A plant is a living thing. It uses its many parts to grow from a small seed to a large plant. Each part helps the plant stay healthy. Plants also need sunlight to grow. They get light from the sun and minerals from the soil. These things help the plant stay alive and grow. 

    Is your TV connected to the Internet? What about your chair, or your fridge? Probably they are not. But in the future, most things in your home may be connected, thanks to the so-called "Internet of things".

    The Internet of things may be coming sooner than you think. Earlier this year, Samsung CEO spent a lot of time talking about the Internet things. He said that three years from now, every Samsung product will be part of the Internet of things, no matter whether it's a remote control or a washing machine.

    So, how do household objects that are part of the Internet of things work? Well, think of a common chair. When connected to the Internet, the chair warms up when it knows the user has just walked into the room and is feeling cold.

    An Internet-connected camera could help people feel safer in their homes. It can know people's faces and has an infrared sensor（红外传感器）, so even if it's dark it can see when someone passes by and send you a message on your smart-phone to let you know who's there. If the person is someone you don't know, it can tell you that, too.

    But according to MIT Technology Review, whether companies are connecting dog food bowls or safety systems to the Internet, there may be some problems. For example, many early connected-home objects don't have much built-in security, which means they could be hacked（攻击）. Moreover, it could be difficult to get these new machines to work together especially when they are made by different companies. To fight this, many companies have joined the Open Interconnect Consortium, which had 45 members by late 2015.

    So, picture this: you enter your home. The temperature changes to make you feel comfortable. Your favorite music starts playing for you. Do you think that this would be a good thing? It may happen sooner than you think.

    Not many years ago, some farmers were worried because hawks ( 鹰) were taking many of their chicken. The farmers didn't know what to do. Finally they went to the country officials and asked for help.

    "Kill the hawks," the officials said. "We will even pay for them." So the farmers began to think of ways to kill the hawks.

    The farmers killed many hawks. They no longer had to worry about their chickens. But they now had a new worry. Field mice were eating up a lot of the farmers' grain.

    How did this happen?

    Hawks cannot only chickens but also field mice. They eat more field mice than chickens. But the farmers didn't know this. When they killed a lot of hawks, they changed the balance.

    When people move into a new place, they often destroy many wild plants. Often these plants are food for the animals. If the animals can't find enough plants to eat, they will starve or have to leave the place.

    In one part of the USA, for example, the deer there like to eat a certain kind of wild roses. The mountain lions there eat the deer. The number of deer, mountain lions and wild roses doesn't change much if people leave things as they are. But people killed many mountain lions in order to protect the deer. Soon there were so many deer that they ate up all the wild roses. Then the deer began to eat the green leaves of young trees. These trees were important to the farmers. So the farmers thought of ways to protect their trees. Now the deer had nothing to eat, and many of them died. This was another lesson from nature.

    To keep the balance of nature is important for us to remember.

    Robots come in many shapes and sizes. But most have one thing in common. They are built to help people, Lately engineers have been developing new kinds of robots. These high-tech machines are designed to lend a hand everywhere from hotels to disaster areas.

    "Robots help people by making their lives easier, safer, and more fun, "says engineer Omar.

    Since November, a robot named Pepper has been on the job at Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. When guests have questions or need directions, they can ask Pepper. They can also use the robot's touch screen to find the information they need. Pepper is able to talk with guests and make them happy with stories too. It can even tell what kind of mood they are in.

    "Pepper provides our guests with information in an exciting and new way." says the hotel manager Donald Bowman.

    For a kid, being in the hospital can be boring and even scary. But a small robot called NAO is helping to make hospital stays easier. It was designed to keep people company.

    A Tennessee doctor named Phil Parker bought a NAO robot three years ago. He programmed(为…….编制程序)it to talk to and play with young patients. He brought it to hospitals to help sick kids. When kids get medical tests, NAO explains what is going on. The robot also reads to kids and plays games with them like Rock, Scissors ,Cloth(石头剪刀布).

    "The robot gets many kids to smile for the first time since they were in hospital," Parker says.

    Other robots are designed to help to save people in dangerous areas. For example, disaster areas can be full of broken stones and other dangers. Engineers in Japan are planning to build a robot called E2-DR to go into those areas and search for people who are hurt.