You get anxious if there's no wi-fi in the hotel or mobile phone signal up the mountain. You feel upset if your phone is getting low on power, and you secretly worry things will go wrong at work if you're not there. All these can be called “always on” stress caused by smart phone addiction.

    For some people, smart phones have liberated them from the nine-to-five work. Flexible working has given them more autonomy（自主权）in their working lives and enabled them to spend more time with their friends and families. For many others though, smart phones have become tyrants（暴君）in their pockets, never allowing them to turn them off, relax and recharge their batteries.

    Pittsburgh-based developer Kevin Holesh was worried about how much he was ignoring his family and friends in favour of his iPhone. So he developed an app — Moment — to monitor his usage. The app enables users to see how much time they're spending on the device and set up warnings if the usage limits are breached（突破）. “Moment's goal is to promote balance in your life,” his website explains. “Some time on your phone, some time off it enjoying your loving family and friends around you.”

    Dr. Christine Grant, an occupational（职业的）psychologist at Coventry University, said, “The effects of this 'always on' culture are that your mind is never resting, and you're not giving your body time to recover, so you're always stressed. And the more tired and stressed we get, the more mistakes we make. Physical and mental health can suffer.”

    And as the number of connected smart phones is increasing, so is the amount of data. This is leading to a sort of decision paralysis（瘫痪）and is creating more stress in the workplace because people have to receive a broader range of data and communications which are often difficult to manage. “It actually makes it more difficult to make decisions and many do less because they're controlled by it all and fell they can never escape the office,” said Dr. Christine Grant.

    Around the world there are some festivals that for some of us may sound bizarre.

    In England they celebrate the rolling cheese race, which occurs every year during the last Monday in May. This festival's characteristic is a contest where an official rolls cheese down a steep hill and festival- goers go chasing after it. The winner is the first one to reach and catch the cheese.

    Another festival celebrated in England is the world championship of grimaces (鬼脸). It is a celebration that dates back to 1297 and is celebrated during the month of September. The task is to perform the best grimace using anything you can to win.

    The worldwide championship of wife lifting is celebrated in Finland. The game is based on Viking traditions where a man should carry away his neighbor's wife. According to the rules, any woman above 17 is considered as a wife, so if you are within this age, take care while visiting this country during the month of July.

    Many of you have watched Pirates of the Caribbean and have known something about pirates. The 19^th of September has been declared worldwide as the day to talk like a pirate. Plenty of people have celebrated it thanks to the publicity (宣传) on the Internet.

    First staged in 1998, the Boryeong Mud Festival is an attraction that pulls more than a million visitors to the South Korean City. As you all know, the town is said to be rich in minerals, so there is no shortage of mud. Mud is trucked onto Daecheon Beach for tourists and locals to enjoy the festival to their best.

    The Monkey Buffet Festival is held in Thailand to develop tourism. It's an unusual feast held for about 600 monkeys. The Monkey Buffet Festival is held in honor of the Hindu gods Ram and Hanuman and involves 3,000 kilograms of vegetables and fruits being laid out for monkeys to stuff themselves.

    On the day the tornado(龙卷风) hit, there was no sign fierce weather was on its way— the sky was blue and the sun had been out. The first warning my husband, Jimmy, 67, and I, 65, got came around 9 p.m., from some text on the TV Jimmy was watching. He ran upstairs to find me in our third-floor bedroom, and we changed the channel from the national television to our local Pensacola, Florida, station.

    Soon the tornado was on top of us. It was the loudest thing I have ever heard. The bones of the house shook, and the power went out. And the wind began to roar(咆哮) through the house, most likely through blown-out windows and the door to our garage. Everything was moving. And the back wall of the house came off and flew into the darkness outside. We had three flights of steps to get to the storeroom down there, the relative safety of the first floor.

    I didn't know how or if we would make it down the steps. It felt as if there were no floor underneath me as the wind lifted me off my feet. As we finally reached the last flight of steps, our front door blew out. Suddenly, a three-foot-long tree branch flew over our heads, missing us by inches.

    By the time I reached the storeroom, the tornado had been over us for about a minute. Jimmy pushed me down to the storeroom floor, but he couldn't get inside himself because of the wind. I held Jimmy's arm as the tornado blew the door open. My knees were full of glass, but I felt no pain. If I had let go, Jimmy would have flown right out the back of the house.

