In agrarian(农业的), pre-industrial Europe,“you'd want to wake up early, start working with the sunrise, have a break to have the largest meal, and then you'd go back to work,”says Ken Albala, a professor of history at the University of the Pacific.“Later, at 5 or 6, you'd have a smaller supper.”

    This comfortable cycle, in which the rhythms of the day helped shape the rhythms of the meals, gave rise to the custom of the large midday meal, eaten with the extended family.“Meals are the foundation of the family,”says Carole Couniban, a professor at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, “so there was a very important interconnection between eating together and strengthening family ties.”

    Since industrialization, maintaining such a slow cultural metabolism has been much harder, with the long midday meal shrinking to whatever could be stuffed into a lunch bucket or bought at a food stand. Certainly, there were benefits. Modern techniques for producing and shipping food led to greater variety and quantity, including a tremendous increase in the amount of animal protein and dairy products available, making us more energetic than our ancestors.

    Yet plenty has been lost too, even in cultures that still live to eat. Take Italy. It's no secret that the Mediterranean diet is healthy, but it was also a joy to prepare and eat. Italians, says Counihan, traditionally began the day with a small meal. The big meal came at around 1 p.m. In between the midday meal and a late, smaller dinner came a small snack. Today, when time zones have less and less meaning, there is little tolerance for offices' closing for lunch, and worsening traffic in cities means workers can't make it home and back fast enough anyway. So the formerly small supper after sundown becomes the big meal of the day, the only one at which the family has a chance to get together.“The evening meal carries the full burden that used to be spread over two meals,”says Counihan.

    New research has found that even if you give up smoking,the damage it has done to your genes（基因）will stay there for a much longer time.

    In the research,a team of US scientists studied the blood of 16,000 people.Among them,some were smokers,some used to smoke,and the rest were non-smokers.Scientists compared their genes and found that more than 7,000 genes of smokers had changed-a number that is one-third of known human genes.

    According to NBC News,both heart disease and cancer are caused by genetic changes.Some people may have had the changes when they were born,but most people get them in their day-to-day lives while doing things like  smoking.

When you stop smoking,a lot of these genes will return to normal within five years.This means your body is trying to heal（治愈）itself of the harmful effects of smoking.But the changes in some of the genes stay for longer.They can stay for as long as 30 years.It's almost like leaving a footprint on wet cement（水泥）一it will always be there, even when you've walked away and when the cement becomes dry.

    Although the study results may make people unhappy,there is a bright side: the findings could help scientists invent medicine to treat genetic damage caused by smoking or find ways to tell which people have heart disease or cancer ricks.

    The National Gallery

    Description:

    The National Gallery is the British national art museum built on the north side of Trafalgar in London. It houses a diverse collection of more than 2,300 examples of European art ranging from 13th-century religious paintings to more modern ones by Renoir and Van Gogh. The older collections of the gallery are reached through the main entrance while the more modern works in the East Wing are most easily reached from Trafalgar Square by a ground floor entrance.

    Layout:

    The modern Sainsbury Wing on the western side of the building houses 13th-to15th-century paintings, and artists include Duccio, Uccello, Van Eyck, Lippi, Mantegna, Botticelli and Memling.

    The main West Wing houses 16th-century paintings and artists include Leonardo da Vinci, Cranach, Michelangelo, Raphael, Bruegel, Bronzino, Titian and Veronese.

    The North Wing houses 17th-century paintings and artists include Caravaggio, Rubens, Poussin, Van Dyck, Velazquez, Claude and Vermeer.

    The East Wing houses 18th-to early 20th-century paintings, and artists include Canaletto, Goya, Turner, Constable, Renoir and Van Gogh.

    Opening Hours:

    The Gallery is open every day from 10am to 6pm（Fridays 10am to 9pm）and is free, but charges apply to some special exhibitions.

    Getting There:

    Nearest underground stations: Charing Cross (2-minute walk). Leicester Square (3-minute walk), Embankment (7-minute walk), and Piccadilly Circus (8-minute walk).

    He was a founder of modem Chinese literature. He was regarded as "an old man always telling the truth". Living across two centuries, he experienced many periods of danger and suffering but never lost his beliefs. His name was Ba Jin.

