Eyesight plays a very important role in our daily life. Every waking moment, the eyes are working to see the world around us. Over forty percent of Americans worry about losing eyesight, but it's easy to include steps into our daily life to ensure healthy eyes. Here are five suggestions for a lifetime of healthy eyesight:

    Schedule yearly exams. {#blank#}1{#/blank#} Experts advise parents to bring babies 6 to 12 months of age to the doctor for a careful check. The good news is that millions of children now can have yearly eye exams and following treatment, including eyeglasses.

    Protect against UV rays(紫外线). Long­term stay in the sun creates risk to your eyes. No matter what the season is, it's extremely important to wear sunglasses. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    Give your eyes a break. Two­thirds of Americans spend up to seven hours a day using computers or other digital products. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} Experts recommend that people practice the 20/20/20 rule: every 20 minutes, take a 20­second break and look at something 20 feet away.

    {#blank#}4{#/blank#} As part of a healthy diet, eat more fruits and vegetables each day. Vitamins(维生素) C and E help protect eyesight and promote eye health.

    Practice safe wear and care of contact lenses(隐形眼镜). Many Americans use contact lenses to improve their eyesight. While some follow the medical guidance for wearing contact lenses, many are breaking the rules and putting their eyesight at risk. {#blank#}5{#/blank#} Otherwise, you may have problems such as red eyes, pain in the eyes, or a more serious condition.

A. Eat your greens.

B. Eye care should begin early in life.

C. They can properly protect your eyes.

D. Stay in good shape by taking more Vitamins.

E. Parents usually don't care about their own eyesight.

F. Always follow the doctor's advice for appropriate wear.

G. This frequent eye activity increases the risk for eye tiredness.

    Whenever we talk about holidays, my mother teases my sister and me about how we “make out like robbers.” She is referring to the fact that we are half Jewish and half Indian, so we receive gifts on both the festivals of lights: Hanukkah and Diwali. Though my mother teases us, I do not mind getting two sets of gifts!

    Hanukkah is celebrated on the 25^th day of the Jewish month, which is usually sometime in December. On Hanukkah, like most Jewish families, we light a menorah and say a prayer each night. We also say a special prayer on the first night. After that, it is a tradition for my sister and me to do 'hot and cold' for our hidden Hanukkah gifts. When we walk towards the gift, our parents say 'hot' and when we walk further away, they say 'cold'. We each receive one present every night of Hanukkah. Another part I like about this holiday is seeing family members who we do not see often. My aunt usually stays for a few days, and we sometimes visit other relatives.

    Diwali is celebrated on the 13^th day of the dark fortnight of the month of Ashwin (October/November). To celebrate Diwali, my family does a pooja, or prayers, in honor of the goddess Lakshmi. Since she is the goddess of wealth and prosperity, the pooja includes washing silver coins in milk and water. In India, people decorate their houses with lamps, similar to the way you might light up your house for Christmas. My family just places a few candles outside. We also set off firecrackers, which is my favorite part. We often do this activity with friends to add to the excitement.

    Both holidays have different histories and stories. We celebrate them in different ways, yet they both have the same meaning. They both translate into Festival of Lights, and they both mean family and presents for me!

    Friendships can be difficult—because often people aren't as honest and open as they should be. Sometimes, people end up getting hurt.

    Most problems with friendships come up because people are just too selfish to care about the things that their friends need. They care about their own needs much more, which makes it hard for friendships to work. However, being selfish is part of human nature. A person is put together in order to take care of himself and his own needs, not necessarily those needs of other people. Even though being selfish is something that all humans are born with, it is something that everyone should guard against.

    The best thing to remember when you are a friend to anyone is that you need to treat your friend the same way as you'd like to be treated. This is wonderful advice for a friendship, because it is really the only way to make sure that you are giving your friend everything you would want to be given in a friendship. Whenever you have a question about how you should treat a friend, it is easy to find an answer simply by asking yourself what you would like your friend to do for you, if he or she is in your shoes.

    Even if you're always thinking about how you'd like to be treated, and your friends are too, there are issues that come up from time to time in each friendship, and it is important to understand how to deal with these issues so that you can build stronger and healthier friendships. Issues like friends getting boyfriends or girlfriends and not spending enough time with their friends, or even friends finding new friends and leaving old friends behind are issues that will probably come up with one or more of your friendships. It is important to know how to deal with these issues so that you can keep your friends and make new ones. No one wants to have a broken friendship.

