Tea drinking was common in China for nearly one thousand years before anyone in Europe had ever heard about tea. People in Britain were much slower in finding out what tea was like, mainly because tea was very expensive. It could not be bought in shops and even those people who could afford to have it sent from Holland did so only because it was a fashionable curiosity. Some of them were not sure how to use it. They thought it was a vegetable and tried cooking the leaves. Then they served them mixed with butter and salt. They soon discovered their mistake but many people used to spread the used tea leaves on bread and give them to their children as sandwiches.

    Tea remained scarce and very expensive in England until the ships of the East India Company began to bring it direct from China early in the seventeenth century. During the next few years so much tea came into the country that the price fell and many people could afford to buy it.

    At the same time people on the Continent were becoming more and more fond of tea. Until then tea had been drunk without milk in it, but one day a famous French lady named Madame de Sevigne decided to see what tea tasted like when milk was added. She found it so pleasant that she would never again drink it without milk. Because she was such a great lady that her friends thought they must copy everything she did, they also drank their tea with milk in it. Slowly this habit spread until it reached England and today only very few Britons drink tea without milk.

    At first, tea was usually drunk after dinner in the evening. No one ever thought of drinking tea in the afternoon until a duchess（公爵夫人）found that a cup of tea and a piece of cake at three or four o'clock stopped her getting “a sinking feeling” as she called it. She invited her friends to have this new meal with her and so, tea-time was born .

    We all know cameras. But have you heard of Google's new camera? It is a small, smart device, called Clips. It comes with a case that has a clip (夹子), but it's not designed to be worn on your clothing. Most interestingly, it uses artificial intelligence to take photography out of your hands so it can capture moments on its own.

    This roughly 2-inch by 2-inch camera, with a three-hour battery life and Gorilla Glass for toughness, is intended for candid moments, like when a child does something cute that may happen too quickly for you to pull out your smart phone.

    Onboard the Clips device, it uses machine learning algorithms (计算程序) to help capture scenes. Those algorithms include face recognition. “Once it learns that there's a face you see frequently, it'll try to get nice photos of those faces,” said Juston Payne, the device's product manager. And they also want it to recognize facial expressions, which involved “training it to know what happiness looks like”. The Google team also trained it to recognize what not to shoot—like when a child's hand is over the lens, or if it is tossed in a dark purse.

    The only way to see the images is by connecting the camera with your phone, as it has no screen for viewing or editing.

    Did people think it was strange? Yes, Payne admitted. But they said they addressed that by making it obvious what it is. A green light on the front signals that the device is on. Besides, unlike a camera meant to monitor your home, it is not connected to the Internet.

    “This product is only possible because of the way that technology has advanced,” Payne said. It was only in the past year or so that they could squeeze the technology down into a device this size. Going forward, we're likely to get more assistance from the artificial intelligence packed into our apps and gadgets.

    Attention from strangers is nothing new to me. Questions about my height is the center of almost every public interaction. My friends say my height is just a physical quality and not a personality aspect. However, when I reflect on my life, I realize that my height has shaped my character in many ways and has helped to make me who I am.

    I learned how to be kind. When I was younger, some parents in my neighborhood regarded me kind of dangerous because I was so much larger than other children of my age. I had to be extra welcoming and gentle simply to play with other children. Of course, now my coaches wish I weren't quite so kind on the basketball court.

    I learned the quality of not being too proud about myself. At 7 feet tall, everyone expects me to be an amazing basketball player. They come expecting to see Dirk Nowitzki, and instead they might see a performance more like Will Ferrell (successfully starred a professional basketball player). I have learned to be modest and to work even harder than my fellows to meet their (and my) expectations.

    I developed a sense of lightheartedness. When people playfully make fun of my height, I laugh at myself too. On my first day of high school, a girl dropped her books in a busy hallway. I got down to her level and gathered some of her notebooks. As we both stood up, her eyes widened as I kept rising over her. Astonished, she dropped her books again. Embarrassed, we both laughed and picked up the books a second time.

