Thomas Edison was one of the most successful inventors the world has ever seen.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}

    Bui people found that although Edison was good at inventing new things, he was a poor fisherman. He used to spend an hour almost every day sitting at the side of a river and fish. He always fished all alone by himself.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    People asked Edison, “Why are you so crazy about fishing when you are so bad at it?” His answer was, “I really never caught ant fish because I have never used any bait (诱饵).” Another question followed, “Why would you fish without bait?” Edison answered, “Because when you fish without bait, people don't disturb you and neither do the fish.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}”

    Sometimes the world's best inventor was the world's worst fisherman. In fact, because Edison was the world's worst fisherman, he could become the world's greatest inventor.

    Are you setting aside some time for yourself to think?{#blank#}4{#/blank#} Here are some ideas for you:

    Slowing down and taking long showers is a good idea.

     {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

    Long walks are good too.

    Afternoon naps have been proved to improve creativity.

A. But he never caught any fish.

B. It provides me my best time to think.

C. So is listening to some soft classical music.

D. In all, Edison has thousands of inventions.

E. He was asked the reason behind him being a fisherman.

F. To make your brain work better, you need to take a rest.

G. Set aside 15-20 minutes per day so that you can do nothing.

A

    Daban town is famous for girls and windmills, while Loulan is a myth (神话) in the desert. Two thousand years ago, beside the beautiful Luobu Lake, there lay Loulan ancient city of the Silk Road. Businessmen from every country gathered there with lots of dancing parities. Everything shows that people in Loulan lived a rich life then.

    However, two thousand years later, this rich land suddenly disappeared from the map of China. It became an area covered with sand and dead tree trunks.

    Loulan was first "discovered" by a Swedish man named Sven Hedin in 1900, and people from America, Britain, Japan and Sweden all set foot here. Then in the 1930s, a Chinese named Huang Wenbi came to Loulan for the first time. He visited and studied this area and found many relics that were beautifully and carefully made.

    It is recorded that the ancient city of Loulan was the capital of the Loulan Kingdom during the Han and Jin Dynasties, and covered an area of some 10, 000 square kilometres. Inside the city, there are the ruins of government offices, temples and other old buildings. Outside the city there are some dried-up rivers and much farmland. In the past century many things have been dug up there including Han Dynasty coins, mirrors and many others of Greek and Roman times. All these things show that a lot of business between the East and the West once took place there.

    Lying on the northwest of the Lop Nur area, the Loulan Kingdom is now a lifeless area with endless ＂forests＂ of mounds (小丘) which aren't easily seen in other parts of the world. Its mystery has been attracting many people from many countries.

    Earthquake rescue robots have experienced their final tests in Beijing. Their designers say that with these robots, rescue workers will be able to have more time to save more lives during an earthquake.

    This robot looking like a helicopter（直升机）, is called the detector-bot . It's about 4 meters long, and it took about 4 years to develop the model. Its main functions（作用）are to collect information from the air, and send goods of up to 30kilos, to people stuck in an earthquake.

    This robot has a high quality 360 degree panoramic camera. It can work day and night and will also be able to send the latest pictures from the quake area. Dr. Qi Juntong, Chinese Academy of Science, said, "Unlike other automatic machines, the most important feature of this robot is that it doesn't need a distant control. We just set the information of the earthquake-struck area on it, and then it takes off, and lands by itself. It flies as high as 3,000 meters, and as fast as 100 kilometers per hour. "

This robot has a different function — it can change as the environment changes. Its main job is to search for any signs of life in places where human rescuers are unable to go.

    As well as a detector（探测器）that finds victims（遇难者）and detects poisonous gas, a camera is placed in the 40 centimeter long robot, which can work in the dark.

    Another use for the rescuers is the supply bot, with its 10-meter-long pipe. People who are caught in the ruins will be able to get supplies including oxygen and liquids.

    Experts have said that the robots will enter production, and serve as part of the national earth- quake rescue team as soon as next year.

    While faking and fierce looks are among animals great defenses, many species know that everyone runs from a big stink (臭气) too.

