Are you interested in country music? I like it very much! It will take me away for a while after I am tired. The guitars and songs will take me to mountains and fields.

    Country music usually talks of everyday life and feelings. It's the spirit of America, easy to understand, slow and simple.

    Country music developed in the Southern United States. It was the folk music of American countryside. Many of songs tell about the lives of farmers. They talk about love, crops or death.

    The life of the countryside can be hard, so the words in country music are often sad. At first, people played the music only at family parties. But it became more popular later. In the 1920s, people played country songs on the radio, and they made them into records.

    When people in the countryside moved to towns and cities to look for work, they took their music with them. Country music continued to change and became popular across America.

    John Denver was one of America's most famous country singers in the 1970s.His song Take Me Home, Country Roads is well­known and people still play it today.

    Artificial intelligence（AI）is making it possible for companies to monitor workers' behavior in great detail and in real－time（实时的）. Start to slack off（懈怠）and AI could talk to your boss.

    One company offering such services is London－based start－up Status Today. Its AI platform relies on a regular supply of employee data, including everything from the files you access to when you use a key card.

    From this, it builds a picture of how employees normally function and signals any unusual performance. The idea is to spot when someone might become a security risk by doing something different from their usual behavioral patterns. “All of this gives us a fingerprint of a user, so if we think the fingerprint doesn't match, we raise a warning, ”says Mircea Dumitrescu, the company's chief technology officer.

    The system also aims to catch employee actions that could accidentally cause a security breach（漏洞）, like opening malware（恶意软件）. “We're not monitoring if your computer has a virus。”says Dumitrescu. “We're monitoring human behaviors. ”

    But catching the security breach means monitoring everyone, and the AI can also be used to track employee productivity. “It seems like they are just using the reputation of AI to give an air of lawfulness to old－fashioned workplace surveillance（监视）, ”says Javier Ruiz Diaz of digital campaigning organization the Open Rights Group. “You have a right to privacy and you shouldn't be expected to give that up at work. ”

    Exactly how companies use the system will be up to them, but it's hard to shake the picture of an AI constantly looking over employees' shoulders. “It will bother people, and that could be counterproductive if it affects their behavior, ”says Paul Bernal at the University of East Anglia.

Phil Legg at the University of the West of England says it will never catch every security risk. “If people know they're being monitored, they can change their behavior, ”he says.

    This year's flu season is pretty scary. To try to minimize the effects, public officials are still urging anyone who hasn't yet gotten their flu shot to get one as soon as possible. However, even if every single person got a shot in the arm, the vaccine(疫 苗)—with its excellent 36 percent effectiveness—would not prevent everyone from getting infected with the annoying virus. Knowledge is power, so here's what goes on in your body when you come down with the flu.

    The influenza virus primarily attacks your nose, throat, and the tubes that lead to your lungs. But the flu is so much more than that. Your muscles ache, your head hurts, and your appetite goes down, among other things. To our surprise, almost all of these symptoms have less to do with the virus itself than with your immune(免疫的)response to them. Unfortunately, the very defense you have in place to get rid of the flu is the reason you feel so painful when you recover.

    The virus usually enters through your mouth, typically by way of your hands. But it takes a few days for symptoms to set in. While this process might cause some harm to your nose and throat, it's nothing major, and nothing like the symptoms that typically accompany a bad or even mild case of the flu.

    The real fun starts when your immune system begins to fight. Your immune system comes in two parts: the innate system and the adaptive. The innate immune system is essentially an all-purpose tool. As soon as your body senses the presence of any injury or invader, the innate immune system launches into action by producing tiny proteins called cytokines and chemokines. The cytokines reproduce almost immediately and start to attack the virus. This increase in immune cells creates a serious inflammation(炎症) throughout the body. But the worst is still to come.

    Meanwhile, the chemokines work with the adaptive immune system to help create T cells. These cells are a special type of white blood cell that works in a much more specific way: They find the influenza virus, identify what's special about it, and create something unique on their surface that finds and destroys similar invaders.

