Television has turned 88 years old onSeptember 7, 2015, and it has never looked better. In its youth, television wasa piece of furniture with a tiny, round screen showing unclear pictures oflow-budget programs. In spite of its shortcomings, it became popular. Between1950 and 1963, the number of American families with a television jumped from 9%to 92% of the population.

    As the audience got larger, thetechnology got better. Television sets became more reliable through the 1960s.The reception (接收效果) improved. The picture improved. The major networks started broadcastingprograms in color.

    Even greater improvements were comingaccording to Sanford Brown, who wrote an article for the Post in 1967. Surprisingly, just about every prediction he made in the article became areality. For example: All sets in the not-distant future will be colorinstruments. He also predicted that TV sets would become smaller, simpler, morereliable and less expensive and may forever put the TV repairman out of work.Smaller sets do not, of course, mean smaller screens. TV engineers expectscreens to get much bigger. However, today's 3-D TV is even farther away, if it's coming at all. There is some doubt whether the public would be eager topay for it, in view of people's cold reception given to 3-D movies.

    But the technology with the greatestpotential, according to Brown, was cable television (有线电视), whichwas still in its early stages then. As he predicted, the future of cabletelevision was highly interactive (互动的). It wasn't cable television that gaveAmericans their electronic connection to the world, however. It was theInternet. He even foresaw the future office: using picture phones, big-screentelevisions for conferences, and computers providing information at the touchof a button.

    Brown ever said, “The future oftelevision is no longer a question of what we can invent. It's a question ofwhat we want.”

    Think of life as a game in which you are playing with five balls in the air. You name them work, family, health, friends and spirit and you keep all of them in the air. You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce(弹跳) back.

    But the other four balls, family, health, friends and spirit, are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be broken. They will never be the same. You must understand that and try to have balance in your life. How?

    Don't look down on your worth by comparing yourself with others. It is because we are different and each of us is special.

    Don't let other people set goals for you. Only you know what is best for yourself.

    Don't give up when you still have something to give. Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.

    Don't be afraid of difficulties. It is by taking chances that we learn how to be brave.

    Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible. The quickest way to receive love is to give it; the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly; the best way to keep love is to give it wings.

    Don't run through life so fast that you forget not only where you've been, but also where you are going.

    Don't be afraid to learn. Knowledge is a treasure you can always carry easily.

    Don't use time or words carelessly. You can't get them back. Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery(秘密), and today is a gift; that's why we call it "the present". Life is not a competition, but a trip, step by step.

    If you are sitting, please stand up. Move your legs. Touch your toes if you can. Do anything but sit. New research shows that if you cut down on the time you spend sitting, you might live longer. Sitting less than three hours a day might extend your life by two years. Cutting television time to less than two hours a day can add one point four years to life.

    The human body is designed to move. The fact is just the opposite. Modern lifestyles and office jobs rarely give us the chance to move around. We sit while we're eating; we sit in the car; we sit while we are watching TV. And most of us sit for many hours at work. Sitting is something we do all the time. On average, Americans sit for four and a half to five hours a day. But that does not make sitting good for us.

    Though you may exercise often, that does not mean you can sit for the rest of your waking hours. We can't throw away physical activity. It is extremely important. Even if you exercise for 30 minutes a day, what goes on in the other 23 and a half hours a day is also very important.

    Changes are coming to some offices, especially in the design of desks. A “standing desk” lets people stand while they work. Another new design is called the “treadmill desk”. It is an exercise machine that lets you walk slowly in one place. Even some U.S. schools begin to experiment with desks that are part bicycle to keep children moving.

    Many companies may not buy a standing desk for everybody. However, they may get five standing desks or a treadmill desk for their employees and put them in a certain place where people can go for an hour a day to answer their emails or talk on the phone. Experts suggest some other activities: take a walk at lunchtime; walk to the offices and talk directly instead of emailing colleagues. All these activities may help you live longer.

    Babies have an astonishing talent that adults entirely lose. By the age of one, they can recognise the significant noises around them and group them into a language. When we have lost this capacity as adults, it becomes enormously difficult to distinguish between sounds that are glaringly different to a native speaker. It all sounds Greek to us. This is because the range of possible sounds that humans use to convey meaning may be as high as 2,000, but few languages use more than 100 and even then the significant noises－the phonemes (音素) of a language－each cover a range of sounds and so vague distinctions which would change the meaning of a word in other languages.

