Do you love holidays but hate the increase weight that follows? You are not alone. Holidays are happy days with pleasure and delicious foods. Many people, however, are worried about the weight that comes along with these delicious foods.

    With proper planning, though, it is possible to control your weight. The idea is to enjoy the holidays but not to eat too much. You don't have to turn away from the foods that you enjoy. The following suggestions may be of some help to you.

    Do not miss meals. Before yon leave home for a feast(宴会),have a small, low-fat snack(小吃). This may help to keep you from getting too excited before delicious foods. Begin with clear soup and fruit or vegetables. A large glass of water before you eat may help you feel full. Use a small plate; a large plate will encourage you to have more than enough. Better not have high-fat foods. Dishes that look oily or creamy have much fat in them. Choose lean meat(瘦肉 ).Fill your plate with salad and green vegetables. If you have a sweet tooth, try mints (薄荷) and fruits. They don't have fat content as cream and chocolate.

    Don't let exercise take a break during the holidays. A 20-minute walk after a meal can help burn off excess(过多的) calories.

    Not long ago, I tried convincing my three daughters that the world's secrets are hidden inside silence. The girls looked at me skeptically. Surely silence is nothing?

    Sitting there at the dinner table, I suddenly remembered their curiosity as children, their wondering about what might be hiding behind a door and their amazement as they stared at a light switch and asked me to “open the light”. But now they are 13, 16 and 19 and wonder less and less. If they still wonder at anything, they quickly pull out their smart phones to find the answer. None of them have any interest in discussing with me. To attract their attention, I told them about two friends of mine who had decided to climb Mount Qomolangma.

    Early one morning they left base camp to climb the south-west wall of the mountain. It was going well. Both reached the summit, but then came the storm. They soon realized they would not make it down alive. The first got hold of his pregnant wife by satellite phone. Together they decided on the name of the child that she was carrying. Then he quietly passed away just below the summit. My other friend was not able to contact anyone before he died. No one knows exactly what happened on the mountain in those hours. Thanks to the dry, cool climate 8km above sea level, they have both been freeze-dried. They lie there in silence, looking no different.

    The girls remained quiet, listening. It seemed as though they had got something.

    It is easy to assume that the essence (本质) of technology is technology itself, but that is wrong. The essence is the time we spend with our family and how much freedom we have by technology.

    Chinese writers seldom win a big prize in the world. One of those prizes is the Hans Christian Andersen Prize, the highest honor in the world that can be given to an author and an illustrator of children's books. No Chinese writer had ever won it, until April 4, 2016, when 62-year-old Cao Wenxuan received the prize. Cao received the honor at the Bologna Children's Book Fair in Italy.

    Patricia Aldana praised Cao's “deeply humanistic” books. These novels admit that life can be sad for children.

    Instilling children with good virtues for the sake of humankind is something that Cao stresses. He said, “It's time for us to alter our understanding of reading. Books should bring not only joy to young readers, but also have their ideas about life.”

    That feature of his works has touched many adults too. “The common choice of the judges, Cao writes beautifully about the lives of children facing great challenges,” said Aldana.

    After his success, Cao praised good translation for bringing attention to his work. Chinese children's literature could get high honor in the world if it were correctly translated in a style that could be easily understood, he said.

    Other writers, including Jin Bo, have also blamed poor translation as the reason why Chinese literature fails to get honor in the world. Jin was named for the Hans Christian Andersen Prize in 1992, but at that time, he had to translate, in a hurry, several paragraphs from his book to give to the judges. "On one hand, the jury has little knowledge of Chinese authors. On the other hand, it is we ourselves who didn't introduce our work and promote (促进) ourselves enough," he said in a class in 2013.

    Mexico sites on an island plateau (高原) surrounded by volcanic peaks, which makes air quality a constant concern for people who live there.

