It was New Year's Eve. Everyone in the city was getting ready for the three-day celebration, including the gardener of the king's garden.

    There was a large group of monkeys living in the garden. They always followed the advice of their leader, the monkey king.

    The gardener wanted to celebrate the New Year's holiday, just like everybody else, so he decided to hand over his duties to the monkeys.

    He went to the monkey king and said, "My honorable friend, would you do a little favor for me? New Year is coming. I wish to celebrate it. So I must be away for three days. Here in this lovely garden. There are plenty of fruits and berries and nuts to eat. You and your subjects may come and eat as much as you wish. In return, please water the young trees and plants while I'm gone."

The monkey king replied, "Don't worry, my friend! We will do a terrific job! Have a good time!"

    The gardener showed the monkeys where the buckets were kept. Feeling confident, he left to celebrate the holiday. The monkeys called after him, "Happy New Year!"

    The next day, the monkeys filled up the buckets, and began watering the young trees and plants. Then the king of the monkeys addressed them,"It is not good to waste water. Therefore, pull up each young tree or plant before watering. Inspect（检查）it to see how long the roots（根）are. Then give more water to the ones with long roots, and less water to the ones with short roots. That way we will not waste water, and the gardener will be pleased!"

    Without a second thought, the other monkeys followed their king's orders.

    Meanwhile, a wise man was walking by the garden. He saw the monkeys pulling up all the lovely young trees and plants, measuring their roots, and carefully pouring water into the holes in the ground. He said, "Oh foolish monkeys, what do you think you're doing to the king's beautiful garden?"

    They answered, "We are watering the trees and plants, without wasting water! We were commanded to do so by our king."

    The man said, "If this is the wisdom of the wisest among you — the king — what are the rest of you like? Intending to do a worthwhile deed, your foolishness turns it into disaster!"

    With the rapid development of China's economy, more and more foreigners begin to learn Chinese because they are beginning to realize the importance and growing influence of China. Pupils in Warwickshire will soon be learning Mandarin after new links were forged(建立联系) with a region in China.

    Head teachers from the county spent a week in Shenzhen in South-east China, making links with schools and touring different education establishments.

    Schools that took part are now looking to introduce Mandarin lessons. Pupils from schools in Warwickshire and Shenzhen are starting to write and e-mail each other and plans are being made to share lessons over the Internet.

The trip was arranged by Warwickshire County Council and funded by the British Council as the first stage of development of a range of ties with the economically booming city.

    International development officer Judith Young said: “We are entering an exciting period of school relation between Warwickshire and Shenzhen. There is a real appetite for sharing ideas among the Chinese. We were able to see the differences and similarities between the education systems and there are many areas in which our schools, teachers and pupils will be able to benefit from a different cultural perspective(观点) and links with a country that is becoming very important on the world stage.

    Throughout the high profile(引人注目) visit led by our county education officer, Eric Wood, our group was made to feel very welcome and attracted a great deal of interest. Our visit to a primary school was featured as the main news item on television that night. A mark of how highly the visit was valued is that plans are being made for a return visit to Warwickshire of civic leaders, senior education officials and school principals.”

    Reading can be a social activity. Think of the people who belong to book groups. They choose books to read and then meet to discuss them. Now, the website BookCrossing.com turns the page on the traditional idea of a book group.

    Members go on the site and register the books they own and would like to share. BookCrossing provides an identification number to stick inside the book. Then the person leaves it in a public place, hoping that the book will have an adventure, traveling far and wide with each new reader who finds it.

    Bruce Pederson, the managing director of BookCrossing, says, “The two things that change your life are the people you meet and books you read. BookCrossing combines both.”

    Members leave books on park benches and buses, in train stations and coffee shops. Whoever finds their book will go to the site and record where they have found it.

    People who find a book can also leave a journal entry describing what they thought of it. E-mails are then sent to the BookCrossing to keep them updated about where their books have been found. Bruce Peterson says the idea is for people not to be selfish by keeping a book to gather dust on a shelf at home.

    BookCrossing is part of a trend among people who want to get back to the “real” and not the virtual(虚拟). The site now has more than one million members in more than one hundred thirty-five countries.

