Fear may be felt in the heart as well as in the head, according to a study that has found a link between the cycles of a beating heart and the chance of someone feeling fear.

    Tests on healthy volunteers found that they were more likely to feel a sense of fear at the moment when their hearts are contracting（收缩）and pumping blood around their bodies, compared with the point when the heartbeat is relaxed. Scientists say the results suggest that the heart is able to influence how the brain responds to a fearful event, depending on which point it is at in its regular cycle of contraction and relaxation.

    Sarah Garfinkel at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School said: “Our study shows for the first time that the way in which we deal with fear is different depending on when we see fearful pictures in relation to our heart.”

    The study tested 20 healthy volunteers on their reactions to fear as they were shown pictures of fearful faces. Dr Garfinkel said, “The study showed that fearful faces are better noticed when the heart is pumping than when it is relaxed. Thus our hearts can also affect what we see and what we don't see and guide whether we see fear.”

    To further understand this relationship, the scientists also used a brain scanner（扫描仪）to show how the brain influences the way the heart changes a person's feeling of fear.

    “We have found an important mechanism by which the heart and brain ‘speak' to each other to change our feelings and reduce fear,” Dr Garfinkel said.

    “We hope that by increasing our understanding about how fear is dealt with and ways that it could be reduced, we may be able to develop more successful treatments for anxiety disorders, and also for those who may be suffering from serious stress disorder.”

Dear John,

    My name is Amber and I want to share my story with you because what you've shared about life and positive energy has changed my life. This past year has been one of the hardest for me. I felt I was stuck in a position that had nothing to do with what I wanted to do with my life. In January, after two years of being together, my boyfriend left me.

    I read your blog every morning as I drink my coffee at work, but it wasn't until this March that I told myself "no more negativity" as you taught readers in your blog.

    Since then I've got into new habits at work to keep my energy positive. When people walk in the front door, I'm the first face they see, so I smile big when I say "good morning" to them, especially on Mondays. Instead of waiting for someone to ask me for help, I offer it with an open mind. The CEO noticed my change and offered me the executive assistant position that I wanted.

    One of the biggest things I've taken to heart from your blog is changing my opinions on my job. Yes, it was not an important position, but when I was passionate （热情的） about it, I could make my life fulfilling.

    All in all, I have to thank you somehow for having the passion to help others because it truly is inspiring to me. So thank you so much, John. My life has changed because your words pointed me in the right direction, Take care!

                                                 Sincerely ,

                                                     Amber

    The Crowne Plaza Hotel in Copenhagen is offering a free meal to any guest who is able to produce electricity for the hotel on an exercise bike linked to a generator (发电机). The idea is to get people fit and reduce their carbon footprint. Guests will have to produce at least 10 watt hours of electricity — roughly 15 minutes of cycling for someone of average fitness. Guests staying at Plaza Hotel will be given meal tickets worth $ 36 once they have produced 10 watt hours of electricity. The bicycles will have smart phones attached to the handlebars measuring how much power is being generated for the hotel.

    The plan, a world-first, will start on 19 April and run for a year. Only guests staying at the hotel will be able to take part. Frederikke Toemmergaard，hotel spokeswoman, said, “Many of our visitors are business people who enjoy going to the gym. There might be people who will cycle just to get a free meal, but generally I don't think people will take advantage of our programme.”

    Copenhagen has a long-standing cycling tradition and 36 % of locals cycle to work each day, one of the highest percentages in the world, according to the website visitcopenhagen. dk. US environmental website treehugger. com recently voted Copenhagen the world's best city for cyclists. “Because Copenhagen is strongly connected with cycling, we felt the bicycle would work well as a symbol of the hotel's green profile (形象).”

    If successful，the electric bicycle meal programme will be spread to all Crowne Plaza hotels in the UK, the hotel said in a statement.

    Have you ever learned about F. Scott Fitzgerald? F. Scott Fitzgerald, born on September 24, 1896, an American novelist, was once a student of St. Paul Academy, the Newman School and attended Princeton. University for a short while. In 1917 he joined the army and was posted in Alabama, where he met his future wife Zelda Sayre. Then he had to make some money to impress her.

    His life with her was full of great happiness, as he wrote in his diary:" My own happiness in the past often approached such joy that I could share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and take down parts of it in my diary."

    This side of paradise, his first novel, was published in 1920. Encouraged by its success, Fitzgerald began to devote more time to his writing. Then he continued with the novel the Beautiful and Damned (1922), a collection of short stories Thales of the Jazz Age (1922), and a play The Vegetable (1923). But his greatest success was The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, which quick brought him praise from the literary world. Yet it failed to give him the needed financial security. Then, in 1926, he published another collection of short stories All the Sad Young Men.

    However, Fitzgerald's problems with his wife Zelda affected his writing. During the 1920s he tried to reorder his life, but failed. By 1930, his wife had her first breakdown and went to a Swiss clinic. During this period he completed novels Tender Is the Night in 1934 and The Love of the Last Tycoon in 1940 while his wife was in hospital in the United States, he got totally addicted to alcohol. Sheila Graham, his dear friend, helped him fight his alcoholism.

阅读理解

    Although computers used to be large, expensive and difficult to use, they have been made smaller, cheaper and easier to use. As a result, more people have been buying computers for their homes and businesses. They are used to record information and make difficult things easy.

    Let's look at some of the many ways computers may affect(影响) your life.

    Want to get the best treatment at hospitals? Your doctors at hospitals have been greatly helped by computers to get information about patients. It is possible for doctors from different hospitals to read the records of patients, discuss them and make decisions on the best treatment. It would, at one time, take them hours and days to do so.

    Want to talk to your friends both at home and abroad? Then it's necessary to connect your computer to the Internet and set up your own e-mail letter box. You can then collect and send mails in seconds. It will be a waste of time and money to post your letters.

    Want to get advice from Michael Jordan on how to play basketball like a NBA super star? Now it is possible to find out what it is on the Internet.

    But if you think you have entered the information age because you have the chance to use the Internet, you are wrong. The reason is quite a simple one: over 98 percent of the information on the Internet is in English. The information on-line won't be helpful to you unless you can use English freely.

    Forests are always losers at the Olympics, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

    For the winter games in PyeongChang, South Korea, virgin forest was destroyed on Mount Gariwang to accommodate ski runs. For the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, a ski run is set to wipe out part of the Songshan National Nature Reserve And let's not forget the 240 acres of Atlantic Forest that were leveled for the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro to make way for a golf course.

    For the upcoming Tokyo games, environmental and human rights advocates have been raising alarms about the use of tropical wood to build the New National Stadium. Activists have fought against such environmental destruction. The damage is often permanent, threatens endangered plants and animals and, in some cases, causes conflicts with native people But frequently the country's organizing committee, and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have found ways to make it reasonable—despite a paragraph in the Olympic Charter that states that the IOC's role is to "encourage and support a responsible concern for environmental issues."

    As it stands now. the IOC has little authority over a city's local organizing committee, which finally plans the event, Chappelet, professor of public management at the University of Lausanne, told Earther. "Even if the IOC is dissatisfied with the way host cities have prepared for the games, they have no built-in systems to supervise (监督) them so that they strictly follow the Olympic Charter. The only thing they can do if they're not happy is to withdraw the right to organize the game. But the IOC could include more enforcement (执行) systems into the contract (合同) they make with the host city, he added. That contract must be signed and obeyed by everyone. Those who break it could be fined.

    Boykoff, the author of several books on the Olympics, suggested a similar solution. "The IOC could insist that host cities prioritize their ecological promises, but instead they look the other way, time and time again," he said.