The Healthy Habits Survey(调查)shows that only about one third of American seniors have correct habits. Here are some findings and expert advice.
1．How many times did you brush your teeth yesterday?
·Finding：A full 33% of seniors brush their teeth only once a day.
·Step：Remove the 300 types of bacteria in your mouth each morning with a battery－operated toothbrush. Brush gently for 2 minutes, at least twice a day.
2．How many times did you wash your hands or bathe yesterday?
·Finding：Seniors, on average, bathe fewer than 3 days a week. And nearly 30%wash their hands only 4 times a day—half of the number doctors recommend.
·Step：We touch our faces around 3,000 times a day－often inviting germs(病菌)to enter our mouth, nose, and eyes.Use toilet paper to avoid touching the door handle. And, most important, wash your hands often with hot running water and soap for 20 seconds.
3．How often do you think about fighting germs?
·Finding：Seniors are not fighting germs as well as they should.
·Step：Be aware of germs. Do you know it is not your toilet but your kitchen sponge(海绵)that can carry more germs than anything else? To kill these germs, keep your sponge in the microwave for 10 seconds.

    By May, after three months, I had lost22pounds and reached my goal of 115 pounds. My friends would say “Alice, you look great!” or “How did you lose so much weight?” Those compliments made me feel good and confident.

    Soon I dropped to110 pounds. A few of my friends told me that I needed to stop dieting, because I was starting to look sick. They brought me a present—— a bag of chocolates, which I later gave to my sister. My mother would come to my room, with tears in her eyes, and have long chats about how harmful this diet was and begged me to stop. My dad would leave worried messages on my cell phone at school, telling me that it would do serious harm to my body.

    By mid-June, when school was coming to an end, I was down to an only alive state of 95 pounds. All of a sudden, I knew I had to do something. I guessed the number itself scared me. I recalled my doctor. He told me about a girl who was 95 pounds and was at the risk of dying. I knew I was putting my life at risk, but for what? To make those who love me worried? Was it worthwhile to be thin?

    Now I realize that models in magazines, TV and movies are not realistic. The price to pay for the “perfect body” is living with a dangerous and sometimes deadly eating disorder. And there are more important things to think about than how thin you are.

The First Hello

    The man from the telephone department got off the bus, and made his way to the tea stall, wiping the sweat off his head, face, then slipping his handkerchief under his shirt to wipe his neck and back. It was a year ago that the phone line had been installed, six months later men from the public works department had come to put up the phone booth—a neat box-like structure, with a glass window, and wooden ledges, yellow in colour. And days after that, a painter had taken an entire day to colour in broad, black brushstrokes, the words: STD Booth, local and STD allowed.

    No one could tell that the last word had been misspelled. Besides, he had taken the entire day. After he had a cup of tea, he left, waving cheerfully. And now months later, someone else was here again.

    Everyone watched the man as he sat on the bench. No one said a word, and soon the sound of him slurping his tea filled the hot afternoon. A few leaves fell, heavy in the heat, and sometimes a car passed, on its way to the main city farther away.

    When the man had finished, he tried to pay but the tea shop owner who sat behind his steaming kettle and the washed upturned cups, waved him away.

    “You are our guest here.”

    So the man took his handkerchief out again and wiped his face.

    They crowded around him as he shut himself up in the phone booth. When the children pressed their nose against the glass, he shooed them away, as he took out a shiny black soon changed to an excited yell as they saw him dial a number, pressing a finger into the ringed dialer of the phone and letting it go all the way in a half-circle. A while later, they hear him say into the mouthpiece, “Hello.”

    “Hello,”the children around the booth took up the cry, the teashop owner broke into a smile and the men waiting for a bus smiled and said hello to each other. The sadhu(印度的僧人)who sat under the banyan tree nodded wisely. As the sound carried, more hellos were heard. The women winnowing grain giggled as they tried the word tentatively, the shepherds feeding their flocks called out to their sheep, laughing as they used the word.

    “It's a big occasion, ”said the headman, in an awed(敬畏的) voice.

    “It is.” agreed those around him. The telephone man emerged and handed over a small chit of paper to the headman. “This is the telephone number.”

    The headman looked at it respectfully as if it were a mantra(符咒). The others around him read out the numbers slowly, digit-by-digit.