    In April, the country took a decisive step toward improving air quality by enacting a temporary ban on private and Federal vehicles in the city. The rule forbids people from driving in the city one day each week and one Saturday each month. Electric vehicles, government service vehicles, public transport options and school buses are not included in the ban.

    Mexico City isn't the first urban center to be involved in car-free living. But the ban is more than an awareness-raiser. It was enacted with the direct aim of solving air pollution. In March, the city sank into a deep brown haze of smog when the pollution levels passed the 200 mark. The city ordered some 1.1m of the area's 4.7m cars off the streets and also offered free bus and subway rides.

    Mexico City's temporary vehicle ban raises questions about the best ways to improve urban air quality. India, whose citizens breathe some of the world's dirtiest air, has tried a variety of solutions. Earlier this year, the Indian government started a 4% sales tax on new-car purchases.

    Beijing also has experience with cleaning the air. The city introduced alternate-day rules in advance of the 2008 Olympic Games, which produced good results. And then there is the London congestion (拥挤) charge, introduced in 2003. The charge has had a measurable effect on air quality.

For now, Mexico City — named by the United Nations as the most polluted city on the planet in 1992 — can look forward to the start of the region's rainy season, when daily showers will help lo clean the air.

    Daniella was brushing her daughter's long brown hair when she noticed that bunches of it were coming out. That was January 1, 2017. Within 20 days, seven-year-old Gianessa's hair and eyebrows were completely gone, and her doctor said they would never grow back. Gianessa had become one of the 6.8 million Americans with alopecia, a disease that causes hair loss.

    Alopecia isn't painful, but for kids who suffer from it, the acute mental pain comes from standing out from the crowd. For the most part, the students in Gianessa's first-grade class in Salem, Utah, were understanding. But occasionally, she still felt like an outcast(被排斥者). "I did not want her to not feel beautiful," her mother told Today.

    Then the school announced its "Crazy Hair Day" competition in April, and Daniella and Gianessa decided that rather than hiding Gianessa's baldness(光头), they would celebrate it. Daniella bought sticker jewels and decorated her daughter's head with colorful designs. "They just fit her personality," Daniella told CNN. "She's so full of life."

    On the morning of the competition, Gianessa was nervous. Would her friends think it was funny? She had nothing to fear. Gianessa was a hit—and the winner of the crazy-hair competition. Gianessa is now glad she dared to go bare. "I was sad at first when I lost all my hair," she told People, "but now I love being bald. I can do things to my head that other kids can't. I'm thinking now it might be fun to decorate my head with some shiny butterflies and flowers."

    Alexa is a form of artificial intelligence, or Al for short. Many people start their mornings by asking Alexa for the weather forecast or the latest news. A device (设备)that houses Alexa can also play music from your favorite playlists, keep a shopping list, order takeout food, answer questions, send voice messages and even run "smart" home controls.

    Training AI systems to respond to problems with human-like intelligence—and learn from their mistakes —can take months, or even years. Consider Alexa and similar software, such as Apples Siri. To do the tasks its human owners ask, these systems must make sense of and then respond to sentences such as, "Alexa, play my Ed Sheeran playlist" or "Siri , what is the capital of India?"

    Computers can't understand language as it is spoken by people. So AI researchers must find a way to help humans communicate with computers. The technology used to get computers to "understand" human speech or text is known as natural language processing. By natural language, computer scientists refer to the way people naturally talk or write. To teach an AI system a task like comprehending a sentence or responding to a person's last move in a board game, scientists need to feed it lots of examples.

    AlphaGO is an AI system designed by Google that has beaten a human champion, Lee Sedol, at the strategy(策略)board game Go. To train AlphaGo, Google had to show it 30 million Go moves that people had made while playing the game. Then AlphaGo used what it learned to analyze those plays as it played against different versions (版本)of itself. During this practice, the program came up with new moves —ones never seen in games between people.

    Computers, software and devices that are powered by AI can do much more, however, than just play board games and music. And one day they could make our life much easier and much more interesting.