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   The English are often described as unfriendly people who don't talk to strangers (陌生人). But not London taxi drivers. I once asked one cabby to describe his life to me and he didn't stop talking until I arrived home half an hour later. He told me many interesting stories and this is one of them.”Some strange things happen late at night. The other day I was taking a woman home from a party. She had her little dog with her. When we got to her house, she found that she'd lost her key. So, I waited in the cab with her dog while she climbed in through the window.”

    “I waited and waited. After hour of ringing the bell I decided to find out what was going on. I tied the dog to a tree and started to climb in through the window: The next thing I knew was that the police came. They thought I was to rob the house! Luckily, the woman came downstairs. She'd gone to sleep and forgotten about me and the dog. I was in such a hurry to get away that I forgot to ask her for the fare.”

    People who often eat nuts appear to live longer, according to the latest study of its kind. The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggested the greatest benefit was in those eating them on their daily diet.

    Eating nuts was linked to a healthier lifestyle including being less likely to smoke or be overweight and more likely to exercise. The British Heart Foundation said more research was needed to prove the link, “While this is an interesting link, we need further research to make sure if it's the nuts that protect heart health, or other sides of people's lifestyle .”

    The study followed nearly 120,000 people for 30 years. The more regularly people ate nuts, the less likely they were to die during the study. People eating nuts once a week were 11% less likely to have died during the study than those who never ate nuts. Lead researcher Dr. Charles Fuchs, from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Brigham and Women's Hospital, said, “The most obvious benefit was a decrease of 29%in deaths from heart disease, but we also saw a significant reduction-11%- in the danger of dying from cancer.”

    They suggest nuts are lowering cholesterol(胆固醇). and insulin resistance(胰岛素抗性). Nuts contain unsaturated fat(不饱和脂肪), protein(蛋白质) and several kinds of vitamins and minerals and they can take the place of snacks like chocolate bars, cakes and biscuits.

    Victoria Taylor, senior expert at the British Heart Foundation, said, “This study shows close connection between regularly eating a small handful of nuts and a lower risk of death from heart disease.” Choosing plain, unsalted foods rather than sweet, salted, or chocolate-covered will keep your salt and sugar intake down.

    Are you so sure your mistakes are just mistakes? Or could they be building blocks to a success beyond any you imagined?

    When my friend Dorothy goes home to visit her family each Thanksgiving, her mother serves the traditional “mistake salad”. The dish was born many years ago, Dorothy explains, when mother was using a cookbook to make a salad. In the process, by mistake, mother included half the salad ingredients (原料) from a recipe (食谱) on the left side of the open cookbook, and half the ingredients from a different salad recipe on the opposite page. Everyone enjoyed the salad so much that she continued to serve it every year. So it was really not a mistake at all.

    Then there was the man named Alfred, who invented dynamite (炸药). When Alfred's brother died, the city newspaper mistook his brother for him, saying in the news that the dead's most famous act was the creation of bombs (炸弹). Surprised to consider that his name would forever be connected with destruction, Alfred wanted to leave a more positive impression on people. So he set a prize for people who made contributions to world peace. Now the Nobel Prize, set up by Alfred Nobel, is the most respected prize in the world.

    Everything is part of something bigger, and so are mistakes. In his brilliant book Illusions, Richard Bach explains that every problem comes to you with a gift. If you only fix your attention on what went wrong, you miss the gift. If you are willing to look deeper and ask for the bright, the problem will disappear. You are left only with the learning, and you go forward on your path.

    Explorers had been landing in America for some time before English settlers arrived in what is now Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. But it was in that spot on the James River that English colonization(殖民化) began, and with it, the history of America.

    James I was the king of England at that time, and he had granted approval for a group of businessmen who were part of the Virginia Company to settle in this new land. In all, 214 people set sail for America. They reached it on May 14, 1607. Very soon after they landed, the English found themselves under attack from Algonquins, a native American tribe(部落) who had been living in that area for some time. The English managed to drive off the attackers and stay there.