    Welcome to Holker Hall & Gardens

    Visitor Information

    How to Get to Holker

    By Car: Follow brown signs an A590 from JB6, M6. Approximate travel times: Windermere-20 minutes, Kendal-25 minutes, Lancaster-45 minutes, Manchester-1 hour 30 minutes.

    By Rail: The nearest station is Cark-in-Cartmel with trains to Carnforth, Lancaster Preston for connections to major cities & airports.

    Opening Times

    Sunday-Friday (closed on Saturday)11:00 am-4:00pm,30 March-2nd November.

Admission Charges

    Special Events

    Producers: Market 13th April

    Join us to taste a variety of fresh local food and drinks. Meet the producers and get some excellent recipe ideas.

    Holker Garden Festival 30th May

    The event celebrate its 22nd anniversary with a great show of the very best of gardening, making it one of the most popular events in gardening.

    National Garden Day 28th August

    Holker once again opens is gardens in aid of the disadvantaged. For just a small donation you can take a tour with our garden guide.

    Winter Market 8th November

    This is an event for all the family. Wander among a variety of shops selling gifs while enjoying a live music show and nice street entertainment.

    “Sorry seems to be the hardest word”—that is one of Elton Johns most popular songs. But not every public figure seems to find it so tough to say that powerful five-letter word.

    In recent days public figures, from politicians to stars, have all publicly expressed remorse. But with so much remorse, how can we tell a forced apology from a heartfelt expression of remorse?

    Specifically, saying sorry should be a realization that something you have said or done has hurt someone and you want to make amends. “People wants the response to be personal to them. They want to feel that they're being listened to and taken seriously,” says Martin Stone.

    Firstly, it is important to show that you understand. It is vital that any group or a person making an apology understands the focus—is it sorry for the way it's acted or is it sorry that the complainant feels the way they do? Watch out for the speed of response. The quicker the apology comes, the better it indicates that the person making it has felt an immediate sense of guilt.

    If sincere, the person making the apology will be looking for clues (线索) to see if he or she is being understood, such as eye contact and facial expressions. Performed apologies always have a sense of being “acted out”, and are often accompanied by too many unnatural gestures.

    For a sincere apology, it is also important to avoid promises that can't be kept. Don't say that you'll make sure that this will not happen again if you're not confident that it won't. It could come back to bite you. And do remember that the use of “but” can hugely change the tone (语气) of an apology. As Stone points out, “I'm sorry but…” sounds like you are making excuses and aren't actually taking any form of responsibility.

    Right in front of the Minneapolis Central Library, a row of green hikes sits parked in a special stand. Each hike is designed with the logo "Nice Ride" the name of the city's bike-share program.

    Nice Ride bikes are a lot like the library books that people come here to borrow. To rent a bike, you simply use your membership card at a Nice Ride bike station. Members can rent one of 1, 200 bikes from 138 stations throughout Minnesota's largest city. People use the Nice Ridebikes to go to work, to go out on business, or just to enjoy the city's many bike paths.

    The rise of bike-share programs like Nice Ride is encouraging more people than ever to choose biking over driving. Skyrocketing gas prices and concerns about the environment have also gotten people to dust off their bike helmets, pump air into flat tires, and hit the road.

    Why ride? Not only is biking good exercise, but switching from a car to a bike also reduces the amount of pollution in the air. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to climate change, is one of the many polluting substances that come out of a car's tailpipe.

    Bike-share systems are found around the world in cities like London, Paris, Barcelona, and Melbourne, Australia. The largest program—with 70, 000 bikes—is in Wuhan, China.

    To make roads friendlier to non-motorists, the U. S. Department of Transportation has invested more than a billion dollars in cycling and pedestrian projects in recent years. The money went toward building thousands of miles of on-street bike lanes and bike-and pedestrian-only passages called greenways.