    According to a new US study, couples who expect their children to help care for them in old age should hope they have daughters because they are likely to be twice as attentive overall.

    The research by Angelina Grigoryeva, a sociologist at Princeton University, found that, while women provide as much care for their elderly parents as they can manage, men do as little as they can get away with and often leave it to female family members.

    Using data from the University of Michigan Health and Retirement Study, a study which has been tracking a cross-section of over-50s for the last decade, she calculated that women provide an average of 12.3 hours a month of care for elderly parents while men offer only 5.6 hours.

    “Whereas the amount of elderly parent care daughters provide is associated with limitations they face, such as employment or childcare, sons' caregiving is associated only with the presence or absence of other helpers, such as sisters or a parent's spouse(配偶),” she explained.

    “Sons reduce their relative caregiving efforts when they have a sister, while daughters increase theirs when they have a brother.”

    “This suggests that sons pass on parent caregiving responsibilities to their sisters.”

    In the UK, the 2011 census(人口普查) showed that there are now around 6.5 million people with caring responsibilities – a figure which has risen by a tenth in a decade.

    But many are doing so at the risk of their own health. The census showed that those who provide 50 hours or more of care a week while trying to hold down a full- time job are three times more likely to be struggling with ill health than their working counterparts(相对应的人) who are not careers.

    Dogs are our best friends. That's especially true after a disaster, such as an earthquake. When buildings fall down, search and rescue dogs help find trapped people. Dogs' amazing noses can pick up the smell of survivors. Now scientists have developed an electronic tool that does the same thing. It's taking smell detection(探测) to a whole new level.

    The new invention is a sort of electronic nose, which can detect extremely low levels of many compounds(化合物) from people's skin. This isn't the first time engineers have developed such an object. Earlier models, however, have been bulky and expensive. They could not detect low levels of target compounds either. The new one is inexpensive and small enough to fit inside hand-held equipment.

    The electronic nose can detect extremely slight smell of more than one compound at the same time. "Being able to do this, in such a small object, is the significant discovery," says Sotiris E. Pratsinis, Professor of Process Engineering&Materials Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. His team tested it in special spaces. They were like the small spaces where people might be trapped. Chemicals given off by the volunteers built up inside. The electronic equipment detected those compounds at unbelievably low levels.

The results were good news for the research team. But they may be not for our four-legged friends, who could soon be out of a job. "Ideally, this technology could replace search and rescue dogs," Pratsinis says.

    Stephen Taylor, an electrical engineer, agrees that the new technology has some benefits over dogs. Still, he thinks it may be too soon to have our trusty friends retire. He suspects, "I foresee that such an object could add to the fine work done by the dogs." Taylor also pointed out some potential limitations of the new invention. "E-noses are useful, but can be very likely to be affected by unstable readings and interruption," he says.

    Some of the world's most famous musicians recently gathered in Paris and New Orleans to celebrate the first annual International Jazz Day. UNESCO(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) recently set April 30 as a day to raise awareness of jazz music, its significance, and its potential as a unifying(联合) voice across cultures.

    Despite the celebrations, though, in the U. S. the jazz audience continues to shrink and grow older, and the music has failed to connect with younger generations.

    It's Jason Moran's job to help change that. As the Kennedy Center's artistic adviser for jazz, Moran hopes to widen the audience for jazz, make the music more accessible, and preserve its history and culture.

    "Jazz seems like it's not really a part of the American appetite, "Moran tells National Public Radio's reporter Neal Conan. "What I'm hoping to accomplish is that my generation and younger start to reconsider and understand that jazz is not black and white anymore. It's actually color, and it's actually digital. "

    Moran says one of the problems with jazz today is that the entertainment aspect of the music has been lost. "The music can't be presented today the way it was in 1908 or 1958. It has to continue to move, because the way the world works is not the same, "says Moran.

    Last year, Moran worked on a project that arranged Fats Waller's music for a dance party, "just to kind of put it back in the mind that Waller is dance music as much as it is concert music," says Moran. "For me, it's the recontextualization. In music, where does the emotion(情感) lie? Are we, as humans, gaining any insight(感悟) on how to talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context," says Moran, "so I want to continue those dialogues. Those are the things I want to foster. "