I was always blamed for watching too much cartoons. As I have said goodbye to my teenage, I shift to watching more movies to prove that I was a grown-up. Surprisingly, I found that movies have something in common with cartoons. They are unrealistic.

    Sometimes movies give people hope, including the hope of justice, the hope of tomorrow and almost everything else. A great number of people were once touched by certain movies. From time to time, movies try to deliver some decisive ideas to the audience. In this way, movies do cheer up many people to go on with their lives.

    It seems that there is a set formula in movies. We usually see the hero or heroine in the movies suffer a lot in the opening. Gradually and likely, the destination of them always comes to a turning point. So they have to struggle or make some important choices. Then the movie ends up with a happy finale. Or at least the hero finally manages to face his poor life with great courage somehow. However, when audience watch movies in the cinema, most of them just follow the story. Few of them may ask, “Will it happen in the real life？”

    Movies are also imitating the real life. Thus a movie, just like a novel, can never be the same as the real life. The setting of a movie is so ideal that we could hardly find it out in reality. The moviemakers just try their best to persuade the audience to believe the story is true. In a word, it is all just make-believe.

    For quite a long time, I think that the adults' world is realistic in the opposite way of the children's cartoon. However, the movies from the adult world turn out to be a made-up thing. At the very moment, I suddenly realize that movies are somewhat of the adult's fairy tales or cartoons.

    To sum up, other than false comfort such as movies and tales, we are more in need of the maturity of mind, so that we can face our lives bravely and correctly.

    If you need glasses to read this, you are among the majority of Chinese students. That's because most students in China are short-sighted which means they can only see things close up and distant things will be blurry. Four-fifths of high school students wear glasses and now more and more children in primary school need glasses, too.

    This epidemic of poor eyesight has two very simple causes: too much time spent indoors studying and too little time spent outdoors playing. Reading and writing for hours and hours, sometimes in poorly lighted rooms, causes eyesight to weaken. But students have to do this because there is so much pressure on them to succeed in school. And because they spend so much time indoors at school and at home, they have less time to spend outdoors enjoying the sun.

    The sun, as a consequence, is important in developing good eyesight. Exposure to daylight releases a chemical in the eyes that prevents, or at least delays, short-sightedness. According to a study by Ian Morgan of Australian National University, Australian children and Chinese children have the same level of eyesight before they start school, but once they enter primary school, Chinese children only spend about an hour a day outside, while Australian children spend three to four hours each day in the sunshine. The result is that while about 40 percent of Chinese primary school students need glasses, only three percent of Australian children do.

    Wearing glasses may not seem like a big deal. For some, wearing glasses can even be an opportunity to make a fashion statement. But poor eyesight at a young age can have serious long term consequences. As you get older, your eyesight can worsen and lead to things like macular degeneration(黄斑变性), a condition of the eyes for which there is no cure and which can eventually lead to blindness.

    With all that in mind, don't you think it's time to give your eyes a break? Try spending a little less time inside and go for a walk in the park, instead. It's the healthy thing to do and your eyes will thank you for it.

    In 1975, George Carlin appeared on a popular TV show, Saturday Night Live, with his famous words about blue food. “Why is there no blue food? I can't find blue food—I can't find the flavor of blue! I mean yellow is lemon; orange is orange and red is cherry. Where is the blue food?”

    Well, Carlin pretty much has it right—there is not no blue food, but there's certainly not a lot of it. Fresh-picked blueberries are blue, though they become purple when they are turned into jam. The blue in blueberries—like the purple in grapes and red in tomatoes—is found in nature. But it isn't a hot color for food. People don't seem to prefer blue food. Some diet programs even suggest that those determined to lose weight should make their food blue.

    Eating, in part, begins with our eyes. Chares Spence—an experimental psychologist from Oxford University—points out that color can change our taste experience. Commonly, we consider red-colored foods up to 20% sweeter than they actually are; and green foods as being more sour. Spence suggests: human expectations may be influenced by our long history of watching—green fruits can become sweet as they grow up and turn red.

    But what about blue? Except blueberries, much of the blue food we see these days is dyed blue artificially. Food producers argue that artificial color doesn't do much damage to health. A lot of research shows that some physical problems of kids are related to food dyes—while other studies show no effects at all. Blue birthday cake or even blue-dyed chicken can be served on the dinner table. So what?

