Feifei, an 11-year-old boy from Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, suffered from a sudden acute eye disease which has almost led to blindness. The disease was caused by excessive（过度的）eye fatigue（疲劳）during the winter vacation, during which he played computer games for continuous 10 days and nights.

    Many youngsters in China nowadays are increasingly addicted to computer games and other electronic products. This is followed by a series of health problems, with the most typical case being myopia, or nearsightedness.

    According to the latest research report released by the World Health Organization (WHO),the myopia rate among Chinese teenagers ranks first in the world—70 percent of high school and college students. The rate is nearly 40 percent in primary school students, while it is only 10 percent for their peers in the United States.

    There are at least 10 million people in China with severe myopia, and they are likely to get pathological（病理性的）myopia in middle age. Pathological myopia can't be treated with glasses or surgery, and it is one of the biggest factors that lead to blindness, Xu Xun, director of the ophthalmology（眼科学）department at Shanghai General Hospital, pointed out.

    Experts explain that two major factors lead to the high rate of myopia among Chinese people. One is high academic pressure, and the other one is excessive use of electronic devices over a long period of time .Genetics, on the other hand, are not the main reason, as only 20 percent of Chinese people had myopia in the 1960s.

    "Teenagers are now faced with severe academic pressure, which means they often study without natural light. This increases their risk of becoming nearsighted," Xu said.

    Experts suggest that youngsters maintain a proper balance between study and rest so as to protect their eyesight, and parents should play an active role in the process.

Do you like spicy food?

    What's your opinion on spicy food? Some people cannot handle even the smallest amount of chili-red pepper-in their dinner while others can't get enough of it.

    Scientists have long been puzzled by why some people love chili while others loathe it. Plenty of research has been done on the subject, dating as far back as the 1970s. Previous results showed that a love of chili is related to childhood experiences, and cultural influences affect our taste buds too. But the latest study has found that a person's love of spicy food may be linked to his or her personality more than anything else, CBC News reported.

    "We have always assumed that liking drives intake-we eat what we like and we like what we eat. But no one has actually directly bothered to connect these personality traits with intake of chili peppers,"said Professor John Hayes from Pennsylvania State University, who led the study.

    But before you look at the study, you should first know that "spicy" is not a taste, unlike sour, sweet, bitter and salty. It is, in fact, a burning sensation that you feel on the surface of your tongue. This got scientists thinking that maybe a love of spicy food is brought about by people's longing for thrill, something they usually get from watching action movies or riding a roller coaster.

    In the study, 97 participants, both male and female, were asked to fill out questionnaires about certain traits of their personality, for example, whether they like new experiences or tend to avoid risks. They were then given a glass of water with capsaicin, the plant chemical that makes a chili burn, mixed into it.

    By comparing the answers to the questionnaire and what participants said they felt about the spicy water, researchers found that those who tended to enjoy action movies or take risks were about six times more likely to enjoy the spicy water.

    Interestingly, we used to believe that the reason some people can withstand spicy food is that their tongues have become less sensitive to it. However, this latest study has found otherwise. "It's not that it doesn't burn as badly, it's that you actually learn to like the burn," Hayes explained.

    According to the Guinness World Records, a Sitka Spruce (锡特卡云杉) growing on New Zealand's southernmost island is the loneliest tree on Earth. Not only is it the only tree on Campbell Island, but the nearest other tree can be found over 200 km away on the Auckland Islands.

    Bluff, Campbell Island is one of the harshest places in the world. With strong winds blowing almost all year round and less than 600 hours of sunshine, it's not exactly a good place to live in, which is probably why, except for occasional visits by research scientists, it, has remained deserted for over half a century.

    It is believed that the Sitka Spruce on Campbell Island was planted by Lord Ranfurly, a former governor of New Zealand, sometime between 1901 and 1907. It's not clear why he decided to plant there, but according to some sources he said that the island was not productive, and took the first step to cover it with forestry. His idea was never going to work because of the harsh climate of the area, but somehow the Sitka Spruce survived.

    Apart from its reputation as the loneliest tree on Earth, the Sitka Spruce of Campbell Island has a series of other particularities. First of all its shape makes it look more like a giant cauliflower than a tree. This is believed to have been caused by repeatedly cutting down its trunk every year, for decades. Another interesting thing about the world's loneliest tree is that, though it is over 100 years old, it has never produced cones (球果).

    Who knew a lonely tree growing 200 km away from its nearest cousins could be so interesting?

