The more hours young children spend in child care, the more likely they are to turn out aggressive and disobedient by the time they are in kindergarten, according to the largest study of child care and development ever conducted. Researchers said this correlation(相关性) held true regardless of whether the children came from rich or poor homes, were looked after by a relative or at a center, and whether they were girls or boys.

    What is uncertain, however, is whether the child care actually causes the problem or whether children likely to turn out aggressive happen to be those who spend more hours in child care. It also remains unclear whether reducing the amount of time in child care will reduce the risk that a child will turn into a mean person. What's more, quality child care is associated with increased skills in intellectual ability such as language and memory, leading some academics to suggest that child care turns out children who are "smart and naughty".

    The government-sponsored research, which has tracked more than 1,300 children at 10 sites across the country since 1991, is bound to cause the debate over child care again: How should people balance work and family? And how should parents, especially mothers, resolve the demands that are placed on them to be both breadwinners and supermoms?

    That debate was already on display at a new briefing yesterday, where researchers themselves had different opinions about the data and its implications（含义）. "There is a constant relationship between time in care and problem behavior, especially those involving aggression and behavior," said Jay Belsky of Birkbeck College in London, one of the lead investigators of the study who has previously annoyed women's groups because of his criticisms of child care. "On behalf of fathers or mothers?" interrupted Sarah Friedman, a developmental psychologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and one of the other lead scientists on the study. "On behalf of parents and families," responded Belsky.

    "NICHD is not willing to get into policy recommendations," said Friedman, contradicting her colleague. "There are other possibilities that can be entertained. Yes it is a quick solution—more hours in child care is associated with more problems. The easy solution is to cut the number of hours but that may have implications for the family that may not be beneficial for the development of the children in terms of economics." In an interview after the briefing, Friedman said that asking parents to work fewer hours and spend more time with their children usually meant a loss of family income, which adversely（不利地）affects children.

    Scientists said that the study was highly reliable. But the researchers said they had no whether the behavioral difficulties persisted as the children moved to higher grades.

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    A woman lost the sight in one eye after going swimming in a pool at a hotel wearing contact lenses（隐形眼镜）. Jennie Hurst, from Southampton, suffered from a rare and painful infection caused by amoeba（变形虫）in water. The infection causes people to be sensitive to light and the 28-year-old said she had to stay in a dark room for three months. She is now warning of the dangers of swimming or showering wearing contacts.

    Ms Hurst experienced four operations and a treatment in which she had eye drops every half hour. "During that time I stayed in my bedroom with black curtains at the window. The only thing I could do was to listen to the radio. One evening, I was so eager to look out of window to get a look of the outside world that I opened my curtains in the middle of the night. As soon as I did this the moon shone in my eyes and it really hurt. I didn't do that again. I have been left with no sight in my left eye and the damage to my right eye could be lasting," she said.

    Ms Hurst had been wearing contact lenses for five years. "I don't even like swimming,"she said. "My friends were quite surprised that I had gone swimming and probably thought that I had been a bit lazy. I wasn't aware of the problem at all — it didn't even enter my brain to take them out. I felt responsible that I had let it happen when actually I could have just taken my contacts out."

    Discovering Tasmania

    The island of Tasmania a place of natural beauty and has more than 2,000 km of walking tracks and 18 national parks. If you go on a tour, you'll discover a wild and beautiful place where the people are friendly and the food is delicious. If you don't like walking, there are other tours you can choose from including a river cruise(巡游) and cycling. You can also enjoy fishing, sailing or sunbathing on the beach.

    The Tarkine coast is located in the northwest of Tasmania. It's such a wild and remote(偏僻) area that you can easily complete your walk without seeing anyone apart from the members of your group and your two guides. The area contains the largest rainforest in Australia which is home to more than 50 endangered species. It is also home to many Aboriginal Heritage Sites. During your tour, you'll come across rivers, mountain ranges, waterfalls, wildlife and long wild beaches.

    Tour Itinerary：

    Day 1：

    You're picked up from your hotel in Launceston and driven to the Tarkine. You then complete a three­hour walk through the forest before arriving at your camp at Mystery Creek. There you will enjoy a delicious meal cooked by your guides.

    Day 2：

    After breakfast, you continue deeper into the rainforest, passing some of the tallest trees in the world as you go, and stopping for lunch and then camp in the evening.

    Day 3：

    The exciting part of today's tour is the Tarkine Falls, a beautiful 15­metre waterfall.

    Day 4：

    You can stay at the camp and bathe in the Tarkine Falls, or you can go for a walk for more fantastic views of the forest.

