After a terrible electrical accident, which caused him to become both blind and deaf, the whole world became completely dark and quiet for Robert Edwards for almost ten years. The loss of sight and hearing threw him into such sorrow that he tried a few times to put an end to his life. His family, especially his wife, did their best to tend and comfort him and finally he regained the will to live.

    One hot summer afternoon, he was taking a walk with a stick near his house when a thunderstorm started all at once. He stood under a large tree to avoid getting wet, but he was struck by the lightning. Witnesses thought he was dead but he woke up some 20 minutes later lying face down in muddy water at the base of the tree. He was trembling badly, but when he opened his eyes, he could hardly believe what he saw：a plough and a wall. When Mrs. Edwards came running up to him，shouting to their neighbors to call for help，he could see her and hear her voice for the first time in nearly ten years.

    The news of Robert regaining his sight and hearing quickly spread, and many doctors came to examine him. Most of them said that he regained his sight and hearing from the shock he got from the lightning. However, none of them could give a convincing answer as to why this should have happened. The only reasonable explanation given by one doctor was that, since Robert lost his sight and hearing as a result of a sudden shock, perhaps, the only way for him to regain them was by another sudden shock.

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    The question of what children learn, and how they should learn it, is continually being debated and redebated. Nobody dares any longer to defend the old system, the parrot-fashion（way of learning by repeating what others say）of learning lessons, the grammar-with-a-whip（鞭子）system, which was good enough for our grandparents. The theories of modern psychology have stepped in to argue that we must understand the needs of our children. Children are not just small adults; they are children who must be respected as such.

    Well, you may say, this is as it should be, and a good idea. But think further. What happens? “Education” becomes the responsibility not of teachers, but of psychologists. What happens then? Teachers worry too much about the psychological implications（暗示） of their lessons, and forget about the subjects themselves. If a child dislikes a lesson, the teacher feels that it is his fault, not the child's. So teachers worry whether history is “relevant” to modern young children. And do they dare to recount stories about violent battles? Or will this make the children themselves violent? Can they tell their classes about children of different races, or will this encourage racial hatred? Why teach children to write grammatical sentences? Oral expression is better. Sums? Arithmetic? No; real-life mathematical situations are more understandable.

    You see, you can go too far. Influenced by educational theorists, who have nothing better to do than write books about their ideas, teachers leave their teaching-training colleges filled with grand, psychological ideas about children and their needs. They make complicated preparations and try out their “modern methods” on the long-suffering children. Since one “modern method” rapidly replaces another, the poor kids will have well been fed up by the time they leave school. Frequently the modern methods are so complicated that they fail to be understood by the teachers, let alone the children; even more often, the relaxed discipline so necessary for the “informal” feeling the class must have, prevents all but a handful of children from learning anything.

    Increasingly, over the past ten years, people-especially young people have become aware of the need to change their eating habits, because much of the food they eat, particularly processed food, is not good for the health. Consequently, there has been a growing interest in natural foods: foods which do not contain chemical additives and which have not been affected by chemical fertilizers（化肥）widely used in farming today.

    Natural foods, for example, are vegetables, fruit and grain which have been grown in soil that is rich in organic matter. In simple terms, this means that the soil has been nourished by unused vegetable matter, which provides it with essential vitamins and minerals. This in itself is a natural process compared with the use of chemicals and fertilizers, the main purpose of which is to increase the amount but not the quality of foods grown in commercial farming areas.

    Natural foods also include animals which have been allowed to feed and move freely in healthy pastures（生活状况）. Compare this with what happens in the mass production of poultry（家禽）: there are battery farms, for example, where thousands of chickens live crowded together in one building and are fed on food which is little than rubbish. Chickens kept in this way are not only tasteless as food; they also produce eggs which lack important vitamins.

    There are other aspects of healthy eating which are now receiving increasing attention from experts in diet. Take, for example, the question of sugar. This is actually a nonessential food! It is not that sugar is harmful in itself. But it does seem to be additive: the quantity we use has grown steadily and in Britain today each person consumes an average of 200 pounds a year! Yet all it does is provide us with energy, in the form of calories. There are no vitamins in it, no minerals and no fibre.

    Want to see 16 sunrises in one day? Float in zero gravity? Be one of the few to have gazed upon our home planet from space? In just four years' time, and for an astronomical $9.5 million dollars, it's claimed you can.

    What's being billed as the world's first luxury space hotel, Aurora Station, was announced Thursday at the Space 2.0 Summit in San Jose, California. Developed by US-based space technology start-up Orion Span, the fully modular space station will host six people at a time, including two crew members, for 12-day trips of space travel. It plans to welcome its first guests in 2022.

