Sweet or salty? What kind of tastes do you like? If like me, you have a sweet tooth and you probably can't resist eating cakes, biscuits or chocolate and will sweeten your tea or coffee with spoonfuls of sugar-delicious! But the taste makes it very easy to ignore the warnings that too much of the white stuff（东西）is bad for our health.

    Consuming sugar is an addiction-the more we eat, the more we want. Today's processed food, like ready meals, is related to the stuff and many fizzy（起泡的）drinks contain seven teaspoons of sugar in just one can. In the UK, statistics show that sugar consumption is at its highest level in history and the government is trying to get the food industry to cut the amount of sugar in popular products like chocolate bars by 20% by 2020.

    Of course, sugary food tastes nice, it can help lift our mood, and a part in it can refresh us. But there are dangers too :a high-sugar diet is linked to putting on weight, and being overweight can increase the risk of getting type 2 diabetes（糖尿病）. With these warning signs, I have considered changing my diet by replacing sugary snacks with fruit and salty biscuits-but that's boring!

I'm not alone. BBC journalist Radhika Shanghani, has gone one step further. Encouraged by some well-knowns and nutritionists promoting a 'zero tolerance' approach to sugar, she gave it up altogether, thinking it would make her healthier. Initially she says, “My first fortnight involves mood swings. I have disturbing headaches and feel permanently hung-over.” These symptoms disappeared but she still found food shopping hard as she was stressing about buying the right things.

    Her experiment wasn't a success. She eventually sought advice from Susan Jebb, professor of diet and population health at Oxford University who said: “Lots of people enjoy sugar and gain pleasure from it, so one has to find a balance between enjoyment and eating the right amount.”

From birth to death, the word kick has been given an important part in expressing human experience. The proud and happy mother feels the first signs of life kicking inside her body. And that same life——many years later—— comes to its end in a widely-used expression, to kick the bucket( 吊桶) . The expression to kick the bucket is almost 200 years old. One belief is that it started when an English stableman(马夫) killed himself by hanging while standing on a bucket. He put a rope around his neck and tied it to a beam(梁柱) in the ceiling, and then kicked the bucket away from under him.

    Another old expression that comes from England is to kick over the traces. Traces were the chains（链子） that held at horse or mule to a wagon(货运马车)or plow. Sometimes, an animal refused to obey and kicked over the traces.

    Kick around is an expression that is heard often in American English. A person who is kicked around is someone who is treated badly. Usually he is not really being kicked by somebody's foot. He is just not being treated with the respect that all of us want. A person who has kicked around for most of his life is someone who has spent his life moving from place to place. In this case, kicking around means moving often from one place to another. Kick around has another meaning when you use it with the word idea. When you kick around an idea, you are giving that idea some thought.

    There is no physical action when you kick a person upstairs, although the pain can be as strong .You kick a person upstairs by removing him from an important job and giving him a job that sounds more important, but really is not.

    Still another meaning of the word kick is to free oneself of a bad habit, such as smoking cigarettes. Health campaigns urge smokers to kick the habit.  

    Passing through the Atlanta airport one morning, I caught one of those trains that take travelers from the main terminal to their boarding gates. Free, and impersonal, the trains run back and forth all day long. Not many people consider them fun, but on this Saturday I heard laughter. At the front of the first car – looking out the window at the track that lay ahead – were a man and his son.

    We had just stopped to let off passengers, and the doors were closing again. "Here we go! Hold on to me tight!" the father said. The boy, about five years old, made sounds of sheer delight.

    I know we're supposed to avoid making racial distinctions(种族歧视) these days, so I hope no one will mind if I mention that most people on the train were white, dressed for business trips or vacations.

    As I got off, I remembered something I'd wanted to buy in the terminal. I was early for my flight, so I decided to go back.

    I did – and just as I was about to reboard the train for my gate, I saw that the man and his son had returned too. I realized then that they hadn't been heading for a flight, but had just been riding the shuttle.

    "I want to ride some more!"

    "More?" the father said, mock-exasperated(嗔怪模仿) but clearly pleased. "You're not tired?"

    "This is fun!" his son said.

    "All right," the father replied, and when a door opened we all got on.

    There are parents who can afford to send their children to Europe or Disneyland, but the children turn out rotten. There are parents who live in million-dollar houses and give their children cars and swimming pools, yet something goes wrong. Rich and poor, black and white, so much goes wrong so often.

    "Where are all these people going, Daddy?" the son asked.

    "All over the world," came the reply. The other people in the airport were leaving for distant destinations or arriving at the ends of their journeys. The father and son, though, were just riding this shuttle together, making it exciting, sharing each other's company.

    Microsoft has developed a new smartphone app that interprets eye signals and translates them into letters, allowing people with motor neurone disease to communicate with others from a phone.

    The GazeSpeak app combines a smartphone's camera with artificial intelligence to recognize eye movements in real time and convert them into letters, words and sentences. For people suffering from ALS（渐冻症）, also known as motor neurone disease, eye movement can be the only way they are able to communicate.

    "Current eye-tracking input systems for people with ALS or other motor impairments are expensive, not robust under sunlight, and require frequent re-calibration and substantial, relatively immobile setups," said Xiaoyi Zhang, a researcher at Microsoft who developed the technology.

    "To mitigate the drawbacks…we created GazeSpeak, an eye-gesture communication system that runs on a smartphone, and is designed to be low-cost, robust, portable and easy to learn."

    The app is used by the listener by pointing their smartphone at the speaker. A chart that can be stuck to the back of the smartphone is then used by the speaker to determine which eye movements to make in order to communicate.