    The telephone man was now too tired to notice the cheering around him. He knew he had to wait long before the bus to take him back arrived. As he sipped his second cup of tea, he remembered something else.

    “Oh, you can't start using the phone now. The minister will come next month and inaugurate it. ”

    No one said a word. No one was surprise. They had waited so long; a month more did not really matter.

    Robots and humans will soon be living in harmony(和睦).A singing robot is being taught to create jazz with a human in a project.

    Antonio Chella from Italy is working with a Telenoid robot. To start with, the Telenoid will be trained to follow the movements and simple sounds made by a human singer, and to connect music with different emotional states. Chella then plans to see if the robot can use these connections to create music.

    Intelligence is often regarded as the ability to find connections between the existing things. But Chella suggests that a conscious(有意识的) creature should be able to go a step further and introduce new connections that result in the creation of something new.

    Some jazz musicians say that they should have a mental library of musical phrases so that they are able to combine them in new ways. More importantly, however, this combination happens in a state that is similar in a sense to dreaming. Chella wants to copy these states in a machine.

    “This work raises interesting questions about the link between consciousness and music making,” says Philippe Pasquier, a musician and computer scientist. But he is skeptical about whether a robot musician needs a physical body.

    Pasquier argues that the robots are faced with two challenges(挑战). Software that can copy Bach has already been developed. But interpretation（演绎）includes human's different tastes and judgments. “What made the Beatles famous was not so much their works, but the fact that the interpretations of the works were wonderful,” he says.

    It is not yet clear how a robot would go about interpreting music in a new way. But by copying humans and then learning to sing, Chella's robot could provide clues.

    What seems to be important is that human composers often listen to lots of music made by others. So Chella's robot had better listen to those jazz standards first.

    In 1973, I was teaching elementary school. Each day, 27 kids entered "The Thinking Laboratory." That was the name students voted for after deciding that "Room 104" was too dull.

    Freddy was an average student, but not an average person. He had the rare balance of fun and compassion(同情). He would laugh the loudest over fun and be the saddest over anyone's misfortune.

    Before the school year ended, I gave the kids a special gift, T-shirts with the words "Verbs Are Your friends" on them. I had advised the kids that while verbs may seem dull, most of the fun things they do throughout their lives will be verbs.

     Through the years, Pd run into former students who would provide updates on old classmates. I learned that Freddy did several jobs after his graduation from high school and remained the same caring person I met forty years before. Once, while working overnight at a store, he let a homeless man sleep in his truck. Another time, he lent a friend money to buy a house.

    Just last year, I was conducting a workshop when someone knocked at the classroom door. A woman excused the interruption and handed me an envelope. I stopped teaching and opened it up. Inside were the "Verbs" shirt and a note from Freddy's mother. "Freddy passed away on Thanksgiving. He wanted you to have this."

    I told the story to the class. As sad as it was, I couldn't help smiling. Although Freddy was taken from us, we all took something from Freddy.

    For the past few months, my three-year-old daughter has spent an hour every week learning a foreign language. She walks into a small room in a local school, where she and a handful of three and four-year-old spend the next hour dancing to ^“La Vaca Lola”, a song about a Spanish cow, creating finger puppets(木偶) to voice what they like and don't like (me gusta, no me gusta) and shouting out which animals are big (grande) or small (pequeno).

    She tells us little about the classes. In fact, for the first few weeks, nothing at all. I begin to wonder if it was a huge mistake (each lesson works out at about £9) but then I show her “La Vaca Lola” on YouTube. She shouts vaca with enthusiasm and with what I hope is a Spanish accent.

    The wish to enroll(使……加入) her in language lessons came, like most things, gradually and then in a sudden rush. In my day job, I read and edit stories about the Chinese economy. For a long time, I felt that it would be good for her to learn another language but I had no great plan as to when.

    Then I read Edward Luce's The Retreat of Western Liberalism and all my thoughts and worry about the economy combined into a panic. Waking in a sweat, it seemed obvious that if my daughter was to have any kind of future, she would have to learn another language. Ideally (理想地) immediately.

    I thought about Mandarin Chinese, one of the top 10 languages most important for our future, according to the British Council (others include Arabic, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Dutch and Japanese). But there were no classes for young children nearby. There were, however, local Spanish classes—the number-one language on the list. When she started to sing "Incy Wincy Spider" in Spanish and English—helped by a Spanish nursery worker-our decision was made.