    A court battle between German and Israeli archives （档案馆） over Kafka's manuscripts （手稿）raised literary, not just legal, questions. At the time of his death, Kafka hardly seemed like a candidate for world fame. He had a minor reputation in German literary circles. He published a few stories in magazines, but they received little attention.

    After he died in 1924, his friend Max Brod collected, edited and published his works - despite Kafka's own instructions in his will ordering the manuscripts to be destroyed - thus making Kafka a household name after his death. When the Nazis invaded Prague, Brod escaped to Israel, bringing the manuscripts with him. When he died in 1968, his manuscripts, together with those of Kafka, were transferred to his secretary Esther Hoffe.

    Even though Brod asked in his will that the manuscripts be given to a public archive, Hoffe sold some of them abroad for a great deal of money. Many of them eventually made it to the German Literature Archive. In 2007, she died and left her properties to her daughters. Then the case about the manuscripts started after the death of one of her daughters. The court said Hoffe had no rights, and could not have any such rights for the documents Brod took from Kafka's apartment after his death.

    Ironically, Kafka's stubborn homelessness and non-belonging in his works were accurately what ensured his place at the center of 20^th-century literature. W. H. Auden proposed that Kafka was to the cold, absurd 20^th century what Dante or Shakespeare had been to their times - the writer who captured the spirit of the age. That is why, in the end, it hardly matters whether Kafka's manuscripts stay in Germany or Israel. What counts is that we are all living in Kafka's world.

    The Notre Dame fire has been put out, but its spire and a large portion of its wooden roof have been damaged. The terrible destruction causes a sudden sharp pain to people around the world. On Chinese social media network Wechat a common comment on the disaster is: "What a pity that we cannot see the damaged parts of the wonder anymore."

    But the good news is that there is at least one way of seeing them, namely via a video game called Assassin's Creed: Unity. In this game, the player can travel to one city after another and enter the buildings exactly like what they are in reality, and see Notre Dame as it was before the fire. Further, with virtual reality technology, which is already quite mature, one can even look around the undamaged Notre Dame as if it is still there. Maybe digital technology could help to better protect architectural cultural heritage.

    The idea of digitizing ancient buildings, making digital models of them so their data can be saved, dates back to the 1990s and the necessary technology has continued to advance since then. By scanning the ancient buildings with lasers, building 3D models with multiple images, as well as measuring everything precisely, engineers can make a copy as accurate as the real one.

    As computers and smartphones are hugely popular, the digital replica（复制品）has great use value  First, it allows tourists to feel the cultural relics without touching them, which helps protect them. The virtual tour of Dunhuang Grottoes in Gansu Province is a good example of this as tourists can view the paintings without standing near them. Furthermore, it can make the digitized cultural relics more famous by spreading awareness about them via the Internet. In 2000, a virtual tour of the Great Wall became very popular at the Hannover World Expo, which increased the number of foreign tourists visiting the site in the following years. Above all, it preserves all the information of the cultural relics. Even if the original ones are damaged one day, people can still know what they were like and can build a replica if desired.

    Of course, however precise a model is, it is not the original. Time is the biggest threat to a country's architectural heritage, which will always become ruins with the passing of time. Maybe we will have better technologies in the future, but the digital technology offers a practical way to preserve architectural cultural heritage at the moment.

Confucius was born into a middle class family in Lu State, an area with the modern city of Qufu, in China's Shandong Province. Now, he {#blank#}1{#/blank#} (remember) for his teachings, which, along with the works of his students，formed the rule of Confucianism (儒学) many {#blank#}2{#/blank#} (year) after his passing away.

Confucius also lived {#blank#}3{#/blank#} active political life. From his job as Minister of Crime, he took part in a campaign (运动) to distance Lu from the rule of the state instead of {#blank#}4{#/blank#} (work) for the central government. However, the plan failed. After a short period of being sent to live in another country, Confucius could finally return to Lu state {#blank#}5{#/blank#} (spend) the rest of his life as a teacher of philosophy.

Even up to the time of Confucius's {#blank#}6{#/blank#} (die), his teachings were not {#blank#}7{#/blank#} (wide) accepted in China, and most of {#blank#}8{#/blank#} (they) were lost when the emperor Qin ordered the burning of Confucius's books.

Yet, his philosophical (哲学的) ideas survived during the later Han Dynasty. Emperor Han Wudi,{#blank#}9{#/blank#} was inspired by the social and political wisdom of Confucius, accepted Confucianism and applied his systems of morality everywhere from classrooms {#blank#}10{#/blank#} law courts. The teachings of Confucius still spread far across China and the Far East.