How to keep a good figure may be important to you. In fact, your house may have an effect on your figure. Experts say the way you design your home could play a role in whether you pack on the pounds or keep them off. You can make your environment work for you instead of against you. Here are some ways to turn your home into part of your diet plan.

    Open the curtains and turn up the lights. Dark environments are more likely to encourage overeating, for people are often less self-conscious when they're in poorly lit places—and so more likely to eat lots of food. If your home doesn't have enough window light, get more lamps and flood the place with brightness.

    Mind the colors. Research suggests warm colors fuel our appetites. In one study, people who ate meals in a blue room consumed 33 percent less than those in a yellow or red room. Warm colors like yellow make food appear more appetizing, while cold colors make us feel less hungry. So when it's time to repaint, go blue.

    Don't forget the clock—or the radio. People who eat slowly tend to consume about 70 fewer calories per meal than those who rush through their meals. Begin keeping track of the time, and try to make dinner last at least 30 minutes. And while you're at it, actually sit down to eat. If you need some help slowing down, turn on relaxing music. It makes you less likely to rush through a meal.

    Downsize the dishes. Big serving bowls and plates can easily make us fat. We eat about 22 percent more when using a 12-inch plate instead of a 10-inch plate. When we choose a large spoon over a smaller one, total intake jumps by 14 percent. And we'll pour about 30 percent more liquid into a short, wide glass than a tall, skinny glass.

    Beauty has always been regarded as something praiseworthy. Almost everyone thinks attractive people are happier and healthier, have better marriages and have more respectable jobs. Personal advisors give them better advice for finding jobs. Even judges are softer on attractive defendants. But in the executive(主管) circle, beauty can become a liability.

    While attractiveness is a positive factor for a man on his way up the executive ladder, it is harmful to a woman.

    Handsome male executives were considered as having more honesty than plainer men; effort and ability were thought to lead to their success.

    Attractive female executives were considered to have less honesty than unattractive ones; their success was connected not with ability but with factors such as luck.

    All unattractive women executives were thought to have more honesty and to be more capable than the attractive female executives. Interestingly, though, the rise of the unattractive overnight success was connected more to personal relationships and less to ability than that of the attractive overnight success.

    Why are attractive women not thought to be able? An attractive woman is considered to be more feminine and an attractive man more manly than the less attractive ones. Thus, an attractive woman has an advantage in traditionally female jobs, but an attractive woman in a traditionally manly position appears to lack the "manly" qualities required.

    This is true even in politics. "When the only clue is how he or she looks, people treat men and women differently," says Anne Bowman, who recently published a study on the effects of attractiveness on political candidates. She asked 125 undergraduate students to rank two groups of photographs, one of men and one of women, in order of attractiveness. Then the students were told the photographs were of candidates for political offices. They were asked to rank them again, in the order they would vote for them.

    The results showed that attractive males completely defeated unattractive men, but the women who had ranked most attractive unchangeably received the fewest votes.

    Modern inventions have speeded up people's loves amazingly. Motor-cars cover a hundred miles in little more than an hour, aircraft cross the world inside a day, while computers operate at lightning speed. Indeed, this love of speed seems never-ending. Every year motor-cars are produced which go even faster and each new computer boasts of saving precious seconds in handling tasks.

    All this saves time, but at a price. When we lose or gain half a day in speeding across the world in an air plane, our bodies tell us so. We get the uncomfortable feeling known as jetlag; our bodies feel that they have left behind on another time zone. Again, spending too long at computers results in painful wrists and fingers. Mobile phones also have their dangers, according to some scientists, too much use may transmit harmful radiation into our brains, a consequence we do not like to think about.

    However, what do we do with the time we have saved? Certainly not relax, or so it seems. We are so accustomed to constant activity that we find it difficult to sit and do nothing, or even just one thing at a time. Perhaps the days are long gone when we might listen quietly to a story on the radio, letting imagination take us into another world.

    There was a time when some people's lives were devoted simply to the cultivation of the land or the care of cattle. No Multi-tasking there; their lives went on at a much gentler pace, and in a familiar pattern. There is much that we might envy about a way of life like this. Yet before we do so, we must think of the hard tasks our ancestors faced, they farmed with bare hands, often lived close to hunger, and had to fashion tools from wood and stone, Modern machinery has freed people from that primitive existence.

