Siri, whose voice do you have?

    The question has interested millions of Apple iPhone and iPad fans, who use the devices' Siri function for help with everything from finding restaurants and directions to organize their day.

    On Friday, CNN reported it had discovered the original voice. The person had never before been identified publicly.

    The network named Susan Bennett, a voice-over actress（配音演员）from Atlanta in the US, as the voice behind Siri, which was first introduced on Apple's iPhone 4s in 2011.

    "I'm the voice actor who provided the voice of Siri," Bennett told CNN in an interview.

    Bennett told the network she worked four hours a day for the entire month of July 2005 recording in her home. She said she was paid by the hour but would not reveal the amount.

    "A colleague emailed me and said, 'Hey, we've been playing around with this new Apple phone. Isn't this you?'" Bennett told CNN.

    Her voice may also be familiar to airline passengers who have passed through a Delta Airlines terminal.

    Bennett also provided the radio and TV voice of First National Bank's "Tillie the All-Time Teller", the first ATM machine, she told CNN.

    "I began my career as a machine many years ago," Bennett told the network. "I'm sure that you hear my voice at some point every day."

    As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. "The woods" was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend's house and found him not at home, his mother might say, "Oh, he's out in the woods," with a tone (语气) of airy acceptance. It's similar to the tone people sometimes use now a days to tell me that someone I'm looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even "away from his desk". For us ten-year-olds, "being out in the woods" was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

    We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring (探索). Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though seemed to have less system than the historic kind something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Indian burial mound.

    Often we got "lost" and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical; the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly-tall beeches easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

    It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence (青春期). In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.

    When school started on that warm August day, I threw myself into everything I did, including playing volleyball. I decided to become beautiful, or at the very least, skinny. I stopped eating completely. Soon I began losing weight, which thrilled me, and I even grew to love the tiredness and lightheadedness(头晕)that came with my poor diet, for those feelings meant that I was winning.

    As the season progressed, things had become tense between my head volleyball coach, Coach Smith, and me. She felt that something was wrong with my health. She talked with me about my eating and was angry that I wouldn't listen to her when she tried to make me eat. She tried to persuade me in a determined way and so we fought constantly. Then my hunger started to affect my performance. I was so tired that practice and games were becoming a struggle. One afternoon, with hurt in her eyes, Coach Smith asked me what I had eaten and I told her nothing yet. She looked at me, disappointment in her eyes, knowing she couldn't make me stop, and walked away.

    A couple of weeks later I attended a formal dinner for our volleyball team. I stood there as my coach managed to say something nice about me. I realized then that I had ruined my senior year by being disrespectful, and I had probably ruined hers as well. So that evening I wrote her a letter apologizing and thanking her.

    Then one Saturday, as I was reading in the library, I felt someone gently take my arm and say softly, “Lynn Jones, how are you doing?” I looked up and saw the familiar face. “Thanks for the letter,” she said. “It meant a lot.”

    When I think of a coach, I think of someone above me, someone who gives instruction — not a friend. But Coach Smith is different, and, like any other good friend, she dealt with my problem in a determined way even when I hated her for it at that time. I didn't deserve her kindness, but she gave it anyway. I will forever be grateful for her help, and now for her friendship.

    A food chain is a simple way of explaining how each living thing gets its food. For example, a simple African food chain might consist of three parts: first, trees and bushes; second, giraffes; and third, lions. Each link in a food chain is food for the next link. Food chains always start with plants and end with animals.

    Plants are at the bottom of the food chain. Scientists call them producers, because they use light energy from the sun to produce food from carbon dioxide and water through photosynthesis（光合作用）. Animals, unlike plants, can't produce their own food. Instead, they must eat plants or other animals. This is why scientists call them consumers.

    Consumer animals fall into three categories. Herbivores（食草动物）eat only plants. Carnivores（食肉动物） eat only other animals. Omnivores eat both plants and animals. In addition to producers and consumers, there are also decomposers(分解者).These organisms, such as bacteria and fungi, feed on decaying(腐烂) matter. They help the food chain by speeding up the decaying process that releases minerals back into the soil to be absorbed by plants as nutrients.

    Most food chains have only four or five links in them. As you go up a food chain, the amount of energy at each level diminishes, because some of the energy is lost in the form of waste or is used up by the organism at the level. That is why it takes many plants, for example, to feed a few giraffes who in turn feed one lion.

    Most animals are part of many different food chains, because they must eat more than one type of food to satisfy their energy needs. All of these interconnected food chains form a more complex structure called a food web. Humans, for example, are at the center of a very complex food web, because we tend to eat many different types of plants and animals.

Visit Chicago Children's Museum

    In brief:

    This museum offers plenty of fun hands-on activities for kids. However, this is one of the few Chicago museums not "fun for the whole family" as adults and older kids will be bored to tears.

    Address: 700 East Grand Ave. (Navy Pier), Chicago

    Phone: 312- 527-1000

    Public transportation:

    CTA bus lines # 29 (State Street), #65 (Grand Avenue), and # 66 (Chicago Avenue) all serve Navy Pier.

    Parking fees:

    · Monday through Thursday: $ 20

    · Friday through Sunday: $ 24

    · Holidays: $ 24

    Opening hours:

    · Weekdays: 10 a. m.-5 p. m

    · Weekends: 10 a. m.-8 p. m

    Entrance fees:

    ·Adults: $12

    ·Children: $12

    ·Seniors (65+): $11

    ·Children (under 5): free

    Activities:

    Located at one of Chicago's top tourist attractions, Navy Pier, the museum offers three floors of activities for kids, including:

    ·Play It Safe—all about home safety

    ·Inventing Lab—provides parts and instructions for creating things

    ·Kids Town—a playroom recreating a Chicago neighborhood where kids can pretend to do things like shopping for groceries and driving a CTA bus

    ·Climbing Schooner—a three-floor climbing building

    ·My Museum—kids get to create various pieces of art that are "all about me"

    ·Skyline—kids learn about skyscrapers and design their own buildings

    ·Tree House Trails—a play area designed like a forest

    ·Waterways—water activities showing how pumps and dams work

    A smile will tell people around you that you are a kind and friendly person. However, many people don't smile because they think they have ugly teeth. For example, one of my classmates, Mike, doesn't have very nice teeth, so that is why he seldom opens his mouth. He even says that he has lost confidence because of his teeth. So it is very important for us to look after our teeth. In fact, a lot of people have this problem. Some people inherit tooth problems from their parents, while others' teeth are damaged because of bad habits, like heavy smoking, eating too much sugar or not brushing teeth often. If your teeth are in bad shape, you should see a dentist and ask for help. They can help improve your teeth and tell you how to take care of them.

    Smiling can help you feel more confident and make people think of you as a more friendly person. If you want to keep healthy, you should not only smile but also laugh. An Indian doctor called Kataria said that young children should laugh about 30 times a day, while adults should laugh between 7 and 15 times a day. So please take this chance to smile and laugh now.