Recently, a painting of actress Elizabeth Taylor, which was drawn by American artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol, sold for US $63 million. Another simple black-and-white image of a Coca-Cola bottle sold for US $35 million. But the all-time record for a Warhol painting is $100 million for a piece titled “Eight Elvises”. What's amazing is not that the pieces sold for so much, but the fact that they are not what you would call traditional art. They are “pop art”, art based on simple images of things and people from advertising, movies, music and day-to-day life.

    Born in the 1920s, Warhol grew up mostly separated from other children due to (由于) health problems. He spent a lot of his time alone drawing and then went on to study art in college. He began his career as a commercial (商业的) artist, creating pictures for magazine articles and newspaper ads. That inspired him to experiment with pop art and he hosted America's first pop art exhibition in the 1960s. The show met with a lot of discussion with some people saying that what he was doing was not art.

    Warhol followed his first works with a series we are all familiar with — paintings of Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo soap pad boxes, and portraits (肖像) of famous people. Soon after, Warhol stopped creating his own artwork. Instead, he had assistants and other artists create them at his studio called “The Factory”. Warhol wanted to show the world that art doesn't have to be complex or original; it can be created by anyone using ordinary things.

    Today, Warhol's work is unmistakable in its uniqueness. No matter how you may feel about his work, one thing cannot be argued. He introduced the world to a whole new art form, inspiring future generations of artists, and eventually becoming one of the most famous and successful pop art artists in the world.

    In today's busy and competitive world, we all lead incredibly stressful lives. When stress becomes overwhelming, it can affect our mood and productivity.{#blank#}1{#/blank#} The good news is that it is manageable and can be reduced, or even relieved completely.

    Enter the world of books. Feeling stressed out? Pick up your favorite book and leave the reality and worries behind. It is the most effective way to relax and overcome stress.{#blank#}2{#/blank#} Getting lost in a book before bedtime can calm your mind and prepare your body for a good night's sleep.

    Connect with people. Another way to successfully beat stress is meeting with friends. Friends and loved ones are important to any healthy lifestyle. If you're feeling a little overwhelmed and just can't seem to shake it off, call your best friend or a member of your family and talk to them.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}

    Walk it off. You can also effectively relieve yourself of stress by simply taking a walk around your neighborhood.{#blank#}4{#/blank#} There's a whole new world up there that you never seem to notice while rushing to work or talking to someone. Take a moment to admire a new building or a balcony somewhere high up that reminds you of a castle from your favorite movie. Enjoy your time alone and seize every moment of it.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Nothing brings you back on track like a good laughter. It is the most powerful antidote(良方) to stress and it brings joy into your life. Laughing brings people together and drives away all stress-related problems as if they never existed. It is absolutely the best medicine there is, and it will keep you both physically and emotionally healthy.

A. Laugh it off.

B. Take some medicine.

C. As you walk, remember to look up.

D. Reading may also help you sleep better.

E. Your hobby could be reading books, or even writing one.

F. But most importantly, it can affect our physical and mental health.

G. The conversation with a close person will immediately make you feel better.

    An experiment was carried out at British school into the performance of new pupils. At the start of the year, the pupils were each given a rating, ranging from "excellent prospect" to "unlikely to do well". These were totally untrue ratings and did not reflect how well the pupils had previously performed. However, these ratings were given to the teachers. At the end of the year, the experimenters compared the pupils' performance with the ratings. Despite their real abilities, there was an astonishingly high connection between performance and ratings. It seems that people perform as well as we expect them to.

    The Self-fulfilling Effect is also known as the Pygmalion Effect. This comes from an old Greek story. The story was also the basis of George Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion", later turned into the musical "My Fair Lady". In Shaw's play, Professor Henry Higgins claims he can turn a Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle into a duchess. But, as Eliza herself points out to Higgins' friend Pickering, it isn't what she learns or does that determines whether she will become a duchess, but how she's treated.

    The implication (含义) of the Pygmalion Effect for leaders and managers is massive. It means that the performance of your team depends less on them than it does on you. The performance you get from people is no more or less than what you expect, which means you must always expect the best. As Goethe said, "Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be."

    A black hole is created when a large star burns out. Like our sun, stars are unbelievably hot furnaces(熔炉) that burn their own matter as fuel. When most of the fuel is used up, the star begins to die.

    The death of a star is not a quiet event. First there is a huge explosion. As its outer layer is blasted off into space, the dying star shines as brightly as a billion suns.

    After the explosion, gravity pulls in what's left of the star. As the outside of the star sinks toward the center, the star gets smaller and smaller. The material the star is made of becomes tightly packed together. A star is so solid that a teaspoon of matter from it weighs billions of pounds.

