole.

English people have problems too when they learn foreign languages. Once in Paris when someone offered me some more coffee, I said "Thank you" in French, I meant that I would like some more, however to my surprise the coffee pot was taken away! Later I found out that "Thank you" in French means "No, Thank you".

    Stress is a word we hear a lot these days. People have stressful jobs; they feel stressed while studying for exams; even family life can be stressful. Stress can cause headaches and lack of sleep arid research has shown that it is one of the main causes of heart disease. None of us can completely avoid stress. Everyone experiences it.

    In ancient times, stress served a different purpose. It kept us alive. When a caveman was walking along and was suddenly faced with a lion, the stress he experienced would make him run away faster than he could usually run. Stress is the state our bodies experience when we need to react to difficult or dangerous situations. While stress saved us back then, and it is still very helpful in difficult situations, we need a break from stress every now and again.

    Luckily, there are ways to relax and deal with stress and it seems that music might be our number one cure. A recent worldwide study showed that listening to music is what most people do to relax and reduce stress. The study was based on interviews with 1,000 people in 30 countries and 56% said that listening to music was the best way to relax. Watching TV, at 53%, was the next most popular way of reducing stress followed by taking a shower or bath at 49%. It is not really surprising that listening to music is such a popular way of relaxing. It is cheap and widely available on radio, TV and the Internet.

    Of course, musical tastes differ from person to person. Sam might love listening to loud heavy metal music to relax after a hard day's work, but his neighbour - a fan of Mozart - might find hearing his music extremely stressful. “Sam needs an iPod”, you- might be thinking and you are probably right. Mobile music players can provide music privately whenever and wherever it is needed; we could even call them the stress fighters of the 21st century. So the next time you fed stressed, take a deep breath, put on your earphones and ... relax.

    Finding a winter job is often a proof(证明)that you're growing up, and it's also a method for earning money to pay for what you dream of. It's never too early to start considering the future. Now, here are some good choices for you!

    Retail (零售) Sales

    Retail offers plenty of opportunity for teens who are looking for a job. This type of work can pay from $10 to $15 an hour depending upon the duty you are expected to take on. It can also be great for teens who are friendly and enjoy talking to other people. For more information, call us at 4005075.

    Food Service

    A job in the food service industry is a natural fit for sociable teens who enjoy communicating with the public. It allows employees to work as part of a team while learning about following instructions. It also comes with the opportunity to earn between $8 and $10 per hour. Just call 4005077 for more information.

    Babysitter

    This job requires someone who is highly responsible. Though it pays generally between $6 and $8 hourly, it also requires a lot of patience. This is a great choice for teens who wish to make a career in teaching, child care, social work or any other field that makes use of social skills or requires interaction with kids. Got a question? Just call 4005076.

    Housekeeping

    This type of work can bring in about $5 an hour and it will allow teens to learn the tourism industry, so hotels are often looking for more housekeeping staff, and parks often need more people to assist with keeping public areas clean and organized as well. Telephone: 4005079

    In an unmanned supermarket, a customer waits to pay. With the use of advanced digital payment technology, including biological recognition and in-depth learning, the man leaves in a minute. There's no cashier in the store. At a large university, students use a hand-scanning machine that authorizes their entry into the gym. Those people are using "smart machines" which identify people by their physical characteristics. These new devices use fingers, hands, faces, eyes and voices. Some machines may even use smells. This new technology, called biometrics, gets information from parts of the body.

    In the past, biometric machines were used mainly in government agencies or in prisons. But now that the cost of the technology is lower, these machines are starting to be used everywhere, from border services to schools.

    Some people, however, are concerned that these machines will mean the destruction of personal privacy. They worry that the machines will get personal information about them, know it seems like these machines are invading our privacy, but actually, biometric machines help to protect it," says Jay Tarkett, who works at a company that develops the machines, "They can be used instead of passwords on a computer, for example. They can also identify criminals at airports. So, really, they help to promote public safety, and all the information stored is kept confidential by the machine itself."

