Many studies have shown that the company of pets can help lower blood pressure and raise chances of recovering from a heart attack, reduce loneliness and help control body weight.

    Any pet owner will tell you how much joy a pet brings. For some, an animal provides more comfort than a husband/wife. A 2002 study by Karen Allen of the State University of New York measured stress levels and blood pressure in people (half of them were pet owners) while they performed 5 minutes of mental arithmetic (算术) or held a hand in ice water. People completed the tasks alone, with a husband/wife, a close friend or with a pet. People with pets did it best. Those tested with their animal friends had smaller change in blood pressure and returned most quickly to baseline heart rates. With pets in the room, people also made fewer math mistakes than when doing in front of other companions. It seems that people feel more relaxed around pets, says Allen, who thinks it may be because pets don't judge.

    A study reported last fall suggests that having a pet dog may also have an effect on your body weight. Researchers at Northwestern Memorial Hospital spent a year studying two groups of fat people who were put on a diet-and-exercise program: one group with pet dogs, and the other without. On average，dog owners lost about 11 pounds，or 5% of their body weight; While those without dogs lost about 8 pounds. The pet owners, said researchers, got more exercise overall (mostly with their dogs) and found it worth doing.

How Super Are Supermarkets?

    Buying e week's groceries is tiring. You want to get it over and done with quickly, so you head for the nearest supermarket, you find everything you need under one roof, and you feel glad that those days of going in and out of different shops in the high street are over. Supermarkets seem to be a big plus. There is a downside, though.

    In the UK 90% of all the food people consume is bought at 5 different supermarket chains. This makes these companies extremely powerful, which lets them use their huge buying power to squeeze small suppliers to get the best deal. Milk is a good example. Supermarkets like to use things like milk, which is the top of almost everyone's shopping list to attract customers. To offer the lowest price possible to the consumer, the supermarkets force dairy farmers to sell milk at less than the cost of production. Supermarkets guarantee their good profits while farmers are left struggling to make ends meet, and the taxpayer pays to support the system without even knowing it.

    It would be nice if local grocers supported local agriculture. But for the big supermarkets this just doesn't make sense. Supermarkets don't want little farmers thinking they can decide prices. So supermarkets have started a global search for the cheapest possible agricultural produce. In many supermarkets it is difficult to find anything which is produced locally.

    UK farmers used to grow a lot of apples. Not anymore. In 1999 36% of apples were imported. By 2015 the figure had risen to 80% and the domestic production of apples had fallen by two thirds. The consumer might just be happy to get a reasonably priced meal made up of foods from Thailand, Spain, Italy and Zambia, but we should also bear in mind the Influence on local producers.

    Then there's packaging. Supermarkets like everything to be packed and wrapped so it can be piled neatly on shelves. Supermarkets produce nearly 10 million tons of waste packaging in the UK every year, of which less 5%is recycled. Some supermarkets make sure that large recycling bins are obvious in their car parks, showing that they are environment-friendly. But that is just an image.

    When a new supermarket is planned there are claims about the number of new jobs that will be created. Unfortunately, the number of jobs lost in the area is larger than the number of new positions in the supermarket. On average each new supermarket leads to the loss of 276 jobs.

    However, the modern world is all about shopping, and the freedom to buy whatever you what, so it would be impossible to stop people shopping at some particular kind of shop. But some measures do need to be taken when small suppliers lose profits, local producers suffer, sea levels rise and jobs are lost, anyway, we can't just care about a free car park and special offers.

    Still seeking a destination for your weekend break? There are some places which are probably a mere walk away from your college.

King's Art Centre

    A day at the Centre could mean a visit to an exhibition of the work of one of the most interesting contemporary artists on show anywhere. This weekend tees the opening of an exhibition of four local artists.

You could attend a class teaching you how to 'learn from the masters' or get more creative with paint —- free of charge.

    The Centre also runs two life drawing classes for which there is a small fee.

The Botanic Garden

    The Garden has over 8,000 plant species; it holds the research and teaching collection of living plants for Cambridge University.

    The multi-branched Torch Aloe here is impressive. The African plant produces red flowers above blue-green leaves, and is not one to miss.

    Get to the display house to see Dionaea muscipula, a plant more commonly known as the Venus Flytrap that feeds on insects and other small animals.

    The Garden is also a place for wildlife-enthusiasts. Look for grass snakes in the lake. A snake called 'Hissing Sid' is regularly seen lying in the heat of the warm sun.

