As children begin to head back to school, there are several things that you can do to make sure that your child stays healthy and performs at their peak potential during the school year.

    1). Make sure your child is up to date on their immunizations(免疫). The summer is a good time to schedule visits to the doctor's as your child is not in school, and the visit won't require that your child miss school days.

    2).Encourage proper nutrition. America faces childhood obesity(肥胖). This means that the percentage of overweight children is increasing each year, and this will place your child at risk of developing a variety of diseases when they are middle age or even young adults. You can start helping your child to become healthier by offering fruits and vegetables at home instead of calorie heavy potato chips and candy.

    3). Get your child involved in sports activities. Activities in high school such as track and cross-country are important for socialization for your child, as well as helping to improve their health. You can get your child interested in wholesome activities by discussing with them how you enjoyed similar activities in high school.

    4). Have the birds and the bees conversation with your child. Many children become sexually active in junior school and senior high school, and the sooner you discuss sex with your child the sooner they will be prepared. Tell your child that there is always the possibility of infecting a sexual disease when two people have sex; and discuss with your child the use of condoms. The sooner you start having this embarrassing situation the better.

    5). Know your child's friends. You can do this by inviting your child to bring their friends over to your house for a pizza night, or by chatting with them when they stop by your house. If you find your child's friend has a bad reputation, then you could consider introducing your child to a different network of people, such as through the girl/boy scouts. Forbidding your child from seeing a certain person may only lead them to rebel and become closer to that person.

    6). Discuss with your child the seriousness of drug use and abuse. Your child may not realize that using drugs can have serious consequences. Your child may get the false impression that drug use is his right. Explain to a child that saying no to drugs is their right, and that anybody offering them drugs is not their friend.

    7). Help your child to avoid a life long smoking addiction by discussing with them the consequences of smoking. The sad fact is that most smokers became addicted when they were in their teenage years, and are unable to quit for long periods of time and often die many years earlier due to their smoking habit which increases the risk of lung cancer, heart disease, and a variety of medical conditions. Even if you are a smoker yourself, you can discuss with your child about how damaging smoking can be on a person's health.

    8). Impress upon your child the importance of traffic rules. Tell them that it is OK to wear a seat belt in anyone's car, because it may save their life one day. If your child rides a bicycle or a skateboard, then discuss with them the importance of always wearing a helmet. As you child becomes qualified for driver's permit, you should discuss with them the importance of prevention from drinking and driving.

    9). Be cautious about signs of depression in childhood. A surprisingly large number of children may become depressed, and a small number of teenagers and children commit suicide(自杀) each year. Realize that any signs of unusual depressed mood, angry outbursts, suicidal comments, feelings of hopelessness, and loss of enjoyment of activities with friends may be signs of depression.

    situation in which they had to observe two circles on a screen.

    At first glance,price-comparison websites are an example of capitalism at its best.But it has caused fierce competition on price and eviscerated profits.Towers Watson,a consultancy,said that "unnecessary" price competition following the rise of comparison sites in Britain had cost insurers ￡1 billion a year.

    Consumers should celebrate that;the firms' losses are their gains.But there is a catch.Comparison sites introduce a new layer of costs,including their own advertising campaigns.In theory,competition in the market for comparison sites ought to keep those costs down.But David Ronayne of Warwick University argues that consumers often lose out from comparison sites.They earn a commission for each shopper who uses them for consumption such as buying insurance.That referral（委托）cost is included in the price the consumer ends up paying.If the increased costs outweigh the saving the comparison enables,consumers end up worse off.

    These worries are not just theoretical.In 2014,Britain's competition regulator found that many comparison sites were using their contracts with retailers（零售商）to ban them from offering lower prices elsewhere.That weakened rivals' incentive（对手的动机）to cut fees,because prices on their site could not fall.By keeping prices similar,the contracts also reduced the incentive for consumers to search on multiple sites,thus helping sites retain their users.

    Weaker incentives to lower commissions mean weaker incentives to lower costs,too.That might explain why comparison websites advertise so heavily,and sometimes offer free gifts to those who use them.In a recent paper,Ben Edelman of Harvard Business School and Julian Wright of the National University of Singapore argue that when a site knows that the prices merchants provide through it will always be the lowest available,it increases investment in attracting customers,safe in the knowledge that the merchants and at last consumers will bear the cost.

    Is there any way to ensure the market for price comparison is competitive?Asking consumers to check multiple websites defeats the point of using them.One solution is to have only one site,but regulate it as a public utility（功用）. Alternatively,the governments could run the site itself.But creating good search and comparison sites may be too hard for them.It is much better to acknowledge that consumers will always have to do some comparison themselves to "keep the system honest".

    Websites that compare the comparison sites can help,although it is easy to see how they could fall prey to the same problems.Any firm with captive users（被动用户）,be it a comparison site a search engine,or a social-media platform,can charge a high price for access to the eyes of its customers.For all their innovation,Internet middlemen are not unlike supermarkets.Shoppers would never imagine that a single store had the lowest price for all the items they need.

I have happy memories of trips to Europe, but my trip to Romania (罗马尼亚) was unique. When I was there as recalled, it was like being in a "James Bond" movie. My husband was born there, but his family sent him to study in Italy. Before he left, his mother told him, "As long as I write in pencil, don't come back. When I write to you in pen, it's safe to return." But she never wrote in pen.

    My husband lived a poor life in Italy. He applied to go to America, but there was a limit in number and he was rejected. He was accepted by Canada, though, and from Calgary he jumped onto a train to San Francisco. There he stayed —illegally. He became a US citizen when we got married. By then he was a charming European with a Romanian accent and the manners of a prince.

