As a Chinese saying goes, "Taste is actually a memory of childhood". Local specialty food may not be popular among all people, but it offers outsiders a glimpse of local culture and history.

    Gongcheng "oil tea" is such a kind of food that would be considered "weird" by many first-time visitors to the remote county in the north of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Many people dislike its bitter and astringent(涩的) flavor when they take a sip.

    "It felt like drinking Chinese herbal medicine. I never expected that I would gradually accept it afterwards, and even become addicted to it," said a traveler surnamed Zhang who comes from Shijiazhuang in northern China's Hebei province.

    Langshan village is said to be the birthplace of Gongcheng "oil tea" whose ideal ingredients are green tea and fermented tea. The village has preserved well its buildings and roads dating back to late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), as well as its traditional way of making the special tea.

    Lin Fengyou, 60, introduced the cooking process. She looks younger than her age, and attributes this to the benefits of drinking "oil tea" throughout the year.

    The first procedure is to use a wooden hammer to pound the tea while heating it in an iron pot, and then add edible oil and boiled water afterwards. She filters off the solid residues(余渣), and pours the glue-like green tea soup into bowls. Then, she adds salt, caraway seed, green onion, dried rice, fried groundnuts, sliced taro and fried beans.

    The taste of the "oil tea" is a mixture of the distinctive flavors of all its ingredients. Local people usually eat it together with glutinous rice(糯米) balls, rice dumplings and glutinous rice cake.

    The villagers consume "oil tea" three times a day. The tea soup is a healthy and refreshing food. "The tea soup to us is coffee to Westerners", said Lin. "But it is tastier."

The Winner's Guide to Success

    Do you know what makes people successful? To find out the answers, an American reporter recently visited some of the most successful people around the world.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}

Be responsible for yourself

    Sometimes you may want to blame others for your failure to get ahead. In fact, when you say someone or something outside of yourself is stopping you from making success, you're giving away your own power.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}

Write a plan.

    It's very difficult to try to get what you want without a good plan. It's just like trying to drive through strange roads to a city far away.{#blank#}3{#/blank#} Without this “map”, you may waste your time, money and also your energy; while with the “map”, you will enjoy the “trip” and get what you want in the shortest possible time.

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Nothing great is easy to get. So you must be ready to work hard—even harder than you have ever done. If you are not willing to pay the price, you won't get anything valuable.

Never give up.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}When you are doing something, you must tell yourself again and again: Giving up is worse than failure because failure can be the mother of success, but giving up means the death of hope.

A. A good plan is like a map to you.

B. It seems to us that everyone knows this, but it is easier said than done.

C. Some people achieve success much later in life because they don't work hard earlier.

D. You're saying, "You have more control over my life than I do."

E. Someone else's opinions of you don't have to become your reality.

F. Be willing to pay the price.

G. Here are some keys to success that they give.

    For centuries, people wondered how big the Earth was. Unfortunately, although the Earth was flat, no one was able to figure out its size. Gradually, however, people began to realize that the Earth was really round.

    Then, in the third century BC(2,300 years ago), a Greek man named Eratosthenes had an idea. Eratosthenes was sure that the Earth was a sphere. He used the sun and geometry(几何学) to figure out the size of the Earth. He calculated that the circumference(圆周) of the Earth was 28,600 miles(46,000 kilometers). The true size of the Earth is 25,000 miles(40,000 kilometers).

    Eratosthenes' measurement was wrong, but it was very close to the truth.

    For many centuries after Eratoshenes lived, people made maps of the Earth. However, they did not know very much about the world outside of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Mapmakers could not draw accurate maps of the Earth until people began traveling around the world in the fifteenth century, mapping small areas each time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people began making correct maps of countries, but the first accurate maps of the world were not made until the 1890s.

    Maps today are reliable(可依靠的), inexpensive, and easy to understand. People depend on maps every day. What would our lives be like without them?

    With the development of our society, cell phones have become a common part in our lives. Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Maybe they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on We Chat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new “species” of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name-phubbers (低头族).

    Recently a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities (身份) bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes a selfie (自拍) in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events finally leads to the destruction of the world.

    Although the ending of the film sounds unrealistic, the damage phubbing can bring is real. Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. “Always bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck,” Guangming Daily quoted doctors' words. “The neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching.” Also, staring at cell phones for a long time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. When getting together with family or friends, many people prefer to play their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

    It can also cost your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

    The values of artistic works, according to cultural relativism (相对主义), are simply reflections of local social and economic conditions. Such a view, however, fails to explain the ability of some works of art to excite the human mind across cultures and through centuries.

    History has witnessed the endless productions of Shakespearean plays in every major language of the world. It is never rare to find that Mozart packs Japanese concert halls, as Japanese painter Hiroshige does Paris galleries, Unique works of this kind are different from today's popular art, even if they began as works of popular art. They have set themselves apart in their timeless appeal and will probably be enjoyed for centuries into the future.

    In a 1757 essay, the philosopher David Hume argued that because "the general principles of taste are uniform (不变的) in human nature," the value of some works of art might be essentially permanent. He observed that Homer was still admired after two thousand years. Works of this type, he believed, spoke to deep and unvarying features of human nature and could continue to exist over centuries.

    Now researchers are applying scientific methods to the study of the universality of art. For example, evolutionary psychology is being used by literary scholars to explain the long-lasting themes and plot devices in fiction. The structures of musical pieces are now open to experimental analysis as never before. Research findings seem to indicate that the creation by a great artist is as permanent an achievement as the discovery by a great scientist.

    Do you know that junk food isn't healthy? Of course you do! Do you eat it anyway? Of course you do! But a new study shows teaching adolescents about the ways food companies fool them into thinking junk food is cool can encourage kids to fight back—by eating healthier.

    The pull of junk food can be super-strong. It's designed to tasty; which makes eating well one of the great health challenges of our time. Everyone from doctors to the government has been trying to handle it. Yet we keep eating junk food.

    Professor Christopher Bryan says, "Food companies want you to want junk food." They spend millions of dollars coming up with new ways to^ promote junk food consumption. They hire scientists to make new junk food almost irresistible. They might do this, for example, by adding more sugar. Rats fed junk food for six weeks will even walk across a floor that gives them electric shocks just to get more of such food.

    Food ads often make unhealthy junk food seem healthy by featuring professional athletes, fit-looking pop stars and smiling, active teens. "We thought when the students learned this, it would matter to them," Bryan says. He worked with 8th graders at a Texas school. Half of them got a lesson Bryan created. It focused on the ways junk food is advertised, or marketed. A second group received lessons that focused on health. These lessons informed students junk food is had, and that foods like apples or carrots are a better choice. The students learned a bad diet can lead to major weight gain, and that being overweight puts people at risk for serious diseases. They also learned how eating well now can keep you healthy when you're older.

    After the lessons, the kids in both groups were asked how they felt about junk food. Most didn't have positive feelings about these unhealthy foods.