    Vulture (秃鸳)

    Vultures, are street sweepers that feast on the rotting flesh of dead animals, which benefits us by ridding our highways and landscapes of animal bodies and the bacteria they might carry. When vultures feel threatened they vomit, and the smell of vomited-on dead bodies puts of most predators. Throwing up allows the vulture to fly away more quickly-and the vomit can hurt the aggressor's eyes and face.

    Opossum (负鼠)

    In some ways opossums have it easy. In order to become "dead", they don't have to fax anyone a death certificate. They just lie there with their tongues hanging out with the smell of dead flesh, sometimes for hours, effectively convincing potential predators they can find a much fresher meal elsewhere. Even if they keep getting attacked, they won't move any more than a human statue until the threat has passed.

    Hoatzin (磨雉)

    Hold your nose and meet the hoatzin, a bird of distinctions, not the least of which is that it smells like fresh cow shit. The animal mostly eats leaves and it's the only bird known to digest by fermentation, like a cow. This process is what causes its smell and has earned it the nickname the "stink bird

    Millipedes (千足虫)

    Millipedes are tricky. For starters they look wormy. Their name is deceptive, too: Their legs number about 750. Their major defense is to curl up into a ball. They, though, also release a harm eyes, and leave a horrible smell on their attackers.

    Sea Hare (海兔)

    The graceful sea hare is plain in taste in the first place, so it's not the most popular dish in the seafood chain. Nonetheless this type of sea creature has a pretty creative smell-related defense that is almost the opposite of its smelly companions on this list. The sea hare gives out a slimy, purple ink, the substance which makes food less palatable to predators.

    Researchers using lobsters (2-f) as model predators found that the sea blocks the lobsters receptive mechanism. In other words, the sea hare gives its attacker the equivalent of a stuffy nose so they don't know how appealing it is.

    A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading. It is remarkable first for what it contains: the range of news from local crime to international politics, from sports to business to fashion to science, and the range of comment and special features as well, from editorial page to feature articles and interviews to criticism of books, art, theatre, and music.

    A newspaper is even more remarkable for the way one reads it: never completely, never straight through, but always by jumping from here to there, in and out, glancing at one piece, reading another article all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the next. A good modern newspaper offers a variety to attract many different readers, but far more than any one reader is interested in. What brings this variety together in one place is its topicality(时事性), its immediate relation to what is happening in your world and your locality now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it mean also that much of what appears in a newspaper has no more than transient value.

    For all these reasons, no two people really read the same paper: what each person does is to put together, out of the pages of that day's paper, his own selection and sequence, his own newspaper. For all these reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, which means getting what you want from them without missing things you need but without wasting time, demands skill and self-awareness as you modify and apply the techniques of reading.

A living robot has been created out of frog skin cells. Xenobots, named after the frog species Xenopus laevis that the cells come from, were first described last year. Now the team behind the robots has improved their design and demonstrated new capabilities.

To create the xenobots, Michael Levin at Tufts University in Massachusetts and his colleagues obtained tissue from 24-hour-old frog embryos after very small physical operation. Where the previous version relied on the contraction of heart muscle cells to move them forward by pushing off surfaces, these new xenobots swim around faster. They also live between three and seven days longer than their previous generation, which only lasted about seven days, and have the ability to sense their surroundings to some extent, turning red when exposed to blue light.

"The fundamental finding here is that when you free skin cells from their normal context, and you give them a chance to build other things than what they normally build," says Levin. "To me, one of the most exciting things here is that they are plastic. This idea that even normal cells, not genetically modified, are in fact capable of building something completely different."

Because they are created from cells, the xenobots eventually break apart and are totally biodegradable, says team member Douglas Blackiston, also at Tufts University. He therefore hopes that they can be used for biomedical and environmental applications.

Previous attempts at creating living robots, such as a wirelessly controlled cockroach, have involved dealing with live animals, raising ethical concerns. Xenobots differ from these because they are made entirely of living cells. "The approach here is maybe ethically the least problematic because everything starts with cells. They have no neurons, so it's not an animal," says Auke ljspeert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, who wasn't involved in the research. "It's really cells, so I find it maybe the cleanest way."