    JERUSALEM—Israel's Environmental Protection Ministry asked citizens Wednesday to avoid unnecessary physical activity and stay indoors, as a serious sandstorm struck the Middle East in a thick yellow haze (霾) for a second day with no hope to see things clearly.

    The ministry said heavy levels of dust and sand in the air were a threat to cities throughout the country. The ministry's website advised pregnant women, the elderly and those with heart and respiratory (呼吸的) conditions to stay indoors, and asked schools to keep children indoors.

    The emergency service Magen David Adom reported that it has treated more than 300 Israelis suffering from breathing problems, and that hospitals have more respiratory-related patients, including a large number of the elderly and those with asthma and related conditions.

    The domestic Israeli airlines Arkia and Israir continued to ground their flights to Eilat because of reduced visibility.

    The sandstorm has affected Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, where at least five deaths have been reported.

    "There has been nothing that came close to the magnitude of this sandstorm," said Daniel Rosenfeld, a professor with the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

    "While Israel has experienced a number of sandstorms in the past, they started from the Sinai Desert and the Sahara Desert to the south and were joined by winter windstorms that cleared the air," he said. In this case, the storm comes from Syria and Iraq to the north and east.

    Because the storm is hitting during the summer, at a time of both little wind and severe heat and humidity, forecasters expect the particles to remain in the air throughout the weekend and possibly into next week.

    "This is really puzzling," said Rosenfeld, adding that he and his colleague will conduct research into the origins of the unprecedented (前所未有的) storm. (326 words)

    Wolves strike fear into the hearts of many species, humans included. Our fear of them has brought them to the edge of dying out, as we have cruelly killed them as competitors and trouble-makers. But researchers are discovering that the very fear they put into prey（被捕食者）species is exactly what helps make ecosystems（生态）healthy.

    Yellowstone National Park is a typical example of just how wolves can help repair an ecosystem. An October 2018 study analyzed 40 years of research on large animals inside the park.

    "Yellowstone has benefited from the reintroduction of wolves in ways that we did not anticipate, especially the complexity of biological interactions（互动） in the park," explained Mark Boyce, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences." We were really surprised at that and we'd never have seen these responses if the park hadn't adopted ecological-process management—allowing natural ecological processes to take place with least human intervention."

    After the wolves were re-introduced at Yellowstone, willow and cottonwood trees increased in number. The population of bears and bison also rose and what was once a ruling deer-wolf interaction is now more diverse.

    To learn more about just how wolves are beneficial, a short documentary from Quest explains how the presence of wolves influences the behavior of deer, which eventually makes entire ecosystems more biologically diverse and healthy. In this documentary, biologist Aaron Wirsing explored why wolves and other top predators （捕食者）were needed for diverse ecosystems to develop. Using a simple video camera, Wirsing is gaining a unique view point on predator-prey relationships and changing the way we think about wolves.

    The research is one more piece of evidence for why protecting these top predators is important not just for wolves as a species, but for hundreds of species at every level of an ecosystem. The fear they bring along may be the very angle that helps save them from dying out.

    "I'm the smartest kid in class." We all want our kids to be self-confident, but unrealistic perception(认知) of their academic abilities, a new study finds, damage a child's relationship with others in the classroom: The more one student feels unrealistically superior(更好的) to another, the less the two students like each other.

Katrin Rentzsch of Bamberg University in Germany first became interested in the effects of such self-perception when she was studying how people became labeled as nerds(书呆子). "I really got interested in the question of whether it's OK to boast(吹嘘) about achievements," she says.

    This line of thinking led her towards something psychologists call "self-enhancement" －when a person feels unrealistically superior to someone else. So Rentzsch and her colleague Michela Schroder-Abe decided to take a closer look at how such self-enhancement affects relationships, so they turned to the eighth-grade classroom, somewhere they could measure differences between actual academic performance, and social popularity. The 358 students came from 20 eighth-grade classes in schools in southeast Germany.

    The researchers asked each student to rate their classmates, in terms of their likability and of their feelings of academic superiority. They then compared those ratings with the students' grades in math, physics, German and English. Importantly, they conducted the analysis at two different social levels: "habitual"－the way people act in general, and "relationship"－the way someone acts around a specific individual.

    In future work, Rentzsch would like to look at these effects on adults, perhaps specifically in team work. She's also interested in self-enhancement beyond academic achievements, for example physical attractiveness. And another question to explore is why students overestimate their academic abilities. Perhaps it is because of too much praise from their parents or teachers.