    Durian(榴莲) is probably the smelliest fruit in the world, letting out an unusual unpleasant smell which would make anyone bring up. However, nobody was aware of what gave this fruit its unique smell, so a team of researchers from Singapore decided to take a look at its genome (基因组) and find out,

    Durian is well-known throughout Southeast Asia as the king of fruits, mostly because of its awful appearance and smell. However, the origin of this unpleasant smell was unknown, so researchers decided to map the genome of the fruit, and find the gene that controlled it. A group of genes, volatile sulfur compounds (含硫化合物), became very active in the fruit, and they were found responsible for resulting in the unpleasant smell.

    The fruit confuses everyone with a sulfuric smell, like rotten onions and ingredients. The smell lasts long, mostly because the fruit contains more volatile sulfur compounds. Other species usually benefit from two gene copies at most, but durian has four, leading to the striking smell.

    However, this smell might be an advantage for durian in the wild. Although we find it unpleasant, many animals might be attracted by it. If they eat the fruit, then they can easily spread its seeds everywhere, thus contributing to the distribution of the species.

    The mapping of the durian genome also showed some other information on the species. First of all, the fruit has an impressive number of genes, namely 46,000. Also, with the help of these genes, they saw how it evolved, and discovered it was related to the cacao tree. All the other discoveries have been published in the journal Nature Genetics.

    Despite the striking smell, many people actually enjoy eating the fruit. However, not all durian species are edible, and some of them may even cause damage to our health, Even so, the fruit is often imported, significantly contributing to the economy.

    Chinese are very generous when it comes to educating their children. Not caring about the money, parents often send their children to the best schools or even abroad to England, the United States or Australia. They also want their children to take extra-course activities where they will either learn a musical instrument or ballet, or other classes that will give them a head start in life. The Chinese believe that the more expensive an education is, the better it is. So parents will spend an unreasonable amount of money on education. Even poor couples will buy a computer for their son or daughter.

    However, what most parents fail to see is that the best early education they can give their children is usually very cheap. Parents can see that their children's skills vary, skilled in some areas while poor in others. What most parents fail to realize though, is that today's children lack self-respect and self-confidence. The problem is that parents are only educating their children on how to take multiple-choice tests and how to study well, but parents are not teaching them the most important skills they need to be confident, happy and clever.

    Parents can achieve this by teaching practical skills like cooking, sewing and doing other housework.

    Teaching a child to cook will improve many of the skills that he will need later in life. Cooking demands patience and time. It is an enjoyable but difficult experience. A good cook always tries to improve his cooking, so he will learn to work hard and gradually finish his job successfully. His result, a well-cooked dinner, will give him much satisfaction and a lot of self-confidence.

    Some old machines, such as a broken radio or TV set that you give your child to play with will make him curious and arouse his interest. He will spend hours looking at them, trying to fix them; your child might become an engineer when he grows up. These activities are not only teaching a child to read a book, but rather to think, to use his mind. And that is more important.

    Developed by researchers and designers specializing in typography(印刷术)and behavioral science, Sans Forgetica is a new font(字体)designed to help readers better remember the information they read by forcing them to spend a bit more time on each word.

    The design of Sans Forgetica is based on a font called Albion, but with substantial  modifications(修改)to reduce familiarity and attain its goal of engaging the brain more and helping the reader retain(保留) more information. It was developed by scientists at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, who believe it could help students studying for exams.

    “We believe this is the first time that specific principles of design theory have been combined with specific principles of psychology theory in order to create a font, ”Behavioral economist Jo Peryman told DW.

    If fonts are too familiar, readers often glance over them without their brain creating may  memories of what was read. At the same time, if a font is too outlandish, the brain has to struggle too much to decipher(破译)it while neglecting the retention of information. According to its developers, “Sans Forgetica lies at a sweet spot where just enough obstacle has been added to create that memory retention.” Its modifications force readers to spend more time, but not too much time, reading each word, allowing the brain to engage in deeper cognitive processing.

    So does Sans Forgetica actually work? Does it help readers better remember the information they read? So far, studies have shown that it can make a difference, although not a significant one.

    One experiment had 96 participants recall word pairs presented in three different fonts. They remembered 69 percent of the word pairs written in Sans Forgetica, compared to 61 percent for the other fonts. In a different experiment, 303 students took a mock(模拟)multiple-choice exam, and whenever the text was presented in Sans Forgetica, they remembered 57 percent of the text, compared to only 50 percent of the surrounding text written in Arial font.

    So Sans Forgetica won't give you the memory of an elephant, but if you're the kind of person who believes every little bit helps, it might be worth a try.