    All of these lessons have defined me. Looking back, I realize that through years of such experiences, I have become a confident, expressive person. Being a 7-footer is both a blessing and a curse (诅咒), but in the end, accepting who you are is the first step to happiness.

    It is important to know another language and how to communicate without words when you are in another country. Before saying anything, people communicate with each other by using gestures(手势). However, many gestures have different meanings, or no meaning at all, in different parts of the world.

    In the United States, nodding your head up and down means "yes", while in some parts of Greece and Turkey, it means "no". In the southeast of Asia, it is a polite way of saying "I heard you".

    Today in the USA, when someone puts his thumb up, it means "Everything is all right." However, in Greece it is bad. Also putting your clasped(紧握的)hands up above your head means "I am the winner." It is the sign which players often make. In Russia it is the sign of friendship.

    In the USA, holding your hand up with the thumb and index finger(食指), and the other three straight means "Everything is OK." In France, it means "You are worth nothing."

    It is also important to make eye communication. If you look down when talking to an American, he or she may feel that you are shy, or you are trying to hide something.

Besides these, you should also know there are some topics that cannot be talked about, such as age, weight and marriage. You can talk about the weather, work, sports, food, where one lives and news of the day.

    WeChat, the Chinese social media smartphone app, saw an increase in user numbers of 41 percent year on year to 500 million at the end of last year, in a sign that parent company Tencent is extending its reach for the mobile Internet. As one of the largest Internet integrated service providers in Chinaand one of the most Internet users in China, Tencent's profit grew 24 percent to RMB 20.98 billion per year, slightly higher than forecasts, driven mainly by online gaming profits. It is unclear how much WeChat contributed to Tencent's profits but the app's growth is a strong indicator of the company's long-term health as it tries to adjust its business to be more suitable for mobile devices.

    "We extended our leadership in games and online media, and made breakthroughs in emerging platforms such as online security and mobile payments." Ma Huateng, Tencent chairman, said in a statement. WeChat is the second highest ranked social app in China, behind QQ, Tencent's another chatting app, which claimed to have 815 million registered monthly users at the end of 2014.

    Tencent has been unwilling to earn money through WeChat by flooding it with advertising, which could influence the users' experience. But this is expected to change. Some analysts anticipated(预期) that advertising would be introduced on a large scale later this year. Early attempts to test ads on the service have not always gone smoothly. After a BMW ad was introduced on some users' feedbacks in January, many users who were not targeted by the brand's marketing complained of "discrimination" by Tencent's data mining algorithm(数据挖掘算法). They claimed it unfairly treated them as not wealthy or successful enough to view the BMW ad.

    I drove a taxi for extra money east of Toronto thirty years ago. Each time a taxi drove up to the front of the Greenwood Racetrack, a group of local kids would run along the sidewalk angling for position by the passenger door. One lucky kid, or rather, the most aggressive one, would open the passenger door and say "Good luck, Mister!" The man getting out of the cab would vaguely say thanks and throw the kid a quarter. It was a routine everybody knew.

    Throughout the summer, one kid caught my eye. He was bigger than most of all the other kids but pushed away by even the smallest. He never made it but never gave up. One day, his chance arrived. As I was pulling up to the sidewalk, all the kids were pushing for a cab just ahead of mine. The boy saw me and walked toward my taxi. As I positioned the passenger door right beside him, he never paused and opened the passenger door, warmly saying, "Good luck, Mister!"

    But the man neither said thanks nor flipped him a quarter. He pushed him aside so hard that the boy fell on the sidewalk. I knew it hurt him badly. I got out in less than 10 seconds, but the man was gone in the crowd. So I looked for the kid. I decided to give him $20 for the effort. By the time I spotted him he was far up ahead, walking away in the opposite direction through the crowd and his head hanging down. When I got the cab turned around I lost sight of him. I never saw him again. I'd like to find him one day and tell him that if only he had stuck around a little longer I would have given him a whole $20.

    I learned from this kid that when things seem so hopeless that you are ready to give up, it's the time when things are most likely to turn around for you.