    Day 5：

    After a last journey through the forest, you are picked up at about 4：00 p．m. and you arrive in Launceston at around 7：00 p．m.

    The tour includes two professional guides, transport to and from the rainforest, all food while on the tours and all safety equipment. You should buy or hire(租用) recommended camping equipment including: backpacks, sleeping bags, rain coats and trousers.

    Edward Hibberd Johnson was an American inventor. He lived in New York City in the 1800s. In 1882, Johnson had an idea. It would change the look of Christmas forever.

    Johnson worked as a boss at a technology company. In 1871, he hired a young man to work for him. The man's name was Thomas Edison. Edison was a great worker. He came up with many new ideas. Later, Edison left to start his own company. Johnson followed him. Johnson started turning Edison's ideas into money. In 1880, Edison invented the light bulb. No one knew how much it was worth. At the time, most homes did not have the electricity to power it. However, Johnson helped start a company to sell the bulbs.

    Before long, Mr. Johnson had a bright idea. Christmas trees were very popular. They were so beautiful because of their candles. Flickering (闪烁的) flames were perfect for Christmas. But they were also dangerous. They could easily start a fire.

    Mr. Johnson thought of a way to fix this. He set up a Christmas tree by one of his windows. Then he took 80 colored light bulbs and hung them around it. The lights were red, white and blue. People on the street stopped to look. They admired the shining Christmas tree. It was so popular that Johnson made it a tradition. Each year he added more lights. In 1884, there were 120 light bulbs on his tree. The lights were not cheap. In 1900, a string of 16 bulbs cost $12. That was a lot of money back then, because people made less. In today's money, that is about $350. But over time, they started to cost less. By the 1930s, colored light bulbs were everywhere.

    Today millions of light sets are sold in America each year. They light 80 million homes. Some of them are now used for other holidays too. They are used on Halloween and Valentine's Day. But it all started with Johnson's Christmas tree.

    For centuries, dolphins have got our admiration, and it is easy to see why. They are beautiful, cute and smart sea animals. Dolphins are not fish, but warm-blooded animals. They live in groups, and speak to each other in their own language. In this way, they are like other animals, such as bees and birds. But dolphins are very different from almost all land animals. It is said that dolphins are the world's second brightest creatures after humans and have many brain features related to intelligence. Their brain is nearly the same size as our own, and they live a long time at least twenty or thirty years.

    Like some animals, dolphins use sound to help them find their way around. They also make these sounds to talk to each other and to help them find food. We now know they do not use their ears to receive these sounds, but the lower part of the mouth, called the jaw.

    Strangely, dolphins seem to like man, and for thousands of years there have been stories about the dolphin and its friendship with people.

    There is a story about sailors in the 19th century. In a dangerous part of the sea off the coast of New Zealand, they learnt to look for a dolphin called Jack. From 1871 to 1903, Jack met every boat in the area and showed it the way. Then in 1903 a passenger on a boat called The Penguin shot and wounded Jack. He recovered and for nine years more continued to guide all ships through the area－except for The Penguin.

    Today, some people continue to kill dolphins, but many countries of the world now protect them and in these places it is against the law to kill them.

Most of the 20th century has been a development on the Industrial Revolution taken to an extreme: people now own more products than ever before; there are enough unclear weapons to destroy the earth several times over; there is hardly any forest left and pollution has got to the point where we buy water. Within a few years I predict you will be able to buy air. (There once was a time when you didn't need to buy food or shelter either.)

Important developments in the last century are the breaking down of the class structures left over from the Industrial Revolution stage, bringing with it the empowerment of the "common man": the working day is set by law to only 8 hours a day; everyone has the vote; the media has less obvious government control; people have landed on the moon, sent spacecrafts to Mars and so on. Families have also shrunk drastically (强烈地); the nuclear family came about, and especially in the last half of the 20th century, one­parent families are becoming more common. This shrinking in the size of the family shows the increased independence of people — once upon a time people had to live in large groups to survive.

As humans have "become the gods", they have realized their individuality and independence and taken their control of the world to an extreme. In many countries the land is almost completely used in the production of food and as living space and they live in small cities which are entirely human constructed, made from materials which are also entirely human constructed (concrete bricks) with hardly any remains of nature. Weeds are poisoned because they are messy; even parks have trees grown in tidy lines; grass is mowed to keep it short and so on. I think the massive drug "problem" troubling people is a result of too much of this influence, humans needing to escape the stark world they have created by entering fantasy worlds.

Over the last 100 years, the 20th century consciousness has spread throughout the world; most of Asia has been thoroughly "Westernized", and most of the Third World is being overrun by Western ways of doing things and living.