Which boy hasn't dreamed of being a cool secret agent? The wonderful fighting abilities and the world-saving adventures are much more colourful than most people's everyday lives. Well, Cody Banks is just like any other boy, except that he is not just dreaming. He has a big secret his friends never know about. He was trained to be a spy by a special CIA programme, which was made to look like a summer camp. He learned high-speed driving, hand-to-hand fighting and the use of high-tech tools.

    After proving he could become a young hero by saving a baby from a runaway car, Banks gets his first real task. He must make friends with a popular girl at school, Natalie Connors. Then, he must spy on her father, a scientist who has developed a dangerous technology. Banks must stop a group of bad people from forcing Natalie's father into using the technology to endanger the world.

    The CIA may have taught him first-class self-defence moves, but they didn't show him how to talk to girls. Banks has zero ability when it comes to dealing with girls. How can he get around his problem and get an invitation to the girl's upcoming birthday party? Will he finally become Natalie's boyfriend and find out whatever he can about her father's work?

    Agent Cody Banks has everything that young people are interested in: big explosions, breath-taking performances and funny girl-dating experiences. It was listed No.2 in the American box office last week.

    “This story is interesting and fun for the whole family to enjoy, and especially cool for young boys,” said Paul Perkins, a film reviewer in the US.

    Head of Research

    Salary:￡55.271

    We are looking for a Head of Research to manage the CWU Research Department and Information Centre. You would be required to exercise control of all research work of the department and manage a team of three researchers and four support staff.

    The person appointed would be expected to carry out research work of a strategic nature across the range of businesses in which the CWU has or seeks membership and to contribute to the strategic thinking and direction of the union as a whole.

    You will need: proven line management skills, especially in managing and motivating a team；good research skills, holding a good degree in a related subject or other similar experience；a high level of mathematical and calculating skills；the ability to produce high quality work under pressure； a commitment to any knowledge of the trade union movement and social democratic politics； and knowledge and/or experience of the postal and/or telecommunications industry.

    To apply, please demand an application pack by emailing hr@cwu.org or by telephoning HR(Human Resources)on 020 8971 7482.When applying, please stay your source.

    Closing Date for Applications: 4th August

    Anticipated interview date: 17th August

    No agencies please

    You may not have heard of it before, but solid rain (固体雨)has been helping Mexican farmers fight droughts(干旱) for over ten years. The magic solid rain looks like sugar and it can take in water up to 500 times as its own size and keep it in the ground for up to a year.

    The story of solid rain began in 1970, when American scientists developed a product used to take in water and help keep babies' bottoms dry. However, a Mexican chemical engineer saw this magic product as an opportunity to fight the drought. He developed a different kind of the product, which could be mixed with soil and slowly feed water to crops over a long period of time. His company, Solid Rain, has been quietly selling the product to Mexican farmers for over 10 years.

    Solid rain seems to be working wonders in Mexico. However, it has not come into use around the world. Well, that's mainly because a lot of people still don't know about it. The Mexican company has invested (投资) almost nothing into marketing, relying instead on word of mouth between Mexican farmers. However, recently, they have gotten requests from other dry countries like India and Australia.

    Solid rain has received the Ecology and Environment Award, but it has also received some negative views. Dr. Linda Scott says that the product is hardly new and that there is no scientific evidence that it can hold water for a year or last in the ground for ten years. Besides, solid rain can cause more harm than good in certain conditions.

    However, real-life use seems to show that solid rain is actually of great use to their farms. Frank Torres, a former green bean farmer used to rely on it even though drought wasn't such a big issue. He said that the production had increased by 50%.

    Researchers at the University of York in England published their findings on facial recognition that, on average, people can remember as many as 5,000 faces.

    There have been many studies recently on facial recognition technology. But the authors of this study say theirs is the first time that scientists have been able to put a number to the abilities of humans to recognize faces. Rob Jenkins, leader of the research, said the researchers' study centered on "the number of faces people actually know." and were not able to discover whether there is a "limit on how many faces the brain can handle."

    Jenkins said the ability to tell individual people apart is "clearly important." In today's modern world of big cities, we meet and deal with thousands of people. The study suggests our facial recognition abilities help us to deal with the many different faces we see on the screens, as well as those we know. The results of the study give a baseline for comparing the "facial vocabulary" of humans with facial recognition software.

    Today, facial recognition technology is used in many ways, including by law enforcement agencies to prevent crime and violence. Governments use it to keep secret areas secure and, in extreme cases, control populations. Some governments use the software to watch people and find out where they go and what they do. Even Facebook uses facial recognition. For example, when you name a friend, Facebook technology may recognize the person's face from a different picture you had shared before.

    For the human study, people spent one hour writing down as many faces from their personal lives as possible. At first, they found it easy to come up with many faces. But by the end of the hour, they found it harder to think of new ones. Their change in speed let the researchers estimate when they would have run out of faces completely. 1,000 to 10,000 faces remembered. People who took part in the study were also shown thousands of photographs of famous people. Researchers asked them which ones they recognized. To make sure they knew these people, researchers required them to recognize two different photos of each famous person. The results showed that the participants knew between 1,000 and 10,000 faces.

    How do they explain such a wide range? Jenkins said one explanation may be that some people have a natural ability for remembering faces. "There are differences in how much attention people pay to faces and how well they process the information." Also it could be because of different social environments. Some people may have grown up in more populated places. So, they may have had more social contact throughout their lives.

    Researchers think age may be an interesting area for further research. “It would be interesting to see whether there is a peak age for the number of faces we know”, Jenkins said. He said it is possible that we gather more faces throughout our lifetime. But, he added, there also may be an age at which we start to find it harder to remember all of those faces.

Having a great collection of books at home doesn't really mean that you are a person who has a passion for literature and reading. It can be a family inheritance (继承) or it can be just to impress people around you about the fact that you are a person of culture. On the other hand, there are many persons who cannot afford to buy books, because some of them are quite expensive, but they usually go to libraries and spend hours reading something that interests them a lot, or just borrow books to read at home.

From my point of view, literature is very important in our lives from several points of view. For example, reading is a means of gaining culture and enriching our knowledge in different areas of activities. It can help us have a great imagination and it makes things easier when it comes to making compositions on different themes. It gives you the possibility to speak about science, even if you don't work in this field, or you can express your opinion about a political aspect, just because you have read something connected to that.

Secondly, literature offers us the possibility to enter the world of imagination, and to leave apart the real one for a couple of hours. We come to meet kings and queens many years ago, dream in the world of the rich or imagine how life will be in the future. Sometimes, we identify ourselves with the characters in the stories we read and they can give us some clues to solve our problems and how to react in certain circumstances.

To conclude, I would like to say that literature is the perfect means to enrich our culture, to express correctly and have a rich vocabulary, to be able to interfere (干涉) in conversations in different fields of interest and to really be considered an erudite person.