“As easy as falling off a log” is often used to describe a job that does not take much effort. You might hear a student say to her friend that her spelling test was “as easy as falling off a log”. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}. It is easier to fall off the log than to stay on it.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}. One is “easy as pie”. Nothing is easier than eating a piece of sweet, juicy pie unless it is a “piece of cake”.

    “Piece of cake” is another expression that means something is extremely easy to do. A friend might tell you that his new job was a “piece of cake”.

    Another expression is “as easy as shooting fish in a barrel”. It is hard to imagine why anyone would want to shoot fish in a barrel. But, clearly, fish in a barrel would be much easier to shoot than fish in a stream. {#blank#}3{#/blank#}.

    Sometimes, things that come to us easily, also leave us just as easily. In fact, there is an expression —“easy come, easy go”—that recognizes this. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}. Easy come, easy go.

    When life itself is easy, when you have no cares or problems, you are on “Easy Street”. Everyone wants to live on that imaginary street.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}. It means to treat a person kindly or gently, especially in a situation where you might be expected to be angry with him. A wife might urge her husband to “go easy on” their son, because the boy did not mean to damage the car.

    Less is more. This is why we say: reduce things by half instead of doubling them, relax instead of stressing, and slow down instead of speeding up. Apply these principles(原则) in your everyday life. You will then find yourself well along on your journey to simplification.

Separate Your Actions

    When you concentrate on one task, you find you have energy that you didn't even know you had. Just imagine: you have to carry two heavy pigs over 100 yards. If you carry two, it will take forever. But if you tie one pig in a place, pick up the other, gather all your strength and make a dash for the finish line, pause for a moment, run back and get the other one, and carry the second pig to the finish line, then you can be sure of success.

Say “No” Firmly

    If you have the feeling that 24 hours per day are not enough for all the things you need to do, then it's not because the day has too few hours, but because you have too many activities. The solution is equally simple: say no to accept so much work in your private life or your working life.

Allow Yourself to Be Weak

     “I can deal with stress” is regarded as a positive statement in the world of work. People who can deal with stress are given more and more to — until one day they break.

Pay careful attention to the signs that tell you that you are under more stress than you can deal with. If you become ill, or your work efficiency decreases, change your life goals. Say quite openly, “I can't manage that.”

Stop Expecting Everything to Be Perfect

     “If only I were slimmer, more beautiful, richer, more clever, then I would be happier.” This is a dream that makes a lot of people ill, and unhappy. Life is imperfect. Only those who accept this reality can lead a really full life.

    Of course there are activities in which errors are dangerous: driving a car; crossing the road. But life doesn't entirely have these things. In among them there is possibility that you may make small and large mistakes.

Escape Now and Then

    Successful people all have their own places where they can be left alone in order to work. Find out which places improve your creativity. For me it's the train. When I know that I'm going to be traveling for four hours without phone calls or people knocking on my door, I find my mind is free and I can read or write articles.

    I stood at the edge of the cliff. The wind stung my eyes, cutting into my skin. Dark-feathered birds circled the air, swooping (俯冲) low over the ocean every now and then to catch their dinner. Hundreds of feet below, the deep ocean beat against the rough sandy shore. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs with excitement — and at the same time, fear.

    Behind me, I heard the rest of the crew start to mutter. I was here for the shooting of a movie as I was one of the lead actors in the film Dangerous Things, and this scene was right in the middle of the climax (故事的高潮). It was vital that this went right.

The director had talked to me about getting a stunt double (替身演员), but I'd persuaded him that I could handle the dive. I'd taken a diving course a few years ago, and I'd been taking swimming lessons since I was five years old. I had been pretty confident that I could do this — up till now.

    Someone called out, “Ceria, you don't have to do this! Are you sure you want to dive?” It was one of the producers, Callie Evans. I knew I couldn't turn back now. I couldn't bear to see the disappointed look on the director's face when he was told that I couldn't do it.

    At that moment, all my fears and worries broke free. The expectation of adventure and victory seemed to move all the hesitation. I swooped downwards. The air on either side of me cut into my extended arms. I knew that this wonderful feeling of flight would only last a few seconds, yet time seemed to slow down so I could hear the thrilled whoops of my crew and a round of applause that seemed to echo in my pounding ears.

The urge to share our lives on social media

    People have long used media to see reflections of themselves. Long before mobile phones or even photography, diaries were kept as a way to understand oneself and the world in which one lives. In the 18th and 19th centuries, as diaries became more popular, middle-class New Englanders, particularly white women, wrote about their everyday lives and the world around them.

    These diaries were not a place into which they poured their innermost thoughts and desires, but rather a place to chronicle (记录) the social world around them. The diaries captured the everyday routines of mid-19th-century life, and women diarists in particular focused not on themselves but on their families and their communities.

Diaries today are, for the most part, private. But things were different for these New England diaries. Young women who were married would send their diaries home to their parents as a way of maintaining kin (血缘) relations. When family or friends came to visit, it was not uncommon to sit down and go through one's journal together.