Byron's Pool

    Many stories surround Lord Byron's time as a student of Cambridge University, Arriving in 1805, he wrote a letter complaining that it was a place of "mess and drunkenness". However, it seems as though Byron did manage to pass the time pleasantly enough. I'm not just talking about the pet bear he kept in his roans. He spent a great deal of time walking in the village.

It is also said that on occasion Byron swam naked by moonlight in the lake, which is now known as Byron's Pool. A couple of miles past Grantchester in the south Cambridgeshire countryside, the pool is surrounded by beautiful circular paths around the fields. The cries of invisible birds make the trip a lovely experience and on the way home you can drop into the village for afternoon tea. If you don't trust me, then perhaps you'll take it from Virginia Woolf一—over a century after Byron, she reportedly took a trip to swim in the same pool.

C

    Fat and shy, Ben Saunders was the last kid in his class picked for any sports team. “Foothall, tennis, cricket-anything with a round ball, I was useless,” he says now with a laugh. But back then he was the one always made fun of in school gym classes in Devonshire, England.

    It was a mountain bike he received for his 15th birthday that changed him. At first he went biking alone in a nearby forest. Then he began to-ride the bike along with a runner friend. Gradually, Saunders set up his mind on building up his body, increasing his speed and strength. At the age of 18, he ran his first marathon.

    The following year he met John Ridgway and was hired as an instructor at Ridgway's school of adventure in Scotland, where he learnt about Ridgway's cold-water exploits. Greatly interested, Saunders read all he could about North Pole explorers and adventures, then decided that this would be his future.

    In 2001, after becoming a skillful skier, Saunders started his first long-distance expedition towards the North Pole. It took unbelievable energy. He suffered frostbite, ran into a polar bear and pushed his body to the limit, pulling his supply-loaded sled（雪橇）up and over rocky ice.

    Saunders has since become the youngest person to ski alone to the North Pole, and he's skied more of the North Pole by himself than any other British man. His old playmates would not believe the change.

    Next October, Saunder, 27, heads south from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back, a 2900-kilometer journey that has never been completed on skis.

    In 2010 I left the United States for the first time to fly over 9,000 miles to Uganda, a country in recovery from civil war. I was going there to help the local kids learn soccer.

    As I played soccer with some kids, the sun burned my skin. I took many breaks to drink from my water bottle before realizing I was the only one who did that. All the energetic children running around never stopped to get water. After looking around, I realized there was NOWHERE for them to get water, and there was no well or water pump in sight.

    I asked a man who was traveling with us why the kids didn't ever stop to drink water. He told me that they would have to walk all the way to the pump in the next village and they didn't want to miss out on playing soccer with a real ball. The kids seemed happy but it was not fair that to get a drink of water meant they would miss out on such a rare occurrence of playing with an actual soccer ball.

    When I got home, I spoke with other people about kids in Uganda. They told me to do something to help them. That sounded like a great idea, but how? I spoke with my friends about helping kids in Uganda. We decided that we could try to solve their most urgent problem—water. And we decided to organize soccer camps to collect money.

    It has been three years since our first camp and we have successfully run two more and funded two water filtration (净化) systems as well as 60 water pumps for farmers. We have been able to improve the health of thousands of Ugandans.

Bogre Udell, who speaks four languages, met Frederico Andrade, who speaks five, at the Parsons New School in New York City.In 2014, they started a project to make the first public records of every language in the world.They've already recorded more than 350 languages, and plan to hit 1，000 in the coming years.

"When humans lose a language, we also lose greater diversity (多样化) in art and traditions，"said Bogre Udell.Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages disappeared.Today, a third of the world's languages have fewer than 1，000 speakers left.Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, and 50 to 90 percent of them are said to disappear by the next century.

Wikitongues has asked for volunteers in 40 countries to film native speakers talking in the past, present，and future tenses of their mother languages.Native speakers are asked to recall childhood, share their stories, and discuss their hopes and goals.One volunteer in the South Pacific islands of Vanuatu recorded a language that had never been studied by language experts before.Another volunteer found a speaker of Ainu, a language in Japan that has no relation to any other known language, and he also recorded it.However, priceless recording opportunities disappear regularly.Not long ago, one of the last two speakers of a Saami language in the Russian steppes died right before his recording session with Wikitongues.

A lack of protection and globalization are responsible for diminishing language diversity.For much of the 20th century, governments across the world forced some local people to use official languages.More than 100 languages in Australia have disappeared since European settlers arrived.However, most languages die today because of other factors; climate change and urbanization contribute (是……的原因之一) greatly to the disappearance of languages.