    But where do these phonemes come from and why do they shift over time? New research suggests that the apparently arbitrary distribution of some sounds around the world may be partially explained by diet. This is unexpected. We'd rather think of language as product of our thought  rather than of the arrangement of our teeth. In reality, though, any given language must be both.

    Hunter gatherer languages very seldom use the sounds known as labiodentals (唇齿音)－those such as f and v－that are made by touching the lower lip with the upper teeth. Only two of the hundreds of Australian aboriginal languages use them, for example. But in cultures that have discovered farming, these consonants (辅音) are much more common. The argument goes that farmers eat more cooked food and more dairy than hunter gatherers. Either way, they need to chew mush less, and to bite less with their front teeth. So farmers grew up with smaller lower jaws and more of an overbite than their ancestors who had to bite through harder foods. It became easier for them to make the labiodental consonants instead of purely labial (唇音) ones: one example is that f come to take the place of p. Romans said "pater" but English speakers (unless they're Rees－Moggs) say "father".

    Beyond these particular changes, the story highlights the way in which everything distinctively human is both material and spiritual: speech must combine sound and meaning, and the meaning can't exist or be transmitted without a real object. But neither can it be reduced to the purely physical, as our inability to understand or even to recognise foreign languages makes clear. The food we eat shapes our jaws, and our jaws in turn shape the sounds of our language. The ease with which we eat probably shapes our thought too, as anyone who has suffered toothache could testify. What we eat may have shaped the sounds of our language, but how we eat changes how we feel and what we use language to express. A family meal is very different from a sandwich at the office desk, even if the calorie is the same. Food has purposes and meanings far beyond keeping us alive and pleasing the Palate (味觉).

    The values of artistic works, according to cultural relativism(相对主义), are simply reflections of local social and economic conditions. Such a view, however, fails to explain the ability of some works of art to excite the human mind across cultures and through centuries.

    History has witnessed the endless productions of Shakespearean plays in every major language of the world. It is never rare to find that Mozart packs Japanese concert halls, as Japanese painter Hiroshige does Paris galleries, Unique works of this kind are different from today's popular art, even if they began as works of popular art. They have set themselves apart in their timeless appeal and will probably be enjoyed for centuries into the future.

    In a 1757 essay, the philosopher David Hume argued that because" the general principles of taste are uniform(不变的) in human nature," the value of some works of art might be essentially permanent. He observed that Homer was still admired after two thousand years. Works of this type, he believed, spoke to deep and unvarying features of human nature and could continue to exist over centuries.

    Now researchers are applying scientific methods to the study of the universality of art. For example, evolutionary psychology is being used by literary scholars to explain the long-lasting themes and plot devices in fiction. The structures of musical pieces are now open to experimental analysis as never before. Research findings seem to indicate that the creation by a great artist is as permanent an achievement as the discovery by a great scientist.

    Imagine someone who has spent the majority of their life sitting with a sign on the side of the road and that very person giving someone their last 20 dollars. That's exactly what Marine Corps veteran (退伍军人) Johnny Bobbitt, 34, did in October in Philadelphia.

    Bobbitt served in the U.S. Marine Corps and worked as a paramedic (医务辅助人员) in Vance County, N. C. before he became homeless. Nobody knew how he got to where he was because he was discreet about that.

    One night in October, Bobbitt was sitting roadside with a sign in Philadelphia as usual, when Kate McClure of Florence Township, N. J. was driving home down Interstate 95 and ran out of gas. Scared and nervous, she got out of the car to head to the nearest gas station. As McClure was heading to the nearest gas station, she ran into Bobbitt and he told her to get back in the vehicle and lock the door. Minutes later, he appeared with a red gas can. He'd used his last $20 to buy her gas.

    After that unexpected meeting, McClure and her boyfriend, Mark D'Amico, who both live in New Jersey, visited Bobbitt several times to deliver gift cards, cash, snacks and toiletries. They then decided to create a fund raising page so he wouldn't have to spend the holidays sleeping on the street.

    McClure started the GoFundMe page on November 10. With the page, the couple hoped to raise $10,000, enough money for his rent, a reliable vehicle and up to six months' expenses. Bobbitt's story ran in a local paper. By November 15，more than 10,000 local people had made donations through the GoFundMe page and more than $300,000 had been raised.

    On Thanksgiving, Bobbitt was resting in a hotel, his feet up on the bed, drawing up a grand plan for his new life, thanks to several thousand dollars raised to repay him for a good deed.