YOUR mom might cook a bowl of noodles for you on your birthday. But in the US, a mom makes a cupcake for her children on their birthday.

    Cupcakes are small, round cakes topped with frosting (糖霜). It has been an American tradition that moms bring cupcakes to the classroom to celebrate their child's birthday. But recently some doctors have called for this to be banned. They believe cupcakes contribute to child obesity. Despite their good intentions, however, some people believe that experts are interfering (妨碍) with American culture. The cupcake is seen as American as apple pie — only prettier.

    According to Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, the cupcake is the most democratic (民主的) of desserts. As they are small enough for one person, you don't have to share your cupcake with anyone — it's all yours. They are also all of the same size, so there can't be any cries of  “she got the bigger piece!”

    Each bite can taste different depending on how much icing you have. It is a lesson in self-determination. Some people eat only a little of the frosting every time, others have it all in just one bite.

    In recent years, eating a cupcake has become as trendy as having a cup of Starbucks coffee.

    Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton jokingly promised on a talk show that if she was elected president, she would give everyone a cupcake on her birthday. Ruth Reichl, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, explains that the rise of the cupcake is very much about going back to American national identity in food, which is all about comfort. “People want to think about when they and their country were innocent,” she said.

    Time is more precious than money for an increasing number of people who are choosing to live more with less—and liking it.

    Kay and Charles Giddens, two lawyers, sold their home to start a B&B hotel. Four years later, the couple dishes out banana pancake breakfast, cleans toilets and serves homemade chocolate chip cookies to guests in a B&B hotel surrounded by trees on a hill known for colourful sunsets.

    “Do I miss the freeways? Do I miss the traffic? Do I miss the stress? No,” says Ms. Giddens, “This is a phenomenon that's fairly widespread. A lot of people are revaluating their lives and figuring out what they want to do. If their base is being damaged, what's the payoff?”

    Simple living ranges from cutting down on weeknight activities to sharing housing, living closer to work, avoiding shopping malls, borrowing books from the library instead of buying them, and taking a cut in pay to work at a more pleasurable job.

    Vicki Robin, a writer, lives on a budget equal to a fifth of what she used to make. “You become conscious about where your money is going and how valuable it is,” Ms. Robin says, “You tend not to use things up. You cook at home rather than eat out…”

    Janet Luhrs, a lawyer, quit her job after giving birth and leaving her daughter with a nanny for two weeks. “It was not the way I wanted to raise my kids,” she says, “Simplicity is not just about saving money; it's about me sitting down every night with my kids to a candlelit dinner with classical music.”

    Mrs. Luhrs now edits a magazine, Simple Living, which publishes tips on how to buy recycled furniture and shoes, organize potluck dinners instead of expensive receptions, and generally how to consume less.

    Mrs. Luhrs explains, “It's not about poverty. It's about conscious living and creating the life you want. The less stuff you buy, the less money goes out of the door, and the less money you have to earn.”

    If you want to live longer and lower the risk of heart disease, a move to the mountains may help. Research by scientists in Greece shows that living in the mountains is good for the heart and longevity(长寿). People living at higher altitude(海拔) have lower possibility of dying from heart disease than those closer to sea level, even if they have factors that could increase their risk. "Residence in mountainous areas seems to have a 'protective effect' from heart disease," said Dr Nikos Baibas of the University of Athens. He and his colleagues suspect that the increased exercise from walking up mountainous area gives the heart a good workout and enables it to cope with lower levels of oxygen.

    Researchers studied the health records and death rates of 1,150 Greeks who lived in three villages near Athens over 15 years. One village was 1,000 meters above sea level and the other two were in low-lying areas. Although men and women living in the mountainous village had higher blood pressure rates and other risk factors than people in the other villages, they had a lower rate of death from heart disease and other causes after a fifteen year follow-up." The contrast was more evident among men than among women," Baibas added in a report in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Heart disease is one of the world's top killers. Smoking, high blood pressure, raised cholesterol levels, being overweight and a family history of the illness increase the possibility of developing the disease.

    A new library in Tianjin—Tianjin Binhai Public Library—recently became an online hit. The Daily Mail described it as “breathtaking”. One look at the library and you'll see why. With its very futuristic design and walls loaded with books, it's the dream library of every book lover.

    But there's a burning question lying in the back of our minds: with physical bookstores closing down one by one, what makes libraries survive the wave of digitalization? Do we really still need libraries as we've got the internet in our hands?

    Reporter Ian Clark has the answer. “Libraries are not declining in importance. People are simply changing the way they use them,” he wrote on the Guardian website. Since not everyone can afford a smartphone, a tablet or an internet connection, and not everyone knows how to search the Internet correctly and efficiently, it's public libraries that make sure that these resources are available to a larger group of people.

    And one of the pitfalls that come with online materials is that they're not always reliable. “Google doesn't tell you what you're not getting, so people need to evaluate (评估) the quality of what they see on their screens,” Sarah Pritchard, dean of libraries at Northwestern University, told Northwestern Research Magazine. And libraries are usually where that “evaluation” happens.

    But we still need the physical space that a library provides. It's something that's called a “third place”, according to the Seattle Times. This is a place in which we can fully concentrate on our study and work without easily getting distracted. Compared to other “third places” like coffee shops, libraries have a “non-commercial nature” that allows you to relax completely.

    “Nobody is trying to sell you anything in the library. There is no pressure to buy and there is no judgment of your choices,” Anne Goulding, a professor at Victoria University in New Zealand, wrote on the Newsroom website.

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    Over the past 40 years, China has helped more than 700 million rural residents out of being poor, and the poverty rate -- the proportion of people living below the Chinese poverty line -- had fallen among the rural population from 97.5 percent in 1978 to 3.1 percent at the end of 2017, official figures shows. China's achievements in poverty alleviation (扶贫) made the world look at China with admiration.

    "For me, it is unbelievable that over 40 years, that is, over the course of one working lifetime, China has gone from one of the poorest countries in the world to one that is about to eliminate(消除) absolute poverty," said Craig Allen, president of the US-China Business Council.

    Varaprasad Sekhar Dolla, a professor of Chinese studies at India's Jawaharlal Nehru University, also spoke highly of China's achievements in poverty reduction. "If global poverty came down greatly in the last three or four decades, it's partly because of the Chinese contribution to reducing poverty within its own national boundaries," said the Indian scholar.

    In the eyes of Khairy Tourk, a professor of economics with the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, "many countries look up to China to learn from its experience." "The Chinese experience is based on building a modern infrastructure (基础设施) and then on setting up special economic zones that would help underdeveloped countries to become more industrial," he added.

    In the government work report delivered at the opening of the annual NPC session (全国人大会议) on March 5, China promises to reduce its population of rural poor by over 10 million this year.