    With seven years' experience in America, a US passport, and two children later, he felt it was safe to visit Romania. He hadn't seen his mother, two sisters, and two brothers since he was sixteen. We flew to Munich, Germany; picked up the German-made car we had purchased in the States; and drove to Romania via Austria and Hungary. When we reached Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, his family was waiting outside his sister's house to greet us. After a long time of hugging, kissing, and crying, his family also hugged me, the American wife with two young children. They had great interest in me. Few Americans visited Romania at that time, and most Romanians had little chance to travel. I had brought an English-Romanian dictionary with me and managed to communicate, using only nouns, with no verbs. My Romanian improved, and the family's stock of English words increased, but mostly I spoke in broken, New York-accented Romanian. The sisters loved their gifts of skirts and purses, the brothers loved the radios, and the children loved the candy. We made side trips to the Black Sea and enjoyed sightseeing in beautiful mountains. Dining at outdoor cafes to the music of violins was fantastic with fancy flavor, but nothing was as special as family dinners.

    Romania didn't have many dry cleaners. Most homes had old-fashioned washing machines but no dryers, and it was a hot summer. My husband's relatives didn't want to risk dirtying their clothes. Their solution was as simple as it was shocking: the women only wore their bras(胸罩) and slips (衬裙) at dinner table. The men were eating without shirts. They all had jobs, so time was precious. Having dinner without proper clothes was a small inconvenience compared with the effort of washing clothes —at least in my husband's home, perhaps all across Romania. I, of course, having just met them, ate fully clothed. I washed my clothes by hand and hung them outdoors to dry.

On the last night of our three-week stay, we had a large family dinner. I was tired of washing my clothes. So I pulled my dress over my head and placed it on the chair behind me. All men and women applauded for my action. Even with my poor Romanian, I understood that they were saying, "She's part of our family now."

My children were 4 and 5 at the time, but they still have memories of that trip. They know how to say, "Good morning." and "There are apricots (杏子) on the tree." I can still say, "Do you speak Romanian?" and "I swim in the Black Sea." But most of all, I remember sitting at a long dining-room table in my bra, enjoying meatballs with fresh garlic (大蒜).

    Winslow Homer was a famous American painter. Since Art History class in college, I had always admired his works and I was lucky to see a large exhibition of his works when I was in my early 30s. It was at this event that I bought a print of his painting. “Snap the Whip.” I had it framed and until I retired from teaching it always hung in my classroom

    I thought it truly captured(捕捉) the freedom and fun of childhood. In the painting, a group of young boys are playing a game arm in arm on grass ground in front of a farm house. They are jumping and laughing wildly with great joy. One of the boys is falling down to the ground. They are not even wearing shoes!

    During my last year of teaching, there was a young woman in her first year of teaching right next door to me and we got to be good friends. She had been an art student before taking up education. Her eyes were drawn immediately to this print when she entered my room. So on my last day of teaching, after the students had left, I took the painting off the wall and walked next door and gave it to her.

    She was really surprised, but very pleased to have it. I was pleased that she liked it and all the students she would have would treasure(珍爱) it as much as I had. We found the perfect place for it on one of her walls and hung it together. Thank you for bring back this wonderful memory for me.

    Boomerang children who return to live with their parents after university can be good for families, leading to closer, more supportive relationships and increased contact between the generations, a study has found.

    The findings contradict research published earlier this year showing that returning adult children trigger a significant decline in their parents' quality of life and wellbeing.

    The young adults taking part in the study were "more positive than might have been expected about moving back home—the shame is reduced as so many of their peers are in the same position, and they acknowledged the benefits of their parents' financial and emotional support. Daughters were happier than sons, often slipping back easily into teenage patterns of behaviour, the study found.

    Parents on the whole were more uncertain, expressing concern about the likely duration of the arrangement and how to manage it. But they acknowledged that things were different for graduates today, who leave university with huge debts and fewer job opportunities.

    The families featured in the study were middle-class and tended to view the achievement of adult independence for their children as a "family project". Parents accepted that their children required support as university students and then as graduates returning home, as they tried to find jobs paying enough to enable them to move out and get on the housing ladder.

    "However", the study says, "day-to-day tensions about the prospects of achieving different dimensions of independence, which in a few extreme cases came close to conflict, characterised the experience of a majority of parents and a little over half the graduates".

    Areas of disagreement included chores, money and social life. While parents were keen to help, they also wanted different relationships from those they had with their own parents, and continuing to support their adult children allowed them to remain close.

Richard Holmes, a British author and academic, is something of a Romantic, famous for biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In his last book, "The Age of Wonder", he wrote about science and Romanticism and their common commitment to discovery. In his new book, "Falling Upwards", he combines the two again to tell the stories of Europe's early balloonists (气球飞行者).

Mr Holmes's love of balloons was aroused at a village festival and his enthusiasm is one of the book's many pleasures. He refers to the cheerful tone used in many first-hand ballooning stories, and applies it in this second-hand account. He describes men and women wrapped up in fur coats under their hydrogen-filled balloons, enjoying cold chicken and champagne and looking back to earth to see mankind "for what it really is."

Mr Holmes makes much of the strange side of ballooning, but the book is at its best when examining its more serious applications. In the American civil war, for example, both North and South put observers in balloons to spy on enemy movements. And during the Prussian attack on Paris in 1870-71， balloonists managed to fly out of the city to communicate with the French government in exile (流亡) in Tours.

"Falling Upwards" contains much of the historian's writing characteristics, such as footnotes and bibliography (文献书目), but its epilogue (后记) refers modestly to what has gone before as "a series of true balloon stories". It does touch on the more technical aspects of ballooning, and says little about the French Montgolfier brothers who are credited as its inventors. That though seems a small price to pay for such a spirited work. Mr Holmes's tale ends at the start of the 20th century when the business of flight was being handed over to the airship and the airplane.