In cities with rent control, the city government sets the maximum rent that a landlord (房东) can charge for an apartment. Supporters of rent control argue that it protects people who are living in apartment. Their rent cannot increase; therefore, they are not in danger of losing their homes. However, the critics say that after a long time, rent control may have negative effects. Landlords know that they cannot increase their profits. Therefore, they invest in other businesses where they can increase their profits. They do not invest in new buildings which would also be rent-controlled. As a result, new apartments are not built. Many people who need apartments cannot find any. According to the critics, the end result of rent control is a shortage of apartments in the city.

    Some experts argue that the minimum wage law can cause problems in the same way. The federal government sets the minimum that an employer must pay workers. The minimum helps people who generally look for unskilled, low-paying jobs. However, if the minimum is high, employers may hire fewer workers. They will replace workers with machinery. Therefore, other things being equal, the number of workers that employers want decreases. Thus, critics hold the opinion that an increase in the minimum wage may cause unemployment. Some poor people may find themselves without jobs instead of with jobs at the minimum wage.

    Supporters of the minimum wage say that it helps people keep their dignity. Because of the law, workers cannot sell their services for less than the minimum. Furthermore, employers cannot force workers to accept jobs at unfair wages.

    Economic theory predicts the results of economic decision, such as decisions about farm production, rent control, and the minimum wage. The predictions may be corrected only if “other things are equal”. Economists do not agree on some of the predictions. They also do not agree on the value of different decisions. Some economists support a particular decision while others criticize it. Economists do agree, however, that there are no simple answers to economic questions.

    Recently, the TV show “Where are we going, Dad?” produced by Hunan SatelliteTelevision is a big hit across nation. Many famous stars brought their children to a strange village alone, and they had to spend 72 hours with their children there. The program fully showed us a modern version of the “how to be a good father”. As the young parents today are too busy to take care of their children, this new form of “Lost on the way” played by nanny Daddy and cute kids triggered（触发）a lot of people's emotional resonance（共鸣）. Both the kids and their parents will find that their hearts are being drawn closer. But this kind of feeling has just proved that there is a big spiritual barrier between the modern parents and children.The TV shows like “Children are hard to support!”, “Where are we going, Dad?”, “hot mom” and “cute kids” are becoming more and more popular. All of these show the new parents' confusion in children's education and the appeal for the balance between career and family.

    In the real life, on the one hand, the young parents feel helpless because they are too busy to accompany their children under the pressures of work and life; on the other hand, they continue to do so. The data collected by HNTV shows that nearly two-thirds of their audience are female, among whom 36% are aged from 25 to 34.We can imagine such a scene that one evening a young mother is watching the show with her young children, while her husband is still at work or trapped in socializing, or maybe is just playing computer games in the bedroom. The story of a child without the company of father is still going on. In fact, it is sometimes the same to mothers. In a modern family, it is often the old who take the responsibility of raising a child. The participation of mother in the children's education is also very low.

    It is just this kind of confusion where the parents have gone in the modern family education, and where the parents will guide their children to go that “Where are we going, Dad?” shows us. If a child wants to grow up healthily and safely into a modern citizen with independent personality and free spirit, it is very important for him or her to follow the parents who serve as their first teacher. Maybe this is the real reason why such kind of TV programs could get hot. The truth is that children will go where their parents go; and society will go where the children go.

    Learning any language is hard, but learning English can be especially challenging. Why? Because native speakers use the language in ways that textbooks could never describe. In particular, words that British people use cause many language students to scratch their heads.

    Here's an example: You overhear a Briton calling someone a “wazzock”. But what exactly is a wazzock? This word, in fact, means a foolish person, although there's nothing about it that would help you guess that. There are many strange terms like this in British English – the Oxford English Dictionary would be much smaller without these peculiar (古怪的) usages filling its pages.

    How can these odd words be explained? Part of the answer is the British sense of humor. Britons don't like to take things too seriously, and this is evident through many British words and phrases. For example, to “spend a penny” means to use the bathroom. It refers to the days when people had to pay a penny to use a public toilet.

    In an interview for the BBC's website, British linguist David Crystal suggested there may be historical reasons for the sheer number of odd words and phrases in British English. He thinks that they began in the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. This was a great age for the theater, when Shakespeare and other writers worked hard to keep up with the demand for new plays. The theater's popularity also created an incentive (刺激) to invent new words.

    With this in mind, perhaps Shakespeare and his peers are to blame for unusual British words such as “codswallop” and “balderdash” – which both, ironically, mean “nonsense”.

    While these strange words may be confusing to non-native speakers, they certainly make studying English a lot more interesting.

    If a diver surfaces too quickly, he may suffer the bends. Nitrogen(氮) dissolved(溶解) in his blood is suddenly liberated by the reduction of pressure. The consequence, if the bubbles (气泡)accumulate in a joint, is sharp pain and a bent body—thus the name. If the bubbles form in his lungs or his brain, the consequence can be death.

