Hilversum is a medium- sized city between the major cities of Amsterdam and Utrecht in the Gooi area of North Holland, the Netherlands. Unlike most of the Netherlands, Hilversum is actually in a hilly area with the soil mostly consisting of sand. Once called the Garden of Amsterdam, it still attracts travelers to come over to cycle and walk through the surrounding forests. They visit it for a relaxing day off from the urban madness. For Dutch people, Hilversum is all about textile (纺织) and media industries, and modern architecture.
         In history, Hilversum was largely an agricultural area. Daily life was marked by farming, sheep raising and wool production. A railway link to Amsterdam in 1874 attracted rich traders from Amsterdam to Hilversum. They build themselves large villas (别墅) in the wooded surroundings of the town. One of the families moving in was the Brenninkmeijers, currently the wealthiest family of the Netherlands. They moved in after big success in the textile industry and aided a substantial textile industry in Hilversum. But the textile boom lasted only several decades. The last factory closed in the 1960s.
          The change to a media economy started in 1920, when the Nederlandse Seintoestedllen Fabriek (NSF) established a radio factory in Hiversum. Most radio stations called in the large villas in the leafy areas of the town. Television gave another push to the local economy. Hilversum became the media capital of the Netherlands, and Dutch televison stars moved into the leafy neighborhoods surrounding the town.
         In the early 1900s, modern architcts W.M. Dudok and J. Duiker placed hundreds of remarkable buildings in Hilversum. These modern architectural masterpieces (杰作) are so many that Hilversum almost feels like an open air museum. Dudok alone shaped most 20th century Hilversum and approximately 75 buildings in 1928-1931. It has wide international fame and is included in many architecture textbooks. The building has a remarkable shape and looks like a combination of “blocks”. Actually, one may start his journey of modern architecture by walking or biking the W.M. Dudok Architectural Route in Hilversum.

    Happiness is for everyone. You don't need to care about those people who have beautiful houses with large gardens and swimming pools or{#blank#}1{#/blank#} and so on. Why? Because those who have big houses may often feel lonely and those who have cars may want to walk on the country roads at their free time.

    In fact, happiness is always around you if you put your heart into it. {#blank#}2{#/blank#} When you study hard at your lessons, your parents are always taking good care of your life and your health. When you get success, your friends will say congratulations to you. When you do something wrong, people around you will help you to correct it. {#blank#}3{#/blank#} All these are your happiness. If you notice a bit of them, you can see that happiness is always around you.

    Happiness is not the same as money. It is a feeling of your heart. When you are poor, you can also say you are very happy, because you have something else that can't be bought with money. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}, because you have more chances to challenge yourself. So you cannot always say you are poor and you have bad luck. As the saying goes, life is like a revolving(旋转的)door. When it closes, it also opens. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}

A. When you are in trouble at school, your friends will help you

B. If you take every chance you get, you can be a happy and lucky person

C. those who have nice cars and a lot of money

D. And when you do something good to others, you will feel happy, too

E. those who have no houses

F. When you meet with difficulties, you can give them up and be happy

G. When you meet with difficulties, you can say loudly you are very happy

    The human body is designed to move. But modern lifestyles and office jobs rarely give us the chance to move around. As we know, we're sitting while we're eating; we sit in the car and we sit while we watch TV. And many of us sit for many hours at work.

    New research shows that sitting less than three hours a day might extend your life by two years. Peter Katzmarzyk, a scientist at the University of Louisiana in the southern United States, says that sitting is ubiquitous in our lives, meaning it is something we do all the time, everywhere.

    However, Mr. Katzmarzyk says that does not mean you can sit for the rest of your waking hours. He also says you may exercise often, "We can't throw away physical activity. It's extremely important. We have 60 years of research showing us that."

    Mr. Katzmarzyk and his colleagues are part of a new generation of researchers studying how sitting all day affects length of life. "Studies that have assessed the relationship between sitting and mortality (死亡率) or television viewing and mortality are very rare. There's only been a few of them, actually five or six now, in the last four or five years." They found that cutting television time to less than two hours a day could add one point four years to life.

    Luckily, change is already 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." A treadmill is an exercise machine that lets you walk in one place. Even some U.S. schools are beginning to experiment with desks that are part bicycle to keep children moving. That's one of the strategies that many companies are using now.

    Mr. Katzmarzyk also says studying this problem has inspired his team to make a few changes in their own lives.

    I just counted how many foreign languages I've studied so far in my life and it's been twelve!