    Diaries are not the only media that people have used to document lives and share them with others. We have long used media like photo albums, baby books and even slide shows as a means of creating traces (痕迹) of our lives. We do this to understand ourselves and to see trends in our behaviour. We create traces as part of our identity and part of our memory.

    Sharing everyday life events can strengthen social connection and intimacy (亲密感). For example, you take a picture of your child's first birthday. It is not only a developmental milestone: the photo also strengthen the identity of the family unit itself. The act of taking the photo and proudly sharing it further reaffirms (再次证实) one as a good and attentive parent. In other words, the media traces of others figure in our own identities.

    Today's social media platforms are, by and large, free to use, unlike historical diaries, which people had to buy. Today, advertising subsidises (补贴) our use of networked platforms. Therefore these platforms encourage use of their networks to build larger audiences and to better target them. Our pictures, our posts, and our likes are commodified—that is, they are used to create value through increasingly targeted advertising.

    Instead of social media merely connecting us, it has become a craze (狂热) for information, continually trying to draw us in with the promise of social connectivity—it's someone's birthday, someone liked your picture, etc. There's a multibillion-dollar industry pulling us into our smartphones, relying on a longstanding human need for communication.

    The urge to be present on social media is much more complex than simply narcissism (自恋).

    Social media of all kinds not only enable people to see their reflections, but to feel their connection as well.

    I returned to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, after college graduation. I had been there before my mother became a minister.

    Two weeks later, I told my mother I was bored. She said, "Here're the car keys. Go and buy some fruit." Delighted, I jumped into the car and speeded off.

 Seeing me or rather my car, a boy quickly ran up to me, eager to sell his bananas and nuts. "Banana 300 naira. Nuts 200 naira!" I bargained him down to 200 total for the fruit and nuts. When he agreed, I handed him a 500 naira note. He didn't have change, so I told him not to worry. He said thanks and smiled a row of perfect teeth.

   When, two weeks later, I ran into this same boy, I was more aware of my position in Nigerian society where it wasn't that uncommon to see a little boy who should have been in school selling fruit in the burning sun. My parents had raised me to be aware of the advantage we had been afforded and the responsibility it brought to us.

    "What's up?" I asked him. "I…I don't have money to buy books." I took out two 500 naira notes. He looked around nervously before taking the money. One thousand naira means a lot to a family that makes only 50,000 each year.

    The next morning, an officer told me, "In this place, when you give a little, people think you're a fountain of chance." Possibly it's right, but this happens everywhere in the world. I wondered if my little friend had actually used the money for books.

    After six months' work in northern Nigeria, I returned and saw him again standing on the road.

    "Are you in school now?" I asked.

    He nodded.

    A silence fell as we looked at each other, and then I realized what he wanted. I held out a 500 naira note. "Take this." He shook his head fiercely and stepped back as if hurt. "What's wrong? I asked. "It's a gift."

    Shaking his head again, he handed me a basket of bananas and nuts before he said, "I've been waiting to give these to you."

China's Entering a New Era of AI

They have beaten us at chess and co-written a Europop album with human beings. Now computers are taking a step into a very human territory: the reading comprehension test, a headache of schoolchildren everywhere. Alibaba on Monday said its artificial outperformed mortals (凡人) in a global reading comprehension.

Luo Si, chef scientist of natural language processing at Alibaba's research department, the Institute of Data Science of Technologies, called the machines' victory "a milestone".{#blank#}1{#/blank#}Some of these uses are already being handled by chatbots globally.

In the test administered last week, companies subjected their artificial intelligence systems to questions from the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, which assessed reading comprehension. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}In top place were

Microsoft, the US software giant, and Alibaba, the Chinese tech group that began with e-commerce and is - like its peers at home and abroad investing more funds into AI.

{#blank#}3{#/blank#}Baidu made an early bet on AI. and is leading its rivals in autonomous driving, some of which was on show at Customer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Tencent, which boasts of I billion monthly active users on its social media WeChat app, and Alibaba have adopted AI in operations such as customizing news and ads, and are investing in new fields.

China aims to make use of its vast treasures of data, collected from its 1.4 billion population including 730 million who are online, and deep pockets to overtake the US in creating a SI50 billion industry that is seen as the next industrial revolution. Excitedly, AI is already being applied in many fields from driverless cars to text analysis. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}The most asked ones include "Where's my package?" especially on Alibaba's Single Day shopping festival.

A. Though China s drive is led by government, it is cultivating homegrown tech giants to leap ahead of the US.

B. Private investment in the AI sector has been expanding 62 percent a year on average for the past four years.

C. The technology has many applications, from customer service to museum tutorials to medical inquiries.

D. The computers' answers to the questions were compared against average human responses and ranked.

E. For example, this technology has already been used to answer general questions on e-commerce platforms.

F. Like all utilities, AI will be boring, even as it transforms the Internet, the global economy, and civilization.