The aggressive spread of market economics and communication technologies~often under the control of Western multinational companies—brings new challenges to local cultures and values in non-Western societies. Sometimes it seems as if a tidal wave of the worst Western culture is creeping across the globe like a giant strawberry milkshake spill oat and over the planet, with a flavor that is distinctly sweet, sickly and apparently homogeneous (同质的).

    For some, especially the young, change may mean escape from oppressive traditions. It may also bring new opportunities for cultures to be combined in creative ways. However, there is genuine cause for concern about the rate at which cultures are being worn away in such a globalized world.

    Perhaps by far the most important far-reaching effect of cultural globalization is the commercialization of culture, which has a disturbing impact on local people's existing values. They are increasingly bombarded with new images, new music, new clothes and new values. The familiar and old are to be abandoned. While there was cultural change long before globalization, there is a danger that much will be lost simply because it is not valued by global markets. In West Africa for example, traditional values have been overtaken by Coca-Cola culture which the local people don't yet have the values to deal with successfully.

    Another common aspect of the globalized culture is that it pursues (追求) the same “one size fits all" American ideal. The result of this cultural process of homogenization is that a large section of the world's population dreams of living like Cosby & Co. or like the characters in any other stereotype American soap opera. In addition, the dream of living a better life causes thousands of people to move to already overcrowded cities whose population has boomed by millions within the last decades. The majority of these new immigrants end up in slums leading to poverty, pollution and misery.

    Such gradual aggression against people's existing values and cultures has a destructive impact on their sense of who they are, what they want and what they respect. It attacks spiritual values and faith traditions. The accumulative (累积的)effect in non-Western societies is a crisis of cultural confidence, combined with the increased economic uncertainty and crime which global integration (一体化)may bring. This creates real problems for social stability» whether it is at the level of nation, community or family.

    In conclusion, cultural globalization，or worldwide McDonaldization, destroys diversity and displaces the opportunity to sustain decent life through a mixture of many different cultures. It is more a consequence of power concentration in the global media and manufacturing companies than the people's own wish to abandon their cultural identity and diversity,

New Reasons to Exercise

    It's a cruel reality that exercising is not a reliable way to lose weight and keep it off. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Here are the benefits of regular exercise.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    A new study had found that just a short period of exercise can help improve the ability to remember things in the hours that follow. The report says, “Exercising four hours after learning a task can help people remember that task in the long term”

    It may keep off depression.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Researchers found that women who exercised regularly reported about 50% fewer depressive signs than women who didn't exercise as much. And the more the women reported exercising, the less likely they were to have signs of depression.

    It can control appetite.(食欲)

    Exercise may be the key to controlling your appetite . A study found that people who exercised for 15 minutes after doing mental work ate 100 fewer calories than people who did mental work and then remained seated. Exercise has the ability to increase available fuel sources in the body that may signal to the brain. “{#blank#}4{#/blank#}I don't need to fill myself with food,” says study author William H. Neumeirer.

    It increases energy.

    In a recent report, men who cycled for 20 minutes experienced a 166% increase in self-reported energy levels, compared with a 15% increase when they sat and did nothing for the same amount of time.{#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A.It improves memory.

B.It has mind-body benefits.

C.Here is the energy source I need.

D.We do the work at the office each day.

E.Working out regularly might prevent depression.

F.But that doesn't mean you should give up the effort.

G.If you need a reason to work out, energy increase is a worthwhile one.

    Chinese researchers say they have come up with a simple way to find out a person's biological age —how much the body has aged physically – through a urine (尿) test.

    Their findings will help researchers conduct numbers of ageing studies and even predict a person's risk of age-related diseases, according to a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Ageing Neuroscience.

    Another paper by researchers at the Beijing Hospital and the West China Hospital in Chengdu, Sichuan province, said on Tuesday that people aged at different rates due to changes in their genetic make-up and their environment.

    Chronological age – which is based on one's birth date —was not an exact measure of biological age so a more exact method was needed, the team said.

    Ageing is driven by the lifelong gradual accumulation(积累) of a broad variety of molecular (分子) faults in the body's cells. The team said they had identified a matter 8-oxoGsn that indicated increases in oxidative (氧化性) damage in urine as people's bodies aged.

    Cai Jianping, a co-author at the Beijing Hospital, said: “As we age, we suffer increasing oxidative damage and so the levels of oxidative matters increase in our body.” The team tested the levels of 8-oxoGsn in urine samples from 1,228 Chinese people aged two to 90 and concluded the marker helped accurately determine the stage of biological ageing in adults.