    “Our goal is to make space accessible to all,” Frank Bunger, CEO and founder of Orion Span, said in a statement. “Upon launch, Aurora Station goes into service immediately, bringing travelers into space quickly and at a lower price point than ever seen before.” While a $10 million trip is outside the budget of most people's two-week vacations, Orion Span claims to offer a real astronaut experience.

    During their 12-day adventure, the super-rich travelers will fly at a height of 200 miles above the Earth's surface in Low Earth Orbit, or LEP, where they will see incredible views of the blue planet. The hotel will orbit Earth every 90 minutes, which means guests will see around 16 sunrises and sunsets every 24 hours.

    Activities on board include taking part in research experiments such as growing food while in orbit--which guests can take home for a super-smug souvenir—and soaring over their hometown. Guests can have live video chats with their less-fortunate loved ones back home via high-speed wireless Internet access and, upon return to Earth, will be greeted with a specially arranged hero's welcome. While enjoying the thrills of zero gravity, the travelers will be able to float freely through the hotel, taking in views of the northern and southern Aurora from the station's windows.

    DepositsHYPERLINK “https://www.orionspan.com/aurora-station-reservations”（订金）are already being a HYPERLINK“http://www.orisonspan.com/aurora-station-reservations”cHYPERLINK“http://www.orionspan.com/aurora-station-reservations” cepted for future stays on the space hotel. The $80,000 is fully returnable, should applicants find themselves unable to rise to the full $9.5 million. Travelers will complete a three-month Orion Span Astronaut Certification (OSAC) program before takeoff. Orion Span has a team of space industry veterans who together have more than 140 years of human space experience.

    Machines equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) have performed better than human beings in a high-level test of reading comprehension. Two natural language processing tools received higher test scores than humans in recent exams.

    One of the tools is a product of the American software maker Microsoft. The other was created by the Chinese online seller Alibaba Group. The company said that a deep-learning model developed by its Institute of Data Science of Technologies was the first to beat a human score in the reading comprehension test.

    The test is called the Stanford Question Answering Dataset. It was developed by researchers at Stanford University in California. It has over 100,000 questions and answers. They are based on information found in over 500 stories from the Wikipedia website. The answers to all the questions come from the reading material.

    The AI-powered machines were tested on whether they could provide exact answers to the questions after processing large amounts of information.

    Alibaba said its deep neural (神经的) network model received an “Exact Match” score of 82.44 on the Stanford test. Microsoft reported that a team at Microsoft Research Asia had a score of 82.65. It said the human score on the same questions and answers was 82.304. Many research organizations also appeared on the list—all with scores below 82.

    Alibaba said it has already used its reading comprehension model in different parts of its business. For example, the company is using machines to answer many incoming telephone calls from customers. The company says in the future, the technology could enable machines to guide visitors through museums or provide advice to medical patients.

    Microsoft noted that, overall, people are still much better than machines at understanding the complexity and nuances (细微差别) of language.

    Learning how to face silence in conversation is an important skill, especially when working across cultures.

    In international negotiations, experienced negotiator (谈判者) stay silent and impassive on purpose because that will make others feel uncomfortable and possibly make compromises without having to do anything. Americans especially can't stand silence, so they often are the first to break the silence and sometimes might be at a disadvantage in negotiations.

    So, what's the best response? Set your jaw and wait it out. Don't offer a compromise just because they are not speaking. If you have to say something, ask a direct question, such as "What's your initial reaction to that offer?" Once a silence is getting into 45 seconds you could say, "Let's come back to that in a minute and go on with the next part of our negotiation."

    In presentations, silence can be far more effective than dramatic passion (热情). Before starting, look at the audience and be silent for a moment because that says, "I'm in control. I know what I'm doing. I'm confident."

    A classic example was when Apple co-founder Steve Jobs launched the first iPhone. He introduced with many pauses so that you didn't miss his key points. Because silence makes us nervous, our natural reaction is that we'd better pay attention, there's something going on here.

    Equally, when giving a speech to staff or trainees, pauses count-especially if there are negatives. If you keep talking you're spoon feeding. Give people a moment of silence to get beyond the emotional response and to start thinking consciously and processing.

    Silence can be an inward-focused thoughtful activity or an outward stillness where you give yourself the time to watch and think and listen to the world around you. Having observed the use of silence in Finland and also among the Blackfeet Nation, a North American Indian tribe in northern Montana in the US, we can see benefits far beyond wheeling and dealing.

    Silence can be a very powerful point for understanding ourselves, understanding others, for developing better common understanding and more productive outcomes and that applies to business, politics, education, law, medicine, every area of human life.