    Some people don't like the idea of using fingerprints because they associate them with criminals, and feel like they are being accused of something, In addition, they don't work for some people, such as bricklayers, who wear down their fingerprints. Yet, face recognition does work well because the subject doesn't really have to do anything, To cash a check at a bank, for example, the customer has to do nothing more than look at a machine similar to an automatic teller. If the face matches the picture kept on file, the customer gets the money with no problems, The need to carry identification with you from place to place, then, would all but cease. It has been found that the hand scan works well ill the college gym. Before this machine was used, students at the college entered the gym using cards similar to credit cards. The problem was that students often lost or forgot their cards. With the hand-scanning machine, however, the problem was solved right away.

    But the machines are still new, and there can be problems. For example, voice recognition works on the phone, but it is not precise, and can be tricked. Another constraint(限制)we notice；, with machines that use face recognition in particular, is that they can be fooled if people color their hair or gain a lot of weight. However, this particular problem may be solved by a new type of technology that scans a person's iris, the colored part of the eye. It can even identify the person from a few feet away, recognizing a customer as he or she approaches the ATM.

    There's a man in the habit of hitting me on the head with an umbrella. At first I couldn't stand it, now I'm used to it.

    I don't know his name. I know he's average in appearance, wears a gray suit, and has a common face. I met him five years ago one hot morning when I was sitting on a tree­shaded bench in Palermo Park, reading the paper. Suddenly I felt something touch my head. It was the very same man who now, as I'm writing, keeps hitting me, mechanically (机械地) and impassively, with an umbrella.

    On that occasion I turned around filled with anger. He just kept on hitting me. I asked him if he was crazy, he didn't even seem to hear me. Then I threatened to call a policeman. Calmly, cool as a cucumber, he stuck with his task. After a few moments of hesitation, and seeing that he was not about to change his attitude, I stood up and hit him on the nose. The man fell down, but he immediately got back on his feet, obviously with great effort, and without a word again began hitting me on the head with the umbrella. His nose was bleeding and, at that moment, I felt sorry for him. I felt regret for having hit him so hard. After all, the man wasn't exactly hitting me; he was merely tapping me lightly with his umbrella, not causing any pain at all. Of course, those taps were extremely bothersome. As we all know, when a fly lands on your forehead, you don't feel any pain; what you feel is annoyance. Well then, that umbrella was one huge fly that kept landing on my head time after time.

    Convinced that I was dealing with a madman, I tried to escape. But the man followed me, wordlessly continuing to hit me. So I began to run (I should point out that not many people run as fast as I do). He took off after me, trying to land a blow. The man was out of breath so that I thought, if I continued to force him to run at that speed, he would drop dead right then and there.

    Being able to take advantage of truly unlimited data is a smartphone user's dream, but everyone I've talked to about 5G is more excited about the usage unlocked by next - generation wireless devices. From smart home security to self - driving cars, all the Internet - connected equipment in your life will be able to talk to each other at lightning - fast speed with reduced delay.

    "5 G is one of those forerunners, along with artificial intelligence, of this coming data age," said Steve Koenig, senior director of market research for the Consumer Technology Association. "Self - driving vehicles are emblematic in this data age - they show application of data completely. With one single task, driving, you have large amounts of data coming from the vehicle itself, and a variety of sensors (传感器)are collecting a lot of information to model its environment as it moves. It's pulling in data from other vehicles about conditions down the road. There's lots of data behind that task, which is why we need the speed and lower latency ((延迟).

    AR glasses and virtual (虚拟的)reality headphones haven't yet been inside the mainstream, but tech companies are joyfully saying that such equipment will eventually replace our smartphones. With 5G, that could actually happen. This is notable because companies such as Apple are reportedly developing AR glasses to improve - or even replace - smartphones.

    Ericsson showed at February's Mobile World Congress in 2019 how smart glasses could become faster and lighter with a 5G connection, because instead of being weighed down with components, the glasses could rely on outside equipment for processing power.

    But don't get too excited. There's still a lot of work to be done in the meantime, including some necessary testing to make sure the radio plays nicely with basic systems and service construction so that 5G isn^'t concentrated only in big cities.