    They had previously found that 8-oxoGsn levels also increased with age in the urine of animals such as mice.

    The team has also developed a rapid analysis technique called ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography(层析法), which can process up to 10 urine samples an hour, according to the study.

    Nobel prize winners sometimes display as much uniqueness when deciding how to spend their prize money as they did on the work that won them the award in the first place.

    When Sir Paul Nurse won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2001, he decided to upgrade his motorbike. A fellow winner in 1993, Richard Roberts, installed a croquet lawn in front of his house. Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, who won in 2004, said the prize meant "financial independence."

    Lars Heikensten, executive director of the Nobel Foundation, said there were no obvious shopping trends among winners.

    "I think it depends a lot on which country they come from, their personal finances... what kind of incomes they have when they get the prize," he said.

    Real estate, however, is a popular option, at least among those willing to reveal what they spend the money on. Phillip Sharp, the American co-winner of the 1993 medicine prize, decided to splash out on a 100-year-old Federal style house. "I took that money and bought a little bit bigger house... It's a beautiful old place," he told AFP(法新社), adding that "The money is a nice part of the process", but "the important thing about the prize is the recognition."

    For winners of the peace prize the decision is often more clear-cut, as the honor tends to go to politicians, organizations and activists who are under more public supervision. Many, like US President Barack Obama in 2009 and the European Union in 2012, donate to charities.

    Literature winners tend to be more private about how they use the money, but the choice is often equally straightforward. "Even if Nobel-winning authors are quite well known, many of them will not have made much money from writing," said Anna Gunder, a Nobel literature expert at Uppsala University. While the prize might keep the wolf from the door for some years, giving them freedom to write, it can also briefly have the opposite effect. "It really changes their careers… During the first year after they've won they often write less, but they generally continue after a year or two," said Gunder.

    That little "a" with a circle around it that is found in e-mail addresses is most commonly referred to as the "at" symbol. Surprisingly though, there is no official, universal name for this sign. There are lots of strange terms to describe the @ symbol.

Before it became the fixed symbol for e-mail, the symbol was mostly used to represent the cost or weight of something. For instance, if you bought 6 apples, you might write it as 6 apples @ $1.11 each.

    With the introduction of e-mail came the popularity of the @ symbol. The @ symbol separates a person's online user name from his mail server address, for instance joe@uselessknowledge.com. Its widespread use on the Internet made it necessary to put this symbol on keyboards in countries that had never seen or used the symbol before. As a result, there is really no official name for this symbol.

    The actual origin of the @ symbol remains unknown. History tells us that the @ symbol came from the tired hands of the monks(僧侣) in the Middle Ages. During the Middle Ages when there were no printing presses, every letter of a word had to be copied by hand for each copy of a published book. The monks that performed these long and boring copying duties looked for ways to reduce the number of strokes (笔划) per word for common words.

    Although the word "at" is quite short, it was such a common word in texts and documents that monks in the Middle Ages thought it would be good idea to shorten the word "at" even more. As a result, the monks left out the "t" and created a circle — getting rid of two strokes.

The brain-training app trains people to tap on images of healthy foods but to stop when they see unhealthy snacks, creating a link between these foods and stops. The new study, by the universities of Exeter and Helsinki, found that playing the game about once a day for a month led to an average one-point reduction of junk food consumption.

Generally, people who used the app more also reported great changes in their food intake. One app user wrote, "Really useful. I used to eat junk food two to four times a week and I have reduced this to once a week after using the app regularly for a month. My desire for junk food has been reduced greatly and I no longer eat in the evening mindlessly."

The study used the app's usage data, and the app regularly asked questions about how often users eat certain food, along with other information such as their age and weight. The findings suggested that using the app regularly was linked with big changes in eating habits.

The app is free and it only takes about four minutes per day, so it's something people can do not just at home but at work and elsewhere. "From our results it seems important that you do the training at regular times and don't just stop. Therefore, keep it interesting, so you won't get bored with it. Personalize the app as much as possible and pick the food that you find really hard to resist," said Natalia Lawrence, a professor of the University of Exeter.

The researchers stressed that their findings should be further proved, because there was no comparison group and other factors____(such as the possibility that people who did more training were also more motivated to lose weight) could play a part in the results.