    From the first use of the rocket to carry satellites into space to the setting up of space stations, human beings have been putting great effort into space research. And so far, we have achieved many successes. But there are still numerous tasks in front of us and we should not stop trying to progress.

    The international space station （ISS） is an important step we should take in space exploration. It is not only helpful but also essential. It provides a proper space environment for many experiments that we have wanted to do for a long time. It is also a base for the observations of the earth and the universe. It could also be an important base for later travel to the moon and Mars. In a word, if we want to explore space more, the first thing we should do is to set up a space station.

    As the space station costs a lot of money, it is hard for one country alone to establish one. The USA seem to be the only country that has the ability to build a space station alone, and it has tried to do so, but not very successful. So it aggregated many other countries to work on it together. Though it is still extremely expensive, it is much cheaper than doing it alone. It is really a job that needs everyone's effort and will benefit everyone.

    Led by the U. S. and Russia, the ISS is a joint project between six space agencies involving 16countries. Called the greatest achievement in human cooperation, the ISS has come to the end of a ten﹣year's hard work in construction. China has applied for participation in （taking part in） the project many times. Unfortunately all the applications were rejected, which drove China onto the path of independent development. As the Long March Ⅱ﹣F/T1 carrier rocket blasted off （leave the ground） and successfully carried the Tiangong﹣1into space on September 29, 2011, China takes a big step toward its Space Station Era.

    Some West media suggested that the successful launch of Tiangong﹣1 would disturb the balance of global space power, raising concerns about "China threat". China's space project is not designed for military purpose but for developing space technology to explore space resources and make use of them for mankind's well﹣being.

    There are many programs for high school students today that help lonely teenagers deal with loneliness. However, loneliness is not only a problem for teens but also an important and rarely acknowledged one in the elderly.

    In Britain, Tracey Crouch was appointed to be the first Minister of Loneliness in order to address the problems caused by loneliness. This is the first time such a position has been created.

    In Britain, there are around 9 million people who say they are lonely frequently. In Germany, a study conducted by Ruhr University Bochum found that 20 percent of people over the age of 85 felt lonely, and 14 percent of those between age 45 and 65 felt socially lonely. In the United States, more than 25 percent of the population live alone, more than 50 percent are unmarried.

    Loneliness is generally associated with heart disease  overweight, and anxiety. Additionally, the stress from loneliness can cause your cells to change on a molecular (分子) level that reduces its abilities to defend your body against diseases. In fact, doctors believe having feelings of loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day in regard to its effect on health!

    In Britain, the new Minister of Loneliness will help introduce government policies on the problem and fund a charity—an organization for helping people in need, to devote their efforts towards aiding loneliness. There are charities that link lonely seniors to high school students in order to give them a line of communication whenever they feel lonely!

    The possibilities for the new Minister of Loneliness are endless. For example, she can provide education services to household businesses so that they can identify lonely customers if they see one. Loneliness fits into the category of being a social problem that must be monitored by the entire community in order to help those in need. Therefore, government involvement in medical services and care for seniors and others is vital for happy seniors.

    A home science experiment recently took the world by storm. Two teens from Toronto, in Canada, sent a Lego man rising above the Earth and captured their tiny astronaut's trip on film.

    Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both 17, used a weather balloon to launch their plastic lego model 16 miles above the Earth. This is inside a part of Earth's atmosphere.

    The two teens were inspired by a similar project performed by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT). The MIT students had launched a weather balloon with a camera into near space and taken many unusual images of the Earth. Mathew and Asad then spend four months figuring out how to launch their own spacecraft into the space.

    Travelling to space is expensive for NASA, but Mathew and Asad worked hard to keep their costs down. They bought much of their equipment used and even sewed the Lego man's parachute by hand. In total, the project cost only$400.

    "We had a lot of anxiety on launch day because there were high winds when we were going up," Mathew told reporters. They had to pump extra helium(氦)into the balloon so that it would rise quickly and avoid being blown too far off course by the strong winds.

    The toy astronaut's journey lasted 97 minutes before the balloon broke and he fell back to Earth. Mathew and Asad then spent two weekends looking for their spacecraft. It had landed 76miles away from the launch site.

    The student scientists are currently finishing up their final year of high school and applying for colleges. They are also looking into more do-it-yourself space projects.

    "I guess the sky is not really the limit anymore," Mathew told reporters. "We never knew we'd get this far. It's been a lesson for us that hard work pays off."