    All of a sudden, Jimmy lifted off his feet. I thought he was gone. And then everything stopped. He landed on his feet. In those first quiet moments, I couldn't believe it was over. Our neighbor says the storm lasted four minutes. In that time, four of the twelve town houses in our unit were completely destroyed. Amazingly, none of us were seriously injured.

    Ms. O'grady, the head of Britains Trades Union Congress, issued a challenge on September 10th. "We can win a four-day working week, "she told members. The demand is far from new. Shorter working weeks have been tried in New Zealand and Sweden, wherein happier, healthier and more motivated employees. Those who work shorter weeks are also reported to be more productive. Should weekends, therefore, be lengthened?

    France's experience suggests workers may not leap at the chance of working for fewer hours. The government reduced the full-time workers week to 35 hours in 2000. Last year the French worked 38.9 hours a week on average, seeming happy to labor above the required level and pocket the extra pay or holiday allowance.

    And businesses may not seize the opportunity either. Working less may be linked to higher productivity (on a per-hour basis), but overall output could still fall because of the smaller number of hours worked. That will not get governments or employers excited.

    Advocates of a four-day week could claim that improving people's quality of life is more important than boosting the economy. In an essay published during The Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote of an "age of leisure and abundance" in which technological advances would allow people to work 15-hour week.

    Unfortunately for any readers working hard on a Friday afternoon, Keynes jumped at his conclusion too soon. Even Ms. O'grady, now demanding a longer weekend, is pessimistic in her timescale. A four-day week is apparently achievable “in this century”.

    I must have always known reading was very important because the first memories I have as a child deal with books. There was not one night that I don't remember mom reading me a storybook by my bedside. I was extremely inspired by the elegant way the words sounded.

    I always wanted to know what my mom was reading. Hearing mom say," I can't believe what's printed in the newspaper this morning," made me want to grab it out of her hands and read it myself. I wanted to be like my mom and know all of the things she knew. So I carried around a book, and each night, just to be like her, I would pretend to be reading.

    This is how everyone learned to read. We would start off with sentences, then paragraphs, and then stories. It seemed an unending journey, but even as a six-year-old girl I realized that knowing how to read could open many doors. When mom said," The C-A-N-D-Y is hidden on the top shelf," I knew where the candy was. My progress in reading raised my curiosity, and I wanted to know everything. I often found myself telling my mom to drive more slowly, so that I could read all of the road signs we passed.

    Most of my reading through primary, middle and high school was factual reading. I read for knowledge, and to make A's on my tests. Occasionally, I would read a novel that was assigned, but I didn't enjoy this type of reading. I liked facts, things that are concrete. I thought anything abstract(抽象的) left too much room for argument.

    Yet, now that I'm growing and the world I once knew as being so simple is becoming more complex, I find myself needing a way to escape. By opening a novel, I can leave behind my burdens and enter into a wonderful and mysterious world where I am now a new character. In these worlds I can become anyone. I don't have to write down what happened or what technique the author was using when he or she wrote this. I just read to relax.

    We're taught to read because it's necessary for much of human understanding. Reading is a vital part of my life. Reading satisfies my desire to keep learning. And I've found that the possibilities that lie within books are limitless.

    A study examining the children of people evacuated(撤离) during the WWII showed the daughters of female evacuees were up to four times more likely to suffer from serious mental health conditions compared to those whose parents stayed at home.

    In the largest enquiry ever of its kind, researchers examined the health records of 3000 children of Finnish people evacuated to Sweden during the 1941-1945 conflict with Soviet Russia. The evacuees, many of whom were at a pre-school age, were placed with foster families in Sweden and were forced to learn Swedish, later returning to Finland. The study found that the female children of these girls had an increased risk of being hospitalized for conditions such as depression. However, this was not the case with children of boys evacuated during the war.

    The study could not determine why. One possibility is that the stress of the evacuees' experience affected their psychological development in ways that influenced their parenting style. Another possibility is that the evacuees' experience resulted in epigenetic changes—changed in the way genes are expressed. For example, the researchers mentioned an earlier finding that Holocaust survivors have higher levels of methyl groups bound to the FKBP5 gene and have passed his change on to their children. This higher level of methyl groups appears to change the production of cortisol, a hormone(荷尔蒙) that controls the stress response.

    "The Finnish evacuation was intended to protect children from the harm associated with the country's wars with the Soviet Union", said study co-author Dr Torsten Santavirta, from Uppsala University.

    "Our observation of the long-term psychiatric(精神病的) risk that reached into the next generation is concerning and stresses the need to weigh benefits as well as potential risks when designing policies for child protection".