    I always follow my interests and find ways to put my language learning into things I'm already interested in. I like to read blogs(博客)in other languages.{#blank#}1{#/blank#}. For the most part, bloggers tend to write the same way they speak, so I don't have to worry much about adopting strange terms that are only used in writing.

    Movies are also a really good tool, especially if you can find subtitles in the language you're learning.{#blank#}2{#/blank#}, they will still keep your brain listening and reading in the same language. Music is another way to start listening to things in your new language. Personally, I'm so bad at understanding lyrics(歌词)even in English, so this one doesn't really work for me, but I have friends who learn a language through lyrics. Games are of course also an excellent way of studying a new language. A lot of language learning computer programs include games. I'm super competitive and if I play any of them, I can be hooked for hours.{#blank#}3{#/blank#}.

    When the initial excitement of learning a new language begins to fade, it can be hard to stick with it. The hardest bit for me is when I'm comfortable enough with a language to understand most things and make myself understood. I'm actually stuck at this stage in Norwegian.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}. Ideally I should sign up to take a big language exam. Each time I start getting self-satisfied, it's time to take a new course or sign up for online lessons, or take up some sort of challenge that will require me to level up my skills.

    {#blank#}5{#/blank#}. The best language class I've ever taken was my beginner's Russian course at university where my professor never used any English. It got to the point where I would kind of just forget about English while in Russian class, which helped me to really immerse myself in the Russian language and do a whole lot with the limited Russian I had.

A. That's really uncomfortable

B. Whatever languages they're translated into

C.I also try to think in the language I'm learning

D. It's time well spent if I'm learning the language

E. Computer games always make me feel worn out

F. Though they don't always exactly match what's being said

G.I found them the perfect learning tool because they're usually written in oral language

    Food feeds the soul. To the extent that we all eat food, and we all have souls, food is the single great united across cultures. With food, there are more opportunities to connect to memory and family and place.{#blank#}1{#/blank#} Food as identity. French, Mexican, Chinese, and Italian cuisines each involve dozens of distinct regional foods. Every single culture and religion uses food as part of their celebrations.

    {#blank#}2{#/blank#}Every season, every harvest, and every holiday has its own food, and this is true in America as well.

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}Sometimes food means living on. While the Chinese cooks who exported “Chinese” food around the world ate authentic cooking at home, the dishes they served, thus creating new cuisines entirely, were based on economic necessity.

    Food as pleasure. Things have changed dramatically in the past 20 years when it comes to food in France. Some of the ideas of French food life may be a performance. France is this pastoral nation where people are spending five hours a day going to 12 different markets to get their food.{#blank#}4{#/blank#}

    Food as status. The introduction of global foods and brands has compounded food as a status symbol for some Chinese.{#blank#}5{#/blank#}In China, people eat food not necessarily for taste, but for texture. You can find food from all of the provinces of China in Shanghai, as well as every kind of global food style imaginable.

A. Food as survival.

B. Food as community.

C. It's the hardest to give up.

D. The celebratory nature of food is universal.

E. It is an accumulation, a function of your experiences

F. How and why you eat your food, is, of course, also very cultural.

G. But food in Italy is love, then nutrition, then history, then pleasure.

    It sounds almost too good to be true, but a new study on sleeping brains suggests that listening to languages while you sleep can actually help you to learn them.

    For the study, researchers played recordings of foreign words and their translations to subjects enjoying slow-wave sleep, a stage when a person has little consciousness of their environment. To ensure that the results were not compromised by foreign language words that subjects may have had some contact with at some point in their waking lives, researchers made up totally nonexistent foreign words.

    When the subjects woke up, they were presented with the made-up words again without their translations. The subjects were then asked to imagine whether this made-up word indicated an object that was either smaller or larger. This vague(模糊的)way of testing their understanding of the words is an approach that is supposed to tap into the unconscious memory.

    Unbelievably, the subjects were able to correctly classify the words in this way at an accuracy rate that was 10 percent higher than random chance. That's not a rate high enough to have them suddenly communicating in a foreign tongue, but it is enough to suggest that the brain is still absorbing information on some level, even during sleep.

    Researchers have long known that sleep is important for memory, but previously its role in memory was thought to relate only to the preservation and organization of memories acquired during wakefulness. This is the first time that memory formation has been shown to be active during sleep.

    In other words, our brains are listening to the world, and learning about it, even when our conscious selves are not present.

    The next step for researchers will be to see if new information can be 1earned quicker during wakefulness if it was already presented during sleep. If so, it could forever change how we train our brains to learn new things. Sleep learning might become a widespread practice.