“I see you've got a bit of water on your coat,” said the man at the petrol station. “Is it raining out there?”“No, it's pretty nice,” I replied, checking my sleeve. “Oh, right. A pony(马驹) bit me earlier.”
        As it happened, the bite was virtually painless: more the kind of small bite you might get from a naughty child. The pony responsible was queuing up for some ice cream in the car park near Haytor, and perhaps thought I'd jumped in ahead of him.
        The reason why the ponies here are naughty is that Haytor is a tourist-heavy area and tourists are constantly feeding the ponies foods, despite sighs asking them not to. By feeding the ponies, tourists increase the risk of them getting hit by a car, and make them harder to gather during the area's annual pony drift(迁移).
        The purpose of a pony drift is to gather them up so their health can be checked, the baby ones can be stooped from feeding on their mother's milk, and those who've gone beyond their limited area can be returned to their correct area. Some of them are also later sold, in order to limit the number of ponies according to the rules set by Natural England.
        Three weeks ago, I witnessed a small near-disaster a few mils west of here. While walking, I noticed a pony roll over on his back.       “Hello!” I said to him, assuming he was j  ust rolling for fun, but he was very still and, as I got closer, I saw him kicking his legs in the air and breathing heavily. I began to properly worry about him. Fortunately, I managed to get in touch with a Dartmoor's Livestock Protection officer and send her a photo. The officer immediately sent a local farmer out to check on the pony. The pony had actually been trapped between two rocks. The farmer freed him, and he began to run happily around again.
      Dartmoor has 1,000 or so ponies, who play a critical role in creating the diversity of species in this area. Many people are working hard to preserve these ponies, and trying to come up with plans to find a sustainable(可持续的) future for one of Dartmoor's most financially-troubled elements.

    When we see well, we do not think about our eyes very often. It is only when we cannot see perfectly that we realize how important our eyes are.

    People who are near-sighted can only see things that are very close to their eyes. Everything else seems ­­blurry. Many people who do a lot of work, such as writing, reading and sewing become near-sighted. People who are far-sighted suffer from just the opposite problem. They can see things that are far away, but they have difficulty in reading a book unless they hold it at arm's length. If they want to do much reading, they must get glasses, too.

    Other people do not see clearly because their eyes are not exactly the right shape. They have what is called astigmatism (散光). This, too, can be corrected by glasses. Some people's eyes become cloudy because of cataracts (白内障). Long ago these people often became blind. Now, however, it is possible to operate on the cataracts and remove them.

    Having two good eyes is important for judging distances. Each eye sees things from a slightly different angle. To prove this to yourself, look at an object out of one eye; then look at the same object out of your other eye. You will find the object's relation to the background and other things around it has changed. The difference between these two different eye views helps us to judge how far away an object is. People who have only one eye cannot judge distances as people with two eyes.

    Most people, when they travel to space, would like to stay in orbit (轨道) for a few days or more. And this stands to reason, if you're paying $ 20,000 for your trip to orbit! So in order for tourism to reach its full potential there's going to be a need for space hotels. What would a space hotel actually be like to visit? Hotels in orbit will offer the services you expect from a hotel—private rooms, meals, bars. But they'll also offer two unique experiences: impressive views—of Earth and space—and the endless entertainment of living in zero gravity—including sports and other activities that make use of this.

    The hotels themselves will vary greatly—from being quite simple in the early days to huge luxury (奢侈的) structures at a later date. It's actually surprising that as later as 1997, very few designs for space hotels were published. This is mainly because those who might be expected to design them haven't expected the costs to come down far enough to make them possible.

    Lots of people who've been to space have described vividly what it's like to live in zero gravity. There are obviously all sorts of possibilities for dancing, gymnastics, and zero-G sports. Luckily, you don't need to sleep much living in zero gravity, so you'll have plenty of time for relaxing by hanging out in a bar with a window looking down at the turning Earth below.

    Of course all good things have come to an end, unfortunately. And so after a few days you'll find yourself heading back to the earth. You'll be thinking how soon you can save up enough to get back up again-or maybe you should change jobs to get to work in an orbiting hotel!

    In China, many people are leaving the countryside to find jobs in the cities, because the countryside is much poorer than the city, and often there isn't much work there. Services such as hospital and transport are usually much better in the city than in the countryside. They hope that their lives will improve when they move to the city.

    But in the big cities of Europe like London or Pads, people are moving out of the city. These rich families want to live a quieter life. They are tired of the noise and the dirt of the city, and they are tired of the crowded streets, crowded trains and buses. They don't want to live in the cities any more. They want a house with a garden in the countryside, and breathe the fresh air there.

    So they move out of the cities. Some don't go very far, just a little way out of the city, to the towns near the cities, other people move to the real countryside with sheep, cows and green fields. There, they start new lives and try to make new friends.

    Not all those who move from the city to the countryside are happy. After two or three years, many people who have done this feel that it was a big mistake. They don't make so much money and there isn't much work to do. People in the countryside are very different and aren't always very friendly.

    As a result, quite a lot of people who have moved to the countryside move back to the city. "

    It's wonderful to see crowds in the streets and cinema lights," they say.

    The saying, "Don't judge a book by its cover, means you should not guess the worth or value of something based on how it looks. That message was clear at a recent event called the Human Library Project. The event took place at the Northern Virginia, or NoVa, Community College, outside of Washington. D. C.

    The Human Library began 19 years ago in Denmark. It grew from a youth organization called "Stop the Violence". Today, it is a worldwide movement. At the NoVa event, students got the chance to learn from a person—a "human book"—instead of a library book.

    Patricia Cooper organized the event. She said that human books celebrate variety by telling their life stories in an easy-going setting. "The goal of the human library is to talk to people in your community who you may otherwise not speak to because you have your own prejudices (偏见) and hopefully to break down some of these barriers."

    This is the third year that NoVa has held such an event. The collection of human books included a civil rights activist, a scientist from the American space agency NASA, and an opera singer.

    Artist Brian Dailey was a human book. He spoke about his travels to 113 countries in seven years. Dailey said that, during his travels, he asked people whom he took pictures of for a one-word answer to a series of other words—such as love, freedom and war. He discovered that people in different countries often had very different reactions to the same word.

    When Dailey asked people in Africa about the word "war" they used words like justice, liberation and peace. When he asked the same question to people in Syrian refugee camps, the answer was: "tears, hunger, fear, destruction".