Grace, usually known as the Home of Microsoft, is inside an office building in Redmond, Washington. Once you come into the building, you will feel that you're in a modern and future home.

      When you enter the building, Grace's voice, coming from a hidden speaker, tells you your messages. In the kitchen, you set a bag of flour(面粉) on a flat stone table. Grace sees what you're doing and makes a menu of flour-based foods on the table. Once you choose one, Grace gives you ingredients(配料).

There's also a notice board in the kitchen made of “intelligent(智能的) cloth” that works like a touch screen computer. You can deal with postcards and invitations and surf the net with the touch of a finger. The invitations could be encoded(编码). You can deal with them on the computer. It's part of Microsoft's Smart Personal Objects Technology, whose aim is to make every object more efficient(有效率的).

      “The day when your house becomes a member of your family is not far,” says Pam Heath, a manager of Microsoft. At the Andersen Windows Company, Jay Libby imagines that windows made of intelligent glass can be changed into TVs.

      “Nobody wants a television set,” says Libby. “What you want is the service it provides.” If the TV isn't improved, it will disappear in the future.

Home entertainment is one consideration for the future. At the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, scientists are designing systems that will allow old people to live better on their own. So Grandma's home can be cleverly designed to recognize(识别) her ways of waking, sleeping and movement. Family members will be told any change by their computers.

阅读理解

Every single one of us can help to deal with climate change and prepare for the effects.

We all have an effect

on the environment through our use of resources (资源) and burning fossil fuels for everyday activities such as driving cars and heating our homes. If we all do our best to protect our environment, then we can make a real difference.

Consider the environmental effects of:

1       the energy used in your home

2       the way you travel

3       the food you eat

Do everything you can to reduce your carbon footprint (足迹) and not only will you be making fewer effects on the environment, but you511 probably find that you'll also save money and lead a healthier life.

Increasing water efficiency in your home reduces the amount of energy used for water treatment and can save money and fight against climate change at the same time.

Other things you can do

Here's a list of some simple things you can do that will help reduce your carbon footprint:

1       insulate (使隔热) your home

2       turn down your central heating by one degree (度数)

3       use energy efficient lighting

4       try not to fly

5       share a car with others

6       ride your bike for short journeys

7       eat local, seasonal, fresh, unprocessed (未加工的) food

8       reduce the amount of waste you produce and reuse or recycle as much as you can

    Height is just one of the thousands of features your genes decide. In fact, because you have two parents, your genes provide you a height that usually lands somewhere between the height of each parent. If both your parents are tall, then most probably you will be tall, too, but if you have questions about how tall you're going to be, ask your doctor if he or she can help you find it out.

    But genes don't decide everything. For example, eating an unhealthy diet can keep you from growing to your full potential(潜力). Getting plenty of sleep and enough exercise will help you grow to the expected height.

    No doubt you're wondering how fast you should grow. It depends. There's no perfect or right answer. Generally speaking, kids grow about 2 inches (6 centimeters) a year between age 3 and the time when they start puberty (when your body starts changing and becoming more grown up).

    Your doctor will know how your growth has been going over the years. Two centimeters here and 2 inches there are not nearly as important as the height you're at now, how you've been growing up to this point, and what other changes your body may be going through.

    Don't be scared if you seem to have grown a lot in a very short time. Everyone has a growth spurt（高峰）during____The age for starting puberty is about 10 for girls and about 11 for boys. But it can be earlier or later —between 7 and 13 for girls and 9 and 15 for boys.

    You'll usually begin to notice that you're growing faster about a year or so after your body starts to show the first changes of puberty.

    When we talk about the universe, we mean not only the earth, the sun and the moon, but also the stars and space between them. There are millions of stars in our sky. The sun is one of them. Around it there are eight big planets moving, including the earth. The moon is our nearest neighbor in space. If you look at the sky on a clear night, it is possible to see about 3, 000 stars. They look small, but they are really very big hot balls of burning（燃烧着的）gas. Some of them arc huge（巨大的）, but others are much smaller like our planet Earth. The biggest stars are very bright, but they can only live for a short time. Every day new stars are born and old stars die.

    All the stars are very far away. The light from the nearest star（except the sun）takes more than four years to reach the earth.

    Hundreds of years ago, people used stars, like the North Star, to know which direction（方向）to travel in.

Today you can still see that star.