It is December 25th, 2050. The people in the city are all celebrating Christmas. I'm the mayor of our city. My citizens and I are holding a big party under the sea, though you wouldn't believe it. But please do not feel excited, you should feel sad because we have to live under the sea. Because of the pollution, the earth has been completely destroyed, from top to bottom. The atmosphere has no oxygen and moisture. As a result, the plants are burned by the strong sunlight with a great number of harmful rays. Of course, none of them are still alive. Not only no green, but also the temperature reaches about 121℃ all day even in winter because there is too much CO2 circling the earth.
On the land, there is no life. Luckily, the sea is not destroyed by human. So, we have to move into the sea. At the bottom of the water, people have built many new cities. There is a lot of advanced* equipment in each city. Computers are used to control all the machines, even the people's life. We can also make the seawater into fresh water. There are two machines making oxygen. If they stop working for only one minute, more than 10 million people will die.
The population of our city is over 30 million and, of course, it is quite crowded. We have lots of high buildings and bridges. The roads are wide, too. Our cars are miniature UFOs, don't be surprised, it is true. At the bottom of the sea you can't see anything, because there is no light all day. However, we have advanced lighting equipment so that we can see the "sun"under the sea. Of course, the advanced lighting equipment is very expensive. And if it doesn't work, we can see nothing under the sea. What should we do then?

    China and Western countries may have different cultural beliefs about certain animals, but when it comes to pigs, we have somehow reached an agreement—that pigs are ugly, lazy, stupid and shameless.

    Just look at the idioms and phrases in our languages. In Chinese, we have the likes of "Boiling a dead pig" and "A pig looking in the mirror is still a pig". And in English, there are expressions such as "eating like a pig" and "sweating like a pig". None of them are exactly praise.

    But truth is that pigs do have some fine qualities. And maybe there's no better time to clear their names than now, with the arrival of Year of the Pig on Chinese Spring Festival.

    For starters, science had proved that pigs aren't stupid at all. According to a paper published last year in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, pigs are "mentally and socially similar to dogs and chimpanzees(黑猩猩)". By training, pigs can learn some skills, such as dancing and swimming. They like to play. They have good long-term memories. And they can tell between who treat them well and those who don't.

    There are popular pig characters in cartoons too. In the UK cartoon series Peppa Pig, the four members of the cartoon's pig family teach children from all over the world about love, friendship, and the value of family. And in China, the adventures of McDull, a piglet who works hard toward his dreams even though he keeps failing, have been recounted in films since 2001. "People care too much about the immediate results, but McDull is slow and patient, and not afraid of repeating failure," said McDull's creator Brain Tse. "He has a heart of gold."

    Perhaps these are the qualities of pigs to keep in heart when we celebrate the New Year—their wisdom, cuteness, patience and bravery.

    Each year on Feb 21, UNESCO (联合国教科文组织) holds an International Mother Language Day (IMLD). The event is to help people to pay attention to the disappearance of the world's languages; many of them are disappearing each year. UNESCO sees this as a terrible fact.

    What happens when a language dies out? Something great is lost-not just sounds and marks but the way that people understand the world and communicate with each other. We keep different cultures and traditions through languages. Kill a language and all these are killed too.

    Through IMLD, more and more people come to realize he terrible situation and try to stop it.

    Google's 2018 Endangered (濒临灭绝的) Languages Project is a good example. Many speakers and protectors of endangered languages upload (上传) texts, audios and videos to the project website. They want to introduce the way that people communicate and express themselves around the world.

    The Myaamia Project is the same kind of effort to revive the language spoken by the Miami tribes (部落) of the United States. Project members work to encourage people to study and communicate with this language, which died out in the 1960s.

    These activities give life to those endangered languages. People who work to keep Languages alive are not limited to the past. Many young people design apps and use social media to support their activities. They "spread the word" to save the world.

    So, while the problem of disappearing languages remains a very serious one, there is hope. We all have a special feeling of our mother language. This is why we should remember the wise words of late president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela: "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to a man in his own language，that goes to his heart."

If music makes you smarter and exercise helps you to think, surely exercising to music can turn you into a clever person.

A team of scientists did research on 33 people who were getting better from heart problems after receiving medical care. They found those people exercised while listening to music. The Four Seasons did much better on language ability(能力)tests than without music. Doctors also use it on people who have had head hurts because it has a beautiful melody.

"Exercise seems to cause changes in the nerve(神经) system and these changes may improve the learning ability of people with heart problems," said Charles Emery. "And listening to music is thought to enhance understanding. We just wanted to put the two results together," he added.

The people said they felt better emotionally and physically after exercising with or without music. But their improvement on the test doubled after listening to music during exercise. Scientists have showed that music can be good for health and education. It helps reduce stress and sadness, encourage relaxation or sleep, wake up the body and improve memory and thoughts.

Scientists have been studying the results of exercise to music on learning and understanding since the early 1950s. A study showed that students who listened to Mozart's violin pieces and exercised went on to get higher marks in an IQ test. With important exams drawing near, your parents will not probably allow you to listen to music or play sports. But perhaps now you have good reasons to argue with them.