    The more the star shrinks(收缩), the stronger the gravity inside it becomes. Soon the star is very tiny, and the gravity pulling it in is unbelievably strong. In fact, the gravity is so strong that it even pulls light into the star! Since all the light is pulled in, none can go out. The star becomes black when there is no light. Then a black hole is born!

    That's what we know about black holes. What we don't know is this: What happens inside a black hole after the star has been squeezed into a tiny ball? Does it keep getting smaller and smaller forever? Such a possibility is hard to imagine.

    But if the black hole doesn't keep shrinking, what happens to it? Some scientists think black holes are like doorways to another world. They say that as the star disappears from our universe, it goes into another universe. In other words a black hole in our universe could turn into a "white hole" in a different universe. As the black hole swallows(吞噬) light, the white hole shines brightly--somewhere else. But where? A different place, perhaps, or a different time--many years in the past or future.

    Could you travel through a black hole? Right now, no. Nothing we know of could go into a black hole without being crushed(挤压). So far the time being, black hole must remain a mystery.

Black holes are a mystery--but that hasn't stopped scientists from dreaming about them. One scientist suggested that in the future we might make use of the power of black holes. They would supply all of Earth's energy needs, with plenty to spare. Another scientist wondered if a black hole could some day be used to swallow earthly waste--a sort of huge waste disposal(处理) in the sky!

    Metal-organic frameworks(MOFs) are compounds that are set to solve some tough challenges: producing water in the desert, removing greenhouse gases from the air and storing dangerous gases more safely.

    The Arizona desert is really dry. Anyone stuck in it without water would die from dehydration (脱水) within three days. Unless, that is, they had one of Omar Yaghi's next-generation water harvesters. Although daytime humidity(湿度)is only about 10 per cent, this rises to 40 per cent at night, which means there's enough water in the atmosphere to support life — if it can be transformed into liquid form.

    That's exactly what Yaghi's device does. It's a box about the size of a small microwave oven designed to suck the humidity from the air at night and turn it into drinking water the next day using only the heat of the sun as its power source. What makes it work is a special material called a metal-organic framework (MOF), which at normal temperatures attracts water molecules (分子) onto its surface of its internal pores(细孔). Warm it up and the water is released, each harvest producing one-third of a cup of pure drinking water.

    "With further improvements, a device, the size of a washing machine, could produce enough water for the basic needs of a household," says Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California. One-third of the world's population lacks safe drinking water; for them such a device could be a lifesaver.

    These crystalline cluster(结晶群)of metals, such as aluminum or magnesium, linked by organic molecules can be made into materials with an extremely high absorption ability, attracting specific molecules to their surface. In this way, MOFs cling to a variety of liquids and gases.

MOFs work thanks to their unique structure—large quantities of nanometer-sized internal spaces. In fact one MOF has so many pores that they would cover an area as large as six football fields. MOFs are also extremely stable light and have many different uses: their molecular structure can be varied to attract specific molecules, such as water, and their pores can be designed to best store them. Adding a small amount of heat or pressure causes the MOF to release what it is holding. More than 70,000 different MOFs have been produced to date for various applications.

We credit Socrates with the insight that "the unexamined life is not worth living," and that to "know thyself" is the path to true wisdom.

But when it comes to introspection (内省), you might easily slip into the "rumination" (沉思) mode. This pattern is likely to cause you to become stuck in the rut of your own thoughts and absorbed in the emotions that might lead you to a wrong way. Research has also shown that people who are likely to ruminate are often at a substantially increased risk of depression.

Instead, scientific research suggests that you should adopt an ancient method favored by the likes of Julius Caesar, known as "illeism" which was coined in 1809 from the Latin "ille" meaning "he". The point of adopting this third person thinking is that such a small change can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see your biases and helping you know the limits of your understanding of the problem at hand.

A study finds that illeism can also bring long-term benefits to wise reasoning (including elements like taking the perspective of others, recognizing uncertainty, and so on). The finding is the brainchild of Igor Grossmann, a psychologist. According to Grossmann, wise reasoning had long been considered too vague for scientific enquiry. In one of his earlier experiments, he established that as with IQ, the scores of wise reasoning could be achieved and were meaningful.

Grossmann's latest research team asked nearly 300 participants to describe a challenging social situation, and two psychologists graded them on different aspects of wise reasoning. The participants then had to keep a diary for four weeks. Each day, they had to describe a situation they'd just experienced, such as a disagreement with someone. Half were prompted to do so in the first person, while the others were encouraged to describe their situations from a third person perspective. At the end of the study, all participants repeated the wise reasoning test.

While the control group showed no overall change in their wise reasoning scores, those using illeism improved on their perspective taking and capacity to find a compromise.

Grossmann's work continues to prove that the subject of wisdom is worthy of experimental studies, indicating wiser reasoning is within everyone's power.