    Other air-breathing animals also suffer this decompression(减压) sickness if they surface too fast: whales, for example. And so, long ago, did ichthyosaurs. That these ancient sea animals got the bends can be seen from their bones. If bubbles of nitrogen form inside the bone they can cut off its blood supply. This kills the cells in the bone, and consequently weakens it, sometimes to the point of collapse. Fossil (化石)bones that have caved in on themselves are thus a sign that the animal once had the bends.

    Bruce Rothschild of the University of Kansas knew all this when he began a study of ichthyosaur bones to find out how widespread the problem was in the past. What he particularly wanted to investigate was how ichthyosaurs adapted to the problem of decompression over the 150 million years. To this end, he and his colleagues traveled the world's natural-history museums, looking at hundreds of ichthyosaurs from the Triassic period and from the later Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

    When he started, he assumed that signs of the bends would be rarer in younger fossils, reflecting their gradual evolution of measures to deal with decompression. Instead, he was astonished to discover the opposite. More than 15% of Jurassic and Cretaceous ichthyosaurs had suffered the bends before they died, but not a single Triassic specimen(标本) showed evidence of that sort of injury.

    If ichthyosaurs did evolve an anti-decompression means, they clearly did so quickly—and, most strangely, they lost it afterwards. But that is not what Dr Rothschild thinks happened. He suspects it was evolution in other animals that caused the change.

    Whales that suffer the bends often do so because they have surfaced to escape a predator (捕食动物) such as a large shark. One of the features of Jurassic oceans was an abundance of large sharks and crocodiles, both of which were fond of ichthyosaur lunches. Triassic oceans, by contrast, were mercifully shark- and crocodile-free. In the Triassic, then, ichthyosaurs were top of the food chain. In the Jurassic and Cretaceous, they were prey(猎物) as well as predator—and often had to make a speedy exit as a result.

    Imagine being a business that regularly takes huge quantities of your own products worth millions of pounds and burns them up. Your stock literally goes up in smoke. It sounds crazy, but the practice is common for some of the world's biggest clothing manufacturers. They argue that it is the most cost-effective way of maintaining their brand's exclusivity (独特性).

    The clothes that are burned are those that do not sell at a high enough price. Rather than watch them go on sale, the companies would set fire to them and regain a small amount of energy.

    Nobody knows exactly how much unsold stock is burnt annually by those fashion houses, but burning clothes has various negative impacts on the environment. For example, burning clothes made from artificial fibers may release plastic microfibers into the atmosphere, which worsens global warming. A U.K. parliamentary committee report on sustainability and the fashion industry advises the government to ban the burning of unsold stock if it can be reused or recycled.

    Actually, there are other approaches. What if those companies had a section tasked with taking back unsold clothes, redesigning them into new products, and shipping out the new products to the market once again?

    There is also now an opportunity to focus on biodegradable (可生物降解的)fabrics. Clothes that break down faster might not have to be burned. They would also appeal to those who care about the environmental impact of their own wardrobes.

    Additionally, we have an over-production problem. According to the World Bank, while clothing sales have risen steadily since 2000, clothing utilization has fallen at roughly the same rate. For every extra T-shirt that is sold, it will be worn roughly half as much as it would have been 20 years ago. That means better forecasting market trends would in theory result in less waste.

    Burning clothes won't happen simply through fashion firms. The scale of fashion production has to change. And it's important to recognize that these consumer-focused brands will only go where the market takes them. If protecting the environment really matters to the public, they have to make clear that they want more sustainable clothing in the first place. Without consumers demanding that, it won't change.

    A famous Anglican Church stands in a quiet corner of Dunedin in New Zealand's South Island. Built in 1865, it is the city's oldest church still in use. Countless couples have gathered here to marry. It's where morning tears are shared, friendships formed and comfort given during times of loss.

    As with many churches, its walls are graced with a collection of beautiful stained-glass windows. Known as the "John Allen window", one window portrays the short life of a local man, John Allen, who died in 1915 in the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey.

    John was the son of Sir James Allen, who as Minister of Defense, helped plan and administer New Zealand's World War I strategy, which saw 100,000 troops sent to fight. With the war over and his son dead, Sir James chose to install a window in the church, with which the Allen family had strong ties.

    Divided into two parts, one depicts (描绘) St. George, the patron saint (守护神) of soldiers, while the other has an angel of peace, along with the words at the bottom, "John Hugh All Gallipoli, 6th June, 1915". Two trees with local birds on the branches can be seen and a kiwi walks at the bottom- reminders that John was a lover of birds.

    "There are many war memorials in the church," says the church. "However the 'John Allen window' stands out; it touches people because of the beautiful design, the New Zealand birds and because John's story, of a life so full of promise ending tragically in the war, reflects the lives and stories of so many others involved in World War I."