Pacing and Pausing

    Sara tried to befriend her old friend Steve's new wife, but Betty never seemed to have anything to say. While Sara felt Betty didn't hold up her end of the conversation, Betty complained to Steve that Sara never gave her a chance to talk. The problem had to do with expectations about pacing and pausing.

    Conversation is a turn-taking game. When our habits are similar, there's no problem. But if our habits are different, you may start to talk before I'm finished or fail to take your turn when I'm finished. That's what was happening with Betty and Sara.

    It may not be coincidental that Betty, who expected relatively longer pauses between turns, is British, and Sara, who expected relatively shorter pauses, is American. Betty often felt interrupted by Sara. But Betty herself became an interrupter and found herself doing most of the talking when she met a visitor from Finland. And Sara had a hard time cutting in on some speakers from Latin America or Israel.

    The general phenomenon, then, is that the small conversation techniques, like pacing and pausing, lead people to draw conclusions not about conversational style but about personality and abilities. These habitual differences are often the basis for dangerous stereotyping (思维定势). And these social phenomena can have very personal consequences. For example, a woman from the southwestern part of the US went to live in an eastern city to take up a job in personnel. When the Personnel Department got together for meetings, she kept searching for the right time to break in — and never found it. Although back home she was considered outgoing and confident, in Washington she was viewed as shy and retiring. When she was evaluated at the end of the year, she was told to take a training course because of her inability to speak up.

    That's why slight differences in conversational style — tiny little things like microseconds of pause — can have a great effect on one's life. The result in this cause was a judgment of psychological problems — even in the mind of the woman herself, who really wondered what was wrong with her and registered for assertiveness training.

    Some of the best thing in life don't happen until you grow old enough to recognize them. I can say that about tea. .

    I didn't start to drink tea until I was 35. The first time felt a genuine urge to drink tea was in 2003, when I stayed briefly in the United Kingdom. After a time of consuming local food, I started to really like strong black tea.

    I took packs of green tea with me as gifts but was disappointed to find my British friends preferred much stronger black tea from Sri Lanka. Later I learned that although people know China for its tea, it ranks only third among the world's black tea exporters, after Sri Lanka and Kenya.

    After I came back to China and started to cover food stories, I met friends in the tea-drinking circle and learned more. Although the majority of the rest of the world drinks black tea, which the Chinese call “red tea”, China processes and drinks mostly green tea.

I feel lucky to be Chinese because of the great variety of tea available in the county. It is estimated that there are more than 2000 tea in China it you divide them geographically,] including more than 600 locally famous tea. A more simple way to categorize it is by color ； and extent of fermentation(发酵). That comes down to six main categories — green, white, yellow, dark greenish(oolong), red and black tea.

    Tasting tea can be compared to our life. It can be plain and predictable but sometimes it is j full of pleasant surprises. Occasionally it can even seem too good to be true. The best thing is, you know there's always more to explore.

    Natural selection is the process by which one type of animal within a species thrives because of certain characteristics that make it more likely to live than others in its group. The history of the peppered moth（灰蛾）is an example of the natural selection process.

    In 19th century England, certain types of peppered moths were able to better blend（融合）into their surroundings. During that time period, great changes were happening in Great Britain. The Industrial Revolution was part of this change, and with it came air pollution. Natural selection often takes hundred or even thousands of years to occur. For the peppered moth, this process occurred comparatively quickly.

    At the beginning of the Industrial Age, most peppered moths in England were light-colored and covered with black markings, although a few moths had dark-colored wings. Because the light-colored moths blended into the light-colored bark on the trees, they could not be easily seen by birds that would eat them. As the air grew more polluted, however, tree trunks became covered with soot（烟煤）and became darker. The light-colored moths became easy for birds to see against the dark tree trunks. Since the dark-colored moths now had the advantage, their numbers grew. Within 50 years, the peppered moth went from being mostly light-colored to being mostly dark-colored.

    In the 20th century, the air cleared up, and the peppered moth population changed again. As tree trunks lighted due to less soot in the air, light-colored moths once again had an advantage. Their numbers increased as soot levels declined. Depending on their environment, the coloration of the moths helped them to be “naturally selected” to survive.

    Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is an important ecological screen for the north of China and even the whole country. Building a green great wall to ensure China's ecological security is one of the most important things of autonomous region.

The largest ecological function zone in the north of China, Inner Mongolia has a variety of landscapes, including forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers and lakes. In recent years, the region's environment has improved, with its forest and grassland area having increased and desert reduced.

    However, it still faces a number of challenges in ecological preservation. For instance, the region faces severe water shortages with the number of lakes dropping from 427 in 1987 to 145 in 2010. In addition to a lack of rainfall, huge water consumption in agricultural and industrial production has worsened the water shortage. Too much use of fertilizers has damaged the soil and affected the growth of grass, accelerating the expansion of the desert, which results from a lack of water.

The local government encourages planting trees on grassland as they can get more pay for trees than by growing grass. However, the trees they plant often have a low survival rate as they have a high water consumption rate. Also, to treat wetlands, some areas have planted a large number of a single tree species. This practice may damage biodiversity (生物多样性) and endanger the survival of certain animals.

Experts suggest taking the region's water resources and weather conditions into consideration in future ecological projects.

The periodic table of elements is a common sight in classrooms，campus hallways and libraries. The mode periodic table arranges the elements by their atomic numbers and periodic properties（周期性）. Several scientists worked over a century to assemble the elements into this format. 

In 1789，French chemist Antoine Lavoisiertried grouping the elements as metals and nonmetals. Forty years later，German physicist Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner observed similarities in physical and chemical properties of certain elements. He arranged them in groups of three in increasing order of atomic weight and called them triads，observing that some properties of the middle element，such as atomic weight and density，approximated the average value of these properties in the other two in each triad. 

A breakthrough came with the pu blication of a revised list of elements and their atomic masses at the first international conference of chemistry in Karlsruhe，Germany，in 1860. They concluded hydrogen would be assigned the atomic weight of 1 and that the atomic weight of other elements would be decided by comparison with hydrogen. For example，carbon，being 12 times heavier than hydrogen，would have an atomic weight of 12. 

In 1869，Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev created the framework that became the moder periodic table，leaving gaps for elements that were yet to be discovered. Mendeleev predicted the properties of some undiscovered elements and gave them names such as"eka-aluminum"for an element with properties similar to aluminum. Later "eka-aluminum"was discovered as gallium. 

German chemist Lothar Meyer produced a version of the periodic table similar to Mendeleev's in 1870. He left gaps for undiscovered elements but never predicted their properties. The Royal Society of London awarded the Davy Medal in 1882 to both Mendeleev and Meyer. The later discovery of elements predicted by Mendeleev verified（证实）his predictions and his periodic table won universal recognition. In 1955 the 101st element was named mendelevium in his honor. 

On UNESCO website，it wrote，"The Periodic Table of Chemical Elements is more than just a guide or catalogue of the entire known atoms in the universe；it is essentially a window on the universe，helping to expand our understanding of the world around us. "