Under the leadership of Captain John Smith, the English built a fort(城堡)and other buildings designed to protect their new colony. They also found friendly native Americans, like Powhatan, who was willing to trade with them.

    There was a terrible winter in 1609 and only 60 of the 214 settlers survived, which was also hard on Powhatan's tribe and other neighboring native Americans.

    One of the main crops grown by the English settlers was tobacco, which they sold to native Americans and to people back in England, beginning in 1612. Tobacco became a very popular crop because it was easy to grow and because it brought in so much money.

    Once the money started flowing in regularly, the Jamestown colony grew, as did other settlements in Virginia and in other states along the eastern coastline.

    America's first elected assembly (议会), the House of Burgesses, met in Jamestown for the first time on July 30, 1619. The year 1619 also saw another significant development: the first arrival of black workers on boats from Africa. These men and women were originally servants, who worked a small piece of land for a few years and then got to keep the land as owners. Jamestown was also the capital of Virginia and remained so until 1698.

    Teenagers around the world can be happy with the news that the brain will ignore parents' order when they use their smart phones. A new scientific study from the University College London has shown that humans may temporarily go deaf when they're focusing on something visual (视觉的) at the same time.

    The researchers played the normal-volume sounds in the background. And 13 volunteers experienced inattentional deafness as their visual tasks became increasingly difficult. "We found that when volunteers were performing the difficult visual task, they were unable to hear sounds that they would normally hear," Maria Chait said in a statement. "The brain scans showed that people didn't filter out the sounds on purpose. They were not actually hearing them in the first place."

    The findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that the centre of sights and the center of sounds share limited resources. Inattentional deafness is a common everyday experience and the study explains why, according to UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience Professor Nili Lavie.

    If you try to talk to someone focusing on a book, game, or television program and don't receive a response, they aren't necessarily ignoring you. They simply might not hear you at all. This could also explain why you might not hear your bus or train stop being announced if you're lost in your phone, book or newspaper. However, some loud sounds will still be able to break through.

    Some situations could become possibly dangerous when the quieter ones go unheard. As you can imagine, in the operating room, when a doctor concentrates on his work, he might not hear the equipment beeping. It also applies to drivers who center on complex directions. Fortunately, experts have given us some useful tips on preventing such situations.

    Words and the way we use them offer a rare window on social and cultural trends. Kory Stamper and Peter Sokolowski know that better than most.

    The Merriam-Webster(韦氏词典) lexicographers(词典编纂者) are part of a team that edits the dictionary. In a recent interview, Sokolowski and Stamper talked about their job and what the way we use words says about us collectively.

    So to know more about them, observers of the language, maybe we should start with some background.

    What is a lexicographer?

    Sokolowski: A lexicographer is a person who writes or edits a dictionary. The job of a dictionary editor is to prepare and present research about language. One of our former editors-in- chief said, "Tell the truth about words," and that sums it up for me.

    What do you guys do all day?

    Stamper: The two main duties of a lexicographer are reading and defining. We read everything: books, journals, blogs, phone books, take-out menus, and so on. What we're looking for are words that catch our eye. We record the context of these words and information about the sources. Those records are added to a database, and they are the raw material we use in writing definitions.

    When we are writing or revising a dictionary, most of our time is spent defining. We define a word according to how it is used in the recorded context, deciding whether the usage has been covered by our dictionary. Once this is done, you look at the new words and new senses and draft a definition.

    Drafting definitions requires some training, some experience and a lot of concentration. It's very, very quiet on the editorial floor.

    How closely do the most looked-up words on your online dictionary seem to be related to the news or trends?

    Stamper: When our dictionary went online back in 1996, we could see for the first time which were the most looked-up words in English: Affect, effect and ubiquitous were the top words. It was fascinating to us­dictionary editors spend so much time writing definitions but never could have known if anyone ever read them. We could follow what people were thinking about according to what words they were looking up. Thanks to our online dictionary, we had data.