With the development of science and technology, new inventions, especially new electronic products, have made people's lives easy and convenient. But as the saying puts: A coin has two sides.

    One day, I was walking in the park with a friend and his cell phone rang, interrupting our conversation. There we were, walking and talking on a beautiful sunny day and…I became invisible, absent from the conversation.

    The telephone used to connect you to the absent. Now it makes people sitting next to you feel absent. Why is it that the more connected we get, the more disconnected I feel? Every advance in communications technology is a tragedy to the closeness of human interaction. With email and instant messaging over the Internet, we can now communicate without seeing or talking to one another. With voice mail, you can conduct entire conversations without ever reaching anyone. If my mom has a question, I just leave the answer on her machine.

    As almost every contact we can imagine between human beings gets automated, the alienation(疏远) index goes up. You can't even call a person to get the phone number of another person any more. Directory assistance is almost always fully automated.

    Pumping petrol at the station? Why say good morning to the attendant when you can swipe(刷)your credit card at the pump and save yourself the bother of human contact?

    Making a deposit at the bank? Why talk to a teller who might live in the neighborhood when you can just insert your card into ATM?

    Pretty soon you won't have the burden of making eye contact at the grocery shop. Some supermarket chains are using a self-scanner so you can check yourself out, avoiding those check-out people who look at you and ask how you are doing.

    I am not against modern technology. I own a cell phone, an ATM card, a voice mail system, and an email account. Giving them up isn't wise…they're a great help to us. It's some of their possible consequences that make me feel uneasy.

    More and more, I find myself hiding behind e-mail to do a job meant for conversation. Or being relieved that voice mail picked up a call because I didn't really have time to talk. The communications industry devoted to helping me keep in touch is making me lonelier.

    So I've put myself on technology restriction: no instant messaging, with people who live near me，no cell phoning in the presence of friends, no letting the voice mail pick up when I'm at home.

    Tulou, the special residential architecture of Fujian Province was included on the UNESCO's World Heritage List during the 32nd session of the World Heritage Committee in Quebec, Canada.

    In the fourth century, Han Chinese living in the Central Plains area began to migrate south, gradually gathering in Fujian and forming the Hakka communities. As a defence against enemies, the Hakkas chose to live in compact (紧凑的) communities, and the tulou was their preferred houses. Tens of thousands of such earthen structures were constructed in Fujian Province.

    Most tulous are to be found in the valleys, surrounded by high mountains, and some are in the depths of the great mountains. Most are three to four storeys high, and look like circular blockhouses (堡垒). Rooms on the first floor are used as kitchens, rooms on the second floor are used as barns (谷仓), and rooms on the third and fourth floors are for bedrooms and living rooms. For defensive purposes, the rooms on the first floor have no windows.

    Raw materials for the tulou were obtained locally. Their main building material was a mixture of clay, sand, lime and water, and egg whites, brown sugar and rice water were added as adhesive agents (粘合剂). It was then mixed to form the walls. Once they dried, the walls were so hard that driving a nail into them would have been difficult. Fir branches, which are extremely strong and do not rot, were used to strengthen them, and many centuries later they have remained their original look.

    Tulous are located in a region where earthquakes happen frequently, and their circular construction helps them resist the regular shocks.

    The proven design even inspired one famous Peruvian architect, who paid several visits to Yongding, to build a tulou back home. Not long after, an earthquake struck only 10 kilometers away, and while all the houses around the earthen building fell down, his tulou remained.

阅读下列短文，从每题所给的四个选项 （A 、B 、C  和 D ）中，选出最佳选项。

    George Bernard Shaw，the greatest and funniest British dramatist(剧作家)of the first half of the 20th century，was born in Dublin，Ireland，on July 26,1856.His early life was not happy. His father was a selfish man who drank too much and could not support his family properly. His mother was a disappointed，unhappy woman who found more pleasure in studying music than in her children. Bernard and his two sisters received little love and attention from their mother while they were young. At the age of ten Shaw entered school. At first he was the best student，but soon he was at or near the bottom of his class.

    Although he did not like school，Bernard was a good，bright，curious student. His lifelong interest in everything from music and art to machines and medicine began from school life. The interests of this tireless schoolboy were literature and music. He often entertained(使快乐)his classmates with stories he read.

    Early at the age of fifteen，he went to work in an office. He did well as an office clerk，but after five years he decided that he wanted to be a writer. He left Ireland and went to London，where he began to write seriously. Seventy-four years later the great dramatist died.