    As the 101-year-old legendary（传奇的）writer passed away in Shanghai after a six-year battle with disease, millions of Chinese were deeply sad. People in Shanghai and Chengdu gathered around his old house and literature museum to mourn for the great man.

    "My school held a series of ceremonies to express our deep sorrow,'' said Zuo Shang, a 17-year-old girl in Shanghai, who appreciates much of Ba's works. "He is a great writer who wrote so many masterpieces, but what I admire about him the most is his courage to tell the truth, 'Telling the truth, being an honest man.' That's what I learned from him," explained Zuo.

    Ba Jin was born in 1904 in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. A son of a wealthy family, Ba helped the poor ever since he was a child. It is they who taught him a strong yet down-to earth way of living.

    Ba finished his first novel, "Destruction", in 1929 during his travels to France. His later masterpieces, "Family" "Spring" and "Autumn", mirrored the struggles, tragedies and loves of the young in a feudal society. The books encouraged Chinese people not to give in to fate and to be their own masters.

    "Ba Jin told the true story of his country and his people. His great love and service to them meant he was thinking about what he could do for them," said Bing Xin, a well-known writer and also his good friend.

    Like other famous writers in China, Ba suffered in the "cultural revolution" during 1966—1976. But several years later, Ba examined his hard experience in strict introspection（自我反省）instead of hatred. His book, "Random Thoughts"， in 1979 displayed his real thoughts with painful sincerity and won him his reputation for honesty.

    "It really hurts to recall my past mistakes, but 1 have to," said the respectable man. "Always tell the truth. Say what you think in the bottom of your heart. That's my life motto."

    There was once a man who had a donkey and a beautiful lapdog. The donkey was kept in a barn and had plenty of corn and hay to eat. Indeed, he was just as lucky as any donkey could be. The little dog stayed in the house and was well liked by the master. He was always playing and jumping about in an funny way and was allowed  to lie in his master's lap (膝盖). Meanwhile, the donkey had plenty to do. He pulled wood all day long and had to take his turn at the mill during the night. He often complained about his problems, and it bored him to see the lapdog living such an easy life, while he had to work so hard. Finally he thought to himself that if he acted the same way as the lapdog to his master, he would be treated the same way. So, one day he ran out of his barn and went fast into the house, where he began to kick about in a very strange way. Then, swaying his tail and imitating the funny behavior of the pet lapdog, he knocked over the table where his master was eating. He also broke all the dishes into very small pieces and did not stop until he jumped onto his master, trying to lick and paw him with his rough feet.

    Seeing their master in great danger, the servants thought it was time to help him. They beat the foolish donkey with sticks until he could not get up again. As he was about to die, he cried, "Why couldn't I have remained satisfied the way I was? Why did I try to imitate a creature who was nothing but a lazy puppy after all?"

    Large gatherings such as weddings and conferences can be socially stressful. Pressure to learn people's names only adds to the stress. A new facial-recognition app could come to the rescue, .but privacy experts recommend going on with caution.

    The app, called SocialRecall, connects names with faces via smartphone cameras and facial recognition, potentially avoiding the need for formal introductions. "It breaks down these social barriers we all have when meting somebody," says Bany Sandrew, who Created the app and tested it at an event attended by about 10000 people.

    After receiving an invitation to download SocialRecall from an event organizer, the user is asked to take two selfies(自拍) and sign in via social median At the event, the app is active within a previously defined geographical area. When a user points his or her phone camera at an attendee's face, the app identifies the individual, displays the person's name, and links to his or her social media profile. To protect privacy, it recognizes only those who have agreed to participate. And the app's creators say it automatically deletes users' data after an event.

    Ann Cavoukian, a privacy expert who runs the Privacy by Design Center of Excellence praises the app's creators for these protective measures. She cautions, however, that when people choose to share their personal information with the app, they should know that "there may be unintended consequences down the road with that information being used in another context that might come back to bite you."

    The start-up has also developed a version of the app for individuals who suffer from prosopagnosia, or "face blindness", a condition that prevents people from recognizing individuals they have met. To use this app, a person first acquires an image of someone's face, from either the smartphone's camera or a photograph, and then tags it with a name. When the camera spots that same face in real life, the previously entered information is displayed. The collected data are stored only on a user's phone, according to the team behind the app.