    The sticker shows four grids of letters, which each correspond to a different eye movement. By looking up, down, left or right, the speaker selects which grids the letters they want belong to. The artificial intelligence algorithm is then able to predict the word or sentence they are trying to say.

    Zhang's research, Smartphone-Based Gaze Gesture Communication for People with Motor Disabilities, is set to be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May.

    The strand bookstore is a New York Institution, and Fred Bass was a part of it almost from the moment he was born until the day he died. Every day, dozens of sellers arrive armed with piles of books, and every day thousands of buyers browse through the 18 miles of shelving, squeezing through narrow, dark aisles towered over by high, cramped shelves.

    Film studios wanting a line of books for a backdrop rent them from the Strand by the foot; interior designers looking for books with the same color spine will order a job lot; and hosts wishing to impress dinner guests will order the latest tomes(巨著) to replace on their coffee tables. Some even might be read.

    "You never know what someone is going to walk in with," Bass told The Villager magazine in 2010, adding that there was nothing he loved more than the "treasure hunt". Many books came from critics keen to add to their income by offloading review copies, they came from large estates, fellow bookshops and even publishers quietly offloading surplus(过剩的) stock. One visitor spoke of Bass as a character who could have come from a book. "I remember sensing in Bass, beyond a slightly gruff look, a man of great passion, a man who knew the innumerable and shifting current of the book trade the way that an old sailor knows the changeable sea," wrote Tom Vanderbilt in the New York Review of Books.

    Bass himself took a kind, almost paternalistic(家长式的) approach to the business. Some employees remained with him for decades.  When Greg Farr, a dissatisfied member of staff, published a novel that was critical of the store's management and the unions he still had his job, furthermore, the Strand sold his book.

Fred Bass was born in Manhattan in 1928, the year after his father, Benjamin, a Lithuanian immigrant, founded the Strand bookstore on Fourth Avenue, which was then known as "Book Row". His mother, Shirley, a Polish immigrant, died from cancer when Fred was six. His father remarried, to Esther, a bookkeeper who was involved in various civil rights causes.

    As a child young Fred swept the floors and by 13 he was working behind the counter on Saturdays. He recalled going on buying trips with his father and hauling back bundles of books on the subway, all tied with rope that cut into his hands. The family lived in the Bronx and young Fred studied English at Brooklyn College in the mornings and worked in the shop in the afternoons. His only extended period of time away was two year' service with the US armed forces, but even then he used his leave from the Korean War to work at the shop. In 1957, a year after taking over the business, Bass moved the store from Fourth Avenue to the corner of 12th Street and Broadway, where it stands to this day.

In 1952, Bass, who could eventually afford to purchase an apartment in Trump Tower, married Patricia Miller. They had a son, Stephen, who died in 2001, and a daughter, Nancy, who married Ron Wyden, a senator from Oregon. Since her teens she has worked with her father, developing the store, remodeling the space and adding air conditioning ("I hated it," said Bass). Since 1986 the Strand has run a "Books by the Foot" department, which creates custom book collections based on readers' literary tastes or preferred colors.

    In 1996, after seven decades as tenants(房客), the Bass family bought their building for $8.2 million. Until then they had negotiated the lease with their landlord at the nearby Knickerbock Bar and Grill; now Bass had to deal with himself." When I want to negotiate my own lease I have go to the bar myself", he joked. Even in his late eighties Bass was making buying trips, though no longer by subway.

Time and the Internet have not been kind to booksellers. "Book Row" is now only the Strand, which itself has been redesigned to be more "userfriendly". T-shirts, postcards, fridge magnets and other gifts now account for about 15 per cent of the Strand's turnover. Satellite stores have been set up and new books have joined the traditional secondhand commodities. "I make less money, "Bass said," but it's a little bit more scientific".

    Perhaps the most unusual part of management at the Strand book store was the book quiz­matching authors and title­that job applicants since the 1970 have been required to take.

    Why are people interested in eating raw foods or whole foods? One reason is that eating these types of food reduces the risk of acid accumulation in your body.

    Raw and whole foods are usually digested more efficiently than cooked and refined foods. When we cook foods, we destroy the natural enzymes (酶) that are part of the food in its raw form. These enzymes were intended by nature to help us digest the food. When we consume food without these natural enzymes, our bodies either digest the food improperly or allow too many nutrients to be absorbed into the bloodstream. In both instances, the result is obesity. When too many nutrients are absorbed at once, the body grows fat. Improperly digested food moves slowly through the digestive tract, where it becomes increasingly acidic. To protect its vital organs from this acidic waste, the body changes the acid into fat and stores it safely away from the organs.

    Processed foods contain chemical elements, which might confuse the appetite mechanism that tells us when we've had enough to eat; as a result, people often overeat. Processed foods also upset the digestive cycle. The body will either identify these foods as allergens and then store them safely away from the organs as fat, or the remains of undigested food will become acidic and enter the bloodstream as acid waste, which will stick to the blood vessel walls and block the passage of vital oxygen and nutrients heading for the body's cells. The body's metabolism (新陈代谢) becomes inactive, and the result is weight gain and obesity.

    The accumulation of acid in the digestive tract makes digestion increasingly inefficient. When that happens, even healthy foods can become acidic and the food allergies will become more common.

    To stop this vicious circle in its tracks, people need to consume food and supplements that will neutralize the acid already accumulated in body. Eating the right types of raw and whole foods can help. It's also important to restore your enzyme balance. You need to identify and avoid the foods that cause acid accumulation and consume the foods that increase enzyme production. If you truly want to change and help your body heal itself, you need to take an active approach.