The Cost of Higher Education

    Individuals (个人) should pay for their higher education.

    In general, a university education is of huge and direct benefit to the individual. Whether they are majoring in geography, geometry or any other subject, graduates earn more than non-graduates. Meanwhile, social mobility is ever more dependent on having a degree. However, only some people have it. So the individual, not the taxpayers should pay for it. There are pressing calls on the resources (资源) of the government. Using taxpayers' money to help small number of people to earn high incomes in the future is not one of them.

    Full government funding (资助) is not very good for universities. Adam Smith worked in a Scottish university whose teachers lived off student fees. He knew and looked down upon 18th-century Oxford, the grand university having much glory, where the academics lived comfortably off the income received from the government. Guaranteed salaries, Smith argued, were the enemy of hard work and when the academics were lazy and incompetent, the students grew similarly lazy in a gradual way.

    If students have to pay for their education, I guess they not only work harder, but also demand more from their teachers and have a better grasp of the subjects. And their teachers have to keep them satisfied. If that means taking teaching seriously, and giving less time to their own research interests, that is surely something to celebrate.

    Many people believe that higher education should be free because it is good for the economy (经济). Many graduates clearly do contribute to national wealth, but so do all the businesses that invest (投资) and create jobs. If you believe that the government should be generous enough to pay for higher education because graduates are economically productive, you should also believe that the government should pay part of business costs. Anyone promising to create jobs should receive a gift of capital（资金） from the government to invest.

    Therefore, it is the individual, not the government who should pay for their university education.

    On November 7, Lewis Pugh completed a one-kilometer swim in the freezing waters of King Edward Cove, off South Georgia in Antarctica. He was wearing only his swimming glasses, cap and speedos!

    Pugh is an advocate for our oceans and seas, working to protect these ecosystem with their large diversity of marine life. When asked why he doesn't wear a wetsuit, Lewis says, "I ask world leaders to do everything they can to protect our oceans. Sometimes the steps they need to take are difficult and unpopular. If I'm asking them to be courageous, I must also be. Swimming in a wetsuit would not send the right message."

    It took Pugh about 19 minutes to complete the one-kilometer swim in Antarctica where the water averaged about 1.6 degrees Celsius. He says that his body can only tolerate about 20 minutes in the freezing waters before it starts shutting down. As he swims, his body temperature steadily drops, which in turn causes his muscle control to drop, slowing him down. When he is done with his swim, his support team rushes him to a hot shower and it takes almost an hour for his body temperature to return to normal.

    Doctors and Pugh caution that one must receive months of training to swim in such cold waters. Even expert swimmers who are unused to freezing water can drown within minutes because of the physical shock experienced by the body. Pugh says he trained for six months before this swim.

    This is not the first time that Lewis has swum in dangerous conditions. In 2007, he swam one kilometer in the North Pole to draw attention to the melting Arctic ice due to climate change. In 2015, he swam in the Bay of Whales in Antarctica's Ross Sea as part of his successful campaign to help set up a marine reserve there.

People who routinely eat a lot of red meat may be increasing their risk of developing Type 2 diabetes （糖尿病）, according to a new study. Processed red meats, like bacon and hot dogs, are linked to an even higher risk.

Researchers tracked the eating habits of more than 200,000 people engaged in long-term health studies for up to 36 years and found that those who regularly consumed a lot of red meat — more than a serving per day — had a significantly higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

"When we looked at the women and men who consumed the most red meat compared to the least, we found about a 50% increase in risk," says study author Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. The results were published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

It turned out that the participants in the study who consumed high amounts of red meat also had higher body weight. They consumed more calories （热量） and were less physically active compared with those who consumed the least red meat.

Given that, in the US, only about 4% of people are identified as vegetarians and only 1%vegans, it's not realistic to think that people will give up red meat altogether. So how much red meat is OK to consume? US dietary guidelines don't clearly state an amount, but a recent review of observational studies suggests it's reasonable to limit daily consumption of unprocessed red meat to 50 to 100 grams to prevent high blood pressure and heart diseases. Willett's recommendation goes even further. "A limit of one serving per week of red meat would be reasonable for people wishing to improve health and well-being," Willett says.

Given the large body of evidence that links too much red meat consumption to increased risks of heart disease and cancer, Christopher Gardner, a food scientist at Stanford University, points out that recommendations to limit the consumption of red meat, particularly processed red meat, have been made by many national and global health organizations.